evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

oh no what have you done

I love that cats slap the shit out of everything they can't understand.

no AI, nothing stressful particularly, just a person who is obviously really good at her job calmly but excitedly explaining stuff (pun intended)

https://youtu.be/RGbZsE7qFgw

The power of ChatGPT

Remember my old bot that posted every rejected parliament petition?

I've resurrected it. Let the chaos begin: @rejectpetitions

Pretty sure the time magazine photo of the year just dropped…

483) Spacebot (and Landerbot). Explores space, finding interesting planets and then deploying Landerbot to investigate further. #SmallRobotsRemastered

I teach cybersecurity. And I genuinely don't know what to tell my students after this one. Federal reviewers spent years trying to get basic encryption documentation from Microsoft for its GCC High government cloud. They couldn't get it. One reviewer called the system a "pile of spaghetti pies," with data traveling from point A to point B the way you'd get from Chicago to New York: a bus to St. Louis, a ferry to Pittsburgh, and a flight to Newark. Each leg is a potential hijacking. They knew this. They said this out loud in writing. Then they approved it anyway in December 2024, because too many agencies were already using it. 🔐 That's not a security review. That's a hostage negotiation. Two things in this story should make every CISO and CIO uncomfortable:

🧩 Microsoft built its federal cloud on top of decades of legacy code that it apparently can't fully document itself
👮 "Digital escorts" often ex-military with minimal software engineering backgrounds are the firewall between Chinese engineers working on the system and classified U.S. networks 🤦🏻‍♂️

The scariest line in the whole ProPublica investigation isn't the "pile of shit" quote. It's this: FedRAMP determined that refusing authorization wasn't feasible because agencies were already using the product. Read that again. The security review process reached a conclusion based on sunk cost, not risk. Ex Post Facto Fallacy

If that logic holds, the compliance framework is just documentation theater. And right now, CISA is being hollowed out, so there are fewer people left to even run the theater.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/03/federal-cyber-experts-called-microsofts-cloud-a-pile-of-shit-approved-it-anyway/
#Cybersecurity #Microsoft #FedRAMP #Leadership #RiskManagement #security #privacy #cloud #infosec

For a coding challenge, I am currently researching big seas. I found:

Philippine Sea ~5M km²
Coral Sea ~4.8M km²
Arabian Sea ~ 3.8M km²
South China Sea ~3.5M km²

Surprisingly, the biggest is in England, called Nigel.

Advance warning: from tomorrow, I'm going to start sharing a poem each day again; so, if you were ever thinking about closing down your social media accounts, now might be a good time.

I forgot I had written this. I still stand by it.

https://hackaday.com/2024/01/03/a-few-reasonable-rules-for-the-responsible-use-of-new-technology/

I made a dodecathedral

the endless frustration: hardware used to be cheap but I had no money, and now I do have money but hardware costs have disproportionately increased :(

Some hero renamed the White House on Google Maps as Epstein Island. Bless you, whoever you are.
Post reporters called the White House. Their phones showed ‘Epstein Island.’ https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2026/03/27/white-house-google-database-epstein/

“I need to discuss science vs. engineering. Put glibly:

In #science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it.
In #engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it."

― Richard Hamming, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" (1997)