Ben Kershner

I’m @synchroni.city on the butterfly site.

I guess it’s a testament to its success that it seems so obvious and low-tech now but Whispersync was genuinely revelatory. The first Kindles didn’t even have WiFi because it was so uncommon. They got WiFi in 3rd gen. Seamless global 3G roaming from the start though

If you think the White Sox Pope Hat is cool, just wait until we do Angine de Poitrine Bobblehead Night

@QuinnyPig <crosses fingers> Aphyr, please Aphyr.

One guess who wrote this.

An Introduction to Distributed Systems by Kyle Kingsbury github.com/aphyr/distsys-…

Tragically I am continuing to find that the most effective guardrail against slop is extremely talented engineers doing very thoughtful, human code review

MSU Twitter dunking on cyberbullying one of their own into deactivating his account in the wake of the heinous events of Monday is just further proof that we have the greatest fans on Earth.

@joepohlen Lake Como’s sandbar fucking sucks.

You are able to get a place on Lake Como in Italy for less than top lakes in northern Michigan.

@msupeach That place was a fucking nightmare with the lights on. There’s a reason the door guys all got into the Rumple before we started cleaning.

@benkershner The Post! First ever bar I went to in EL. Miss those dark vibes

Send him in. He will open the strait.

UPDATE: Letters from Leo can now independently confirm that the meeting took place — and that the Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that Pope Leo XIV shelved plans to visit the United States later this year. Many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.

@sethharpesq My wife had hinted to me that I should buy a new truck because my Tacoma is “already” eight years old and my response is that I will do that when I can hand it off to my son. He’s two.

Absolutely insane that my truck hasn’t lost ONE DOLLAR in value after NINE YEARS and 90,000 more miles on the odometer. A testament to how crappy new American cars are. People will pay MORE for an older vehicle to OPT OUT of all the janky bells and whistles new ones come with.

Europe is sending the SS Compliance to the Middle East Someone is about to find out what GDPR means the hard way

Crypto use case dropped

The Democrats massively exceed all expectations as they… <checks notes> lose the race by 12 percentage points.

With apologies to Clarke and Dawe. INTERVIEWER: Thank you for joining us Senator Collins. Now this OpenBSD vulnerability that was revealed earlier today– COLLINS: The one where the kernel panicked? INTERVIEWER: Yes COLLINS: Yeah, it's not very typical, I'd like to make that point. INTERVIEWER: Well how is it untypical? COLLINS: There are a lot of these packets going around the world all the time and very seldom does anything like this happen. I don't want people thinking that C is not safe. INTERVIEWER: Was this C code safe? COLLINS: Well I was thinking more about the other ones. INTERVIEWER: The ones that are safe. COLLINS: Yeah, the ones that don't panic the kernel. INTERVIEWER: Well if this wasn't safe, why was it running at ring zero on millions of machines? COLLINS: Well I'm not saying it wasn't safe, it's just perhaps not quite as safe as some of the other ones. INTERVIEWER: Why? COLLINS: Well some of them are built so that they don't segfault at all. INTERVIEWER: Wasn't this built so it wouldn't segfault? COLLINS: Well obviously not. INTERVIEWER: How do you know? COLLINS: Well because a selective ACK block placed 2^31 bytes away from the receive window, causing an int comparison to overflow, so the kernel concluded the same byte was simultaneously above and below the acknowledged sequence number, deleted the only hole in its SACK list, appended to a null pointer, panicking the kernel and pulling down the entire machine. It's a bit of a giveaway, I just like to make the point that that is not normal. INTERVIEWER: Well what sort of standards is this C code written with? COLLINS: Oh very rigorous software engineering standards. INTERVIEWER: What sort of thing? COLLINS: Well it's not supposed to crash, for a start. INTERVIEWER: What other things? COLLINS: Well, there are regulations governing which functions you're allowed to call. INTERVIEWER: What regulations? COLLINS: Well, gets() is out. INTERVIEWER: And? COLLINS: No strcpy. No strcat. INTERVIEWER: sprintf? COLLINS: Look, sprintf is fine if you're careful. INTERVIEWER: Are people careful? COLLINS: For the most part. INTERVIEWER: What else? COLLINS: Code's gotta be in source control. There's a test suite. INTERVIEWER: What does it test for? COLLINS: That it compiles I suppose. INTERVIEWER: So the allegations that it's a dangerous language that does next to nothing to check whether code is doing what it's supposed to, that's ludicrous? COLLINS: Absolutely ludicrous. C is a serious production language. INTERVIEWER: Well what happened in this case? COLLINS: Well the kernel crashed in this case by all means but it's very unusual. INTERVIEWER: But Senator Collins, why did the kernel crash? COLLINS: Well it got a packet. INTERVIEWER: It got a packet? COLLINS: The kernel received a packet. INTERVIEWER: Is that unusual? COLLINS: Oh yeah. Online? Chance in a million! INTERVIEWER: So what do you do to protect the internet in cases like this? COLLINS: Well we patched the bug upstream. INTERVIEWER: …leaving other vulnerabilities no doubt unfixed. COLLINS: No no no the bug has been patched. You might need to deploy it but– INTERVIEWER: But this class of vulnerability– COLLINS: It's not a class of vulnerability, it's a one-off bug caused by programmer error. INTERVIEWER: Well what else is out there? COLLINS: Nothing's out there. INTERVIEWER: There must be something. COLLINS: There is nothing out there. All there is, is code, and programmers, and fixes. INTERVIEWER: And? COLLINS: And untold numbers of exploitable kernel-level exploits. INTERVIEWER: And what else? COLLINS: And a 27 year old integer overflow. INTERVIEWER: And anything else? COLLINS: And large private models at AI labs discovering more vulnerabilities in secret. But there's nothing else out there. INTERVIEWER: Senator Collins, thank you for joining us. COLLINS: It's a complete void. Nothing worth thinking about. Oh, we're out of time? Could you call me a cab? INTERVIEWER: But didn't you come in a self-driving car? COLLINS: Yeah I did but… INTERVIEWER: What happened? COLLINS: Well the kernel panicked.

Midwesterners should not do this, you will escalate your privs too frequently.

@teswoketoi @PrezTranspo Which brings me to my city council platform: pedestrians and cyclists should be allowed to throw bricks at vehicles breaking the law.

@teswoketoi I almost got ran over by a @PrezTranspo bus today making a righthand turn across both a bike lane that had bikes in it and a crosswalk that had people in it and the driver took the time to open the door and yell at me “the light was green!”

got honked at for crossing the street when i had the right of way burn mercer island to the ground.

@iowahawkblog Theme song for athletic conference of schools about homicidal youth fantasizing about school shootings.

Honestly this should be the new Big Ten flyover commercial song