Since it seems like there's been a lack - real or perceived - of simple information about the SSH compromise:

• An important system library, xz, was hacked recently by one of the maintainers of said library.
• The compromised code has been out in some form since February 24th.
• Most Linux operating systems should be updated as soon as possible; if you know you haven't updated anything since before February 24th, don't until your distro says it's safe.
• SteamOS is not affected.
• MacOS is not directly affected, but the compromised library is in Homebrew so if you use that, you should update as well.
• Windows is not affected, but Linux running in WSL can be so update that too.

If none of this is anything that means anything to you, you probably don't have anything to worry about.

Footnote: If you want to check if you have a crocked version of xz, run xz -V at the command-line. Versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 are the versions with the compromise.

Part of the reason the internet is in the state it's in now - a handful of walled gardens all trying to turn it into 1980s cable TV, where you consume consume consume and have no say in the construction of your environment - is that the conditions that allowed the "old Internet" to exist no longer pertain. The people running those forums you liked, the IRC servers you hung out on, your Usenet site? They were getting paid! That was at least a part of their job, whether they were sysadmins at an ISP or other early-adopting company, or were part of the tech club at a larger university and it was part of their work as a grad student, or even that they worked at a company with an internet link and wangled their way into getting the network admins to let them hang a machine out on a public IP, and they worked on their "personal" stuff on work hours. Those conditions just don't exist anymore.

As a consequence, rebuilding some of those environments requires co-operative effort. People are struggling to find new spaces outside of those walled gardens, whether the Fediverse, or Cohost or any other place new (or old, as we see with the gradual increase in text posts on Usenet again!) Part of that comes down to problems the users face after leaving the big sites like Twitter or Tumblr. Wherever they go, the users:

• Don't have to be "here" in some fashion or another, whether it's because this is the forum for some game company, or because it's a local site news server where posting to foonet.help is the best way to get ahold of the ISP crew, or or or...
• Don't have a raft of other places to be. This isn't just one of a dozen forums anyone is on anymore, or the Usenet site that goes along with the IRC channels they hang out on, and the bboard the ISP provides to their shell account users. People have been both conditioned and forced out of having a bunch of connections, a presence that is their own.
• Are pretty much universally well-used to everything being a fight with no help! It's not just expecting namesearching dumbasses to come call you slurs because you have a mediocre opinion of Oingo Boingo, but that the companies and the sites themselves are insistently hostile, as we see with the reason behind the latest major exodus of Tumblr users.

How do we solve this? Again, it's going to require some co-operative effort. That means things like Fediverse servers actually talking things out instead of defederating over anything or nothing; this probably also implies whitelist federation. This means things like people working together to find workarounds for site limitations. It also means people taking responsibility for their own presence again; instead of relying on site DM systems that could be taken away at any time or may not exist, get email addresses for your various identities! Get multiple Discord accounts, get a small website homepage, and so on. And if you're positioned to do that, help the people around you who aren't.

Paul glanced at Halleck, took in the defensive positions of his guards, looked at the banker until the man lowered the water flagon. He said: “Once on Caladan, I saw the body of a drowned fisherman recovered. He — “ “Drowned?” It was the stillsuit manufacturer’s daughter.

Paul hesitated, then: “Yes. Immersed in water until dead. Drowned.”

“What an interesting way to die,” she murmured.

Paul’s smile became brittle. He returned his attention to the banker. “The interesting thing about his man was the wounds on his shoulders — made by another fisherman’s claw-boots. This fisherman was one of several in a boat — a craft for travelling on water — that foundered . . . sank beneath the water. Another fisherman helping recover the body said he’d seen marks like this man’s wounds several times. They meant another drowning fisherman had tried to stand on this poor fellow’s shoulders in the attempt to reach up to the surface to reach air.”

“Why is this interesting?” the banker asked.

“Because of an observation made by my father at the time. He said the drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable — except when you see it happen in the drawing room.” Paul hesitated just long enough for the banker to see the coming, then “And, I should add, except when you see it at the dinner table.”

So yeah... Whaddya think? I'm also looking at implementing Webmention. I'd like to start using this more and I've had some good longish posts on Cohost lately that I would like to post here too, so let's see if we can't make this here internet hovel a little more comfortable so I feel like posting more.

Okay! Some minor improvements later and TIWLMISIO should no longer be blowing up from heap exhaustion; I am now pregenerating all the HTML and just spitting it out instead of parsing markdown every single time a page is loaded. Hopefully that helps. Anyway here's Wonderwall

Trying to figure out the best way to keep Lisp from crashing over and over. I think I might just... need a bigger host?

ail (and by extension, everyone else) was reliably informed (after he had the temerity to find an American setting for a game boring, gasp and shock) that there are only three games about America, and so obviously American culture is just so ignored and underrepresented in media, I have somewhat revised my opinions about Gramsci's "war of position" and how cultural struggle is approached.

It's clear that cultural hegemony is a real and immanent force that strongly gets into the heads of even "progressives" including nominal socialists. It's also clear, per Vonnegut, that the Power Of Art as a progressive force has been decidedly oversold. It's no surprise, then, that people have gotten disenchanted with the idea of cultural struggle.

The problem with counterstruggle has largely been that it has been pursued via eg "culture-jamming" on one hand, and Big Legitimate Art on the other, and both have the problem of usually not presenting either, a) a clear statement about capitalism or imperialism per se being the problem, or b) any kind of positive program or response. The abandonment of the war of position to Adbusters and the like has been a pretty serious negative impact.

Presenting any kind of clearly socialist response in any context, of course, is already being declared (per the current vernacular) "cringe" (and has been treated negatively even by vaunted socialists for the entire post-Soviet era at least); you can note that the SVB collapse was due to Tech Bros, but if you clearly state it was a failure of the capitalist system you can expect to get booed. From liberals, of course, that's expected. From nominal socialists, however, you can also expect to get static. After all, "everyone knows that," "you're preaching to the choir," etc, regardless of the content or the actual audience.

And that's why there's only three games about America. Revolutionaries should be used to being mocked and attacked for being such already, so that shouldn't affect what we do or the strategies we pursue. The near-complete abandonment of war of position (at least in the cultural realm) must be revisited, but we have to be able to firmly state both problems and solutions, and any cultural struggle also needs to be grounded in real material struggle, not just Saying Smart Words.

The tech bubble collapse has begun, with aggressive layoffs across everyone's least favorite large capitalists, from Amazon to Microsoft. The usual fascist scum are crowing about how this will weaken workers, end diversity programs, get them dates and any other Nazi fever dream you care to name, most especially halting the advance of organized labor.

The best time to organize was years ago; the second best time is now.

Layoffs come because companies have decided to shrink their business operations or because they think they can make the existing workers do all the work the previous staffing levels did. That means that anyone not laid off is even more critical than they were before the layoffs. Either you are in a more critical role than the folks who got shitcanned, or they've just made you more critical because you are now carrying the workload of whoever you're picking up the slack for, plus your previous load.

There is never a bad time to organize! Don't "consider yourself lucky", understand that the company needs you, now more than ever! Remember this: They just showed you that they are not your friends. They can and will thrust anyone they don't absolutely need to keep lining their pockets to the wolves. Remember that. The company is the enemy, but they need us. They need us, but we don't need them, and the union makes us stronger than they can ever hope to be!

Saying it's "kinda like Hollow Knight but not really?" is a really stupid description but it's the only thing I can think of. In some respects it feels like Prince of Persia but with a technical combat system and lots more schmoovement, some medium Celeste-style aerial platforming, so far a really interesting world that's on one hand bleak but on the other feels like it's actually populated with people and not just people-shaped signposts and vending machines, and it just plays really nicely in general. There's some busywork type quests of the "collect ten bear asses" variety but they serve to guide you places and once that's done the fetch quests seem to be just things to do while you're following main paths and plot threads (kinda SMTIV-like in that respect?). Besides all that, it's absolutely beautiful and the soundtrack is fantastic too, I could just chill and listen to it all day

So far, at least, it's extremely fucking good. I haven't played a new game that grabbed me like this in a while. Go check it out and give Shirakumo some love.

So this year I'm doing Advent of Code and I'm putting up all my solutions on a git repo here. So far up to day five!

Because this post is bursting at the seams