🔗 Hey you, start communicating!

OK! Definitely taking on board Kev’s closing instruction …

So yeah, start communicating! 🙃

💬 Kev Quirk

And of course - because ‘everything is a remix’ - Kev’s post 🔗 was inspired by this one.

Meanwhile, also this morning 🔗 swissmiss shared this short poem.

point out the good
when you see it.

in life,
in others,
in yourself.

because the world
needs to remember
what kindness and
love look like.

💬 Topher Kearby

Which all goes to explain why random people out there are on the internet are going to start receiving email from me. The first one is going out in a minute. It won’t be daily. There will be a reason.

🔗 Features via Mission Alignment

When you use Micro.blog, you should never have to opt in or pay extra for something that is a core part of our mission.

💬 Manton Reece

Thank you @manton - very nice.

🔗 Other Looks – ProjectVRM

We do need a refresh, and I’ve been working with our friends at WordPress on that. The main constraint is that we need to base the site on a WordPress theme of some kind. I invite suggestions.

💬 Doc Searls

Do we though? Or are we attempting to ‘keep things simple’?

The stuff that @dave has been highlighting in his threads points to ideas that can still live in Wordpress. Personally I liked the design that 🔗 Devon came up with - why not go with that?

🔗 Routing around the algorithms

And what’s funny about that is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. But my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.

💬 AOC

Reminding us all that even real writers. Prolific writers. Writers that write for a living - constantly question themselves.

🔗 Keeping it real

We are now at the stage where it is not an issue of whether I can write, but whether what I’m writing about is worth reading.
…
I say this to you as someone who has been a full-time freelance writer since the 1990s, someone who tends to write and have published around two thirds of a million words per year.

💬 William Gallagher

🔗 Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal

I get that Anthropic are severely compute-constrained, but in a world where the very existence of “AI data centers” is a red-hot political issue (see recent news out of Utah for a fresh example), signing up with this particular data center is a really bad look

💬 Simon Willison

The World: “That has got to be AI.”

Great Photographers Around The World: “Hold My Beer.”

🔗 Explore 25 Incredible Photos of the Milky Way Captured Around the World

There are so many on the click through - but of course I would highlight one (of two) from New Zealand.

Every year, this collection reminds us that photographing the Milky Way is not only about technique or planning. It is about curiosity, patience, and the desire to experience the night sky in places where it still feels wild.

💬 Dan Zafra

(Dan is the editor of ‘Capture the Atlas’ and curator of the annual contest.)

I sometimes have a hard time putting into words that clearly explain my position and feelings on a topic. Take The Met Gala for example. Jax and I talking and I just couldn’t explain my contempt for it. Result - Jax writes it off:

Well you never like this kind of stuff.

💬 Jax

• I paraphrase
• True
• Not the point

No more struggles 🔗 Robert L Arnold clearly lives in my brain.

This reminds me that I need to find my ‘Hacker’ rant …

🔗 Your Data Lake’s Vulnerability Problem Is Really an Identity Problem

One contractor laptop. Multiple enterprise environments compromised. That’s the actual story.
In mid-2024, at least 165 organizations got hit through their Snowflake instances. AT&T lost over 50 billion call records. Ticketmaster, Santander, Advance Auto Parts. The headlines wrote themselves: Snowflake hacked.
Except Snowflake wasn’t hacked. Mandiant, CrowdStrike, and Snowflake all reached the same conclusion in their forensics. No zero-day. No flaw in the cryptographic platform. No internal compromise of Snowflake’s corporate network. No brute-force attacks against API limits.
What actually happened? UNC5537, a financially motivated group also tracked as Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters, walked through the front door with valid stolen credentials. Those credentials were harvested over years by commodity infostealer malware (VIDAR, LUMMA, REDLINE) running on the personal laptops of third-party contractors. The same laptops these contractors used for gaming and pirated software also held the keys to their clients' enterprise data lakes.

💬 Logan @ LLBLL