toucana

Dear Mr President - you know that Ohio Republican Senate candidate whose ass you were lusting over in public ? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-jon-husted-body-comments-b3072952.html Well he lost … and talking of losers

I was down there this afternoon. Looks even worse from the other side :-/

Part of the damaged Pero’s bridge buckled and collapsed even futher into Bristol harbour last night. https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/peros-bridge-bristol-collapses-further-11223004 It happened on a Saturday evening in front of Halloween revellers heading off to busy harbourside bars and restaurants. Many of the revellers gathered to watch from a safe distance to see the sad spectacle from the Waterfront (I was down there myself for a day-long Riichi Mahjong meet-up on the Millenium Square side). Photos and video shared on social media this morning now show a central section of the structure crumpled in the water, including one of the horns that made the bridge so distinctive.

From IRC the other night:

The ‘Railway Hack’ mentioned in that video is described further here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmbz3BinijU Railway is a cloud-based platform used by software developers to deploy and update applications. Yesterday morning Railway announced that unauthorised third parties had gained access to user environment variables which in turn allowed them to compromise API keys. Railway advised users to rotate their credentials immediately, but many found themselves unable to do so because Railway had locked down significant parts of their system as they attempted to mitigate the effects of the intrusion. When news of the PHP2Shell compromise also broke yesterday, many developers who wanted to push critical PHP security updates to apps hosted on the Railway deployment platform found themselves unable to do so.

One problem is that code patches issued by PHP can themselves be reverse engineered by hackers using AI vibecoding tools to reconstruct the exact vulnerabilities the patches were supposed to be addressing, and the hackers can then retarget swarms of hostile AI agents onto those vulnerabilities with even greater force. This in part is what ‘doomers’ like this PHP programmer are talking about 24 hours after the “AI-pocalypse” began: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iMdoDZap7c

A YouTube video by a researcher called Dr Josh C. Simmons offers a reasonably accessible account of two newly discovered PHP vulnerabilities that have been shutting down government websites around the world in the last 24 hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k-RksX8SR0 The two vulnerabilities CVE-2026-109-618 and CVE-2026-109-619 are both assigned a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.2(Critical) and are collectively known as “PHP2Shell”. They allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code and potentially take complete control of a web server without needing any login credentials. They were first discovered back in August. Patches had been prepared in September and were scheduled for release on Thursday 22 October, but news of the vulnerabilities leaked early on Tuesday 20th, forcing PHP to issue an emergency bulletin yesterday before the patches were available. With up to 70% of the websites in the world relying on PHP code, the problem became so urgent that NSA among others was warning owners to to take their websites offline until they could be patched. Hence the worldwide scramble. The AI assisted research which spotted these PHP vulnerabilities has also flagged up a jaw-dropping problem with an Indian CA (Certification Authority) called eMudrha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehcBwqyUGjo They were apparently using ‘4’ as one of their intermediate private keys.

Today I learned that Ciabatta bread is named after the Italian word Ciabatta meaning ‘slipper’. My surprise was compounded when I learned that it was invented as recently as 1982. I had always imagined that Ciabatta was one of those time-honoured Italian food names whose origins go far back into antiquity - like Prosciutto a dry-cured ham that dates from the early Roman empire, or Gorgonzola - a blue cheese named after a town in Lombardy where it was first created in the 9th century AD (allegedly by a love-sick cheesemaker who forget to cover a vat in the rush to meet his mistress). The backstory of Ciabatta is rather more prosaic. It was first produced by a baker called Arnaldo Cavallari who lived in Polesine in NE Italy. He was one of a number of Italian bakers concerned by the local popularity of sandwiches made with baguettes imported from France. He spent several weeks experimenting before coming up with a brand new bread recipe consisting of a soft wet dough made with high gluten flour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciabatta Ciabatta bread quickly became very popular in Italy, and was introduced to the UK in 1985 by Marks & Spencer, and to the USA by the Orlando Bakery of Cleveland.

A YT content provider who specialises in collecting odd warning signs was intrigued by a large one spotted outside a titanium factory which read “NO BALL POINT PENS ALLOWED ON PLANT SITE” https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R8lB6A-riIY Somewhat intrigued, he did some research to find out why, and discovered that ball point pens have tungsten carbide tips. If a production engineer has some of these in a breast pocket and leans over the railing of an overhead gantry, the pens could fall down and contaminate the feed-stock of a titanium furnace. The plastic components of the pen would be instantly destroyed, but the tungsten carbide ball in the tip which has a higher melting point could survive and introduce a microscopic inclusion flaw into a titanium casting. As these melts tend to be used for mission critical high precision components in the aerospace industry, possible points of failure have to be kept to an absolute minimum.

The Pero's Bridge on Narrow Quay Bristol was built in 1999 as a Millenium project - the Nazis stopped bombing Bristol over 55 years earlier..

A FOI request has led to the belated release of an engineering report from last year which included an inspection of Pero's Bridge by Arup in December - according to this article in the local press https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/inspection-report-reveals-lack-maintenance-11196758 The report discloses quite a litany of construction and maintenance failures that led to water penetration, severe corrosion, and regular flooding of the hydraulic pit and power pack. The bascule section of the bridge is shortly due to be removed for repairs, and will hopefully be put back into commission in March 2027 .

I’m not aware of any record of such an execution in the UK. Albert Pierrepoint’s own memoirs refer to only one unusual hanging early in his career where the convicted felon was a dwarf. Pierrepoint was the no. 1 UK executioner until his retirement in 1956. Capital punishment only continued for eight more years until 1964 in the UK.

The ladies who know me say it suits me, while my wife remarked it perfectly complements the Mad Scientist look I seem to be rocking atm. So I’ll probably keep the beard - (not least because I don’t ever want to go through the experience of regrowing it).

This was a handicap game of Go I played as Black the other night against an opponent who was 17 ranks stronger than me (16K v 2D). As often happens, this turned into a life or death fight over the fate of a ‘Dragon’. White resigned shortly after this move - Can you see what happened next ? Solution

According to CNN, President Trump and his advisers are now debating whether to call off plans to livestream the execution of the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan . https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/13/politics/trump-fort-hood-shooter-livestream-execution President Trump who was not consulted before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the livestream plans last week has said privately that did not know that Hasan was paralysed from the waist down after being shot in the back by law enforcement during the Fort Hood incident in 2009, and now uses a wheelchair.