Tootfinder

Weekend Reads
* VPN IPv6 leaks
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19698
* ACME protocol brief history

Smoothing Rough Edges of IPv6 in VPNs
How do commercial VPNs interact with IPv6? We show two "rough edges" in how commercial VPNs handle IPv6. First, we show that many IPv4-only VPNs leak IPv6 traffic to the ISP. Individual use VPNs in part to conceal their local IP addresses, so such leaks reduce user privacy. While prior work has studied VPNs in testbeds, we use a new dataset of 129k VPN-using daily visitors to WhatIsMyIPAddress.com that quantifies these leaks and show 12 VPNs previously considered safe still leak for at least 5%…

from my link log —
ACME, a brief history of a protocol which has changed Internet security.
https://blog.brocas.org/2025/12/01/ACME-a-brief-history-of-one-of-the-protocols-which-has-changed-the-Internet-Security/

Smarthistory – A brief history of Western culture #history

The Smell of Progress: A Brief History of Bird Droppings Ruling the World
https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatehistorian/p/the-smell-of-progress-a-brief-history?utm_source=share&utm_medium=an…

I just read a brief informal history of my department written in the early 1990s. It's disturbingly familiar on many points, though the "high enrolments" it refers to are obviously a phenomenon from another century.

from my link log —
Error handling in Rust: from `failure` to `fehler`.
https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/failure-to-fehler/
saved 2020-04-09 http…

With thanks to @… who alerted me to the German-language version, this looks good & will be published in English soon (& available in Australia)
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-brief-history-of-a-long-war-9780593840153

I can only dream of identifying something as big as a tree. I'm on the microscopes today trying to tell the differences betwenlen lots of tiny snails that all look the same 😶‍🌫️😵‍💫
Back to their roots: a brief history of trees – in pictures | Photography | The Guardian
htt…

http://www.nerdware.org/doc/abriefhistory.html
2009 - Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer designed a new programming language while waiting on Skynet compiling a single C header. They did it by rejecting almost every feature of Java and C . This successfully proved the …

Good Morning #Canada
December 8th, 1869, Timothy Eaton opened a small dry-goods and haberdashery business at 178 Yonge Street in the city of Toronto. From that humble start grew a national retail chain that eventually would bring Christmas Window Displays that attracted crowds for 100 years, and the tradition continues today. The heyday for the window displays was the 1940s to 1980s when Eatons and Simpsons competed for children's noses pressed up against their windows. But every store, large or small, had their own creative display in December. In the 1990s retail chains started to falter and disappear and some displays, like those from Woodwards and Ogilvys, were preserved by museums. I remember our annual visit to Eatons and Simpsons on Yonge Street in the early 60s, when Mom and Dad would load up the car with 7 kids and we'd tour the Christmas displays.
#CanadaIsAwesome #HappyHolidays
https://www.tvo.org/article/walking-in-a-window-wonderland-a-brief-history-of-torontos-department-store-christmas-displays

from my link log —
A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks.
https://loriemerson.net/2024/08/31/a-brief-history-of-barbed-wire-fence-telephone-networks/
saved 2026-02-12

a brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…

A Brief History of Times Square
#MetropolitanABookOrPlay
#HashTagGames