Posts in: Journal

The original machination.org was kind of a relentless real time (as soon as I consumed something and gave it some sort of credence in my mind) link log. The post yesterday was a more emblematic of a later stage, a slightly more sanely paced round-up. Thought about doing it again today. No. I’ve got other stuff I need to do. I was pushing through being sick and hanging the noose of the world’s news as seen by me around my neck isn’t going to help. Maybe intermittent long links, Tim Bray style. The things that stick with me and why and how, that don’t seem too redundant to what has stuck in the zeitgeist. If I can keep a good habit.

But what a wild headline ride this last day, huh? Definitely worth getting off and stepping back for a moment, at least.

When a shield becomes a shackle

Today’s Cloudflare outage illuminates another infrastructure dependency we’ve sleepwalked into: defensive consolidation. Sites adopt Cloudflare not for performance but survival, protection from the automated scraping that feeds AI systems and other bots that now dwarf human traffic. In defending against automated consumption, most hand control to intermediaries. When Cloudflare stumbled this morning, some sites that delegated DNS entirely couldn’t even disable Cloudflare to restore access. The protection became a jail.

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Gardens vs. giveaways

So much more vision than in D.C. A relatively low-effort, certainly less expensive, high-impact community-centric and green way to re-use a stadium site. Certainly better than what D.C. is actually going for now. Moot now, anyway, as the old RFK stadium was being taken down before the options going forward were finalized and the Commanders deal reached. There was an option for the site without a publicly subsidized NFL stadium.

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The best way we can honor service members is to send the National Guard home

There isn’t an obvious public link to this specific message, sent out on Free DC’s list, though their site has plenty of their digital campaign materials about this and other issues they advocate for. I thought it was excellent though. Once again, I think of my passed grandfather, Battle of the Bulge veteran, Republican, who I know would find this use of the military offensive. I’ve reproduced the core of the email I received, including their emphasis and links (minus ActionNetwork’s redirects):

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I might become a decent writer if I put as much effort into composing and finishing prose in private as I did in venting it off as stream of consciousness to a couple of poor victims I portray as friends. Instead, it gets vented there (and sometimes cribbed for here) and I don’t feel the urge to revisit and work it further.

What happens when we all put our heads in the cloud

Yesterday’s AWS outage reinforces an old truth: the cloud is—oversimplified but not wrong—someone else’s computer. This isn’t an argument against cloud adoption. It’s about trust distribution and control boundaries. How much faith do you place in a single provider, how much can you afford to take advantage of their redundancies—or can you afford not to? What’s beyond your control regardless of SLAs? What do those SLAs actually mean? Are you hedging those bets?

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I took Metro this morning. Got on a Silver Line train in the direction of Ashburn. Operator pronounced it ASSburn.

Yeah, we’re all on the train to ass burn these days.

Bruce Schneier on Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism

Bruce Schneier lays it out pretty broadly that regular Americans really should be thinking of their personal threat model as living under authoritarianism. It might be uncomfortable to think about. I remember in the past, it was a bit of a no-go to even bring up whether we saw our government as a potential threat in our threat model at a past job. And getting an answer? Well, that was even less fun, given the sensitivity of certain data and the tension of priorities.

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