blog.erincandescent.net

Honestly the fact that in 2026 it's practically impossible on Linux for a service to have its own keys in the TPM or other box where (a) it can't get the key material out and (b) nobody else can access it is a fucking disaster.

Lots of things being said about Patrick Stewart at the moment but I think the thing that sticks most in my mind is from this Q&A from 2011 (CW: Domestic Violence) where he talks about his childhood, and, just talks with such a profound sense of empathy.

My lightly edited transcript below:

The work that I do in campaigns about violence towards women, particularly domestic violence, is something that grew out of my own childhood experience.

And I'm associated particularly with one organization in England called Refuge, which has since the 1970s provided, along side many other services, safe houses for women and children. And I mean SAFE houses. Where they can go and feel perhaps for the first time in years secure with their children. Refuge is a great organization.

Now a few months ago I did do this event called "The Million Man Pledge" which was co-sponsored by the United Nations and it was, it is, a great campaign which is based on the belief that the people who could do most to improve the situation of so many women and children are in fact men. It's in our hands to stop violence towards women. So I do what I do... So I do what I do in my mother's name, because I couldn't help her then.

Now I can.

But since, and I've talked often about this I'm on record about my childhood, but last year I learned things about my father that I didn't know and my elder brother didn't know. And that was in 1940 due to his experiences in France with the British Expeditionary Force my father was suffering from what was then called severe shell shock, and that's what I read at his notes at the Imperial War Museum in England.

We now know it as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And we also know that there are solders all over the world, here in the United States and in the United Kingdom who are returning from combat zones with a serious condition of post-traumatic stress disorder. Now we know what it is and we know how to deal with it. In 1940 it was just shell shock. And basically soldiers were being told pull yourself together, get a grip on yourself and get out there and be a man.

Well an expert in this condition who works with a charity, another organisation I am now happy to be a apart of of called Combat Stress, has said to me what your father had in 1940, because he was never treated, never left him. And all the conditions of your childhood that you have described to me are classic symptoms of veterans who were suffering from this serious physiological and physical illness. So I work for Refuge for my mother and I work for Combat Stress for my father in equal measure.

I guess most of the Scandinavian immigrants are in North Germany? :<

I am noticing a pattern as to where in Germany it is available in stores :<

Maybe I can get some in December when I'm in Hamburg for 40C3

Germany has successfully convinced me of the deliciousness of Marzipan.

In my defence, basically all Marzipan I encountered before moving here was wrapped in mediocre chocolate and I think that just hides the flavours I enjoy.

The Mastodon 5.0 design is... weird. I don't understand it. I've not hated on previous Mastodon designs but this time, to me it just looks worse than 4.x 🤷‍♀️

You can actually signup directly to Tangled and it will create you a new ATProto account on their PDS, funnily enough. So it is slowly happening.

As a general thing, it's seeing things like tangled build on the "multiple apps, one account" dream. There's also attempts (rocksky.app, teal.fm) at music recommenders. It feels early days but hopeful.

I have been doing some work on my blog recently to make it play better with the ATProto ecosystem, and.

I had a lot of dreams back in 2014 as to the sorts of social applications you could build with ActivityPub and very few of them really materialised. In 2026 they have materialised, on ATProto.

It may have taken a decade longer than I'd wanted but its really nice to see.

Modern MBPs do run FFXIV unreasonably well and also get unreasonably hot while doing so, so I imagine its a bit of a battery health double whammy

I would guess a bunch of it is just age related. also gonna depend upon how deep your discharge cycles are

Womp. I guess it did reach the design life of 1000 cycles and it is 4.5 years old and heavily used, so not unexpected tbh.

Maybe I can get the screen replaced at the same time, I've got a couple of marks and lost a couple of backlight LEDs.

For anyone trying to interpret Anthropic's S1 - the "Change in fair value of convertible notes, etc" line with the $72B loss as of June 2026? That's "we have given out a lot of options and the value of our shares have increased and hence these options are now worth more". No "actual" money has been lost here.

It's not nothing (as a protective shareholder you should be very much worried about dilution!) but their actual cash and asset loss over the period is ~€8B

On the operating side they are/were actually very close to profitability, though whether that holds with their recent price cuts is another matter!

Had a headache all morning and felt a bit grim. Eventually walked into the kitchen and saw the collection of caffeinated beverages on the shelf.

Only at this point did it click that "wait. Maybe it's caffeine withdrawal"

Me: why is one of my services taking 3 whole minutes to pick up its background jobs

...me a few minutes later, on the database server_

apk add chrony && rc-update add chronyd default && rc-service chronyd start

fucking timesync man.

Maybe Unix systems should ship an actual certificate validation daemon that speaks the Server-Based Certificate Validation Protocol (SCVP) or similar so that

1. everyone can share one SCT-checker etc,
2. we can centralise fetching updated revocation lists,
3. we can centralise the logic we'll need for merkle tree certifikates,
4. we don't have repeats of mistakes like those times certificates ended up in the CA Certificates bundle because they were in the Mozilla root store to be explicitly revoked

bonus points if for k8s & docker setups you can just bind-mount the socket into the container.

Perhaps if Chainguard are on your advance disclosure lists, they shouldn't be

On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. Like other distributors, Chainguard had received the patch in advance so its users could update the moment the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release. This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.