The Friday Five for 31 October 2025

Oct. 30th, 2025 03:03 pm
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[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
These questions were originally suggested by [livejournal.com profile] twirlandswirl.

1. Did you vote in your most recent applicable election? (If you're not yet old enough, do you plan to vote in the future?)

2. Have you ever protested or attended a march?

3. What political issue is the most important to you?

4. Are you a member of a party in your country? If so, which?

5. Do you ever plan to run for office?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
The foreshore was covered in silt. I considered climbing over the gate outside the National Theatre but the steps looked slippery so I continued to Gabriel’s Wharf and down to Ernie’s Beach. Even there it was muddy so I walked along the sand in the other direction before heading down underneath the wooden structure and then close to the river. I guess the boats hadn't started running until after the tide had gone out a way and so the silt hadn't been washed away.

It was cold that morning, winter really feeling like it had arrived already, and it was only about 4 degrees when I left my house.

Some finds:

A few pottery sherds from Express Dairies (the one saying EDCL and the one with the blue aster flower), perhaps from an Express Dairies cafe. I found there was a cafe at 102 Waterloo Road which was apparently a popular meeting place for gay men in the 1920s.



A tiger's eye bead. So pretty!


A pipe made by E. Spaull. The address on it is 67 Grange Walk, Bermondsey, which shows it was made between 1907 and 1942 by Mrs Elizabeth Spaull & Co.

E. Spaull made clay pipes from 1880 to 1942 and was one of the last companies still making clay pipes in the twentieth century.

Apparently there is still a sign for the company at 67 Grange Walk in Bermondsey, so I will go and look for it sometime!


A piece of glass from an A.1. Sauce bottle.

A.1. Sauce is a type of brown sauce and was likely manufactured in Vauxhall.

Apparently it was still being produced in England in 2020 for export to Asia, so might still be. There are also versions of A.1. Sauce available in the US and Canada.

The bottle would have looked originally like this one:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/303136241835

It was advertised like this, as a royal relish. “Brand, this sauce is A.1.”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.1._Sauce#/media/File%3AA1_ad_1906.jpg


A piece of glass that says “Pimlico”. I've identified this as part of a bottle made by the Clayton Brothers. They were based in Pimlico. The bottle may have contained lemonade and was probably similar to this one at the London Museum: https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/v/object-497735/bottle-lemonade-bottle/



Another piece of uranium glass, but not glowing as much, so perhaps it just has a uranium glaze.



A piece of a torpedo bottle, with the distinctive shape.

--

A sherd that says “Skey Tamworth.” This would have been from the Wilnecote Works which were founded in 1860 by George Skey & Co. The colour of the sherd makes it look like it could have been from a stoneware flagon.


The glass remains of what looks like it could have been a sugar or salt shaker.


I haven't been able to identify:
The sherd that says “101 Lea” - Leather Lane? Leadenhall Street?
The sherd that looks like it says “CEN”
The sherd that looks like it might have said “Cotton” - perhaps some kind of pot from a chemist?
A piece of glass that says “tary” on it.



A person with a bicycle appeared, also mudlarking, and then two litter pickers and a dog.

I didn't stay too long as I was getting too cold and there was a Tube Walk later in the day, but I found some interesting things.

Mudlarking finds - 57.1

Mudlarking finds - 57.2

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

Notable poll

Oct. 29th, 2025 09:38 am
vyvyanx: (Default)
[personal profile] vyvyanx
One of the pro-democracy groups who send me emails notified me that YouGov's latest weekly voting intention survey shows a remarkable (and, AFAIK, unprecedented) characteristic - Labour, the Tories, the LibDems and the Greens are all polling at the same level: 16+/-1%. (To be specific, Labour and the Tories are on 17%, the Greens on 16% and the LibDems on 15%.) This seems to be the product of long-term Tory decline, shorter-term Labour decline, LibDems being a little bit above their usual level, and the Greens having a significant rise since Zack Polanski became leader and began making himself widely known.

Time series here: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/voting-intention

Clocks

Oct. 27th, 2025 03:12 pm
lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)
[personal profile] lnr

A short list of clocks which do not update themselves:

  • Matthew's bedside alarm clock. Several experimental button pushes to remember how.
  • Matthew's travel alarm clock. Fairly self explanatory
  • Small clock in the dining room. Turn the time knob, not the alarm one!
  • Oven. Doddle.
  • Microwave. A bit of poking, but not too bad.
  • Bike computer. Putting this one off as it requires a cocktail stick and remembering the right runes so you don't accidentally completely reset it. Write down the odo distance first before attempting!
  • The electronics (and the big living room wall clock, and the heating controller) all look after themselves, which is just as well, as there are quite a lot of them.

Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

qian: Tiny pink head of a Katamari character (Default)
[personal profile] qian
[personal profile] skygiants did a very kind post about this development, which made me think perhaps I should also do a public post about it on this, the social networking site on which I am probably most active ...

Anyway, my epistolary novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is being republished by indie press Homeward Books and for the first time, it will be available in hard copy form! With a jazzy new cover featuring art by Kim Nguyen, it is SO cute and chic. Homeward Books are fundraising to put out their first two releases (Jade is the second) and you can pre-order both via the Kickstarter here.

how to draw a tetrapod

Oct. 24th, 2025 10:42 pm
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[personal profile] fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2025-10-24-tetrapod.html

Concrete tetrapods are used to dissipate wave energy in coastal defences.

There's a bit of a craze for making tetrapod-shaped things: recently I've seen people making a plush tetrapod and a tetrapod lamp. So I thought it might be fun to model one.

I found a nice way to describe tetrapods that relies on very few arbitrary aesthetic choices.

Click here to play with an animated tetrapod which I made using three.js. (You can see its source code too.)

Read more... )

Tube Walk reminder

Oct. 24th, 2025 10:36 am
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[personal profile] miss_newham posting in [community profile] tubewalks
This Sunday! (ie October 26th). We'll be walking from Upminster to Upminster Bridge. See you in Upminster!
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila
  1. What do you see when you are looking out of the window closest to you?
    The canal lock. No boats coming through, though, it’s quiet season now.

  2. Who was the last person coming into your room?
    Astro. He is now lounging on the day bed, as is his wont (example below).
    20250809_120552(0)

  3. What is the most predominant colour around you?
    A gentle pastel green. It is very soothing.

  4. What is right behind you?
    A box containing a bunch of stuff that I need to take to work. Thanks for the reminder, meme. :/

  5. What is on today's calendar sheet?
    More than I could possibly accomplish in one day, and several meetings of different types.

The Friday Five for 24 October 2025

Oct. 23rd, 2025 03:23 pm
anais_pf: (bunny gif)
[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
These questions were originally suggested by [livejournal.com profile] akarii.

1. What do you see when you are looking out of the window closest to you?

2. Who was the last person coming into your room?

3. What is the most predominant colour around you?

4. What is right behind you?

5. What is on today's calendar sheet?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

Mudlarking 56 - Milk trains

Oct. 22nd, 2025 06:55 pm
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
The rain stopped just for a bit and it wasn't quite dark so I headed for the foreshore. The tide wasn't far out so I just went to Blackfriars.

I didn't find a lot before it started to rain again and the light was poor.

The piece of glass is from a milk bottle from Express Dairies. I've found a piece of glass from one of their bottles before and it was then that I learnt about milk trains. The milk that would have been inside the bottle likely travelled to London on a milk train. Wikipedia has a detailed article on milk trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_railway_milk_trains

In other news, I am trying to get to grips with Instagram and attempting to post photos of some of my mudlarking finds over there. In the past I've only really used Instagram to look up what flavours of ice-cream are currently available in various ice-cream parlours, so it may take me a while to get used to it.

Mudlarking finds - 56

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

Where are we on X Chat security?

Oct. 20th, 2025 03:45 pm
[personal profile] mjg59
AWS had an outage today and Signal was unavailable for some users for a while. This has confused some people, including Elon Musk, who are concerned that having a dependency on AWS means that Signal could somehow be compromised by anyone with sufficient influence over AWS (it can't). Which means we're back to the richest man in the world recommending his own "X Chat", saying The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

Elon is either uninformed about his own product, lying, or both.

As I wrote back in June, X Chat genuinely end-to-end encrypted, but ownership of the keys is complicated. The encryption key is stored using the Juicebox protocol, sharded between multiple backends. Two of these are asserted to be HSM backed - a discussion of the commissioning ceremony was recently posted here. I have not watched the almost 7 hours of video to verify that this was performed correctly, and I also haven't been able to verify that the public keys included in the post were the keys generated during the ceremony, although that may be down to me just not finding the appropriate point in the video (sorry, Twitter's video hosting doesn't appear to have any skip feature and would frequently just sit spinning if I tried to seek to far and I should probably just download them and figure it out but I'm not doing that now). With enough effort it would probably also have been possible to fake the entire thing - I have no reason to believe that this has happened, but it's not externally verifiable.

But let's assume these published public keys are legitimately the ones used in the HSM Juicebox realms[1] and that everything was done correctly. Does that prevent Elon from obtaining your key and decrypting your messages? No.

On startup, the X Chat client makes an API call called GetPublicKeysResult, and the public keys of the realms are returned. Right now when I make that call I get the public keys listed above, so there's at least some indication that I'm going to be communicating with actual HSMs. But what if that API call returned different keys? Could Elon stick a proxy in front of the HSMs and grab a cleartext portion of the key shards? Yes, he absolutely could, and then he'd be able to decrypt your messages.

(I will accept that there is a plausible argument that Elon is telling the truth in that even if you held a gun to his head he's not smart enough to be able to do this himself, but that'd be true even if there were no security whatsoever, so it still says nothing about the security of his product)

The solution to this is remote attestation - a process where the device you're speaking to proves its identity to you. In theory the endpoint could attest that it's an HSM running this specific code, and we could look at the Juicebox repo and verify that it's that code and hasn't been tampered with, and then we'd know that our communication channel was secure. Elon hasn't done that, despite it being table stakes for this sort of thing (Signal uses remote attestation to verify the enclave code used for private contact discovery, for instance, which ensures that the client will refuse to hand over any data until it's verified the identity and state of the enclave). There's no excuse whatsoever to build a new end-to-end encrypted messenger which relies on a network service for security without providing a trustworthy mechanism to verify you're speaking to the real service.

We know how to do this properly. We have done for years. Launching without it is unforgivable.

[1] There are three Juicebox realms overall, one of which doesn't appear to use HSMs, but you need at least two in order to obtain the key so at least part of the key will always be held in HSMs

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
Sunset was before low tide, so this was a short trip to the foreshore on a Saturday evening.

I found another vulcanite bottle stopper. This one says “F. Daniells Addlestone” on it. F. Daniells manufactured aerated mineral water in Addlestone from 1895 to 1909 so the bottle stopper is likely from then.

I found a piece of a jam jar that says “W.P. Hartley” and it's got a little bit of the lighthouse logo. I wonder what flavour of jam it contained.

I found a handle from something, a knife perhaps.

It was getting dark and I decided it was time to stop mudlarking as I wasn't able to see much. I instead turned on my UV torch and swept across the foreshore with the purple light. I did find a few tiny pieces of uranium glass that glowed brightly. It may be “custard glass” as without UV it looks kind of white. I am not going to lick it to see if it tastes like custard.

Mudlarking finds - 55

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

The Friday Five on a Sunday

Oct. 19th, 2025 10:35 am
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila
  1. How long ago did you join LJ (or DW)?

    I joined LJ in 2001 and DW in 2009. I stopped paying for an LJ account some time ago, but I don’t want to abandon the community I still have there. So I still cross-post to both, manually since automatic cross-posting hasn’t been possible for some years.

  2. How did you find out about LJ (or DW)?

    I believe I was introduced to LJ by [livejournal.com profile] victorine. I can’t remember who introduced me to DW: apologies if this was you!

  3. If someone introduced you to LJ (or DW), is s/he still on your friends list?

    If they’re still active, either as a poster or a commenter, then yes. I don’t remove people until they’ve been inactive for years and are clearly not coming back.

  4. Have you introduced anyone to LJ (or DW)?

    A few people, but I can’t remember their identities. It was mostly a long time ago, when there was more chance of recruiting people to blogging / journaling sites. Most people just use social media apps these days, so it feels pretty pointless trying to compete with that. I’m also really fond of my stable, long-running communities on these sites, and as long as there are a few empathetic folks left to commune with, I’m happy.

  5. Is your LJ (or DW) public or friends only, and why?

    They used to be mostly public, but these days almost everything personal or with photos of me and/or my children is locked. Back in the early days of journaling, it was easy to feel optimistic about the internet being used for peace and love and bringing together global communities. With social media being used so frequently to amplify hate and fear, terrorise minority groups, and shield trolls and creeps from consequences, I don’t feel quite so confident about sharing my life openly.

Mudlarking 54

Oct. 19th, 2025 10:24 am
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
A quick lunchtime mudlark. While I've mostly stopped picking up blue and white pieces of pottery, I do still pick it up if it has an interesting pattern or is a piece of Westerwald pottery.

Mudlarking finds - 54

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)
dancefloorlandmine: (Theatre)
[personal profile] dancefloorlandmine
Back from an evening watching Mark Steel on his 'Leopard In The House' tour, about his cancer diagnosis and treatment, presented with his usual humour, and also featuring some of his rather impressive piano playing in the interval, along with a bunch of digressions.

First time at the Churchill Theatre, too - a classic 70s theatre, which, thanks to being built on the side of a hill, features the oddness of the circle entrance being on the entry level, which means down several flights of stairs to get to the stalls.

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