Marcus

Sometimes I wonder if the comfort of decludging (software) infrastructure is functionally the same thing as gardening but that would require me to go outside to find out

You could avoid more recurrences by just not using it. I get that we live in a world of shitty AI web crawlers but if anything was going to be liberal in accepting web traffic in spite of bad actors, it really should be government websites of all things...

I emailed DIA to enquire a bit more about hCaptcha briefly appearing in front of www.govt.nz and someone from their All of Government unit said that it's "something that we are actively investigating across our sites to understand the issues and to avoid more recurrences in the future"

"I... take the... science that you made... earlier and I... apply it... in scenarios that are... cost effective."

@openpolicy.bsky.social I can't wait to doomscroll the official NZ Govt app www.dia.govt.nz/press.nsf/d7...

Chopper!

Something to OIA anyway

It seems like this was reversed at some point over the past 2 weeks. My change detection tool should give some hints as to when it was undone but it seems likely lately all I have time to post about is government firewalls 😅

Ah yes, I'm late to the party! How'd you get on? It doesn't seem like Hansard has an RSS feed at a glance. Even if it did, an increasing number of RSS feeds are being put behind bot-blocking firewalls so they're getting harder to use for automation 😡

@seafoam.bsky.social Hello! I was going through my folder of screenshots of websites I like a lot (maybe i will finally redesign my site...) and am stopping by to say I like it a lot! My screenshots were of v5 so I need to take some new ones 😤

A screenshot of Safari on iOS navigating to www.govt.nz. A hCaptcha page is visible asking the user to prove that they are a human

A screenshot of Safari on iOS with www.govt.nz visible

It seems that www.govt.nz will now prompt the user to fill out a captcha if they're unknown or seem malicious.

I was able to trigger it reliably by navigating to the site in a private window.

@openpolicy.bsky.social As a Software Developer by day, I understand why firewalls are used here but I'd be curious if there's a case to be made that even unintentionally blocking citizens from interacting with governmental services is highly questionable at best, if not illegal

Cool, now presumably because of the infinite looping that Radware itself initiated, it has probably learned that my normal browser doesn't seem human and so I guess I can just never submit on bills from this laptop/IP address.

My experience with the whole "Firewalls in front of parliament websites" genre really feels like there's a giant iceberg and I'm only seeing the tip of it every so often

It's fine, I didn't even really want to engage with democracy anyway!

New World has been dead to me ever since the Warkworth branch stopped making Mince Slices at their bakery

I just started working in the area and hadn't had a chance to visit yet 😤

It's kinda wild that I still occasionally get emails from people using one of my open source projects. It doesn't have any telemetry and I should hope most users don't have trouble so I have no real idea how widely it's used at all

It's interesting that the Wikipedia entry notes that the complaints weren't notably higher (or lower) using Linux so there's some amount of data that a switch would be feasible. The real test is how well you can interoperate with other organisations using Excel etc

A German state is moving 30,000 PCs to Linux and LibreOffice Posted in r/linux by u/themikeosguy • 2,504 points and 433 comments

There's a transcript with the former Mayor of Munich who introduced LiMux and talked about Microsoft's lobbying attempts to get him to switch back

old.reddit.com/r/linux/comm...

LiMux - Wikipedia

That was followed by a new group of politicians elected in 2020 who reversed the decision to go back to Linux and they apparently recommitted to the decision in 2024 by launching some sort of open source plan on top of opening an Open Source Program Office

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#T...

That story gave me deja vu so I dug around and apparently Munich, Germany transitioned to Linux (a distro called LiMux) from 2004 to 2013,saving over 10m euro. Microsoft moved their German HQ to Munich in 2016 and the city council voted to migrate back to Windows in late 2017 at a 90m euro estimate

Been a happy Bunny user for a year or so now! I've been using the CDN offering for hosting my personal site as well as a couple of side projects

"I perform high frequency butter arbitrage"

A screenshot from Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. An explainer window is visible explaining how the IR Motion Camera works as a mouse sensor within the Switch 2 joycons. At the top of the explainer window is a rating section that shows the 🤔 emoji with the text "A Little Tricky". Presumably this means that the explainer itself is a little tricky to understand for a layperson.

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour may mark the first official appearance of the "🤔" emoji in a first-party Nintendo title

I have spent 5 minutes using my Switch 2 and Virtual Game Cards is some of the most "Designed by a team of lawyers" shit I have ever seen in my life

I actually got in bed early for once only for my phone to light up the room because I received a notification. Usually I have almost all app notifications turned off (using badges) with a few exceptions like this one from Apple Health... telling me that it's time to go to bed 🤦

Evergreen SEO by always rendering articles with today's date

I guess I'll have to update Linkedin 🤢

After ~3 1/2 years, today is the last day at the current job and then I start my next one on Tuesday🕴️