Can you explain what you mean by that?

Unless one is able to build something without needing to take outside capital, it seems inevitable that anyone willing to take true creative riskes will eventually be pushed out–and by corollary any true successes are unlikely to survive the succession of their original founders unscathed.

When I'd started, the cluster had three SunOS servers, named cayley, descartes, and napier; undergrad math students had their home directory allocated on a local disk on one of these three machines, which each cross-mounted the others' via NFS. At this time, however, the Math Faculty Computing Facility had just received a fancy new dedicated NFS file server from (IIRC) NetApp, and all our home directories had been moved there instead, presumably freeing up desperately-needed CPU cycles on the three compute servers so we could run the Modula-3 and μC++ compilers.

One evening I was in one of the XTerm labs in the Math and Computer centre working on a CS assignment (the only alternative being to do from my dorm room via 2400 buad dialup). As was tradition, I had left the assignment until the night before it was due to start work on. Indeed, it seems that we all must have, because after getting part way through I needed to access some input data files that were shared from the home directory of the course account—something like ~csXYZ/assignments/N/input—only to find I could not read them.

These files were of course owned by the csXYZ course account and should have been either world-readable or readable by the corresponding csXYZ group to which all students registered that term belonged. Unfortunately something had gone wrong, and although the files were rw-r-----, they belonged to the wrong group, so that I and the other students in the class were not able to access them.

It now being after 6pm there was no hope of tracking down one of the course professors or the tutor to rectify this before morning (and it's quite likley the assignment submission deadline was 9am).

Fortunately, I was a naive and ignorant undergrad student, and not knowing what should and should not have been possible I began to think about how I might obtain access to the needed files.

I knew about suid and sgid binaries, and knew that on these modern SunOS 4 machines you could also have suid and sgid script, so I created a script to cat the needed files, then changed its group to match that to which the files belonged, then tried to chmod g+s the script—but of course this (correctly) failed with a message informing that I could not make my file sgid if I didn't belong to the group in question. I then took a different tack: I chgrped the script back to a gropu I did belong to, ran chmod g+s, then chgrped the script back to the group that owned the files I wanted to read.

I now know that this should have resulted in the script losing its setgid bit, but at the time I was unaware of the expected behaviour—and it seemed that the computer was as ignorant as I was because it duly changed the group as requested without resetting the setgid bit, and I was able to run the script, obtain the files I needed, and finish the assignment.

I then headed over to the CS Club office to discuss what had happened, because I was somewhat surprised this had worked and I wanted to understand why, and I knew that despite the lateness of the hour the office would certainly be open and very likely contain someone more expert than I who would be able to explain.

The office was indeed open but no explanation was forthcoming; instead, I was admonished not to discuss this security hole with anyone until I had reported it, in person, to the system administrators.

Thus it was that bright and early the next morning I found myself in Bill Ince's office with a printout of the terminal history containing a demonstration of the exploit in hand. I informed him I had a security issue to report, and handed him the printout.

He scanned the paper for a moment or two, and then replied simply "ahh, you found it".

It seems I was not the first to report the issue, and he explained that it was due to a bug in the new NetApp file server. He then turned monitor of the terminal on his desk around to show me a long list of filenames scrolling by, and (in hindsight rather unwisely) informed me that it was displaying a list of files that were vulnerable to being WRITTEN to due to the same hole.

He duly swore me to secrecy until the issue could be resolved by NetApp (which it was a few days later), thanked me, and sent me on my way.

Did you make some assumptions about the minimum window / screen size based on oversized modern smartphones, forgetting that lots of us still cling to more reasonably sized older devices?

If only that were still a thing.

As with any kind of literary fiction, what moral (if any) you take from this story is largely up to you.

Of course at the time the computing power needed just to do the image tracking was far in excess of what could be carried on his person, so it involved a (possibly pre-WiFi) radio link to a lab network of graphics workstations, and as far as I know the software wasn't doing any kind of AI ad identification, but only matching pre-tagged ad images (or maybe just tracking the physical locations of the user vs the known location of the ads, via GPS + INS + video tracking).

It was nevertheless an exceedingly impressive demo that it has taken quite some time to make a significant improvement on.

I'd really love an iOS app for Reddit that made the site look more like this one (or like the old `.compact` version did).

I strongly suspect that physically separating highschool students from their older peers for a couple of years meant that most of the older kids who were in to drugs etc. graduated and were not around to introduce their younger peers to these vices.

It's the flip side of the phenomenon whereby many university societies shut down and either never reopened after the pandemic or struggled to get going again (examples I know about including swing dance clubs and solar car racing teams), because the only students with enough experience to teach their younger peers had by then all graduated.

Minor quibble: the current Magic Circle is not "different from the last one" because it is the same organisation—though it has obviously had a significant change of policy and a considerable turnover of membership in the three and a half decades since Sophie Lloyd was accepted as a member.

> The Manchester Evening News reported that passengers accessing the wifi at Piccadilly station were directed to a webpage titled “we love you, Europe”, which contained Islamophobic messages and details of several terrorist attacks that have taken place in the UK and in Europe.

I think "[Stations] among those targeted with Islamophobic message" would have been a more informative wording.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from...

- The base movement turns the date wheel every day at (or, typically, just before) midnight via the 31 teeth on that wheel.

- The single tooth on the date wheel drives the five-pointed cog. I gather that this must turn the month wheel two teeth—probably one tooth when changing from 30th to 31st and a second tooth when changing from 31st to 1st, though I do not see exactly how this works. (It looks like the date wheel finger would only turn the small cog one tooth per month, and the small teeth on that cog look like they would only interact with the longer teeth on the month cog.) On short months the long teeth on the month wheel are in turn are nudged by the second, shorter finger on the hour collar at about 3am on the 1st (while the date wheel is still showing 31), which causes the month wheel to advance the second tooth almost a day early, and this must cause the five-pointed cog to nudge the date wheel to advance from the 31st to the 1st (though again I am not sure exactly how that works).

- The long finger on the hour collar turns the day-of-week disk 1/14th turn at 6am and 6pm, resulting in that wheel making a complete turn every 7 days. Thanks to the long dash of colour on this wheel, one dot is shown 6am–6pm while two dots are shown 6pm–6am.

Watchfinder made a pretty good video about it, though slightly hampered by the owner of this particular watch having chosen just about the lowest-possible contrast colours for the indicator dots: https://youtu.be/28LYcZJ6hHE

I hope that this will in due course be recognised as a terrible mistake and rectified. Unfortunately my hope is only faint.