https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/05/forest-gone-storm-that-moved-a-mountain-climate-crisis-environment

I remember hearing about this, ages ago. Interesting to read the full story (free archived page) - 10k words.

The American Missionary and the Uncontacted Tribe - By Doug Bock Clark (2019)

Bugger ... link is messed up - paste the GQ link into wayback, or archive.ph

Here's the original, you can paste into an archive reader.

https://www.gq.com/story/john-chau-missionary-and-uncontacted-tribe

Long 28k-word article on passwords and internet security >

https://demystified.info/security.html

Pop quiz: Which password is more secure?

A) Mbxsa38!
B) gacrpooofent

The answer is B. Surprised? People think A is more secure because it follows the typical rules for a “strong” password: at least one uppercase and lowercase letter, number, and special character. But the most crucial aspect by far of password security is length. A secure password is hard to guess. Password B is longer than password A, so it takes more tries to guess it, just like it takes more tries to guess a number between one and one hundred than a number between one and ten.

Even though password B is only four characters longer, it isn’t just a hundred times harder to guess, or even a million times harder to guess — it’s 78 million times harder! A cybercriminal using an extremely powerful password cracking system could crack password A in less than an hour, but it would take the same system thousands of years to crack password B.

I never thought I needed or wanted to know so much about passwords!

Now if only there were a simplified version I could send my mum...

https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/

Posted by: @vaderag

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I never thought I needed or wanted to know so much about passwords!

Now if only there were a simplified version I could send my mum...

https://xkcd.com/936/

Just don't use the password example in that 😀

hehe ... apparently, LOADS of people *do* use that exact password! 🙈 

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/08/visions-of-an-english-civil-war

https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

Voting isn’t democratic. We need 'sortition' - Randomly selecting people to rule would be a hell of a lot better than holding elections.

By Roger Hallam (13 Sept, New Statesman archive link).

You randomly select people from the people, so you still get the people making the decisions.

Meaning that the richest 1 per cent of people make up – you’ve got it – 1 per cent of the people in the parliament, and the bottom 50 per cent make up 50 per cent of the members of the parliament.

It’s the revolution we all want.