alibarber

I’ll need a moment to let this sink in.

It’s not just technology, it’s a movement.

There's another quite good blog from Cloudflare about this here too:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/enforce-first-as-bgp/

I was recently looking at a Python project to learn a bit about RTC and just generally hack around and try something out.

https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc

It was fun and I found the code nice and helpful.

I clicked on the PRs to see if there was anything interesting to look at. I started reading one when I just realised I was just reading someone’s Claude talking to GitHub Copilot. That was when I decided that the Dead Internet Theory had already happened.

I remember vaguely from interning at a bank that there you were actually obliged to be totally isolated from the company for a continuous period of time by policy.

The thinking was that if you were cooking the books of doing some dodgy dealing on the side it would come to light without you there to actively 'manage' it.

Yes - and realistically, if you're $BIGCO who's shipped a billion devices with some obscure curl vulnerability you just discovered, then the hard part is going to be rolling out a patch to all of them anyway, which is still a 'you' problem.

Such a shame - in America they give you $95 for not getting Siri apparently

https://apnews.com/article/apple-iphone-siri-artificial-inte...

I'm afraid that it looks as if there are plenty of other contenders for those who might wish to undermine the EU, now and in the future.

Yes I have also received payments for refunds of PAYE automatically within a month or two of no action on my part.

Some banks in some parts of the EU have - SEPA instant was only mandated in January 2025, only for Euro payments.

Selling a car usually does require a report to the government. Why would the seller care what happens down the line to the buyer?

Don’t let facts get in the way of a good narrative it seems.

I’ve never submitted a tax return in the UK as a simple PAYE employee.

In another European country where I work (Finland) it’s as you describe but it’s still more than doing absolutely nothing that I did in the UK.

This is about illegally dangerous products (banned chemicals, dangerous baby toys, crappy mains chargers) specifically. The stuff that makes for exciting viewing on Big Clive's YouTube channel.

Local importers, shops and marketplaces selling such stuff do often get hit by national enforcement. Not enough in my opinion - but this isn't about just targeting Teemu for the normal commodities that you can indeed buy anywhere else.

I'm delighted about this and also really hated the debate that had surrounded it.

Bring up WebSerial and WebUSB and oh no, all of a sudden, my 'document browser should not be accessing hardware' - yes we get it, you think the web is a collection of documents and are technically - in the most strictest sense possible correct. Hyper TEXT Transfer Protocol and all that.

Of course I've been watching Netflix and YouTube on my Firefox 'document browser' for years, because if I couldn't then there would literally no hope of anyone using Firefox in the real world, but WebUSB and WebSerial people are nerds who we can argue the toss about document browsers with and prove wrong.

From what I gathered from the article the person who got off was a resident of Tristan? They have such limited shipping options that this might have been the only way for them to travel from any mainland. Not sure though, but I don't think they got off there to seek medical assistance.

(albeit over Teams)

Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.

Obligatory 'works fine for me', but I did have an issue earlier with using another ISP (timeouts) but switching to mobile data solved this, so maybe some connectivity issue?

The same way you fine drivers for traffic violation, but not the road.

Eh - my new car has an EU mandated speed limiter in it that takes over the cruise control. It uses a combination of GPS and vision to determine what speed limit to apply. Only slammed the breaks on on the motorway to drop from 120 to 80 KM/h erroneously 4 times in one journey last week.

Much like the oft maligned Google PM that releases/deprecates another chat product to get their promotion, some commissioner somewhere in Brussels managed to make the world a better place with this too.

In ham radio - we have a 'Q code' (abbreviation) for man-made noise: QRM (QRN is naturally occurring: thunderstorms and such). This is used mainly to refer to electrically noisy transformers, vehicles, misconfigured transmitters etc. Always been there, gets worse and/or better over time - but gotta figure out how to deal with it as part of the hobby.

When doing stuff on the internet, I've just decided to stop worrying and treat these scans like that above mentioned QRM. You can filter it a bit if you like [1], but really, a sensibly configured and maintained SSH server is as secure as it gets as far as I can see.

[1] https://alastairbarber.com/Building-Anycast-Network/#securit...

Let that sink in.

So - it sounds like you are doing exactly what is suggested, taking sensible steps to ensure your retirement and making the most of the available savings plans?

The 100k is just a number that means 'doing well for yourself in the local market and for the work you do'. From what I understood the 'retire at 45' is something separate.

I feel like this is a bit snarky, it simply means plan for your retirement and invest in your own future, take advantage of government / employer backed savings plans. Plenty of these exist over here. Don't waste your money.

Everything is not perfect in the singular country of Europe, I sure as hell don't want to be relying on only what the state decides it can give me in my old age.

Yes for the most part Finnish bureaucracy works fairly well but some parts don't make sense. To get a bank account as a non-EU foreigner just follow these simple steps:

- Receive the residence permit card. This is good enough for the men with guns at the airport to let you in to the country, welcome!

- Get municipality of residence. To do this you need an address, to get an address you need a bank account. To get a bank account you need the following ID card. To get the following ID card you need municipality of residence.

- When you find some way to break the above loop, go to the police station and apply and pay for an ID card. Take the first residence card with you.

- Now take this ID card to a bank along with your passport and residence permit.

The data printed on the ID card is effectively less than that printed on the residence card. But as the residence card is not considered an official form of ID, banks won't let you use it. Heck, the corner shop won't let you use it as ID to buy booze and smokes.

The border police in ~20ish other Schengen countries should be fine with it though. Not the ID card of course, that has 'NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL' printed on it in big letters unless you're an actual Finnish citizen.

Having an EU passport means you get to replace the first step with 'register your right of residence at an office at an appointment 3 months in the future' and also means you get to skip the ID card bit, but you can't jump straight to bank account.

Of course - Finland being a solid member of SEPA, why do you even need a local account? Just use Wise or whatever. In that case, I hope you like filing everything on paper and in person because the only practical way to identify online here is with a local service provider (bank, mobile phone certificate, or smart ID card). I hear you say eIDAS, but that's not widely adopted by private companies so things like setting up internet or electricity connections are not going to be possible with that.

Neither of the two countries I’ve opened bank accounts in, the UK and Finland, have a free form of ID available for their citizens (and absolutely not for immigrants!), and yet the banks have certainly wanted to be sure of my citizenship and status.

Having opened accounts in two different European countries, the more surprising thing here for me is that the US banks _didn’t_ already do this.

And thanks for the feedback - I've really been trying to write more so always nice when someone takes the time to read :D

Forgive my ignorance - but what's the payoff for fraudsters in getting access to a generative AI service for a short-ish period of time, before they get cut off?

With EC2 / GCC credentials, I could understand going all out on bitcoin mining - but what are they asking the AI to do here that's worth setting up some kind of botnet or automation to sift the internet for compromised keys?

It's fun and has now become an addictive rabbit hole - trying to get packets from one location to the other in the fastest, most direct way (and at hobbyist budget level).

Initial writeup based on IPv6: https://abarber.com/Setting-Up-ASN-IPv6-Routing-BIRD-Teltoni...

Have been having fun recently with an IPv4 block and Asynchronous routing, working on writing that up right now :)

1: it's hard to remember addresses

fd::1 is perfectly valid internal IPv6 address (along with fd::2 ... fd::n)

Having been messing around personally with getting my own blocks of IP addresses and routing[1] - I've become terrified at the idea of implementing access control based on IP address.

Unless your own organisation in the RR has the IP addresses assigned to you as Provider Independent resources, there just seems to be so many places where 'your' IP address could, albeit most likely accidentally, become not yours any more. And even then, just like domain names, stop renewing the registration and someone else will get them - I was that someone else recently...

[1] AS202858