If you're wondering how the UK budget got published early: https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/01122025-Investigation-into-November-2025-EFO-publication-error.pdf
Tl;dr is basically they upload the PDF to a Wordpress folder each year, and didn't realise (it's a pre-existing issue) that anybody could access the PDF by guessing the file name.
I almost forgot an upcoming anniversary. 20 years ago I wrote this comment complaining about the state of the AdBlock extension: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315754#c12. I’m trying to reconstruct from my emails what happened later (I didn’t archive IRC discussions unfortunately).
While the AdBlock devs claimed that everything was fine, on 2005-11-29 Mozilla was contacting everyone listed as an AdBlock contributor (myself included), trying to find someone who could update it for the Firefox 1.5 release. Mozilla already made the necessary adjustments on addons.mozilla.org but back then update manifests were self-hosted, and somebody had to modify the file on the AdBlock website. The only person with the necessary access was rue, the project maintainer at the time, everybody else could only stand by helplessly.
At some point over the next two weeks I convinced rue to let me improve code quality of AdBlock, with improved maintainability as one of the goals. I’m not sure when I started this work which turned into a complete rewrite (yes, the codebase was that bad) but on 2005-12-16 I was looking for people to help me test it, saying that the extension would be ready by tomorrow. It actually took one day longer, on 2005-12-18 I posted an almost finished version in a Russian-language web developers forum: https://web.archive.org/web/20061011145831/http://xpoint.ru/forums/programming/XUL/thread/34705.xhtml
That’s when rue got cold feet, they considered the changes too extensive. Things went quickly downhill from there, and I think one of the closing comments from them went along the lines of “developing a browser extension for millions of users takes more than a big mouth.” I don’t think AdBlock ever had millions of users.
On 2005-12-19 I was already trying to see where Mozilla stands on yet another AdBlock fork being published (a fork called Adblock Plus already existed, though it wasn’t listed on addons.mozilla.org). On 2005-12-21 I contacted the developers of Adblock Plus, asking them whether they would allow me to use the name of their project so that there aren’t two competing AdBlock forks around.
By 2006-01-10 I was done rewriting the rest of the code, and an allowlist functionality was added as well (originally I was prohibited from adding this feature, it being planned for AdBlock 0.6 which never got released). This is the changelog which I was sharing at that point: https://palant.info/temp/ABP_changelog.txt
On 2006-01-13 I got a permission from Adblock Plus devs to publish my code as Adblock Plus 0.6, sort of as an update to their project. At the same time rue seemed to have a change of heart once again, saying that I would be allowed to publish my rewrite as AdBlock 0.7. I didn’t quite trust this arrangement (rightfully so), so on 2006-01-14 I submitted an application for an Adblock Plus project page on mozdev.org.
Adblock Plus 0.6 has finally been published on 2006-01-17. The rest is history…
Omg Becky look at her risk register.
It’s so big.
🎶
just called ai "the mediocrity machine" in a meeting and the tech bro is shaking a finger at me and twitching so hard he can't even plug what's happening into the machine so it can tell him how to respond
I just realized my Mastodon experience hasn’t enshittified one bit in the 2+ years I’ve been here.
In fact, it’s only gotten better.
#Oops: The seminal paper that has been used for 25 years to justify that the use of #Glyphosate is safe has been retracted.
"Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors. "
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230099913715
When was the last time you took a flight to anywhere for any reason? #poll #pleaseBoost (and don't get picky on the time descriptions because you know full well what I mean in the limited characters)
