Yearly Archives: 2025


Tech buzzword panic

EFF has run a valuable campaign on the risks of leaking metadata to third parties. If you upload a photo to a public website, for instance, the file might contain information on exactly when and where you took the picture. A stalker can make use of the information, especially if you upload photographs wherever you go. If you make a phone call or text message, the associated metadata may get less privacy protection than the what you said or typed. The US government has claimed that warrantless searches of communication metadata, which might identify the sender, receiver, and time of a message, are OK. Unfortunately, this has led some people to think that metadata themselves (I’m standing by “data” as a plural) are evil.
(more…)


Tom Lehrer and Georg Kreisler

Tom Lehrer’s satirical songs are familiar to many of you, I’m sure. Not many of you will have heard of another satirical songwriter, Georg Kreisler, if only because he wrote in German. If you’re American and have heard of him, it’s probably because of the striking similarities between two of his songs and two of Lehrer’s. Let’s take a look at them.
(more…)


Follow this blog with ActivityPub

Just this post, and I should be done for today. A benefit of the migration is that the ActivityPub plugin now works. You can follow this blog from Mastodon or similar services by subscribing to “@blog@garymcgath.com” just as you’d subscribe to any other account. It might not be available on servers that allow only short-form posts.

This is the first post I’ve made since installing ActivityPub, so it serves as a test and means the feed isn’t empty.