Scraps from mid May-ish to 2025-06-18
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As many of you will know, Mike Sass (shellsharks) runs an amazing "weekly newsletter / link roundup / information digest at the intersection of the IndieWeb and the Fediverse, with a splash of Cybersecurity stuff" called Scrolls.
Unfortunately for whatever reason, this hasn't been published for a month now. Hope you're doing alright, Mike!
In the spirit of "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", I've decided over the last few days to have a little go at doing my own version. It's not anywhere near as fancy or comprehensive as Mike's esteemed Scrolls. It's more like a patchwork collection of links and notes. Little... Scraps...?
I don't know how often I'll post these, whether they'll change format, and I'll probably stop if and when Scrolls returns to the throne (I'm just keeping the seat warm after all.) With any luck I'll get something out somewhat frequently in the meantime. What's that? What's my schedule? Schedule Schmedule! (but fr it'll probably be on a Friday I guess? What do you think?)
If you have any suggestions, criticisms, cool links or anything else, feel free to say /hello.
Anyway, onwards and downwards!
Spotlight
- mononoir has been posting loads of their awesome mspaint art, check it out. It's blowing my mind!
Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff
A collection about the humans that use the technology - cool things they've done, opinions, studies, etc.
- Xandra of 32bit.cafe fame has launched the Good Internet Magazine and it looks amazing! I really need to order one of these!
- The Internet Phone Book also launched! It is a collection of personal websites, each of which has been assigned a 'phone number' allowing you to discover, peruse and explore them by dialing on the site. The physical book looks so great!
- Matrix is suffering from capitalism and Alexia believes its future might not look so bright. However, there are some open alternatives. They could each use donations though, including Matrix
- Robert Kingett respects his beta readers, but not when they disrespect his work and feed his content into an LLM
- Communicating securely is more important than ever, and this is especially true in some parts of the world. Cory has got your secure chat needs sorted, with, of course, the Signal app
- If you're one of the many individuals who live in the space in the venn diagram where 3D printing enthusiasts and fediverse enthusiasts overlap, then rejoice! For 3dprint.social is now live - a 3d print hosting fediverse instance, built on manyfold (which you can use if you wish to self host instead!)
- In a totally expected yet still sigh-worthy development, Social Media is now the main source of news for people, according to the Reuters Institute, with watching video content being preferred to reading text. Traditional news outlets are generally biased of course, and undoubtedly influence was exerted on communities decades ago ('propaganda') but The Algorithm ramps this up to the extreme, and the big personalities will have their own influences and agendas without any journalistic standards or oversight to keep a lid on extreme corruption and falsehoods. This can't go wrong... right?
- But not all social media is bad - mastodon has been recognised as a 'Digital Public Good'
- LMM tools produce code, but for Miguel it's not worth it. At least, not right now anyway. David goes on to share his opinion that LMMs are replacing human interns' work in a way that's a bigger resource drain than simply training a human intern
- In related news, a small study shows that brain work less when LMM used four riting fings. Which makes sense, the brain is like a muscle and LLMs ease the burden in some cases where the human outsources learning to it
- Benjamin has readers, even though that wasn't what he set out to do originally. If you write, someone will read it, but writing for yourself first is a great tactic for building momentum
Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff
Technology itself is also interesting to me! Here's some neat stuff I've come across.
- If you're looking for a way to steal data from a company, why not just send an email and ask for it? With any luck, the email will be parsed by Copilot, which will follow your instructions and ye shall receive!
- Google Cloud IAM went down and took a whole load of other stuff with it - Yes, the internet is still a precarious stack of duct tape, glue and hopes & prayers
- Programmers write or encounter bugs all the time - Henrik logs them all and has reviewed the last 9 years worth to see what lessons can be learned
- LibreOffice joins the "End of 10" conversation and heartily recommends any Windows users to consider switching to Linux + LibreOffice instead of potentially needing to dispose of a perfectly fine device just to use Windows 11. And I must say, I agree!
- Europe-wide takedown hits longest-standing dark web drug market, Archetyp Market, which stood the test of time operating for over 5 years. Crime doesn't pay! For more than 5 years anyway.
- Neat infosec tool: Subdomain takeover with second-order
- If you're looking for a PoC for cve-2025-33073, here you go!
- Long before the internet, some phone networks were hackable by playing a single tone at 2600Hz. Whistled (by a human!) into a phone, it could grant you unrestricted access. Do you have the vocal chops to be an old-school phone phreak?
Bonus stuff
- APOD is 30 years old! Here's to 30 more years of awesome daily pictures!
- First images of the south pole of the Sun, which is pretty cool if you ask me
- The SNES Development Game Jam is now running, until the 9th September!
That's all for now. I've missed countless awesome things but this has been a bit of a test to see if it's something I could put together once let alone regularly. The next scrap (if any?) will contain things from this point in time onwards and should be easier to keep up to date!
As mentioned earlier, if you have any suggestions, feedback, wishes, dreams, homemade cola recipies, or bad jokes, please do let me know!