Ever since the start of this coronavirus pandemic, I’ve wanted to know how bad the situation is in my local area and how it has evolved over time. There are quite a few online resources that will tell you how bad it is right now, but very few that offer a broader perspective. Back in April, I signed up with gov.uk to gain access to the raw data but the figures were patchy and dirty and hard to work with. I gave up. Recently, a lull in my workload led me back to Google and I discovered the Government’s interactive map. With a couple of hours playing around I managed to turn it into this animated GIF showing how Covid has evolved in South Bristol since July 2020.

Instagram doesn’t allow links in the captions and comments on posts. Well, you can put links in but they aren’t clickable. I hadn’t realised this until my cousin Polly pointed it out to me on this post. I don’t disagree at all with Instagram’s policy decision on this. I’ve had sites swamped in spam links and it’s painful to see your hard work destroyed by brainless idiots (literally…).

So we buried my mum on Wednesday. Well technically we cremated her, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it. On account of covid, we were only allowed 20 mourners so it was a small, short affair. In view of the limitations, there didn’t seem much point pushing the boat out so we opted for a minimal 20 minute service. We had a lively and humorous funeral celebrant mastering the ceremony. Her three children delivered moving tributes. Mine is below. I’ll leave Will and Lucy to share their own. All in all, it was small but perfectly formed.

People who know me know I generally have a lot to say. More than once, an earnest and well-meaning person has told me to “please shut up”. I am fine with this. Exactly once, at a party, an earnest and well-meaning person told me “for an opinionated twat, you don’t post much on Facebook”. This is self-evidently true, but why?

This post is about hardening /tmp and other temporary directories so that programs cannot be executed from them or privileges escalated. Why would you want to do this? Simply to give potential attackers less of a surface to work with. Many exploits involve the attacker gaining access to the local file system. Once they have access to the local filesystem they can download a payload and run it. It’s well understood that /tmp and other temporary directories can be written to and read from by all. It is less known that files in those directories can also be executed, making them extremely popular with the authors of malware.