Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

THIS NEEDS TO BE A THING:

Fingerprint login for your phone, that, when a pre-selected finger is used, completely wipes the phone.

#infosec

Hack of age verification firm may have exposed 70,000 Discord users’ ID photos

#onlinesafetyact #wtf #wetoldyouso

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/oct/09/hack-age-verification-firm-discord-users-id-photos

Happening Wed Oct 8, a LIVE recording of the #TalkingPostgres podcast with amazing guest @tchorix of EDB, to talk about #PostgreSQL & The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things

Join Discord to be part of the parallel live text chat—or listen once Talking Postgres Ep32 is published on Friday (we always publish this monthly pod on a Friday...)
https://aka.ms/talkingpostgres-ep32-cal

Tell your database friends! Or your Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy friends... #OpenSource #podcast #Postgres #database

I don't like the phrase "Technical Debt". It's effectively lost all meaning.

I always need to ask, "what about it is technical debt?"

I've gotten a variety of responses:
- the abstractions are wrong
- the performance is bad
- the technology is out of date
- it's undocumented
- I don't know the tech

That last one in particular when someone told me, "It's technical debt because I don't know the tech," is when I knew the phrase had lost all meaning.

📅 Mark your calendars!
POSETTE 2026 is coming June 16–18!
POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is a virtual celebration of PostgreSQL with dozens of talks plus lots of learning and community connection.

https://posetteconf.com/2026/

#PosetteConf #postgresql #databases #OpenSource #community

Those of you who are software engineers (not software engineering managers) and have daily standups: who wants those?

A — I do.
B — I don't, but the majority of my team does.
C — Nobody in our team does, but our manager wants them.
D — Nobody wants them, not even our manager, but we must have them per organisational policy.

(Boosts for reach much appreciated.)

UK petition: " Do not introduce Digital #IDcards " - https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194 currently close to 1.65 million signatures; let's get it to 2 million today, please sign if you can... #privacy #surveillance

My view - saying the recent incidents should be a wake up call isn’t moving the needle enough in business.

So a lever is, if JLR need bailing out, put the PM on TV to announce it, explain why and the context of attacks on UK institutions, and announce paying all extortion attempts will be outlawed by the end of parliament. It would send shockwaves through business and force real resiliency planning.

The cherry on the top of this story? At the time I was *sitting in the offices of the company acting as my ID provider* trying to design user-centric products for them.

Also in the brief flicker of life of gov.uk Identify, or whatever it was called, I tried to use it to access my driving licence details and it immediately shat itself and *deleted my entire identity* because of the apostrophe in my surname.

I expect a similar quality of execution from Starmer’s Digital ID.

Starmer announcing a mandatory digital ID as though the mythical digital borders ever got built, or indeed even as though the last time GDS tried to build any kind of digital ID system, it didn’t get strangled in the crib by a different government department refusing to play along. He may as well have announced moon marshmallows.

Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.
(This is a post about Tylenol and autism. )