Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker is underway. The basic facts, that Gawker published excerpts from a video showing Hogan having sex with a wife that was not his own, are not in dispute. Hogan alleges that publication of the video of his intimate affair is a violation of privacy. Alas for Hogan, he can’t make a copyright claim because the video was recorded by the home security camera of the cuckolded husband, Bubba the Love Sponge.

Gawker is making the expected First Amendment defense. Or, in their words, “Because the Internet has made it easier for all of us to be shameless voyeurs and deviants, we love to watch famous people have sex.” See? Public interest.

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away in another courtroom, the jury returned a verdict in favor of Erin Andrews in her lawsuit against a hotel that allowed a peeper to record a naked video of her. Before posting the videos publicly, he had attempted to sell them to TMZ, who declined. Apparently the so called journalists at TMZ don’t care about the public interest.

(For the record, I’ve always loved Hulk Hogan, or at least the character that is Hulk Hogan. I’ve never been quite as impressed with Gawker’s character.)

I’m reading Most Secret War by R. V. Jones, an English physicist’s account of his intelligence work in the Air Staff during World War II. I’m only up to the beginning of 1941, but it’s been a terrific read so far, with many enlightening anecdotes. A few dealing with erroneous assumptions were particularly good.

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On the Brave New World of Mars, humanity is segregated into genetically engineered castes, each a different color. Beneath the surface of this inhospitable Dune like world lives Darrow, a young miner. The Helium-3 must flow. But rebellion is afoot, and Darrow undergoes operation Gattaca to transform his lowly Red body into that of a Gold. Then it’s off to the Institute, where he competes in the Hunger Games to crown the next Ender. Soon he’s caught up in a Game of Thrones as the great houses vie for power. Along the way he makes some quirky friends, all the while remembering his dead Braveheart wife.

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How hard is it to preload a PC with the software it needs to work? Really fucking hard.

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Time and Esquire both went full Trump this week, with cover titles of “How Trump Won” and “Hater in Chief”, respectively. Not to mention very similar red, white, and gray color themes.

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Unexpected roaming fees are the worst. You’re just cruising along, having a jolly old time, and then boom. $20 per megabyte??? Should have read the fine print. Of course, if you had known to read the fine print, you probably would have already known about the roaming fees, and therefore not needed to read the fine print. And so it goes, in life and in ssh.

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OpenBSD 5.9 won’t be out for a little while, but it may be helpful to plan ahead, especially since there’s been some considerable progress on hardware support. Here are some notes about what works in general and a few particular models.

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William “the Jar” Mason is a semi famous programmer. Mostly retired, but his website still has some classic postings from early days working on essential software tools like vi and lynx. Unzealous Association is a link aggregator popular among people who like to read Mason’s articles.

The trouble begins one day when wjm decides that UA sends too much traffic his way. Like a denial of service. And so wjm responds by redirecting anyone with a referer of UA to a picture of a roast ham. (This is probably an overreaction. It’s not really the UA users at fault, but the many aggressively stupid bots that scrape all linked sites. But it has the desired effect of keeping links to wjm’s site off the front page.)

This action is not without collateral damage. It’s not just that headline links disappear, but also less trafficked links in comments are affected. This then incites an unhelpful mini thread on UA about how the internet works.

The UA response is to autokill any comments linking to wjm. The comment is hidden from most users, but remains visible to the author without any indication of what went wrong. (Also Known as hellbanning, the nuclear option of troll containment.)

There are a couple other ways this could have played out. Possibly, if the UA software can detect wjm links in order to kill them, it could also skip adding the <a> tags. Users who cut and paste the link don’t have referer headers. Problem solved. Another option might be to simply ride it out and see if the complaint threads dissipate. Maybe wjm will even change his mind some day.

Unfortunately, when all you have is a trollhammer, all you see are trolls.

Some recent flak outages were mysterious. One day things would be working, but the next they wouldn’t. All the flak.lua processes had disappeared. No error messages were reported in any observable location. No unusual looking requests were observed in any recorded location. Sometimes a process would survive days of heavy traffic. Other times it would die after only a few hours of light traffic. It was as if the process involved simply lost the will to live.

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