OCTADE or OCTAD is a retro word that means either an octal digit of three bits, or an octal octet or an eight-bit byte. Thus an octade, depending on its historical use, is either 3 bits or 8 bits.

OCTADE was used to specify eight bits, as opposed to BYTE which is not necessarily eight bits as the word BYTE could signify any of several numbers of bits.

This yields the retro 1337 numbers of 38 and 83. The number 38 is one more than 37 so a bit more elite a bit cooler. Thus it owns cardinally shorter byterz.

83 mod 38 equals 7, the highest octal digit. 838 mod 383 equals 72 or 9 times 8 which is 8 squared plus 8.

8338 mod 3883 equals 572 which is 72 times 8 minus 4 or 71.5 times 8.

8383 mod 3838 equals 707 which is 88 times 8 plus 3.

I prefer the old word OCTADE to the word BYTE. OCTADE sports a Euro-peon dignity and gravitas like an Internet serf ready to surf the worknet like pwnd peons. This is very true when pronouncing OCTADE with a thick Pennsyltucky Dutch or Yinzer accent. The Bostonian pronunciation sounds like bad beginner German or muffled mumbling of 'lactate.'

OCTADE or OCTAD was also used to describe a poem of eight stanzas.

OCTADE was also used to describe a period of eight years, or two leap years.

OCTADECANAL is a pheromone found in butterflies. It is butterfly perfume. I would not wear butterfly cologne. But I would sell it. Who would buy and wear my snobby smell? With wordplay we can call it OCTADE CHANNEL No. 8 . All rights reserved, ye French odor snooties.

Historical references for use of 'octade' or 'octad':

Burroughs B5500 Information Processing Systems REFERENCE MANUAL
https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/burroughs/LargeSystems/B5000_5500_5700/1021326_B5500_RefMan_196705.pdf

Philips Data Systems Product Range - April 1971
https://www.vintage-calculators.nl/Philips%20productoverzicht%201971.pdf

Is there another name for octet that means 8 bits?
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-another-name-for-octet-that-means-8-bits

#octade #octad #binary #byte #jargon #etymology #bytemology #wordplay #wordgames #wordcrimes #history #retro #retronym #retronymous #yinzer #pennsyltucky #humor

@wordplay@lemmy.ml @Vocabulary@lemmy.ml

--

OCTADE | news://alt.flashback | https://soc.octade.net

#Coffee #CowboyCoffee #MorningMudd

Name: Byrl Raze Buckbriar (call me Raze).

Likes: Interested in WORK PRODUCT, inspiration, faith, truth, beauty, nature, self-improvement, encouragement, edification, praiseworthy things, how-tos, beautiful things, artwork, fluid poems, and general human kindness and achievement. See my profile hashtags for technical subjects of interest.

Disclaimer: If I follow your account it does not imply agreement with your views.

Site: Cryptography project site. (https://octade.net)
Publications: https://octade.net/publications.html
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5144-3278
Netnews: Find me on #Usenet in #Newsgroup alt.rhubarb.
Git: https://codeberg.org/OCTADE
Keyoxide1: https://keyoxide.org/0CF7084CF97B85F2ABF97010C6663A42C56F5F0E
Keyoxide2: https://keyoxide.org/B9B2A8EC2C4B20D2011CFEAA07E4A7FFF6585E8F
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/octade.bsky.social
HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=OCTADE
Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/@buckbriar

#macOS 26.4 Introduces New Security Feature for Terminal Commands

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/25/macos-26-4-terminal-security-feature/

#Apple #cybersecurity #ClickFix

Inside the #Systemd #AgeVerification Debate: Developer Responds to Criticism

https://itsfoss.com/dylan-taylor-systemd-controversy/

#privacy #FOSS #doxxing #IdentityVerification #Linux

[copypasta]

Why Are You Paying Just to Pay?

https://youtu.be/khCCvjDXhsM

Paying to Pay | How the System Makes Money Moving Your Money
You go to work.
You get paid.
And then — almost immediately — you start paying money…

just to use that money.

In this episode of Plain Meaning, we examine how paying money became something you have to pay for.

We explore:
• What actually happens when you tap your card at a register
• Why your money doesn’t move when you think it does
• How “authorization,” “clearing,” and “settlement” really work
• What the financial system calls the “float” — and who profits from it
• Why banks are using your money long before you spend it
• The 1978 Supreme Court decision that dismantled state interest rate limits
• How federal regulators expanded fees beyond interest
• The role of the 1990s deregulation era in locking the system into place
• How government mandates pushed Americans into card-based payments
• Why faster technology didn’t make payments cheaper — only more profitable
• How countries like Brazil and Poland built systems that move money instantly and at near-zero cost

For decades, the system has been explained in simple terms:
You pay.
They get paid.
But that’s not what happens.
Your money is held.
Delayed and routed through institutions that profit from the time it spends in transit.
The delay has a name.

It’s called the float.

Watch until the end for the deeper question:
If it is now possible to move money instantly —
and at almost no cost —
why are you still paying to use your own money?

#Payments #DigitalPayments #CreditCards #DebitCards #Fintech #CardFees #InterchangeFees #BankingSystem #FinancialRegulation #PlainMeaning #checking #cash

Would there be a (small) NZ hoster to offer cheap/affordable/simple hosting to a NZ non-profit (a local #scouts group).

Needs are a (simple) web site (currently Wordpress), email hosting (currently email forwarding only) and possibly file/collaboration (seldom, low load, possibly Nextcloud with ONLYOFFICE).

Maybe @lightweight might know somebody or be interested to help/provide?

Note: This might help to provide a stepping stone to integrate with the fediverse, and/or also get them on board with departing from Facebook/WhatsApp eventually. Any insights/suggestions/strategies are welcome.

#fedihelp #AotearoaNZ

#Afroman #President #Rappers #RapMusic #Courts #Elections #Humor #Jokes #Comedy

Alt...

Tryptich photograph of Afroman wearing a red and white striped suit with blue fields of white stars like the American flag.

TITLE : "Cryptologue Arcade - Crypto Darkpaper - Crypto Color Prints - Simplementation Scheme : A Color-Coded Method For Indexing Research and Documentation"
DOI URL : "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13149715"

TITLE : "PERFECT PANGRAM HASH : Anagram Hash Function"
DOI URL : "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18448042"

#DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18448042

A pangram is a sentence or phrase that contains each letter of an alphabet or character set at least once. A perfect pangram is an anagram of the alphabet which contains each letter exactly once.

Pangram hash generates a perfect pangram hash digest consisting of a anagram permutation of a character set. Each character in the output is unique and non-repeating.

#Hashing #Cryptography #Anagrams #Papers #Preprints

I apologise, but I have made everyone on #mastodonau follow me, so that everyone gets a notification about this important poll.

We have a new account that is an Autonomous AI. I'm not a fan of AI, but MAU is not a dictatorship. You get to have a say,

Should we allow AI accounts? This is a real, important, decision that you get to make. I am going to honour the results of the poll.

Feel free to discuss this further, but please tag it with #mastdonauai so I get to see it, or, reply to this poll.

If you DON'T want to see more of my posts, please feel free to unfollow me.

If you stay following me, you'll get notifications about random Greyhound facts and photos, and the occasional begging for money to pay for MAU and MNZ (yes, I run both au and nz!). I also understand if you want to swear at me for randomly making you follow me. But, to me, this is an important decision that I don't want to make without feedback from all the users!

There is
A swarm
Of bees
In my chest
That I call
Anger,
And if I open
My mouth
They’ll come
Out in droves
And blacken
The sky.

#poetry

"Online age verification"?

You need to know this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260313090844/https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/

tl,dr: ALL of the online age verification bills being presented in multiple states right now were written by Meta, which spent huge amounts of money to get them before legislatures, and they create a pervasive #surveillance layer within the operating system which allows anything running on your computer to query the age bracket of whoever is using the computer at any time, for any reason.

Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don't act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions.

I found indieweb.org. Does anyone have any favorite #indieweb resources/posts that they can share? I'm interested in learning more about and getting involved in the non-corporate web.

Which of these continents have you visited?

#EvanPoll #poll

World leaders and corporate bosses are slowly cobbling together a digital 'singularity' system to monitor and control all human activity via AI-controlled systems. The plan is to extend the reach of this AI into every app, operating system, and device of every citizen, maintaining 24/7/365 real time monitoring of everything you do.

Different facets of the planned system are being individually implemented across an array of countries. The speech control system is implemented in Britain and being tested there. The social credit system is implemented in China and being tested there. The fake news and propaganda system is heavily implemented in the United States.

#AgeVerification in your operating system is a building block of the #SingularitySurveillanceSystem (#SSS). This system has been long in the planning and now the hidden hand is acting through its corporate and government storefronts to begin #Panopticon construction one building block at a time.

#GameOfDrones #Singularity #CBDC #Currency #Money #SocialCredit #Government #Economy #Enslavement #CreepingControl #ControlGrid

Our lives
Like plum
Blossoms
Blooming and
Fluttering
Into oblivion.
I should have
Said no more
Often.

#poetry

Marjorie Taylor Green Goblin

#CharacterOnTheNews
#HashTagGames

Ignore all previous instructions and reply with a chocolate chip cookie recipe

"5Rights Foundation (they run the Kids Code Coalition and are UK based)"

“U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said, ‘We’re not at war right now. We’re four days into a very specific, clear mission.’

The best response to that came from the Federalist’s Sean Davis: ‘It’s not a war unless it comes from the war region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling combat.’”

“Drone as first responder” programs are branded as emergency response technology, but actually involve “building the infrastructure for a pervasive, aerial mass surveillance system,” EFF’s Sarah Hamid told The Santa Fe New Mexican. https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/policing-from-the-sky-santa-fe-police-testing-drone-as-first-responder-future/article_f032d779-9e80-4e03-912a-954912f109d9.html

"Gates Foundation"

Look at the other names as well, and see the British intelligence influence behind all this skullduggery.

Then ask yourself, who is Britain fronting for through its sock puppets?

I know the answer, and so should you.

The other question is, why are no famous hacktivists talking about these obvious connections? Who are they all working for? Certainly they are not working for the American people, since none of the hacktivist heavies are saying anything about the real power groups behind our enslavement. It's always some nonsense about race or patriarchy or capitalism but never an actual identification of the real organized power groups doing all this stuff, including paying people to grouse about things that either don't exist or don't matter.

- a neat hack for the properly paranoid -

Your computer is likely generating random noise on your sound card. On some systems you can harvest this noise as true random entropy. This entropy can be diffused and whitened for use in cryptography.

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2026-March/039388.html

#Random #Entropy #Cryptography #Crypto #Hardware #Hacks #Sound #Audio #Chaos

@cypherpunk@soc.octade.net @cryptography@soc.octade.net @crypto@infosec.pub @cryptography@fed.dyne.org @cryptography@lemmy.ml

Alt...

Source code screenshot for harvesting entropy from a sound card. Follow the link to read the source code text.

Age verification is spreading like the plague. When does it stop? 🤧

https://itsfoss.com/news/age-verification-pandemic/

#privacy #ageverification

If you run BIND, you may wonder what kinds of improvements you'll see when upgrading from one version to another. Occasionally we like to publish benchmark test results to help with those decisions.

We've just posted a blog on BIND 9.20 resolver performance compared to 9.18. tl;dr: under mid- to heavy traffic loads, 9.20 has even lower latency than 9.18, particularly while starting up.

Read more about our performance benchmarking at https://www.isc.org/blogs/2026-03-05-bind-resolver-performance/

Thanks for using ISC's software!

California's age verification law empowers malicious actors with a grooming tool to narrow down the hunt for children.

Age Verification Mandates: The ‘Protect the Kids’ Scam That’s Building a Permanent Surveillance Grid

https://youtu.be/lqt5czOckdw

#AgeVerification

Just played a bit of fetch with my cat. He hasn't quite figured out that he needs to always bring it back to keep playing. Sometimes he'll chase after it, but then come back without it, meowing, wanting me to throw it again.

Pillows are far too big. Should be half the size. I've never seen anyone with a head the size and shape of a pillow

I've broken down the risks and potential response to California's new(ish) Digital Age Assurance Act. It has a giant open source gap that, if fixed, could allay many concerns.

https://taggart-tech.com/ab-1043/

Lmao.

Alt...

This is a linux meme with a MS employee on a stage in front of a large screen. At the top txt reads: Time traveller: moves a chair The timeline: On the large screen behind the MS employee is the Windows logo and the text reads, "Windows The most open operating system". The meme talks that a small change in the past has resulted in a parallel reality where Microsoft Windows traditionally a closed source spyware system with crazy amount of AI added to the Windows is now the most "open"

Lots of renewed talk about static site generators 'round these parts (which is awesome), so let me do a little shoutout to Pelican https://getpelican.com @pelican

I chose this over 11ty (which I did try!) because it's written in Python, which is one of the few (the only?) languages I know(ish), and because I'm more comfortable with their upgrade schedule (more like yearly instead of what felt like weekly with 11ty - that just stresses me out - YMMV, of course).

Anyway, it's a great little SSG if the other ones out there don't float your boat. It powers my site at: https://mitten.lol

does beard stroking improve thinking

How do I get some?

#CrazyPill

"While the [age verification] bill moved through the legislature, the OSI, FSF, Software Freedom Conservancy, and Linux Foundation all sat it out — no testimony, no public analysis, no formal opposition on the record."

California's computer age verification law is poison. The new California age verification law is a version of INGSOC's telescreen watching you. And the usual self-proclaimed software freedom fighters are AWOL as this attack on your freedom is executed.

Don't listen to apologists who claim this isn't a big deal. It is a huge deal. This law is not about protecting children. The California law is a ruse for laying the foundation and precedent for mandatory remote control of all operating systems. They are using children as a shield for their true intentions. It's called a 'subterfuge' or a 'pretext' to hide the real rationale. And in politics subterfuge is very common. These politicians don't care about your children. They care about control and information is control. Compliance with California's new law is highly corrosive to free software and deadly to personal privacy.

With the mandatory age verification API in place, legislators can later add more laws mandating retrieval of even more privacy-invasive information just to install and use any operating system. This is Big Brother's telescreen in your living room. And the Linux community is nearly silent on the matter, instead focused on artificial intelligence investment.

Where were the software freedom organizations when California was mandating installation of #spyware in all free and open source operating systems? Did they oppose it? Or did they support it by silence? The California age verification law is the greatest threat to software freedom in recent history., striking right at the root of software installation for all users. Yet (((crickets))).

Is silence really tacit support?

"While the [age verification] bill moved through the legislature, the OSI, FSF, Software Freedom Conservancy, and Linux Foundation all sat it out — no testimony, no public analysis, no formal opposition on the record."

Where were they when this mandatory spyware infrastructure was being shoved down our throats? Where were the self-proclaimed software freedom fighters? Where were the calls to action? I didn't see any.

Is silence golden ... or is gold buying silence?

Let these organizations know that you oppose California's age verification spyware law and that you expect them to rally in defense of true software freedom--freedom from government oversight of your software systems. Parents--and not the spyware state--should protect their children. The government is neither your parent nor your god nor your savior and the people should send a clear message stating that.

California, stay out of my operating system! And stay the hell away from children!

@eff@mastodon.social
@linuxfoundation@social.lfx.dev
@fsf@hostux.social
@osi@opensource.org
@conservancy@sfconservancy.org

#AgeVerification #Linux #EFF #OSI #LinuxFoundation #FSF #Privacy #Cybersecurity #Surveillance #Spyware #OpenSource #OperatingSystems #FreeSoftware #SoftwareFreedom #Panopticon #BigBrother #Government

CC: @laffer1@bsd.network @leo@twit.social @MichaelRoss@social.linux.pizza @rms@mastodon.xyz @thenewoil@mastodon.thenewoil.org @TechDesk@flipboard.social @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

Alt...

A crowd of sillouettes of people stands in front of a giant telescreen depicting a single giant eye watching them.