Philipp @pb@chaos.social

Oh joy, 2020 isn’t a complete disaster after all: I can finally get a proper Brezel in Bergen!

I’m leaving the country for the first time in more than four months and you’ll be relieved to know that I am taking some extra precautions.

According to the comments under the article, the main reason for concern is that the app is developed in China. 🙄

Context: I found a vulnerability in the (solely SMS-based) authentication of a scooter rental app that allowed an attacker to log into the account of any user whose phone number they know. I logged into our editor’s account and was able to rent a scooter at his expense.

It me. https://www.bt.no/nyheter/lokalt/i/K3dAjE/saa-lett-klarte-bt-aa-kjoere-elsparkesykkel-paa-en-annens-regning

This clearly makes sense.

So I’m trying to use the lovely open-source Linux Biolinum typeface in a web project. Is it just me or is the SIL Licence plain silly? I’m allowed to create a web font from it, but ONLY if I don’t use the original name? Fine, Cynics Botulinum it is then.

The deadline is closing in and I am writing EXCELLENT code!

The one shining magical ray of sanity is https://beets.io. It’s a command-line-based music organiser that somehow pulls off the impossible: it combines sensible defaults with endless customisability, lots of included functionality and an intuitive interface.

Earlier this year, I cancelled my music streaming subscription. It’s mostly gone really well and I love having control over my music library again, but good grief the user experience has not aged well.

This is absurd. I used to live right next to that border, and I’ve crossed it at those very places so many times that I almost forgot it was there. These photos must be from a parallel universe. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/11/cross-border-love-a-photo-essay

Plant-based meat: a misleading name for cruelty-free substitutes
Meat plants: a totally logical name for slaughterhouses

Ah yes, common Norwegian questions: “Did you own a power station during 2019?” https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/taxes/tax-return/find-item/1/5/10/

(In related news, I just submitted my tax return.)

It would take any moderately talented scammer ten minutes to clone this and an hour to build a form that looks more legit and host it under a more convincing domain name. And they’d probably store their data more securely than in some official’s Excel sheet.

2020 keeps on giving. This is what’s essentially a visa application form for the Czech Republic, hosted on… Office365. It’s terrifying for many reasons, one of which is that I have absolutely no way to verify that this is really an official form and not, say, a scam.

To my great disappointment, it turns out that Google Sheets doesn’t support emoji in drawings. 🤖😢

A frightening amount of data-driven journalism is based on hastily hacked-together Google Sheets that the entire newsroom must be able to edit, so I’m having fun experimenting with ways of scaring non-technical colleagues away from the “backend” parts of our sheets.

The first good thing that’s come from all these lockdowns: this Easter, my timeline has been completely devoid of the usual arguments about Germany’s ban on public dancing. #Tanzverbot

I just fixed a bug caused by an off-by-one error that would’ve been a lot harder to track down after next Friday. 1024 imaginary internet points if you can guess what it was.

This is by far the filthiest thing I’ve searched for in ages.