How to setup your website so you too can have a fancy author tag when your posts are shared

Chris Shiflett is an entrepreneur, product designer, and web developer.

More than half (56%) of ransomware victims paid the ransom to restore access to their data last year, according to a global study of 15,000 consumers conducted by global security company Kaspersky.

After being hit with ransomware, one city faced a tough decision.

FBI Boston's Joseph Bonavolonta address the Cyber Security Summit on October 21st. Bonavolonta said that paying the ransom is often the easiest path out of ransomware infections.

Some 80% of businesses that choose to pay to regain access to their encrypted systems experience a subsequent ransomware attack, amongst which 46% believe it to be caused by the same attackers.

A semantic diff utility and library for tree-like files such as JSON, JSON5, XML, HTML, YAML, and CSV. - trailofbits/graphtage

The Secret History of the Manicule, the Little Hand that’s Everywhere - Editor's Picks - Messy Nessy Chic

memEx - A structured personal knowledge base, inspired by zettlekasten and org-mode

How to add client-side interactivity to Astro components using native browser JavaScript APIs.

From the docs:

You can add interactivity to your Astro components without using a UI framework like React, Svelte, Vue, etc. using standard HTML <script> tags.

💯 This works as expected!

A bookmarklet to copy browser tab URLs with titles as rich text and Markdown.

The full paper is available.

Abstract:

Developing a general algorithm that learns to solve tasks across a wide range of applications has been a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence. Although current reinforcement-learning algorithms can be readily applied to tasks similar to what they have been developed for, configuring them for new application domains requires substantial human expertise and experimentation1,2. Here we present the third generation of Dreamer, a general algorithm that outperforms specialized methods across over 150 diverse tasks, with a single configuration. Dreamer learns a model of the environment and improves its behaviour by imagining future scenarios. Robustness techniques based on normalization, balancing and transformations enable stable learning across domains. Applied out of the box, Dreamer is, to our knowledge, the first algorithm to collect diamonds in Minecraft from scratch without human data or curricula. This achievement has been posed as a substantial challenge in artificial intelligence that requires exploring farsighted strategies from pixels and sparse rewards in an open world3. Our work allows solving challenging control problems without extensive experimentation, making reinforcement learning broadly applicable.

One of life's greatest simple pleasures is creating something just for yourself.

New cyber incident response obligations for Australian organisations

Learn more about ransomware trends through Coveware's quarterly ransomware reports. The data is collected firsthand from Coveware's Incident Response team.

I really enjoyed the notion of "Key Time Indicators" in this article. The same author also has 2024 -- a year in reading.

Things I watched, read, played, got into, enjoyed, or did and would do again, in 2024.

Lincoln College President David Gerlach said a ransomware attack made it harder to combat declining enrollment, fueling a decision to close the school.

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid a $17,000 ransom in bitcoin to a hacker who seized control of the hospital's computer systems and would give back access only when the money was paid, the hospital's chief executive said Wednesday.

Starter Projects — Eleventy

The attack on Colonial Pipeline has focused new attention on a potentially radical proposal to stem the growing threat posed by ransomware: making it illegal for victims to pay their attackers.

As cyber-attacks intensify around the world, two experts argue for or against a ban on payments

Isso integrates with Shaarli.

This Shaarli plugin allows you to automatically publish links you post on your Mastodon timeline. - kalvn/shaarli2mastodon

Conceptually, I prefer this to using feediverse as I am.

This is in will-not-fix right now given how I have deployed Shaarli and given that I am somewhat likely to replace it.

There are some excellent gems: it's worth reading the whole post! A few things that really stood out to me:

From an information theory point of view: We want to communicate concepts, but we have to translate them into words. This can lose a lot of information. Examples are another channel of communication, that can identify errors in translation

💯

An easy-to-use secure configuration generator for web, database, and mail software. Simply select the software you are using and receive a configuration file that is both safe and compatible.

Year after year, document formats like .docx, .ppt, and pdf lose a little bit of steam. You might not have noticed… But Markdown is growing over and into the old formats, slowly, and nicely, like moss on a stranded star destroyer. Notes on a revolution in slow motion.

On many Unix-based operating systems, rsync is a command line tool for transferring and synchronizing files on a computer, either between storage attached directly to the computer or between another computer located elsewhere on a network. The rsync command line tool has long been included on macOS, but Apple has provided the last version of…

It's true!

# /usr/bin/rsync --version
openrsync: protocol version 29
rsync version 2.6.9 compatible

Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

You can get 90% of the value of Tox by wrapping Poetry or uv, and will end up with simpler, faster, and more flexible QA tooling.

As a reluctant tox user and uv convert myself, I appreciated this articulation of why tox might not be the right choice.

On losing the plot.

Generate any location from the real world in Minecraft Java Edition with a high level of detail. - louis-e/arnis

Writings on infosec, technology and life

A look back through my journey around the sun

It’s the last day of the year, just in time to write my now-customary year in review article. Does anyone actually read these, or am I just writing them for myself? It doesn’t really matter either way, as I mainly do write them for myself. I do enjoy looking back at previous years and see what has changed and what has stayed the same.

OFAC administers a number of different sanctions programs. The sanctions can be either comprehensive or selective, using the blocking of assets and trade restrictions to accomplish foreign policy and national security goals.

The Justice Department announced today a disruption campaign against the Blackcat ransomware group — also known as ALPHV or Noberus — that has targeted the computer networks of more than 1,000 victims and caused harm around the world since its inception, including networks that support U.S. critical infrastructure.

⚡ Instantly interested!

Original headline: I left Spotify. What happened next?

I enjoy shocking people by telling them I don’t use LLMs.This isn’t true, but it’s morally true for the reference class I’m in (people who wrote a book about...

Automate Your Life

An official public list of Tasker projects from Tasker's developer and users like you!

Datastar helps you build reactive web applications with the simplicity of server-side rendering and the power of a full-stack SPA framework.

Include Datastar with a single 14.5 KiB file and start adding reactivity to your frontend immediately. Write your backend in the language of your choice! Official SDKs are available to help you get up and running even faster, or you can send SSE events directly from your backend.

Datastar looks very interesting!

CSP Evaluator allows developers and security experts to check if a Content Security Policy (CSP) serves as a strong mitigation against cross-site scripting attacks. It assists with the process of reviewing CSP policies, which is usually a manual task, and helps identify subtle CSP bypasses which undermine the value of a policy. CSP Evaluator checks are based on a large-scale study and are aimed to help developers to harden their CSP and improve the security of their applications. This tool (also available as a Chrome extension) is provided only for the convenience of developers and Google provides no guarantees or warranties for this tool.

The features list is fantastic.

Karakeep (previously Hoarder) is an open source "Bookmark Everything" app that uses AI for automatically tagging the content you throw at it. The app is built with self-hosting as a first class citizen.

Support for ollama is included.

Pick your own goal that best challenges you and write your novel, short stories, poems, stage or screen play, blog posts, or any other writing project as part of a growing community of writers.

It's like the now-defunct NaNoWriMo but. you can write anything (not just a novel) any month (not just November).

This is Writing Month.

A modernized, complete, standalone TeX/LaTeX engine.

Using KOReader and PocketBook to replace Google Play Books and upgrade my reading workflow.