I was led by this Tweet to have a peek at the Draft EU–UK Trade Cooperation Agreement and can confirm that on p. 931 (not p. 921), under ‘Protocols and Standards to be used for encryption mechanism: s/MIME and related packages’, there is this: The text: The underlying certificate used by the s/MIME mechanism has […]
Tag: 2020
The Mediawiki page-count bug: what’s caused it?
Either something is interfering with Mediawiki or I’ve reached the limit with the software after 4,300-odd entries on Autocade. Which is highly unlikely as the same software runs Wikipedia. For the first time ever I noticed this in the footer: This is how a page with no views looks. Once it nets a few […]
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Is NewTumbl hiding posts critical of it?
Postscript: Alex, who maintains three spaces on NewTumbl, can still see my “missing” five posts. In addition, NewTumbl has responded and it’s believed there was a bug. More on that here. This is interesting: talking to Bii on Twitter, who is also a NewTumbl user, I discovered that he can’t see my last five posts […]
Facebook leaves up over 95 per cent of hate speech; ‘embarrassing to work here,’ says ex-staffer
Buzzfeed’s article, on departing Facebook staff who write ‘badge posts’, wasn’t a surprise; what was a greater surprise was just how long it took for such news to surface. Badge posts are traditional farewell notes at Facebook, and not everyone has had rosy things to say. One wrote, ‘With so many internal forces propping […]
The 2020 Level 2 history exam is racist
The below is excerpted from an email sent to the Race Relations’ Commissioner, Meng Foon, sent yesterday, in light of this Tweet (and the thread that follows): Me and my friend just wrote a letter to NCEA about the inclusion of a Lionel Terry poem in the History exam 💅😘 — Cadence Chung (@cadence_chung) November […]
Bring back humour to all, please!
Nigella Lawson saying 'Microwave' like this has made my Christmas already pic.twitter.com/ByXTDVIloq — 🍯 (@EtceteraWithEst) December 8, 2020 Very humorously, Nigella Lawson mispronounced microwave, only to have Those Who Have No Humour get up in arms and Ms Lawson having to clarify that she indeed knew how to pronounce the word the Tory way. Maybe […]
Searching for Murray Smith
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that […]
COVID-19 infections as percentage of tests done, December 7
It’s hard not to be in a bubble sometimes, especially when that bubble is safe in the southern hemisphere and away from wars and COVID-19. With TVNZ having a New York bureau, we of course hear about how poorly the US is doing with COVID-19, and we also hear from the London bureau, where […]
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Why con?
During the course of the 2010s, I came across two con artists. One thing that united them was they were men. But they could not have been more different: one was rather elaborate and was the subject of a Panorama documentary; the other was a rank amateur and, at least in the situation we […]
The most likely explanation: Google doesn’t like academic reports that harm its interests
TechCrunch/Creative Commons 2·0 I summarized this article to my friends as: ‘How can we trust Big Tech? Google didn’t like hearing the truth from an intelligent woman, so they forced her out.’ And my friend Cathy pointed out it’s a woman of colour. And if you take the basic position that Google lies, just […]