Milt Windler, one of the four leaders of Mission Control who in 1970 directed the round-the-clock efforts to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth safely, has died at the age of 94. //

“Apollo was such a rapid pace that I don’t think people had the chance to think about it very much. It has only become more clear to me later on that we were making history,” said Windler in a 2006 oral history interview for the University of North Texas. “You’d do a mission and then you’d immediately turn around and get ready for another mission.”

“It was not [a] time for reflection,” Windler said. //

“If I did it again, I’d probably try to do something more about trying to pay more attention,” said Windler. “Apollo was — well, all of [the missions] were … bang-bang-bang. You couldn’t enjoy, really, in a way you couldn’t savor it, like maybe it would have been better to have done.”

When I first opened draw.io, I honestly wasn't expecting much. The interface looked clean and fairly basic. There wasn't a lot happening on the screen, and I initially wondered whether I had found a proper Visio alternative or just another lightweight diagramming tool.

I decided not to judge it too quickly and spent a little time exploring the interface. That was when I started noticing that simplicity was actually one of its strengths. //

After spending enough time with draw.io, I stopped thinking about what I was missing from Visio. Instead, I started focusing on what I could actually get done with it. That shift made a bigger difference than I expected.

Let's face it, most of us buy NAS drives on faith. I certainly did, and every hard drive in my NAS is a NAS or enterprise model because that's what you're told to put in one. Ask why, and the answer often comes back as a single firmware timeout that determines how long a drive keeps fighting a bad sector before it gives up. It's not the only specification you should pay attention to, but it's an important one for when using RAID.

That timeout goes by three names: TLER on WD drives, ERC on Seagate, and CCTL on Samsung and Hitachi. It's been a spec-sheet bullet since WD's RE4 server drive advertised it in 2009, and it's a big reason people tell you to buy the best hard drives for NAS instead of whatever's cheapest. So I asked my own drives what they were set to, and the number wasn't the one I expected.

Picture a drive hitting a sector it can't read cleanly. A desktop drive will keep rereading it, adjusting and retrying, because it assumes it holds the only copy of your data and giving up means losing it. That's the right call for a lone drive in a PC, and it's why desktop drives have traditionally shipped with the limit switched off.

In an array, that stubbornness backfires. Once you set up RAID in a NAS, another copy of that data sits on a different drive, and the array would rather rebuild the sector from there than wait. Hardware RAID controllers drop a drive that stalls past their command timeout, while Linux waits 30 seconds by default before resetting a drive that's gone quiet. A time-limited drive gives up early, reports the error, and lets the array fix it, saving you time and your data.

sudo smartctl -l scterc /dev/sde 

remembering that smartctl counts in tenths of a second:

sudo smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/sde

50 legendary internet rabbit holes you can spend hours exploring👇

1. zoom.earth — Watch the world via live satellite imagery
2. flightradar24.com — See every plane currently in the sky
3. marinetraffic.com — Track all ships at sea in real time
4. windy.com — Live map of winds and storms
5. lightningmaps.org — Watch lightning strikes hitting Earth in real time
6. earthquake.usgs.gov — Live list of recent earthquakes
7. submarinecablemap.com — Ocean cables carrying the internet
8. globalforestwatch.org — Watch forests disappear from space
9. worldometers.info — The world's statistics, second by second
10. internetlivestats.com — Current number of tweets and searches being posted
11. thetruesize.com — Compare the true sizes of countries
12. oldmapsonline.org — Maps from centuries ago
13. davidrumsey.com — Archive of 150,000 historical maps
14. openstreetmap.org — World map drawn by volunteers
15. window-swap.com — Look out the window of a random person around the world
16. virtualvacation.us — Virtual walks through cities
17. mapcrunch.com — Teleport to a random spot on Earth
18. atlasobscura.com — Catalog of the world's strangest places
19. neal.fun — Interactive knowledge experiences
20. htwins.net/scale2 — Scale journey from atom to universe (Updated HTML5 link)
21. eyes.nasa.gov — Explore the solar system in 3D
22. stellarium-web.org — Real sky map in your browser
23. apod.nasa.gov — NASA's astronomy picture of the day
24. images.nasa.gov — NASA's entire visual archive, free
25. pudding.cool — Visual articles told through data
26. ourworldindata.org — The state of the world with real data
27. gapminder.org — What we mistakenly think we know about the world
28. informationisbeautiful.net — Visualizing complex data
29. data.worldbank.org — World Bank's open data
30. data.tuik.gov.tr — Turkey's official statistics database
31. archive.org — Archive of millions of books, films, and software
32. gutenberg.org — 70,000 free books whose copyrights have expired
33. openlibrary.org — Record of every book in the world
34. loc.gov — U.S. Library of Congress digital archive
35. europeana.eu — Europe's cultural heritage archive
36. dp.la — America's digital library collection
37. artsandculture.google.com — Tour museums from home
38. rijksmuseum.nl — Download artworks in high resolution
39. wikiart.org — Archive of 250,000 artworks
40. publicdomainreview.org — Forgotten visual treasures of history
41. openculture.com — Free archive of culture and education
42. metmuseum.org — Met Museum's open collection
43. musicmap.info — Family tree of music genres
44. radiooooo.com — Pick a country and decade to listen to that era
45. listen.hatnote.com — Turn Wikipedia edits into audio
46. wikipedia.org — Random knowledge well
47. timeanddate.com — Time, sunrises, and sky events
48. sciencedaily.com — Live stream of science news
49. arxiv.org — Free preprints of scientific papers
50. observablehq.com — Visualize data with live code

Researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports, evaluated how much modern cars spy in their drivers:

The new Northeastern study shows, for the first time, data flowing among the vehicles, the vehicle apps you download when you buy your car, and third-party companies, documenting exactly what kind of data gets siphoned from our vehicles and which companies are receiving that information.

Basically, your car’s manufacturer has you under constant surveillance, and they use that data against you.

Default date in form

^  #  ^  Date of check  ^  User Name  ^ Description  ^
<pagemod custom_check _before>| @@auto_inc@@| @@Date of check|@@today@@@@ | @@meta.user.name@@ |@@Check Description@@  |
</pagemod>

<form>
action pagemod _self custom_check

fieldset "New Entry"
textbox  "Check Description" ^
hiddenautoinc "auto_inc"
hidden   "today" "=%Y-%m-%d"

yesno    "Need to enter your own date?"

fieldset "Enter your date" "Need to enter your own date?"
date     "Date of check"

fieldset "√"
submit   "√ Submit"
</form>

MKD Ars Praetorian
10y
433
Bash said:

As much as I'd love a future Democrat government to fix this fourth amendment violation, this is not a new policy as of our current president. The current administration may have 'invented' using this tactic for oppression and intimidation, but so far both the R's and the D's are in support of this violation of our constitutional rights.

"Both"? This goes back to Collection Act of 1789, so throw in some Fs (Federalists), Ws (for Washington and the Whigs), NR (National Republican), NU (National Union), and D-Rs (Democrat-Republicans) and those Founding Fathers in the first Congress who voted for it.

Section 24 of the Collection Act empowered inspectors by giving them the authority to execute a warrantless search of any maritime vessel for any undeclared cargo or merchandise that was not on the vessel's shipping manifest if they believed that the ship was concealing taxable items intended for sale. The Collection Act did not specify criteria for suspicion, apparently leaving this up to the individual customs agents to determine on a case-by-case basis. It allowed for appointed agents of the United States to detain and board any vessel in U.S. waters in an effort to discover undocumented cargo. Furthermore, if a search proved fruitful, agents could appropriate a warrant and perform a daytime search of any dwelling, house, storage facility, or other place if they believed operations defrauding the nation of revenue were occurring there.

Q. So is SpaceX just being selfish, or what?

A. SpaceX is a business, and like a lot of other businesses, especially publicly traded ones, the goal is to maximize revenue. From their perspective, it makes sense to remove distractions (such as Dragon and Falcon 9) and focus on the future of the company (Starship).

One way of looking at the last 20 years of spaceflight history, and NASA’s efforts to stimulate a low-Earth orbit economy, is to view SpaceX as the exception to the rule. In some sense, an economy based on astronauts in low-Earth orbit got lucky that SpaceX executed so successfully on Dragon. This allowed for the creation of a market around the idea of access at a price of $50 million per seat. At the same time, transportation competitors in cargo (Northrop) and crew (Boeing) struggled mightily. The best SpaceX’s competitors could do was nearly twice the price, and even then, not as reliably.

NASA seems to think Starliner, even at higher prices, will provide the guaranteed access it needs to low-Earth orbit in the 2030s for its astronauts. But in terms of a broader space economy in low-Earth orbit—which for decades the space agency has explicitly sought to foster—it is difficult to see Starliner providing a suitable solution. So yes, SpaceX pulling out of this market harms the industry. But should it be incumbent upon SpaceX to continue a line of business solely because it benefits its peers and competitors? //

Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
16y
41,072
I mentioned this after another article on the topic. The problem was NASA simply assumed that Dragon would be available for them in the future. They were used to dealing with contractors who were beholden to NASA's (and the DoD's) purse strings. It never occurred to NASA that a private company might decline to do business with them when given the opportunity. Otherwise, NASA would have included an availability clause in their Commercial Crew contracts that required SpaceX to provide the craft they helped pay for. It was simply NASA hubris that never envisioned this possibility. //

afidel Ars Legatus Legionis
24y
18,341
Subscriptor
Asbestos Muffins said:
nasa was barred from doing anything like that though. the whole point was commercial operators, privately owned and maintained vehicles
No, they weren't. They could have put in optional buys into the contract requirements, say up to 30 launches in traunches of 5 or 10 with pricing not to exceed X% above the previous traunch. That's fairly standard contract language when a buyer is investing heavily in a product.

Debian 12 > Debian 13 Plesk Obsidian 18.0.74 and above

Anthropic lost more than $8 billion on its operations last year. Now the company, warning that AI could threaten humanity, wants Washington to take a bigger role in controlling the industry.

An $8 billion loss ought to put management on the spot. Anthropic would rather have Congress worrying about the end of the world. //

Congress could make catching Anthropic more expensive, using rules Anthropic helped write. That looks like a pretty good deal for Anthropic.

With an IPO ahead and those losses on the books, I suspect the doom talk helps shift the conversation to something more comfortable for management. Instead of explaining when the business will make money, Anthropic gets to explain why Washington needs its advice to save humanity. The proposed rules could help protect its position while it works on the profits. //

Nobody at Anthropic seems to have stopped building. While its executives warn Congress about existential risk, its scientists run experiments and file discoveries to show prospective investors. That's a fine case to make to Wall Street. Sell the shares on that.

But leave Congress out of it. Make rival developers spend more before they can sell, give officials authority to block their releases, and let an incumbent benefit plenty; no ownership required.

Congress should ask the same question any investor would: Why is the company reporting an $8 billion operating loss so eager to write the rules for its competition?

Stitching nine clouds together

• https://rclone.org/
• Once all the remotes were properly connected, I created the merge with a single config block: a new remote called CloudUnion.
• https://rcloneview.com/

Subnet routers

Use subnet routers to give devices outside your local network access to services within specific subnets. Extend your private network with Tailscale.

ArsTechnica is reporting on a “new” attack against RSA, one that bypasses factoring.

First, this attack isn’t new. The original research is from 2007. What is new is the implementation.

Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures. It does not recover the private key from the public key.

Third, the attack only works against pure signatures. That is, signatures without any formatting or padding. This is not generally how we use RSA in practice.

Fourth, speed is all relative. This is not a polynomial-time algorithm; it’s a subexponential-time algorithm. But it is somewhat faster than factoring. The authors were able to forge messages for 1024-bit RSA with 1380 CPU core-years (over five real-world months).

The authors have a webpage that explains the context much better than the article. And here’s the paper.

You can get started for FREE with a 10GB vault. I think that’s really cool, because it’s enough to actually give it a try and use it productively. It’s not time-limited, so you can set up a vault, stream some backups to it, and let it keep working to really test the service.

So I decided to do just that.

I have a small box I use for VPN purposes on DigitalOcean. It’s a 512MB “droplet” (ick – it’s a VPS people). I already back it up to my home lab, but it’s a good candidate for a Restic-based backup.

In general, when I backup, I capture the following:

• Essential file and filesystems, using a “default include” model. I exclude a bunch of directories such as /dev, but by default I include everything.
• I also include “status” dumps, such as dpkg -l, ps -ef, df -h, and other info.
• Finally I do database dumps.

In the case of my VPN server, the things I care about are:

• /etc, where all the OpenVPN config lives
• because I use @Nyr’s Road Warrior script and I put the .ovpn file in /root, I should back that up, too.
• My own backups put data in /backup (dpkg -l output, etc.) so I’ll back that up.

Bot farms generating comments to reinforce a narrative, opinion, idea, that they were paid to push

I, Tom Lehrer, individually and as trustee of the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions:

All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been permanently and irrevocably relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain. In other words, I have abandoned, surrendered and disclaimed all right, title and interest in and to my work and have injected any and all copyrights into the public domain.

The permission granted includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages.
Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included. //

So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

Did you know that the first character that Walt Disney created to specifically appear on television was inspired, in part, by early Space Age rocket scientists?

On this day 65 years ago (September 24, 1961), Disney introduced the “renowned scientist, lecturer, psychologist [and] world traveler,” Ludwig Von Drake. A member of the Duck family (he is the “brilliant and eccentric” uncle of Donald Duck), Von Drake was “the outstanding genius of the century” (per Disney himself) who helped to explain scientific principles and technological concepts to the millions of people who tuned in every Sunday to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on NBC. //

“The world-famous authority on outer space, Professor Wernher von … I mean … Ludwig Von Drake,” Disney said.

This page serves as a comprehensive guide to understanding Time Zones. IANA Time Zones, short for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Time Zones, play a critical role in standardizing time zone identification. Based on IANA and Moment.js 2.30.1 (2025b).

IANA Time Zones adhere to a structured format: {AREA}/{LOCATION}. The "AREA" signifies a continent or ocean, while "LOCATION" designates a precise location within that continent. The table also contains DST and standard offset time in ± hh:mm format and offset abbreviations.

When I was a young lad learning networking (informallly in the late '80s and early '90s, and formally in the mid '90s), your could start from scratch and get a somewhat whole picture in a 12 week 2x90min sessions per week term.

Nowadays, It takes 2~3 14 week terms to work through the full stack. And, to top it off, many lazy professors (the older the more common this behaviour, perhaps us a burden to make new powerpoints) dedicate ample swathes of time to dead-wood topics (like 10base2 Eth and the intricacies of the crossover cable), and little to no time to modern topics (like 2.5Gbps and up Eth and the intriciacies of the 64b-66b cookbook of some 10Gbps (and up) Eth). I saw (and heard) this with my own eyes (and ears) when I was teaching networks at undergrad level between 2009~2016.

I've always advocated for a scheme in which you dedicate the first part of the first term by runnig up the stack fast by analyzing only a few SIMPLE components in each layer (say, 802.11b + IPv4 + RIPv2 + UDP + Some apps that use UDP), so that the students get a picture of a whole stack as fast as possible, and the reminder of the 2 + Chage terms to go through the model layer by layer (application to phy like cisco or phy to application like classic, does not matter)...

And to drop all the dead wood.

This gave me my opening to elaborate on my belief that teaching mental models is central to what we as educators need to do. I managed to quote Rodney Brooks one more time on the symbol-grounding problem. He makes the point that robots can’t use transformer-like LLMs to reliably perform tasks, because LLMs don’t have grounding in the real world of physical objects in which robots operate. They manage symbols (words) but can’t connect those words to real objects.

I believe this is equally true when the objects in question are networks. A real understanding of, say, transport protocols and their relationship to end-to-end security is not the same as how the words written about transport protocols normally show up in a document. Certainly this matches my experience from asking an LLM about QUIC and the Internet hourglass for a previous discussion about LLMs in networking education.

I was challenged on the question of how one builds a mental model of networking, and my initial answer – that it is built up over years of experience – was rightly challenged by Jim as well. What can we teach in a one semester course if that’s the expectation? To take an example of a famously complex protocol, I think it’s fair to expect that a student can learn the broad design challenges that are tackled by a protocol like BGP, while we would not expect them to be able to configure BGP policies for an ISP at the end of one semester. //

We need to teach about how abstracting away the details can lead to later problems, of which the initial design of HTTP over TCP is a famous example. //

we did seem to have something like a consensus around a few ideas: teaching principles and the design process more than artifacts; helping students build a solid mental model of networking; and using a problem/solution approach rather than just teaching the current set of protocols.