Stop saying that the link between autism and vaccines is "unproven". It is discredited. It is disproven. Disproven and unproven are not the same thing.
Last week we toasted the 30th birthday of the lspace.org domain. Now there's another anniversary to celebrate: today, *34* years ago, saw the creation of the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett, aka "afp".
Afp was where the first wave of Internet Discworld fandom happened, with active participation by Terry Pratchett himself. Without afp there would never have *been* an lspace.org or L-Space Web. Nor would there have been quite a sizeable number of human beings whose very existence is the direct result of afp or afp-adjacent relationships. And you can make a case that there would have been no Discworld conventions either -- or at least not quite in their current form: that the very first DWCon was hatched on afp is, I think, reasonably well-known.
But what perhaps fewer people are aware of is that the creation of afp itself was entirely an Antipodean affair. The newsgroup was proposed and had its charter written by Karl Geppert, then a computer science student at Monash University in Australia.
Next, the 'newgroup' control message that caused afp to actually come into being was issued by Craig Harding, who was a sysadmin at ACME, which was, as far as I have been able to deduce, a $60/year Usenet gateway in New Zealand ("Palmerston North's only UN*X based BBS"), running on a 40 MHz i386 with a 130 Mb (yes, that's *mega*bytes) hard disk -- be still my beating heart.
That newgroup message was then approved for posting by "Da Boss" of the ACME Amateur Antipodean Anonymous Alliteration Association -- which I am fairly certain was just Craig himself. :-)
And this is how it came to be that one lonely i386 computer in New Zealand in 1992 was the direct and immediate cause of everything else that happened after, Discworld fandom-wise. Including the afp newsgroup propagating to the Netherlands a few days later, where a bored PhD student had until then mostly been spending his time posting to rec.music.misc...
IT job! My team at Durham University (in the UK) is looking to hire an additional Linux sysadmin. This is a permanent, hybrid, operational technical role in our central IT department:
https://durham.taleo.net/careersection/du_ext/jobdetail.ftl?job=26000035
I like Durham (and my management), and we've no shortage of virtuous work to do.
I'm not directly involved in hiring for this post, but if you or anyone that you know are lovely and know one end of a config management tool from the other, please follow the link!
📢 Save the date: XDC 2026 will take place September 28–30 in Toronto 🇨🇦
Big thanks to Arm for organizing this year’s conference — more news soon!
Epochal change in Linux text consoles underway
Better security, getting rid of legacy, and new features: This is what an impending change in Linux's Virtual Terminal (VT) technology promises.
