Maybe, I’m not so sure. I had thought they knew it was very likely the accusations were true, but they spent a lot of time sidestepping action. If public criticism hadn’t been so relentless, they might have been content to sweep it under the rug, as is tradition.

But I have never kept close track of the royal family, largely because I always assumed they were untouchable.

They probably have to start small, it’s unprecedented territory, and they’d want the proper charges to stick. I expect this also opens up the door to evidence gathering for the bigger charges.

I’m not British but I’m also very surprised. I can’t help but wonder if they would have dared had he still had his title?

on his birthday too.

The cops took the phrase “the icing on the cake” literally, and I think it was an excellent choice.

Why would a group of countries that includes Iran try to get the US to bomb Iran? Is it perhaps more likely that the country which bombed it 6 months ago, whose leader Trump met with last week, would like it bombed? The country that’s a major weapons importer from the US?

It’s not that I’m not grateful that the UN has published something about this, but when there are 3 separate caveats in the first sentence that “it’s totally not us saying this officially!”, it emphasizes how useless the UN is at dealing with its blessed founding member. Really disappointing while being in no way surprising.

To cover up their own internal mess and deep unpopularity, yet again. Nothing boosts politician popularity short-term like a war - it certainly worked for Bush 1 & 2.

I have a few issues with substack, but truth be told, I dislike requiring handing over information to multiple services without seeing value upfront - and getting rid of obtrusive pop-ups does not qualify as value. Their willingness to platform Nazis just sealed my unwillingness into a conscious refusal.

In a similar vein, the corporate relationship adjustments you mentioned are also steps I’ve taken, but I’m inclined to agree with Naomi Klein’s perspective on consumer boycott being insufficient to address systemic problems. The general advice is to change what is within your power, but when you have close to zero power, does that advice then imply that you should try to do nothing or that you simply can affect nothing?

My substack qualms and the corporate relationship adjustments topics tie in quite nicely with a phrase from your substack that has been bothering me all weekend. It critiques my usual instincts for what to do as first steps, but it also articulates a problem I’ve struggled with for a while: “Documentation without transformation”.

Now I’m not of the opinion that we’ve ever truly been able to trust the information we consume as being objective truth, but AI has certainly suddenly increased the scarcity of reliable information.

The larger issue for me is that transformation is clearly necessary, but the scale of transformation required is so immense that it’s not something I’ve seen happen historically without also incurring immense suffering. This is not to say that the majority of humanity isn’t hugely suffering now, just that this kind of systemic change is one of those “this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better” type situations - in an acute way.

The usual trigger for change at this scale seems to be when realised losses of resource scarcity for too many exceeds the risk of setting what’s left on fire.

So we’re left with a situation where there’s potentially neither reliable documentation nor positive transformation. This does not spark joy.

I suppose my questions for you are then:

• what actions do you think would be sufficient to effect the systemic change necessary?
• how do you remain optimistic about this whole thing?

“I don’t know” is a totally valid answer to either too, in the spirit of acknowledging honest uncertainty.

For anyone who doesn’t want to click through to rawstory and then Twitter (why does Lieu still use this?), the document in question is EFTA00020517 (redacted version). Trigger warning for both rape and murder although it does not go into significantly more detail than the rawstory link. I think this document was from the batch at least a month ago though.

It also claims that the coroner ruled the death a suicide even though officers on the scene said there was no way it could have been.

I haven’t got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You’ve given me a lot to think about. While I don’t quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they’re salient and framed extremely well.

Oh yes, I understand how they go about smoothing everything over.

But, given the details we know, don’t you think:
• one corporate resignation,
• one months-prior bureaucrat firing, and,
• one investigation into a former PM,
is pretty far removed from could be considered a proportional fallout?

This is the theme of almost all of the “toppling”. Mostly they’ve just… resigned. They probably keep all the perks, and then take up a corporate advisor position once there’s less heat.

Headlines like this make it sound like there’s been real impact beyond generating articles about a few of the more public figures. But reading article, it’s really just a few politicians and bureaucrats resigning. Mandelson’s firing was already months ago. The investigation into a former Norwegian PM sounds like that’s as harsh as it’s got so far for politicians this time. And nothing except one law firm board member resigning for private companies?

They’re all getting away with it, and all the victims get is a hundred headlines about Musk being named in the files, and having their lives endangered from the terrible Don-centric redaction.

It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?

I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.

Out of curiosity, what sort of customizations are you doing with it? I’m just a bit surprised that docker rebuild or a non-trivial fork would be needed, so I’m assuming they’re pretty big changes.

I’m not a spice merchant, and most exploits rarely involve a single step. This screenshot is just a system design red flag.

You’re free to examine the repo yourself and find your own spice, my 5 min look tells me that piefed needs to expend a significant amount of effort on infosec to maintain user trust in the longer term.

As others have pointed out, it does still require (with some caveats about the infra setup) the user to be an admin. But if someone manages to get in to the interface, or another person is granted admin access who shouldn’t have been, it makes it more risky than it needs to be. It also for me is a design choice that indicates other parts of the system should be carefully examined for how they’re handling and sanitizing input.

Any webserver you browse is possibly capable of ACE depending on the implementation. When it starts to hold user data is when that starts to be a big concern. The more points of entry, the more that needs to be secured.

I don’t have any experience with piefed admin, or any opinion on piefed itself, just too many years of web admin experience. And as soon as I see intentionally made doors that allow code input, I start to worry about how much experience the devs who made it have with web admin.

Well, just copy and pasted rather than written. I would have hoped that infra read-level permission, infra write-level permission and admin interface permissions were all separate to begin with, even if the person who spun up the instance obviously has all three.

You do need a level of trust in an admin, of course, but wide open text boxes for putting in code are a questionable system design choice, in my opinion. It adds an extra point of possible entry that then relies on the security of the overall admin interface instead of limiting it to what should require highest level infra admin permissions to access. And if it is something that would be limited to someone who has those, then what is the actual utility of having a textarea for it in the first place?

I get that many people are concerned about is scoring systems, but it seems a lot more worrying to me that it allows arbitrary code execution.