Posts from 2023

December 2023 120 posts

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT danluu.com · “the top result was a Google Store link to buy Google’s own Pixel 7, with the rest of the top results being various Android phones sold on Amazon.”
Dec 31
Update: Maersk Ship Hit by Missile, Avoids Boarding in the Red Sea gcaptain.com · “U.S. Navy helicopters responded to the distress call and engaged with the small boats, sinking three of them and killing the crews.”
Dec 31
7 watts idle on Intel 12th/13th gen: the foundation for building a low power server/NAS mattgadient.com · “Before going further, the 7 watt figure for this system was before storage has been added.”
Dec 31
How I forked SteamOS for my living room PC iliana.fyi · “Every build of a Steam Deck image can be found at https://steamdeck-images.steamos.cloud/steamdeck/"
Dec 31
Court of Appeal ruling will prevent UK museums from charging reproduction fees: at last theartnewspaper.com · “Moreover, Lord Justice Arnold pointed out that the new copyright bar has been in place since 2009.”
Dec 30
Tether Reveals Partnerships With Secret Service, FBI in Letter to U.S. Senate finance.yahoo.com · “Tether seeks to be a world class partner to the U.S. as we continue to assist law enforcement and expand dollar hegemony globally.”
Dec 30
Why Android developers no longer need Windows USB drivers fabiensanglard.net · “If no driver can be found, Linux loads usbfs which lets user-space programs access the device. Mac OS does the same, with IOKit. Windows reports an error.”
Dec 30
Why I'm skeptical of low-code nick.scialli.me · “A lot of low-code solutions seem to hit about 80% of a company’s requirement.”
Dec 30
Malware abuses Google OAuth endpoint to 'revive' cookies, hijack accounts bleepingcomputer.com · “BleepingComputer has contacted Google multiple times over a month with questions about these claims and how they plan to mitigate the issue, but we never received a response.”
Dec 29
Amazon plans to make its own hydrogen to power vehicles theverge.com · “The electrolyzer is plugged into the power grid, and fossil fuels still make up about 60 percent of the US electricity mix.”
Dec 29
Korea to welcome 'digital nomads' with new visa starting Jan. 1 koreajoongangdaily.joins.com · “The visa requires applicants to have an annual income double the amount of Korea’s gross national income (GNI) per capita for the previous year.”
Dec 29
Gentoo goes Binary! gentoo.org · “There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker.”
Dec 29
Amazon.com, Inc. - 662503 - 12/20/2023 fda.gov · “FDA purchased on your website, www.amazon.com, products that are labeled as energy enhancing supplements or food, but laboratory analyses confirmed that they contained undeclared and potentially harmful active pharmaceutical ingredients.”
Dec 28
My CCPA Dialog With OpenAI dbreunig.com · “We can confirm that your email does not appear in our training dataset.”
Dec 28
What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it theregister.com · “The GPL is not acting the way the GPL should have done when one-third of all paid-for Linux systems are sold with a GPL circumvention. That’s RHEL.”
Dec 28
4 billion if statements andreasjhkarlsson.github.io · “Running this gives us a nice 40 GB file which contains all 4.2 billion comparisons needed to determine if any 32 bit number is even or odd!”
Dec 28
Operation Triangulation: The last (hardware) mystery securelist.com · “Because this feature is not used by the firmware, we have no idea how attackers would know how to use it.”
Dec 27
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement theverge.com · “Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”
Dec 27
First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation eia.gov · “Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns.”
Dec 27
No new iPhone? No secure iOS: Looking at an unfixed iOS vulnerability joshua.hu · “If in the future you are able to reproduce this issue using a different device that’s running iOS 17 or later, please let us know.”
Dec 27
Federal court decides in favor of retired engineer told by state to not talk about math in public wect.com · “The NC Board of Examiners and Surveyors claimed that this was punishable by a misdemeanor unless he obtained a professional engineer’s license from the state.”
Dec 26
Amazon Prime Video starts showing ads in January unless you pay $2.99/month extra 9to5google.com · “No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership.”
Dec 26
A data corruption bug in OpenZFS? despairlabs.com · “The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system.”
Dec 26
Wayfair CEO: Employees need to work longer hours cnn.com · “There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success.”
Dec 26
Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought freethink.com · “They’ve now announced that people who received both therapies were 49% less likely to experience recurrence or death a median of three years after treatment compared to people in the Keytruda-only group.”
Dec 26
Post-apocalyptic life in American health care metarationality.com · “The short version is that at least seven experts spent roughly ten full-time days trying to find out a basic fact about my mother’s insurance, and finally failed.”
Dec 25
GTA 5 source code leaks online, giving Rockstar a huge blow on Christmas: Report sportskeeda.com · “According to a report by popular YouTuber SKizzle on X on December 24, 2023, the entire source code of Grand Theft Auto 5 was leaked publicly.”
Dec 25
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets roylongbottom.org.uk · “In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply.”
Dec 25
Ruby 3.3.0 Released ruby-lang.org · “Now more than 3x faster than the interpreter on Optcarrot!”
Dec 25
Costs of running a macOS app studio business notes.alinpanaitiu.com · “In the end, I get the equivalent of a $5800/month net salary.”
Dec 24
U.S. medical schools aren't teaching future doctors about 7.4 million of their patients statnews.com · “As of 2023, only 15% of U.S. medical schools have taken advantage of these grants.”
Dec 24
The Era of American Computer Magazines Has Drawn to a Close bytecellar.com · “And now, basically all American computer print magazines have vanished.”
Dec 24
NY Gov. Hochul vetoes ban on noncompete clauses, waters down LLC transparency bill gothamist.com · “Major business interests, including Wall Street firms and the state Business Council, lobbied Hochul to reject the ban on noncompete clauses, arguing they are necessary to protect trade secrets and retain talent.”
Dec 23
Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims theguardian.com · “Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam, the report said.”
Dec 23
They Want You To Forget What A Film Looks Like aftermath.site · “According to The Digital Bits, Park Road Post had a recent 4k scan of True Lies from the original camera negative.”
Dec 23
In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users organicmaps.app · “It’s possible to do even more in 2024 if we get enough donations to scale the infrastructure, reward our contributors, or hire a full-time working team.”
Dec 23
Xfinity Data Breach Impacts 36 Million Individuals securityweek.com · “Comcast recently reported having roughly 32 million customers, which suggests that the data breach could affect all Xfinity customers and possibly employees as well.”
Dec 22
How Big is YouTube? ethanzuckerman.com · “Our current estimate for the size of YouTube is 13.325 billion videos”
Dec 22
The hyperloop is dead for real this time theverge.com · “The pod only reached a top speed of 100mph, far short of the original promise of seven times that amount.”
Dec 22
Google Search Overwhelmed By Massive Spam Attack searchenginejournal.com · “Many of the domains have only been registered within the past 24-48 hours.”
Dec 22
SMTP Smuggling - Spoofing E-Mails Worldwide sec-consult.com · “CERT/CC allows public release of SMTP smuggling, since no software vulnerabilities were identified ("it’s not a bug, it’s a feature")”
Dec 21
Google OAuth is Broken (Sort Of) trufflesecurity.com · “Because these non-Gmail Google accounts aren’t actually a member of the Google organization, they won’t show up in any administrator settings, or user Google lists.”
Dec 21
How Two Pharmacists Figured Out That Decongestants Don't Work scientificamerican.com · “We were confident at that point that oral phenylephrine did not work.”
Dec 21
This weed killer is banned in 58 countries. U.S. workers say it's giving them Parkinson's latimes.com · “Despite Marks’ concerns, Syngenta publicized her original findings at an annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience in 2004, Botham testified.”
Dec 21
Rite Aid Banned from Using AI Facial Recognition After FTC Says Retailer Deployed Technology without Reasonable Safeguards ftc.gov · “Rite Aid will be prohibited from using facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes for five years”
Dec 20
Waymo significantly outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7+ million miles of rider-only driving waymo.com · “This means that over the 7.1 million miles Waymo drove, there were an estimated 17 fewer injuries and 20 fewer police-reported crashes compared to if human drivers with the benchmark crash rate would have driven the same distance in the areas we operate.”
Dec 20
Terrapin attacks can downgrade security of OpenSSH connections bleepingcomputer.com · “Terrapin is not a simple software bug that can be fixed with an update to a single library or component.”
Dec 20
Delta Dental of California data breach exposed info of 7 million people bleepingcomputer.com · “Based on this, the data breach has so far impacted 6,928,932 customers of Delta Dental of California, who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed.”
Dec 20
Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34 jepsen.io · “In short: MySQL Repeatable Read transactions cannot safely read a value and then write it.”
Dec 19
A Lufthansa A350's Frustrating Oakland Diversion onemileatatime.com · “The controller responds "I can’t have this conversation with you, you either divert to Oakland or you can continue to hold, it’s up to you"”
Dec 19
Volkswagen Will Bring Back Physical Buttons In New Cars insideevs.com · “This move, according to VW, "frustrated customers who shouldn’t be frustrated."”
Dec 19
My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter ounapuu.ee · “What I discovered instead was that the power adapter that comes with the fountain outputs a solid 7.5V.”
Dec 19
Figma and Adobe are abandoning our proposed merger figma.com · “despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.”
Dec 18
Apple halting Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales: Here's why 9to5mac.com · “In its initial filing with the ITC, Masimo accused Apple of 103 instances of patent infringement across five different patents.”
Dec 18
Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach krebsonsecurity.com · “When ChronoPay’s internal emails were leaked in 2010, the username and password for its MegaPlan subscription were still working and valid.”
Dec 18
Your Smart TV Knows What You're Watching themarkup.org · “These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second.”
Dec 18
Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber For Negative Review onemileatatime.com · “I was pressured to write a statement that I didn’t give you permission to be filmed,”
Dec 17
New Mind-Reading "BrainGPT" Turns Thoughts Into Text On Screen iflscience.com · “Accuracy measurements using the BLEU algorithm – a way to evaluate the similarity of an original text to a machine-translated output by giving it a score between 0 and 1 – put the new tech at about 0.4.”
Dec 17
“Yes” Actually Means “No”: The Curious Language of VCs blog.jacobstechtavern.com · “Please note however that this is neither a term sheet or a wire transfer.”
Dec 17
Bluetooth keystroke-injection in Android, Linux, macOS and iOS github.com · “The Linux vulnerability was fixed in 2020 (CVE-2020-0556), but the fix was left disabled by default.”
Dec 16
OpenAI suspends ByteDance's account after it used GPT to train its own AI model. theverge.com · “As I reported, most of ByteDance’s GPT usage has been done through Microsoft’s Azure platform, not through OpenAI directly.”
Dec 16
Google will no longer hold onto people's location data in Google Maps: meaning it can't turn that info over to the police businessinsider.com · “That means Google itself will no longer have access to user location history data. And by extension, neither will law enforcement”
Dec 16
Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors spectrum.ieee.org · “Experts estimate CFETs to roll out commercially seven to ten years from now, but there is still a lot of work before they are ready.”
Dec 16
Cruise slashes 24% of self-driving car workforce in sweeping layoffs techcrunch.com · “GM, which acquired Cruise in 2016, was rewarded by shareholders for the cutbacks. GM shares rose 4.8% to $35.64 following the news.”
Dec 15
Data exfiltration from Writer.com with indirect prompt injection promptarmor.substack.com · “Dec 5: Writer responds "We do not consider this to be a security issue since the real customer accounts do not have access to any website."”
Dec 15
Ubiquiti users claim to have access to other people's devices securityaffairs.com · “However this time I was presented with 88 consoles from another account. I had full access to these consoles, just as I would my own.”
Dec 15
Bricked Xmas whizzy.org · “I guess I overflowed some buffer and I’ve corrupted the firmware.”
Dec 15
NASA working to solve Voyager 1 computer glitch from billions of miles away cnn.com · “As both Voyager probes experience new trials, mission team members have only the original manuals written decades ago to consult”
Dec 14
FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences using Large Language Models deepmind.google · “FunSearch works by pairing a pre-trained LLM, whose goal is to provide creative solutions in the form of computer code, with an automated "evaluator", which guards against hallucinations and incorrect ideas.”
Dec 14
Intel CEO attacks Nvidia on AI: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market' tomshardware.com · “We think of the CUDA moat as shallow and small,”
Dec 14
OpenAI inks deal with Axel Springer on licensing news for model training techcrunch.com · “In return, Axel Springer will receive payments of an unspecified size and frequency from OpenAI.”
Dec 14
Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them 404media.co · “NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train’s control systems that prevented them from running if a GPS tracker detected that it spent a certain number of days in an independent repair company’s maintenance center”
Dec 13
Australia makes world-first decision to ban engineered stone following surge in silicosis cases abc.net.au · “The report found there was no safe level of silica, concluding: "The use of all engineered stone should be prohibited."”
Dec 13
Cloud engineer gets 2 years for wiping ex-employer's code repos bleepingcomputer.com · “Following his dismissal, Brody allegedly refused to return his work laptop and instead used his still-valid account to access the bank’s computer network”
Dec 13
Norton Healthcare Ransomware Hack: 2.5 Million Personal Records Stolen securityweek.com · “While the notice did not say how many individuals were affected, Norton Healthcare informed the Maine Attorney General’s Office that the attackers stole the personal information of 2.5 million individuals.”
Dec 13
Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight theverge.com · “After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them”
Dec 12
Zero downtime Postgres upgrades knock.app · “Postgres 11.9 is being retired by Amazon’s RDS service on February 29, 2024.”
Dec 12
Phi-2: The surprising power of small language models microsoft.com · “The training for Phi-2 took 14 days on 96 A100 GPUs.”
Dec 12
House Intelligence Committee FISA "Reform" Bill Would Greatly Expand the Class of Businesses and Other Entities Required to Assist in FISA 702 Surveillance zwillgen.com · “the expanded definition would appear to cover data centers, colocation providers, business landlords, shared workspaces, or even hotels where guests connect to the Internet.”
Dec 11
Hacktivists hacked a Irish water utility and interrupted water supply securityaffairs.com · “Our caretaker went down and when he got to the pumphouse, up on the screen was a sign ‘You have been hacked’.”
Dec 11
Report: 2.6 billion personal records compromised by data breaches in past two years: underscoring need for end-to-end encryption apple.com · “The findings underscore that strong protections against data breaches in the cloud, like end-to-end encryption, have only grown more essential since last year’s report and the launch of Advanced Data Protection for iCloud.”
Dec 11
Mixtral of experts mistral.ai · “Concretely, Mixtral has 46.7B total parameters but only uses 12.9B parameters per token.”
Dec 11
More than 1500 HuggingFace API Tokens Were Exposed lasso.security · “Intriguingly, among these accounts, 655 users’ tokens were found to have write permissions, 77 of them to various organizations, granting us full control over the repositories of several prominent companies.”
Dec 10
Paris-based Startup and OpenAI Competitor Mistral AI Valued at $2 Billion unite.ai · “Joining the fray are tech giants Nvidia ( NVDA ) Corp and Salesforce ( CRM ) , contributing an additional €120 million in convertible debt.”
Dec 10
Please, Expose your RSS rknight.me · “I was surprised to find that a lot of people don’t have a link anywhere to their feed.”
Dec 10
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing pluralistic.net · “when I was a bookseller, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal the books I’d sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table”
Dec 9
Spain expels two US spies for infiltrating secret service english.elpais.com · “What do Americans have to pay for if we give them everything they ask for?”
Dec 9
pinning all system calls marc.info · “The ping(1) binary does not call execve(2) or fork(2). So now you can’t ever call fork() or execve() because there is no “syscall” instruction for those two system calls.”
Dec 9
The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity slack.com · “More than half (54%) of these workers say it’s because they feel pressured to, not because they choose to.”
Dec 9
Dieselgate, but for trains - some heavyweight hardware hacking badcyber.com · “A condition has been written in the computer code to disable the ability to run a train if it spends at least 10 days in one of these workshops.”
Dec 8
Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android techcrunch.com · “These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.”
Dec 8
How we investigated France's mass profiling machine lighthousereports.com · “Those flagged as high risk are subject to special investigations where fraud controllers are empowered to visit people’s homes unannounced, count toothbrushes to guess how many people live there, question their neighbours and scour bank records.”
Dec 8
Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users macrumors.com · “In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information.”
Dec 8
23andMe is updating its TOS to force binding arbitration with a limited opt-out window stackdiary.com · “Because these terms were put in place on November 30, 2023 – it has already been over a week, and most users might not understand why this is important or relevant.”
Dec 7
Pilotless FedEx, Reliable Robotics Plane Completes Flight ttnews.com · “Our system doesn’t do automated engine starts, so somebody has to be in the plane to start the engine.”
Dec 7
Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers to move the industry electrek.co · “To be frank, Tesla isn’t sharing its 48V architecture from the Cybertruck for purely altruistic reasons.”
Dec 7
Building end-to-end security for Messenger engineering.fb.com · “Messenger, however, has a long history of storing people’s messages for them so that they can access them whenever they need without having to store them locally.”
Dec 7
Introducing Gemini: Google's most capable AI model yet blog.google · “Our new benchmark approach to MMLU enables Gemini to use its reasoning capabilities to think more carefully before answering difficult questions, leading to significant improvements over just using its first impression.”
Dec 6
Quad9 Turns the Sony Case Around in Dresden quad9.net · “The DNS does not contain content - it is a system designed for delivery only of pointers, not for data transport.”
Dec 6
Klarna freezes hiring because AI can do the job instead mashable.com · “We’re not currently hiring at all, apart from engineers.”
Dec 6
15,000 Go Module Repositories on GitHub Vulnerable to Repojacking Attack thehackernews.com · “A third-party can’t reasonably register 15,000 GitHub accounts.”
Dec 6
23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users techcrunch.com · “On Friday, genetic testing company 23andMe announced that hackers accessed the personal data of 0.1% of customers, or about 14,000 individuals.”
Dec 5
Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops social.hackerspace.pl · “One version of the controller actually contained GPS coordinates to contain the behaviour to third party workshops.”
Dec 5
Firefox on the brink? brycewray.com · “Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government’s visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don’t have to support Firefox anymore.”
Dec 5
Tesla is officially losing half $7,500 tax credit on two Model 3 trims electrek.co · “Tax credit will reduce to $3,750 for Model 3 Rear-Wheel Drive and Model 3 Long Range on Jan 1, 2024. Take delivery by Dec 31 for full tax credit.”
Dec 5
An Update on December 2023 Organizational Changes newsroom.spotify.com · “I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance.”
Dec 4
Security flaws in court record systems used in five US states exposed sensitive legal documents techcrunch.com · “One of the bugs was as easy to exploit as incrementing a document number in the browser’s address bar of one Florida court records system, said Parker.”
Dec 4
An Update On The DoorDash Experience in NYC about.doordash.com · “In order to better balance the impact of these new costs, we’re moving the option to tip in the DoorDash app to after checkout.”
Dec 4
A Decade of Have I Been Pwned troyhunt.com · “The project I built out of a passion to do community good was now being used as a tool to extract as much money out of me as possible.”
Dec 4
OpenAI Agreed to Buy $51 Million of AI Chips From a Startup Backed by CEO Sam Altman wired.com · “Rain told investors that Altman had personally invested more than $1 million in the company.”
Dec 3
Let's learn how modern JavaScript frameworks work by building one nolanlawson.com · “And asking developers to write the correct memo code is a losing battle.”
Dec 3
Report Phone Spam - Shut down robocallers & text spammers reportphonespam.org · “Blocking a phone number is a bit better than nothing, but not much.”
Dec 3
No new top boss at NSA until it answers questions about buying up location, browsing data theregister.com · “The administration is abusing the CUI designation to keep this unclassified information from the American public,” Wyden continued.
Dec 2
Not Everything Is Google's Fault (Just Most Things) blog.railway.com · “As it turns out, a Google engineer was able to arbitrarily change the quota on GCP.”
Dec 2
Cicadas Are So Loud, Fiber Optic Cables Can 'Hear' Them wired.com · “Every 1 meter of fiber, more or less, we can turn it into a kind of microphone,” says Ozharar.
Dec 2
Singing to babies is vital to help them learn language, say scientists theguardian.com · “We believe that speech rhythm information is the hidden glue underpinning the development of a well-functioning language system.”
Dec 2
Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says. Here's why cnbc.com · “We are three and a half years in, and we’re totally stuck,” Bloom said of remote work. “It would take something as extreme as the pandemic to unstick it.”
Dec 1
Buggy animation in Atlassian BitBucket is wasting half a CPU core at all times thehftguy.com · “The icon is a static SVG image that’s about 3 lines of text.”
Dec 1
Anduril unveils Roadrunner, 'a fighter jet weapon that lands like a Falcon 9' techcrunch.com · “Because the product is reusable and recoverable, operators can act without the fear that they could lose an expensive asset.”
Dec 1
Code is run more than read olano.dev · “Software designed by different people than the ones woken up at midnight when it breaks.”
Dec 1

November 2023 114 posts

CSAR: European Parliament rejects mass scanning of private messages. Here is why edri.org · “On this basis, the Parliament firmly rejected rules which would force companies to scan huge volumes of people’s private messages – instead now requiring there to be reasonable suspicion.”
Nov 30
Report: Stability AI Positioning Itself for Acquisition pymnts.com · “Stability AI was spending about $8 million a month on bills and payroll in October.”
Nov 30
xCurl daniel.haxx.se · “They have not been in touch or communicated about this work of theirs to anyone in the curl project.”
Nov 30
Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT not-just-memorization.github.io · “It’s wild to us that our attack works and should’ve, would’ve, could’ve been found earlier.”
Nov 29
Iranian hacker group Cyber Av3ngers hacked the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa in Pennsylvania securityaffairs.com · “During the weekend, Iranian threat actors hacked the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa (MWAA) and took control of one of their booster stations.”
Nov 29
Inside Foxconn's struggle to make iPhones in India restofworld.org · “The Sunguvarchatram plant still assembled fewer than 10% of all iPhone 15s, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Nov 29
Massachusetts becomes fifth state in nation to make prison calls free wgbh.org · “The Department of Correction currently charges 12 cents per minute, and most county sheriffs charge 14 cents per minute”
Nov 29
My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story chrislewicki.com · “I may have just created a $500M piece of scrap.”
Nov 28
FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine agrees Loyal's data supports reasonable expectation of effectiveness for large dog lifespan extension loyal.com · “Once we satisfactorily complete safety and manufacturing sections and other requirements, vets will be able to prescribe LOY-001 to extend the lifespan of large dogs while we complete the confirmatory pivotal lifespan extension study in parallel.”
Nov 28
Microsoft opens sources ThreadX under MIT license theregister.com · “As soon as this innocent little OS turned 21 in 2019, Microsoft grabbed it, acquiring ThreadX owners Express Logic and rebranding the poor thing as Azure RTOS, which hasn’t done any favours for its brand awareness.”
Nov 28
Introducing SDXL Turbo: A Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model stability.ai · “It’s important to note that SDXL Turbo is not yet intended for commercial use.”
Nov 28
BlackCat claims it is behind Fidelity National Financial ransomware shakedown theregister.com · “Wouldn’t want to disclose every card at this early stage.”
Nov 27
Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files theregister.com · “The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023.”
Nov 27
$20k Bounty was Claimed! prettier.io · “On November 9th, we put up a $10k bounty for any project written in Rust that would pass 95% of Prettier test suite.”
Nov 27
Can no longer search code without being logged in. github.com · “This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.”
Nov 27
Titled Tuesday Cheating - Part 2 dorianquelle.github.io · “In no condition do we find any evidence of cheating.”
Nov 26
Making it clear when we're on a call with you to protect you from fraud monzo.com · “Since we launched this feature, we’ve seen approximately 700 fraud reports each month directly within Call Status.”
Nov 26
the curse of docker computer.rip · “One of the great sins of Docker is having normalized running software as root.”
Nov 26
Update on the rust port github.com · “Depending on how you count, we’re at anywhere between 60% (c++ sloc removed) and 74% (rust sloc vs c++ sloc) done.”
Nov 26
The Bond villain compliance strategy bitsaboutmoney.com · “The crime was the product.”
Nov 25
Darktable : crashing into the wall in slow-motion ansel.photos · “I’m full-time on it since 2018, for a monthly income between 800 and 900 €”
Nov 25
The MAUI team does not respond to issues with any urgency... THIS IS THE ISSUE!!! github.com · “I have reported issues as far back as Feb, 2022, and of as now, many of these reported issues remain unfixed.”
Nov 25
Why is 56k the fastest dialup modem speed? 10stripe.com · “The result is that you will never be able to connect at a speed faster than 53.3 kbit/s.”
Nov 25
Screensharing mistake gets Nvidia sued over alleged stolen trade secrets theverge.com · “So brazen was Mr. Moniruzzaman’s theft, the file path on his screen still read "ValeoDocs."”
Nov 24
The Feds' Vehicle 'Kill Switch' Mandate Is a Gross (and Dangerous) Violation of Privacy fee.org · “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor vehicles”
Nov 24
Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall ethz.ch · “The autonomous machine can place 20 to 30 stones in a single consignment – about as many as one delivery could supply.”
Nov 24
The first embryos from a mammal have now been grown in space sciencenews.org · “Out of 360 samples, 72 survived the trip, and 17 of those developed into normal blastocysts.”
Nov 24
US govt pays AT&T to let cops search Americans' phone records – 'usually' without a warrant theregister.com · “Under Hemisphere, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) pays telco AT&T to provide all federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies with the ability to request searches of trillions of domestic phone records dating back to at least 1987, plus the four billion call records added every day.”
Nov 23
After OpenAI's Blowup, It Seems Pretty Clear That 'AI Safety' Isn't a Real Thing gizmodo.com · “One side decidedly overpowered the other (hint: it was the money side).”
Nov 23
Tesla open sources all design and engineering of original Roadster teslarati.com · “Tesla has opened everything from Owner’s Manuals to Circuits and Connectors for the original Roadster.”
Nov 23
The Story of Titanium construction-physics.com · “Of the first 6000 pieces fabricated from the beta titanium alloy, 95% were lost.”
Nov 23
Reflecting on 18 years at Google ln.hixie.ch · “Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.”
Nov 22
Morgan Stanley Fined $6.5 Million for Exposing Customer Information securityweek.com · “The moving company, the AG says, sold the computer equipment at internet auctions without Morgan Stanley’s knowledge.”
Nov 22
Third-party data breach affecting Canadian government could involve data from 1999 theregister.com · “The government of Canada has confirmed its data was accessed after two of its third-party service providers were attacked.”
Nov 22
Northvolt develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion battery northvolt.com · “It is based on a hard carbon anode and a Prussian White-based cathode, and is free from lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite.”
Nov 21
Cruise co-founder resigns following CEO exit engadget.com · “Kan is said to have announced his resignation over Slack.”
Nov 21
Introducing Claude 2.1 anthropic.com · “Claude 2.1 has also made significant gains in honesty, with a 2x decrease in false statements compared to our previous Claude 2.0 model.”
Nov 21
OpenAI Staff Threaten to Quit Unless Board Resigns wired.com · “Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence.”
Nov 20
Ransomware gang files SEC complaint over victim's undisclosed breach bleepingcomputer.com · “The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware operation has taken extortion to a new level”
Nov 20
A secret Google deal let Spotify completely bypass Android's app store fees theverge.com · “If we don’t have Spotify working properly across Play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones.”
Nov 20
Nothing Chats, the Sunbird-based iMessage app, is a privacy nightmare with unencrypted messages and images 9to5google.com · “Sunbird has access to every message sent and received through the app.”
Nov 20
Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team theverge.com · “The team already saw a restructuring earlier this year, which Business Insider wrote included layoffs that left RAI "a shell of a team."”
Nov 19
U.S. Agency Declares 21 Species Now Extinct pbsnc.org · “The swamps where it lived were converted to farmland, and its trees were cut down for logging.”
Nov 19
It's Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated blog.miguelgrinberg.com · “These methods should have been designed to fail when a naive datetime object is passed to them”
Nov 19
Kyutai is a French AI research lab with a $330 million budget that will make everything open source techcrunch.com · “The good news is that Scaleway, the cloud division of Iliad, recently acquired a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs.”
Nov 19
New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy fortune.com · “About 1 in 5 American workers, nearly 30 million people, are bound by noncompete agreements, according to the Federal Trade Commission.”
Nov 18
Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem nautil.us · “For now, neither scheme is practically useful: Preprocessing currently helps at the extremes, when the database size balloons toward infinity.”
Nov 18
Introducing graphics offload blog.gtk.org · “We are coming back from this adventure with some frustrations and some successes.”
Nov 18
OpenAI fires co-founder and CEO Sam Altman for allegedly lying to company board theguardian.com · “Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”
Nov 17
The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars theconversation.com · “Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day – about 1% of the world’s total oil demand.”
Nov 17
Royal Mail’s recovery from ransomware attack will cost business at least $12M theregister.com · “The total costs related to the attack are likely to be higher but International Distribution Services, or IDS, has not pinned hard figures to these.”
Nov 17
Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected goldmansachs.com · “Battery pack prices are now expected to fall by an average of 11% per year from 2023 to 2030.”
Nov 17
Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive signal.org · “We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate.”
Nov 16
Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion theregister.com · “If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware and VP approval will be required.”
Nov 16
Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year 9to5mac.com · “This is not Apple opening up iMessage to other platforms.”
Nov 16
Smart drugs aren’t so smart after all bps.org.uk · “Those who’d scored above average after taking the placebo tended to fall below average while on one of the drugs.”
Nov 16
U.S. Reenters the Nuclear Fuel Game spectrum.ieee.org · “The specialized fuel these advanced reactors will need is currently made on a commercial scale only in Russia.”
Nov 15
New CacheWarp AMD CPU attack lets hackers gain root in Linux VMs bleepingcomputer.com · “In 3 case studies, we demonstrate an attack on RSA in the Intel IPP crypto library, recovering the entire private key, logging into an OpenSSH server without authentication, and escalating privileges to root via the sudo binary.”
Nov 15
Australia’s overuse of antibiotics found to be driving rate of drug-resistant infections theguardian.com · “The reality is we’re giving out a lot of antibiotics when we don’t need to.”
Nov 15
Poloniex exchange suffers $100M exploit, offers 5% bounty cointelegraph.com · “Sun also offered a 5% white-hat bounty to the Poloniex hacker.”
Nov 15
Reptar lock.cmpxchg8b.com · “We verified this worked even inside an unprivileged guest VM, so this already has serious security implications for cloud providers.”
Nov 14
Child sexual abuse online: effective measures, no mass surveillance europarl.europa.eu · “In the adopted text, MEPs excluded end-to-end encryption from the scope of the detection orders to guarantee that all users’ communications are secure and confidential.”
Nov 14
Google Sues Men Who Weaponized DMCA Notices to Crush Competition torrentfreak.com · “Two men who allegedly used 65 Google accounts to bombard Google with fraudulent DMCA takedown notices targeting up to 620,000 URLs, have been named in a Google lawsuit filed in California on Monday.”
Nov 14
Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians iihs.org · “Pedestrian crash deaths have risen 80 percent since hitting their low in 2009.”
Nov 14
Hacking Google Bard - From Prompt Injection to Data Exfiltration embracethered.com · “Indirect Prompt Injection attacks via Emails or Google Docs are interesting threats, because these can be delivered to users without their consent.”
Nov 13
The Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner just paid a record $4 million to skip to the front of the line fortune.com · “You are getting close to $4.5 million to use the canal, so that is pricing out a lot of ships.”
Nov 13
Marina Bay Sands Discloses Data Breach Impacting 665k Customers securityweek.com · “The company said it had found no evidence that the exposed data was misused to “cause harm to customers”.”
Nov 13
Placemark is going open source and shutting down macwright.com · “I couldn’t find a way to make it work as a sustainable bootstrapped startup.”
Nov 13
SanDisk Extreme Pro Failures Result From Design and Manufacturing Flaws, Says Data Recovery Firm tomshardware.com · “According to Häfele, the components used in these SSDs are too big for the circuit board, causing weak connections (i.e., high impendence and high temperatures) and making them prone to breaking.”
Nov 12
A truly incredible fact about the number 37 grossack.site · “First it sounded totally unbelievable, since 37 is a tiny number in the grand scheme of things.”
Nov 12
How a kernel developer made my styluses work again on newer kernels! davidrevoy.com · “Both styluses of my XPPen Artist 24 Pro and XPPen Artist 16 Pro Gen2 styluses are now usable again on newer Linux kernels.”
Nov 12
It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian krebsonsecurity.com · “Your only option at this point is recreate your account at Experian and steal it back from the ID thieves!”
Nov 11
Debunking the Myth of “Anonymous” Data eff.org · “For data brokers dealing in our personal information, our data can either be useful for their profit-making or truly anonymous, but not both.”
Nov 11
Lost Doctor Who episodes found – but owner is reluctant to hand them to BBC theguardian.com · “Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels.”
Nov 11
Microsoft lays hands on login data: Beware of the new Outlook heise.de · “Without informing or inquiring about this, Microsoft grants itself access to the IMAP and SMTP login data of users of the new Outlook.”
Nov 10
Apple's MacBook Pro memory problem is worse than ever macworld.com · “Apple’s charging you $200 for RAM it buys for $30.”
Nov 10
Confluence flaw severity raised amid mass exploitation theregister.com · “In the recently updated advisory, it conceded an attacker could reset Confluence and create an administrator account.”
Nov 10
Mr. Cooper says customer data exposed during cyberattack techcrunch.com · “Mr. Cooper said it expects to incur up to $10 million in additional vendor costs during its fiscal fourth quarter, adding that it does not expect a material impact to its business.”
Nov 10
It’s Your Right to Know Why a Health Insurer Denied Your Claim propublica.org · “Cigna and Anthem told members that they would need to obtain a court order or subpoena to access their claim file records.”
Nov 9
Perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs theregister.com · “Even if the text message is deleted from the smartphone, the Honda vehicle retains a copy in on-board memory, even after the smartphone is disconnected.”
Nov 9
Google offered Epic $147 million to launch Fortnite on the Play Store theverge.com · “It was meant to stem a potential “contagion” of popular apps bypassing Android’s official store”
Nov 9
Are we doing this again? Yes, we’re doing this again. webdevlaw.uk · “Force technology companies to inform the Home Office in advance of security and privacy features they want to add, including encryption, and force them to disable features which the government objects to”
Nov 9
Removal of MyQ integration home-assistant.io · “In their partner program, the partner companies pay Chamberlain Group for the privilege of letting MyQ owners control their own garage doors.”
Nov 8
Cruise confirms robotaxis rely on human assistance every four to five miles cnbc.com · “During driverless operations there was roughly 1 remote assistant agent for every 15-20 driverless AVs.”
Nov 8
Ombudsman: European Commission’s concealment of secret ‘expert list’ on CSAM regulation constitutes ‘maladministration’ iccl.ie · “After the Commission acknowledged to the EU Ombudsman that it, in fact, had such a list, but failed to disclose its existence to Dr Kris Shrishak, the Ombudsman held the Commission’s behaviour constituted “maladministration”.”
Nov 8
Texas produces twice as much methane as better regulated neighbor, study finds theguardian.com · “Despite increasing its own oil production in recent years, New Mexico has no site with repeated methane leaks, unlike in Texas, which Kayrros said is likely due to a 2021 state law aimed at curtailing methane emissions from industry.”
Nov 8
Article 45 Will Roll Back Web Security by 12 Years eff.org · “Article 45 forbids browsers from enforcing modern security requirements on certain CAs without the approval of an EU member government.”
Nov 7
Seeing like a bank bitsaboutmoney.com · “The reason you have to “jump through hoops” to “simply talk to someone” (a professional, with meaningful decisionmaking authority) is because the system is set up to a) try to dissuade that guy from speaking to someone whose time is expensive and b) believes, on the basis of voluminous evidence, that you are likely that guy until proven otherwise.”
Nov 7
Go, Containers, and the Linux Scheduler riverphillips.dev · “This means if you have a 16 core machine the Go runtime will create 16 OS threads - regardless of any CGroup CPU Limits.”
Nov 7
Euclid's first images: the dazzling edge of darkness esa.int · “The image shows 1000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster, and more than 100 000 additional galaxies further away in the background.”
Nov 7
'Couldn't See Anymore:' Bored Ape Conference Attendees Wake Up With Searing Eye Pain, Vision Loss 404media.co · “I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore. Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital,”
Nov 6
Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant lapcatsoftware.com · “Apple utilizes developers for vast amounts of unpaid QA labor.”
Nov 6
First handset with MTE on the market projectzero.google · “Currently, MTE is only available on the Pixel as a developer option, intended for app developers to test their apps using MTE”
Nov 6
Ace Hardware says 1,202 devices were hit during cyberattack bleepingcomputer.com · “On Sunday morning, we detected a cybersecurity incident that is impacting the majority of our IT systems,”
Nov 6
Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly blog.paavo.me · “In this example frame the game renders 13 sets of teeth, and their visual impact on the frame is zero: not a single pixel is affected.”
Nov 5
Dengue rates plunged after release of lab-altered mosquitoes dw.com · “They found that the introduction of the infected mosquitoes into local mosquito populations was “associated with a significant reduction” in dengue of up to 97% in each city compared to ten years prior to the start of the experiment.”
Nov 5
Drunk Grizzlies Keep Getting Hit By Trains In Montana cowboystatedaily.com · “Another idea is to not load the train cars so full, an idea that BNSF does not like.”
Nov 5
Can solar and wind power Britain? An update of David MacKay’s numbers hannahritchie.substack.com · “In the last decade the cost of solar power has fallen by around 90%, and wind by 70%.”
Nov 5
Post mortem on the Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics Outage blog.cloudflare.com · “the overnight shift consisted of security and an unaccompanied technician who had only been on the job for a week.”
Nov 4
YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers androidauthority.com · “AdGuard, told the outlet they normally see about 6,000 uninstallations per day on Chrome, but that shot up to 11,000 per day between October 9 and the end of the month, peaking at 52,000 on October 18.”
Nov 4
Software that supports your body should always respect your freedom fsf.org · “We recommend that you disable automatic operating system updates on the smartphone using the mentioned apps.”
Nov 4
Othello is Solved arxiv.org · “It is computationally proved that perfect play by both players lead to a draw.”
Nov 4
.US Harbors Prolific Malicious Link Shortening Service krebsonsecurity.com · “We have not found any legitimate content served through their shorteners.”
Nov 3
Dozens of countries will pledge to stop paying ransomware gangs bleepingcomputer.com · “An alliance of 40 countries will sign a pledge during the third annual International Counter-Ransomware Initiative summit in Washington, D.C., to stop paying ransoms demanded by cybercriminal groups.”
Nov 3
Mint is shutting down, and it’s pushing users toward Credit Karma theverge.com · “the new experience in Credit Karma does not offer the ability to set monthly and category budgets”
Nov 3
Source Code Downloads dunfield.themindfactory.com · “As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code to “stuff I’ve written” in the hopes that others may find it useful or maybe learn a few things.”
Nov 3
Here’s a rare look at Google’s most lucrative search queries theverge.com · “Google has long encouraged brands to buy ad space for queries with their own name, lest they have their search results space stolen by a competitor.”
Nov 2
Increasing trust for embedded media android-developers.googleblog.com · “The new Android WebView Media Integrity API will give embedded media providers access to a tailored integrity response that contains a device and app integrity verdict so that they can ensure their streams are running in a safe and trusted environment”
Nov 2
In a surprising finding, light can make water evaporate without heat news.mit.edu · “Under certain conditions, at the interface where water meets air, light can directly bring about evaporation without the need for heat, and it actually does so even more efficiently than heat.”
Nov 2
Raspberry Pi Receives Strategic Investment from Arm, Further Extending Long-Term Partnership newsroom.arm.com · “Arm has acquired a minority stake in Raspberry Pi, further extending a successful long-term partnership between the two companies as they collaborate to deliver critical solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) developer community.”
Nov 2
SEC sues SolarWinds for misleading investors before 2020 hack bleepingcomputer.com · “We allege that, for years, SolarWinds and Brown ignored repeated red flags about SolarWinds’ cyber risks, which were well known throughout the company and led one of Brown’s subordinates to conclude: ‘We’re so far from being a security minded company,’”
Nov 1
Finding You: The Network Effect of Telecommunications Vulnerabilities for Location Disclosure citizenlab.ca · “Telecom insiders understand that the vulnerabilities in the SS7 signaling protocol used in 3G roaming have enabled the development of commercial surveillance products that provide their operators with anonymity, multiple access points and attack vectors, a ubiquitous and globally-accessible network with an unlimited list of targets, and virtually no financial or legal risks.”
Nov 1
FCC Launches Inquiry to Increase Minimum Broadband Speed Benchmark, Set Gigabit Future Goal docs.fcc.gov · “This standard is not only outdated, it masks the extent to which low-income neighborhoods and rural communities are being left offline and left behind.”
Nov 1
How Bear does analytics with CSS herman.bearblog.dev · “I don’t think any bots hover and instead just use JS to interact with the page, so I can, with reasonable certainty, assume that this is a human reader.”
Nov 1

October 2023 118 posts

German court bans LinkedIn from ignoring "Do Not Track" signals stackdiary.com · “The court said this communication is misleading, as LinkedIn is legally required to respect the Do Not Track requests.”
Oct 31
The Norwegian Data Protection Authority's decision against Meta is extended to the EU/EEA and made permanent datatilsynet.no · “Meta has stated that they will ask users for consent to use their data for behavioural marketing in the future. However, the company has not introduced any actual changes yet, and thus the illegal activities continue to this very day.”
Oct 31
Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience" nme.com · ““Using unauthorised accessories compromises your gaming experience. For this reason, the unauthorised accessory will be blocked from use on 11/12/2023,” read the pop-up on the console. It then advised the player to return the product to the store or talk to the manufacturer.”
Oct 31
X is officially worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it theverge.com · “That price is a 55 percent discount to Musk’s original purchase price, per the documents, which note that “the fair market value per share is determined by the Board of Directors based on a number of factors in a manner that complies with applicable tax rules.” (Musk is X’s chair and has yet to create a formal board.)”
Oct 31
I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars ludic.mataroa.blog · “The computers are set to idle for 10 minutes after every query.”
Oct 30
X celebrates 60% savings from cloud exit world.hey.com · “Optimized our usage of cloud service providers and began doing much more on-prem. This shift has reduced our monthly cloud costs by 60%.”
Oct 30
Sophisticated StripedFly Spy Platform Masqueraded for Years as Crypto Miner zetter-zeroday.com · “It made just $10 in 2017 mining Monero cryptocurrency, and about $500 in 2018.”
Oct 30
Citrix warns admins to patch NetScaler CVE-2023-4966 bug immediately bleepingcomputer.com · “Mandiant cautioned that compromised sessions persist even after patching and, depending on the compromised accounts’ permissions, attackers could move laterally across the network or compromise other accounts.”
Oct 30
Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin andadinosaur.com · “Since May, uBO has been in a cat-and-mouse game with YouTube. And they’ve shown incredible resilience, especially when you consider that there are only two people on the uBO team dealing with YouTube.”
Oct 29
NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal installation ISO successfully independently rebuilt discourse.nixos.org · “You may remember 2021 announcement that the minimal ISO was 100% reproducible. While back then we successfully tested that all packages that were needed to build the ISO were individually reproducible, actually rebuilding the ISO still introduced differences.”
Oct 29
Signed Windows Installer github.com · “Digicert seems to be our only option now but a certificate there would cost $629 (tax excluded) for a single year.”
Oct 29
You’re Invited to a Colonoscopy! asteriskmag.com · “The 18% reduction in colorectal cancer incidence was statistically significant, while the 10% reduction in colorectal cancer mortality and 1% reduction in overall mortality were not.”
Oct 29
FCC Wants to Bolster Amateur Radio radioworld.com · “The current baud rate limits were adopted in 1980.”
Oct 28
Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way iliana.fyi · “Our second interesting problem, which is a much worse, “oh no”-level problem: for some reason, passes are cryptographically signed, and they have to be signed with a key known to one of Apple’s certificate authorities.”
Oct 28
Fixing the Volume on my Bluetooth Earbuds blog.ornx.net · “Then, it’s just as simple as looping over the mp3 files, and if it’s contained in the image, running mp3gain on the file and then replacing it in the image with the gain-modified version. I used an adjustment of -19.5 decibels.”
Oct 28
'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Nobel Prize-winning researcher Katalin Karikó thedp.com · “To Grady, $35,000 spent on Karikó was “$35,000 that could be spent supporting a new scientist who may make a discovery,” Langer added.”
Oct 27
Finding That Lead Emissions From Aircraft Engines That Operate on Leaded Fuel Cause or Contribute to Air Pollution That May Reasonably Be Anticipated To Endanger Public Health and Welfare federalregister.gov · “From this analysis, the EPA estimates that approximately 5.2 million people live within 500 meters of an airport runway, 363,000 of whom are children aged five and under.”
Oct 27
A Third of Chocolate Products Are High in Heavy Metals, CR's Tests Find consumerreports.org · “CR’s scientists measured heavy metal content against California’s standard levels because there are no federal limits for the amount of lead and cadmium most foods can contain, and they believe that California’s standard levels are the most protective available.”
Oct 27
Lessons Learned from Twenty Years of Site Reliability Engineering sre.google · “Teams were expecting to be able to use Google Hangouts and Google Meet to manage the incident. But when 350M users were logged out of their devices and services… relying on these Google services was, in retrospect, kind of a bad call.”
Oct 27
The Cloud Computer oxide.computer · “we believe that cloud computers should come complete with all system software built-in, and with no additional licensing to manage or to pay for.”
Oct 26
The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop nngroup.com · “Due to the usability issues described above, dispersed websites appear to provide less, yet harder-to-access content. Some users feel that the company is hiding information and may lose trust in it.”
Oct 26
75 percent of exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested chalmers.se · “In the study, we see, for example, that 16 percent of the ipê that ends up on the market is harvested without proper permits, and that landowners claim that they have felled more ipê on their land than is likely to exist on the stated area.”
Oct 26
Google Founder's Airship Gets FAA Clearance spectrum.ieee.org · “The huge airship will initially be attached to a mobile mast for outdoor ground testing, before conducting about 25 low-level flights, for a total of 50 hours’ flight time.”
Oct 26
iLeakage: Browser-Based Timerless Speculative Execution Attacks on Apple Devices ileakage.com · “We recover YouTube watch history from the Chrome browser for iOS, which is a shell on top of Safari’s browsing engine due to Apple’s App Store policy.”
Oct 25
Okta's latest hack fallout hits Cloudflare, 1Password techcrunch.com · “BeyondTrust said it notified Okta of the incident on October 2, but accused Okta of not acknowledging the breach for almost three weeks.”
Oct 25
California DMV immediately suspends Cruise's robotaxi permit techcrunch.com · “The AV traveled about 20 feet and reached a speed of 7 miles per hour before coming to a complete and final stop, the order reads.”
Oct 25
Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source daemonology.net · “The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920.”
Oct 25
Google Chrome's new "IP Protection" will hide users' IP addresses bleepingcomputer.com · “The first phase, dubbed “Phase 0,” will see Google proxying requests only to its own domains using a proprietary proxy. This will help Google test the system’s infrastructure and buy more time to fine-tune the domain list.”
Oct 24
A Controversial Plan to Scan Private Messages for Child Abuse Meets Fresh Scandal wired.com · “Mekić then found out that the ads, which have garnered at least 4 million views, were only displayed in seven EU countries: the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Slovenia, Portugal, and the Czech Republic.”
Oct 24
Why We Don’t Generate Elliptic Curves Every Day words.filippo.io · “Second, and most importantly, verifying the validity of parameters is even harder than generating them. For example, picking a random prime is way easier than adversarially checking if a given number is prime. This adds a tremendous amount of complexity to the security-critical, attacker-reachable hot path.”
Oct 24
Adelaide woman receives settlement after a lengthy battle against tech giant Google abc.net.au · “Dr Janice Duffy successfully argued in 2015 and 2023 that Google published defamatory extracts from American website RipOff Report on its search engine page, despite her notifying the company and asking for the posts to be removed.”
Oct 23
Shopify Files Lawsuit over Illegal DMCA Takedown Abuse torrentfreak.com · “The defendant stands accused of sending more than 70 fraudulent takedown notices from October 5 to October 13, targeting at least twenty perfume shops with bogus copyright claims. These false claims resulted in 52 strikes against various stores.”
Oct 23
UK Government Caught Surveilling Social Media of Teaching Assistants and Librarians reclaimthenet.org · “These educators found file lengths spanning up to 60 pages, documenting their tweets and comments opposing the government’s policies and criticizing the schools inspectorate, Ofsted.”
Oct 23
‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google theverge.com · “Reddit isn’t denying that it might block crawlers. “In terms of crawlers, we don’t have anything to share on that topic at the moment,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge, clarifying that the company’s earlier “nothing is changing” comment only applied to logins.”
Oct 23
Amazon Managers Can Now Fire Employees Who Refuse to Work From the Office 3 Days a Week entrepreneur.com · “In July, the company added that remote employees must relocate near office “hubs” where most of their team members work. Those unwilling to relocate or find a compatible team were offered a “voluntary resignation” package. By September, Amazon began sharing individual attendance records with employees, a change from its previous practice of tracking anonymized data.”
Oct 23
Stealing OAuth tokens of connected Microsoft accounts via open redirect in Harvest App eval.blog · “After 3 years of reporting, the company finally fixed the vulnerability silently and didn’t bother to inform. On 1st August 2023, I tested the vulnerability again and found it fixed. The report is still marked as triage as of 21 October 2023, and their bug bounty policy mentions rewards but no bounty or even HackerOne points were rewarded by the company.”
Oct 22
Nanofiche archmission.org · “Nanofiche can also store up to 2,000 analog pages of text at 150 dpi, per square centimeter. For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi.”
Oct 22
The white furnace test lousodrome.net · “There are so many aspects of the implementation that can go wrong: the sampling distribution, the proper weighting of the samples, a mistake in the PDF, a pi or a 2 factor forgotten somewhere… Those errors tend to be subtle and can result in a render that still looks reasonable. Nothing looks more like a correct shading than a slightly incorrect one.”
Oct 22
Adtech Surveillance and Government Surveillance are Often the Same Surveillance eff.org · “The company says it purchased data on over a billion devices. The government, in turn, can buy access to geolocation data on all those devices, when generally they’d have to show probable cause and get a warrant to get that same data.”
Oct 21
Reddit mods dumped tokens hours before blockchain program termination cointelegraph.com · “In another incident, just 17 minutes before Reddit’s statement, moderator u/Rider_of_the_storm allegedly shifted 345,422 MOON, worth over $69,000 at the time, to an exchange address. The Reddit account in question has since been deactivated.”
Oct 21
@MrWhosetheboss video reveals Google's Pixel 8 Pro Tensor G3 off-loads all generative AI tasks to the cloud notebookcheck.net · “Maini highlights how the new generative AI features including AI wallpaper and Magic Editor, for example, need a permanent internet connection as these require more processing power than the Tensor G3 SoC can deliver.”
Oct 21
with firefox on X11, any page can pastejack you anytime openwall.com · “In firefox running on X11, any script from any page can freely write to the primary selection, and that can be easily exploited to run arbitrary code on the user’s machine.”
Oct 21
Encrypted traffic interception on Hetzner and Linode targeting the largest Russian XMPP (Jabber) messaging service notes.valdikss.org.ru · “The attacker has issued several new TLS certificates using Let’s Encrypt service which were used to hijack encrypted STARTTLS connections on port 5222 using transparent MiTM proxy. The attack was discovered due to expiration of one of the MiTM certificates, which haven’t been reissued.”
Oct 20
Hackers Stole Access Tokens from Okta’s Support Unit krebsonsecurity.com · “Maiffret said BeyondTrust followed up with Okta on Oct. 3 and said they were fairly confident Okta had suffered an intrusion, and that he reiterated that conclusion in a phone call with Okta on October 11 and again on Oct. 13.”
Oct 20
Cops Are Suing a Teen for Invasion of Privacy After Allegedly False Arrest Goes Viral vice.com · “The officers performed a breathalyzer test, which showed Galanakis had a blood-alcohol content of 0.00. After that, the officers accused Galanakis of smoking cannabis based on the field sobriety test. Winters then arrested him.”
Oct 20
Breyer on chat control investigative research: EU Commissioner as double agent of foreign interference patrick-breyer.de · “Research published yesterday by several European media outlets has revealed that an international campaign in support of the EU’s proposed child sexual abuse regulation has been largely orchestrated and financed by a network of organisations with links to the tech industry and security services.”
Oct 20
I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python. lerner.co.il · “Meta’s AI system noticed that I was talking about Python and Pandas, assumed that I was talking about the animals (not the technology), and banned me. The appeal that I asked for wasn’t reviewed by a human, but was reviewed by another bot, which (not surprisingly) made a similar assessment.”
Oct 19
Bandcamp’s Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off 404media.co · “Bandcamp’s entire union bargaining team, the eight union members democratically elected by their peers to negotiate their first union contract, were laid off when Epic Games sold Bandcamp to music licensing company Songtradr on Monday.”
Oct 19
Research repository arXiv receives $10M for upgrades news.cornell.edu · “The funding will allow the growing repository with more than 2 million articles to migrate to the cloud and modernize its code to ensure reliability, fault tolerance and accessibility for researchers.”
Oct 19
Cisco warns of new IOS XE zero-day actively exploited in attacks bleepingcomputer.com · “Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows an attacker to create an account on the affected device with privilege level 15 access, effectively granting them full control of the compromised device and allowing possible subsequent unauthorized activity.”
Oct 18
Equifax Fined $13.5 Million Over 2017 Data Breach securityweek.com · “Furthermore, the FCA points out that Equifax Ltd learned that UK consumer data had been compromised only 6 weeks after the hack was discovered, minutes before the American parent company made the incident public”
Oct 18
The Fake Browser Update Scam Gets a Makeover krebsonsecurity.com · “Tal said hosting malicious files on the Binance Smart Chain is ideal for attackers because retrieving the malicious contract is a cost-free operation that was originally designed for the purpose of debugging contract execution issues without any real-world impact.”
Oct 18
IRS advances innovative Direct File project for 2024 tax season: free IRS-run pilot option projected to be available for eligible taxpayers in 13 states irs.gov · “Taxpayers who fall outside the pilot’s eligibility limits will be unable to participate in the pilot in 2024.”
Oct 17
Iowa Man Files Lawsuit After Being Arrested Twice for Criticizing the Police at a Public Meeting reason.com · “The mayor and police chief had Noah arrested, jailed, strip-searched, and criminally prosecuted simply because they didn’t like what Noah had to say,”
Oct 17
Tech CEO Sentenced to 5 Years in IP Address Scheme krebsonsecurity.com · “Throughout that conversation, Golestan maintained his innocence, even as he explained that the creation of the phony companies was necessary to prevent entities like Spamhaus from interfering with his business going forward.”
Oct 17
AT&T Moves to Disrupt Test of SpaceX's Starlink Cellular Service pcmag.com · “AT&T now argues that SpaceX is trying to conduct the Starlink cellular test under the wrong regulatory process.”
Oct 17
55 Vulnerabilities in Squid Caching Proxy and 35 0days joshua.hu · “The Squid Team have been helpful and supportive during the process of reporting these issues. However, they are effectively understaffed, and simply do not have the resources to fix the discovered issues.”
Oct 16
About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off theverge.com · “Songtradr’s statement also confirmed that its purchase of Bandcamp had been completed, but it did not confirm if it would voluntarily recognize Bandcamp’s union that employees won earlier this year”
Oct 16
LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees npr.org · “In its most recent quarterly report released in July, LinkedIn said its revenue increased 5% year over year and surpassed $15 billion for the first time.”
Oct 16
Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic pluralistic.net · “NPR’s Twitter accounts had 8.7 million followers, but even six months ago, Musk’s enshittification speedrun had drawn down NPR’s ability to reach those users to a negligible level.”
Oct 16
Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data eff.org · “Mastercard takes this a step further, as U.S. PIRG reported, by analyzing the amount and frequency of transactions, plus the location, date, and time to create categories of cardholders and make inferences about what type of shopper you may be.”
Oct 15
Sippy helps you avoid egress fees while incrementally migrating data from S3 to R2 blog.cloudflare.com · “If the object is not found in R2, it will simultaneously be returned from your S3 bucket and copied to R2.”
Oct 15
Microsoft consumes Activision: and a plea blog.zarfhome.com · “Depending on how you count, that’s three-to-five companies which have died and passed the Infocom IP on to a successor.”
Oct 15
Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux lock.cmpxchg8b.com · “He had kept tape backups from old BBS systems, and was able to recover a warez copy of the SDK – unbelievable!”
Oct 15
Multi-modal prompt injection image attacks against GPT-4V simonwillison.net · “I was really surprised to see this work: I had assumed OpenAI would block Markdown images like this from loading content from external servers. Johann disclosed the Markdown exfiltration vulnerability to them in April”
Oct 14
Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor righto.com · “The 386 was originally supposed to have an on-chip cache, but there wasn’t room and the cache was dropped in the middle of the project.”
Oct 14
The Nuclear Scientist And The Warplane That Became Britain’s Most Unlikely Airliner twz.com · “Unknown to them, the leather flying helmet that contained his intercom didn’t fit easily over the scientist’s large head, so he couldn’t hear them. Nor did Bohr, who could be remarkably unworldly, properly understand how to use the oxygen.”
Oct 14
Removal of Mazda Connected Services integration home-assistant.io · “We’re also sad that Mazda’s first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead.”
Oct 13
SOCKS5 heap buffer overflow - CVE-2023-38545 curl.se · “Typical server latency is likely “slow” enough to trigger this bug without an attacker needing to influence it by DoS or SOCKS server control.”
Oct 13
Tainting the CSAM client-side scanning database. blog.xot.nl · “There is no independent way for the service providers or the devices to verify that the fingerprints in this data actual correspond to CSAM.”
Oct 13
Cloud gaming firm Shadow says hackers stole customers' personal data techcrunch.com · “This highly sophisticated attack began on the Discord platform with the downloading of malware under cover of a game on the Steam platform, proposed by an acquaintance of our employee, himself a victim of the same attack.”
Oct 13
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student scrollprize.org · “That is until Luke Farritor, a contestant of the Vesuvius Challenge, became the first person in two millennia to see an entire word from within an unopened scroll this August.”
Oct 12
Microsoft reveals IRS notice asking for $28.9 billion in back taxes engadget.com · “Microsoft owes the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) $28.9 billion in back taxes, not including penalties and interest, at least according to the tax authority.”
Oct 12
Slack's Google Drive App can share your private Docs and Drive files kapwing.com · “The problem is, that preview image gets re-uploaded to Slack’s CDN, and is in high resolution and is now accessible to everyone in my Slack workspace.”
Oct 12
Transcript Dutch parliamentary hearing on EU Chat Control and Client Side Scanning berthub.eu · “What we are talking about now is that in all our WhatsApp groups, our Signal groups, our Telegram groups, a new participant will join the conversation, namely an EU logo.”
Oct 12
The fraud was in the code citationneeded.news · “Code snippets shown to the jury demonstrated how Nishad Singh wrote some code that would update the insurance fund amount by adding to it the daily trading volume, multiplied by a randomish number around 7,500, and dividing it by a billion, thus making it appear as though the website was referencing a real account balance that was fluctuating as the exchange added funds or withdrew from it to cover losses.”
Oct 11
Phishers Spoof USPS, 12 Other Natl' Postal Services krebsonsecurity.com · “Alas, running a search for domains registered through Alibaba to anyone claiming to reside in Georgia, AL reveals nearly 300 recent postal phishing domains ending in “.top.””
Oct 11
Announcing Cloud Spanner price-performance updates cloud.google.com · “Spanner’s high throughput, virtually unlimited scale, single-digit millisecond latency, five 9s availability SLA, and strong external-consistency semantics are now available at half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB for most workloads.”
Oct 11
Engage a Wider Audience With ActivityPub on WordPress.com wordpress.com · “With a custom domain you can easily move your entire fediverse connection to any host at any time.”
Oct 11
Google Cloud mitigated largest DDoS attack, peaking above 398 million rps cloud.google.com · “For a sense of scale, this two minute attack generated more requests than the total number of article views reported by Wikipedia during the entire month of September 2023.”
Oct 10
Report: GitHub Copilot Loses an Average of $20 Per User Per Month thurrott.com · “As the WSJ notes, individuals pay $10 per month for GitHub Copilot, but multiple sources told it that the service loses an average of $20 per user per month, with some users costing Microsoft as much as $80 per month.”
Oct 10
Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips arxiv.org · “The model asserts that when people flip an ordinary coin, it tends to land on the same side it started – DHM estimated the probability of a same-side outcome to be about 51%.”
Oct 10
Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It macrumors.com · “Last month’s release of Counter-Strike 2 forced a 26GB update for everyone with CS:GO, including Mac users, but after installation those on macOS soon discovered that the update makes the original game as well as the update unplayable because of the lack of support and no rollback option.”
Oct 10
Unity CEO John Riccitiello stepping down, effective immediately engadget.com · “In 2023, the company reduced its headcount three times in an attempt to cut costs.”
Oct 9
MGM Resorts confirms hackers stole customers' personal data during cyberattack techcrunch.com · “MGM’s filing with regulators reveals that the company expects the attack to reduce its third-quarter profit by approximately $100 million.”
Oct 9
Attorney General Bonta's Sponsored Bill to Ban Hidden Fees in California Signed into Law oag.ca.gov · “Hidden fees are fees in which a seller uses an artificially low headline price to attract a customer and usually either discloses additional required fees in smaller print, or reveals additional unavoidable charges later in the buying process.”
Oct 9
Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender's advantage fakehistoryhunter.net · “If it had been common knowledge among castle builders, then why are there still quite a lot (about 30%) of castles with counter-clockwise staircases?”
Oct 9
Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things ludic.mataroa.blog · “I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day.”
Oct 8
Zen 5's Leaked Slides chipsandcheese.com · “Therefore “zero bubble conditional branches” is not an exciting point. Existing CPUs from Intel, Arm, and AMD themselves can already handle conditional branches with zero bubbles.”
Oct 8
Decomposing language models into understandable components anthropic.com · “In a transformer language model, we decompose a layer with 512 neurons into more than 4000 features which separately represent things like DNA sequences, legal language, HTTP requests, Hebrew text, nutrition statements, and much, much more.”
Oct 8
A Note From WIRED Leadership wired.com · “After careful review of the op-ed, “How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet,” and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.”
Oct 7
At least 1,000 birds died from colliding with one Chicago building in one day theguardian.com · “A 2021 study done in McCormick Place, the same site of Thursday’s bird deaths, found that shutting off half the lights in large buildings can reduce collisions by six to 11 times.”
Oct 7
Big Oil's Using Fortnite, TikTok, And Twitch In Effort To Convince Kids Fossil Fuels Are Cool kotaku.com · “The idea is that in the map, players will need to occasionally fill up at the central Shell gas station and use its new V-Power NiTRO+ fuel to successfully navigate obstacles and courses.”
Oct 7
Meta in Myanmar, Part III: The Inside View erinkissane.com · “Here’s what Meta is actually saying: Sure, they might identify and remove only a tiny fraction of dangerous and hateful speech on Facebook, but of that tiny fraction, their AI classifiers catch about 95 – 98% before users report it. That’s literally the whole game, here.”
Oct 7
Alameda had a $65B line of credit and 'unlimited withdrawals' techcrunch.com · “Because of these special privileges, Alameda had a $65 billion line of credit, Wang said.”
Oct 6
Tell HN: Postman update removes all your stuff if you refuse to create account news.ycombinator.com · “Today when I opened the program it asked me to create an account. When I declined, it wiped all my collections and everything else.”
Oct 6
Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water news.mit.edu · “The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts.”
Oct 6
Cloud Costs Every Programmer Should Know vantage.sh · “For the first 10 TB that leave AWS, the rate is $0.09 per GB.”
Oct 6
Delta is fourth major U.S. airline to find fake jet aircraft engine parts with forged airworthiness documents from U.K. company fortune.com · “Those engines account for less than 1% of the more than 2,100 power plants on its mainline fleet, the spokesman said.”
Oct 5
US government issues first-ever space debris penalty to Dish Network theguardian.com · “Dish Network has to pay $150,000 to the commission over its failure to deorbit its EchoStar-7 satellite, which has been in space for more than two decades.”
Oct 5
Announcing the $12k NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty words.filippo.io · “The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ‘90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA.”
Oct 5
What we Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Chinese Mold Maker airgradient.com · “It is important that you clarify with the mold maker who exactly owns the mold because often they keep this opaque and call it a “contract mold”.”
Oct 5
The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon Over an Economy-Wide "Hidden Tax" thebignewsletter.com · “At this point, the price Amazon charges these third party sellers has grown to nearly 50% of its revenue.”
Oct 4
1.1.1.1 lookup failures on October 4, 2023 blog.cloudflare.com · “On 4 October 2023 at 07:00 UTC, the DNSSEC signatures in the version of the root zone from 21 September expired.”
Oct 4
The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens wired.com · “Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information.”
Oct 4
ShellTorch: Multiple Critical Vulnerabilities in PyTorch Model Server (TorchServe) (CVSS 9.9, CVSS 9.8) Threatens Countless AI Users oligo.security · “TorchServe’s documentation claims that the default management API can be accessed only from localhost by default.”
Oct 4
The inability to count correctly: Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level blog.cr.yp.to · “NIST’s underlying calculation of the security level was a severe and indefensible miscalculation.”
Oct 3
Redfin is Leaving NAR redfin.com · “In about half the U.S., including in cities like Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Long Island, Minneapolis, Nashville, Phoenix and Salt Lake City, we can’t quit NAR individually or en masse, because NAR membership is required for agents to access listing databases, lockboxes, and industry-standard contracts.”
Oct 3
Texas man sent to death row over junk science denied US supreme court appeal theguardian.com · “At least 32 people have been exonerated for crimes based on shaken baby syndrome forensics.”
Oct 3
Satya Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google, and Apple could fix it theverge.com · “Has Microsoft tried to become Apple’s default search engine, Severt asked? Yes, Nadella said. How’d it go? “Not well,” Nadella deadpanned.”
Oct 3
Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes themarkup.org · “In the end, the success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police.”
Oct 2
Millions of Exim mail servers exposed to zero-day RCE attacks bleepingcomputer.com · “Just over 3.5 million Exim servers are currently exposed online per a Shodan search, most of them in the United States, followed by Russia and Germany.”
Oct 2
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 nobelprize.org · “These seminal results were published in 2005, fifteen years before the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Oct 2
First Blood Test for Dozens of Hereditary Cancers Approved by FDA insideprecisionmedicine.com · “The Invitae Common Hereditary Cancers Panel evaluates a blood sample to identify DNA variants in 47 genes associated with an elevated risk of developing certain types of cancer.”
Oct 2
Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics, Study Finds thedrive.com · “A report from the Pew Charitable Trust found that 78 percent of ocean microplastics are from synthetic tire rubber.”
Oct 1
Mozilla and the burning need for clients for power users theregister.com · “So how come the original open source web browser is now, Statcounter estimates, under 3 percent? Mozilla, it seems to us, has missed a lot of opportunities, and continues to do so.”
Oct 1
Kids and teens are inundated with phone prompts day and night nbcnews.com · “New research Common Sense Media released Tuesday finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications on their phones every day.”
Oct 1
New discoveries in Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe: A Human statue with a realistic facial expression found in Karahantepe arkeonews.net · “One of the most realistic statue of the era was unearthed, standing at a height of 2.3 meters and featuring a lifelike facial expression in Karahantepe.”
Oct 1

September 2023 116 posts

Europol Sought Unlimited Data Access in Online Child Sexual Abuse Regulation balkaninsight.com · “All data is useful and should be passed on to law enforcement, there should be no filtering by the [EU] Centre because even an innocent image might contain information that could at some point be useful to law enforcement”
Sep 30
Every single Onewheel is being recalled after four deaths theverge.com · “At the time, the company issued a press release in objection to the CPSC and called the agency’s statements “unjustified and alarmist.””
Sep 30
PSA: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency androidauthority.com · “The phone would keep dropping the call within a second of pressing the call button, which occurred for three attempts.”
Sep 30
Lazarus luring employees with trojanized coding challenges: The case of a Spanish aerospace company welivesecurity.com · “The fake recruiter contacted the victim via LinkedIn Messaging, a feature within the LinkedIn professional social networking platform, and sent two coding challenges required as part of a hiring process, which the victim downloaded and executed on a company device.”
Sep 30
I Tested an HDMI Adapter That Demands Your Location, Browsing Data, Photos, and Spams You with Ads 404media.co · “It insisted it needed all of this data in order to mirror the screen from my phone to a monitor that I owned, via a cable that is physically connected between the two.”
Sep 29
Russian zero-day seller offers $20M for hacking Android and iPhones techcrunch.com · “On Wednesday, Operation Zero announced on its Telegram accounts and on its official account on X, formerly Twitter, that it was increasing payments for zero-days in those platforms from $200,000 to $20 million.”
Sep 29
Government Shutdown Could Bench 80% of CISA Staff securityweek.com · “In the case of CISA, which had 3,117 employees as of June 17, only 571 would remain during a lapse in appropriations.”
Sep 29
Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it proton.me · “Since 2019, Alphabet and its subsidiaries have spent more than $125 million on federal lobbying, campaign contributions, and trade associations”
Sep 29
Wifi without internet on a Southwest flight jamesbvaughan.com · “It’s a long enough flight that I planned to purchase the $8 internet access and get some work done, but Southwest’s wifi portal wouldn’t accept any form of payment.”
Sep 28
Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians? rocknerd.co.uk · “Epic only bought Bandcamp eighteen months ago.”
Sep 28
WebGPU Technical Report chromium.googlesource.com · “Vulnerabilities in the SwiftShader JIT compiler aren’t being fixed in the SwiftShader codebase.”
Sep 28
Inhibition of fatty acid oxidation enables heart regeneration in adult mice nature.com · “We find that disablement of fatty acid oxidation in cardiomyocytes improves resistance to hypoxia and stimulates cardiomyocyte proliferation, allowing heart regeneration after ischaemia–reperfusion injury.”
Sep 28
Decade of newborn child registry data stolen in MOVEit mass-hack techcrunch.com · “Ontario’s government-funded birth registry has confirmed a data breach affecting some 3.4 million people who sought pregnancy care, including the personal health data of close to two million newborns and children across the Canadian province.”
Sep 27
Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions theverge.com · “Microsoft thinks next-generation nuclear reactors can power its data centers and AI ambitions, according to a job listing for a principal program manager who’ll lead the company’s nuclear energy strategy.”
Sep 27
How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution ariel-miculas.github.io · “That allowed the user (aka gdbserver) to write up to 256 bytes past the end of the array.”
Sep 27
Mistral 7B mistral.ai · “It does not have any moderation mechanism.”
Sep 27
Reddit will start paying you real money for good posts techcrunch.com · “For users with between 100 and 4,999 karma, they will receive $0.90 per 1 gold.”
Sep 26
Firefox 118.0, See All New Features, Updates and Fixes firefox.com · “Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine.”
Sep 26
$700 a month for a bed-sized ‘pod’ in downtown San Francisco? Techies are renting them sfstandard.com · “They’re each 4 feet high, 3½ feet wide, and long enough to fit a twin-size mattress.”
Sep 26
How to Hide a $2 Trillion Antitrust Trial thebignewsletter.com · “Last week, according to our calculations, over half of the trial, including testimony from key witnesses, happened in closed session, unavailable to the public.”
Sep 25
Unity apologizes to devs, reveals updated Runtime Fee policy gamedeveloper.com · “The Unity Runtime Fee will no longer apply to games built on Unity Personal.”
Sep 25
Minecraft Wiki:Moving from Fandom minecraft.wiki · “Unfortunately, because Fandom does not close wikis that have moved away, the old Fandom wiki will remain in place and continue to appear in search results.”
Sep 25
Expanding access to safer AI with Amazon anthropic.com · “As part of the investment, Amazon will take a minority stake in Anthropic.”
Sep 25
California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease news.yahoo.com · “A recent study by UCLA and UCSF physicians found that among dozens of California workers who got silicosis from grinding countertops, nearly a fifth had died. Their median age at death was 46.”
Sep 24
The invisible problem jenson.org · “Every single person had problems with targeting, using the clipboard, and made lots and lots of errors.”
Sep 24
Choose Postgres queue technology adriano.fyi · “The cult of scalability would rather we build applications that scale beyond our wildest dreams than applications that meet concrete customer and business needs.”
Sep 24
ICloud Drive Silently Deletes Your Content dominikmayer.com · “Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup.”
Sep 23
Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can't 404media.co · “The main reason scalpers continue to get tickets and fans continue to be upset is because ticket scalpers are professional ticket buyers, who in many cases have navigated Ticketmaster’s buying process every day for years.”
Sep 23
School Surveillance Tools Are Harming Kids and Making It More Difficult to Finish Homework, Report Finds gizmodo.com · “Shockingly, 38% of teachers said they were even aware of a student who was contacted by law enforcement as a result of the monitoring.”
Sep 23
Blocking Visual Studio Code embedded reverse shell before it's too late ipfyx.fr · “An attacker just has to upload the binary, which won’t be detected by any anti-virus since it is legitimate and singed windows binary.”
Sep 23
0-days exploited by commercial surveillance vendor in Egypt blog.google · “In the case of this campaign, if the target went to any ‘http’ site, the attackers injected traffic to silently redirect them to an Intellexa site, c.betly[.]me.”
Sep 22
38TB of data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers wiz.io · “In addition to the overly permissive access scope, the token was also misconfigured to allow “full control” permissions instead of read-only.”
Sep 22
Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee's Carbon Footprint scientificamerican.com · “In fact, remote workers often drive more often than their in-office counterparts by taking several short car trips throughout the day.”
Sep 22
The bogus CVE problem lwn.net · “For the curl bug, which should probably not be scored at all, NVD initially came up with a "9.8 critical", scoring an integer overflow in a delay parameter as one of the most severe types of vulnerability possible.”
Sep 22
Today The UK Parliament Undermined The Privacy, Security, And Freedom Of All Internet Users eff.org · “As enacted, the OSB allows the government to force companies to build technology that can scan regardless of encryption–in other words, build a backdoor.”
Sep 21
The WebP 0day blog.isosceles.com · “This bug also shows that we have an over-reliance on fuzzing for security assurance of complex parser code.”
Sep 21
Cisco makes largest ever acquisition, buying cybersecurity company Splunk for $28 billion in cash cnbc.com · “The purchase price is equivalent to about 13% of Cisco’s market cap, a big number for a company that has historically avoided blockbuster deals.”
Sep 21
Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month blog.kagi.com · “With new search sources proving more cost-efficient, the improved efficiency of our infrastructure, and the broader market embracing Kagi, we can again offer an unlimited experience to a broader group of users.”
Sep 21
British journalist held by police at Luton airport for five hours without arrest theguardian.com · “Police told Broomfield they were engaged in “a mopping up operation”. They seized his phone and laptop and have since refused to return them.”
Sep 20
Hackers breached International Criminal Court’s systems last week bleepingcomputer.com · “At the end of last week, the International Criminal Court’s services detected anomalous activity affecting its information systems”
Sep 20
FAA Authorizes Zipline International, Inc. to Deliver Commercial Packages Using Drones That Fly Beyond Operator's Line of Sight faa.gov · “The FAA authorized Zipline International, Inc., to deliver commercial packages around Salt Lake City using drones that fly beyond the operator’s visual line of sight without visual observers.”
Sep 20
‘Less than half’ fresh produce sold globally makes any profit fruitnet.com · “Three-fifths of the fresh fruit and vegetables traded commercially around the globe are now sold at a loss or breakeven price, following an unprecedented increase in production and operating costs during the pandemic.”
Sep 20
We Are Retroactively Dropping the iPhone’s Repairability Score ifixit.com · “Of course, it can only authenticate if Apple knows about your repair in advance, because you gave them the exact serial number of your iPhone, and they’ve pre-matched it to a display or battery.”
Sep 19
Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government. pressprogress.ca · “Access to your photo has been restricted within India because Facebook has been notified by the authorities under an emergency order pursuant to Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000”
Sep 19
Quantum Resistance and the Signal Protocol signal.org · “We then combine these two shared secrets together so that any attacker must break both X25519 and CRYSTALS-Kyber to compute the same shared secret.”
Sep 19
AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5 Billion toonk.io · “That’s 7.3 Million IPv4 addresses x $43.80, almost $320 Million a year. At 25% usage, that’s nearly $800 Million a year. And at 31% usage, that’s a billion dollars!”
Sep 19
Striking UAW auto workers want a 40% pay increase: how much they make now cnbc.com · “Profits at the struck auto companies increased 92% from 2013 to 2022, totaling $250 billion, according to EPI.”
Sep 18
Some new snippets from the Snowden documents electrospaces.net · “Appelbaum also provides some new information about the Snowden documents in general, by saying that The Intercept “closed their Snowden archive and reportedly it has been destroyed.” (page 63, note 17)”
Sep 18
Peach Sandstorm password spray campaigns enable intelligence collection at high-value targets microsoft.com · “Activity observed in this campaign aligned with an Iranian pattern of life, particularly in late May and June, where activity occurred almost exclusively between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM Iran Standard Time (IRST).”
Sep 18
Apple TV, now with more Tailscale tailscale.com · “This new feature could come in handy if you’re traveling with your Apple TV and want to access the same geo-restricted channels you can see from home.”
Sep 18
Bounties Damage Open Source Projects ziglang.org · “Instead of creating a clear contract where you take on some of the risk, you implicitly put the entirety of the risk on the contestants (eg partial solutions don’t get any payout).”
Sep 17
Close to 2,000 Environmental Activists Killed Over Last Decade e360.yale.edu · “In 2022 alone, 177 environmental activists were murdered, or roughly one every other day, according to Global Witness, a U.K.-based watchdog group.”
Sep 17
A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model jackcook.com · “From my calculations based on sizes of each layer, Apple’s predictive text model appears to have about 34 million parameters, and it has a hidden size of 512 units.”
Sep 17
Large Language Models for Compiler Optimization arxiv.org · “Our approach achieves a 3.0% improvement in reducing instruction counts over the compiler, outperforming two state-of-the-art baselines that require thousands of compilations.”
Sep 17
Collective letter from game development companies: Turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization until new conditions are reviewed docs.google.com · “As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies is forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization across our projects until these changes are reconsidered.”
Sep 16
How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers read.engineerscodex.com · “Instagram scaled from 0 to 14 million users in just over a year, from October 2010 to December 2011. They did this with only 3 engineers.”
Sep 16
Pineapple ONE pineapple-one.github.io · “It runs at 500 kHz, has a 512 kB program memory and 512 kB RAM. It also features a simple B&W VGA card with resolution of 200x150 px, so we can connect an external monitor and display some simple graphics.”
Sep 16
Hot Chips 2023: AMD’s Phoenix SoC chipsandcheese.com · “Part of that difference is because HP insists on limiting clock speed to 4.5 GHz, even though the 7840HS should be able to boost to 5.1 GHz.”
Sep 16
TikTok fined €345m for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts theguardian.com · “It also found that the “family pairing” scheme, which gives an adult control over a child’s account settings, did not check whether the adult “paired” with the child user was a parent or guardian.”
Sep 15
Hackers claim it only took a 10-minute phone call to shut down MGM Resorts engadget.com · “The conversation that granted initial access took just 10 minutes, according to the group.”
Sep 15
Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain billwillingham.substack.com · “The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want.”
Sep 15
Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands theguardian.com · “For example, Carrefour said a bottle of sugar-free peach-flavoured Lipton iced tea, produced by PepsiCo, shrank to 1.25 litres (0.33 gallon) from 1.5 litres, resulting in a 40% effective increase in the price a litre.”
Sep 15
How mobile apps illegally share your personal data noyb.eu · “In reality, the transmission of their personal data began without any interaction on their part – and before they even had a chance to think about consent.”
Sep 14
SpaceX’s Starlink made $1.4 billion last year theverge.com · “In a 2015 presentation to investors, the Elon Musk-founded company initially predicted that Starlink would make $12 billion and $7 billion in operating profit in 2022.”
Sep 14
Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates blog.google · “For Chromebooks released before 2021 and already in use, users and IT admins will have the option to extend automatic updates to 10 years from the platform’s release (after they receive their last automatic update).”
Sep 14
Google is cutting hundreds of jobs in its recruiting organization cnbc.com · “In January, Alphabet-owned Google announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs, affecting roughly 6% of the full-time workforce.”
Sep 14
When MFA isn't actually MFA retool.com · “But through this Google update, what was previously multi-factor-authentication had silently (to administrators) become single-factor-authentication, because control of the Okta account led to control of the Google account, which led to control of all OTPs stored in Google Authenticator.”
Sep 13
The million-dollar reporter meduza.io · “Timchenko’s hacked iPhone had a Latvian SIM card. Citizen Lab recorded the first Pegasus-related activity in Latvia in 2018, and experts believe Riga still uses NSO Group’s products today, says Scott-Railton.”
Sep 13
Temporary withdrawal from the market of the iPhone 12 for non-compliance with EU regulation anfr.fr · “The ANFR’s measures show that the limb-SAR values exceed the limit, being at 5,74 W/kg. However, the body-SAR complies with the regulation.”
Sep 13
Bug in macOS 14 Sonoma prevents our app from working mullvad.net · “Firewall rules do not get applied properly to network traffic, and traffic that is not supposed to be allowed is allowed.”
Sep 13
The Death of Unity gamedeveloper.com · “We did the itch.io bundle for ukraine. That was approximately a million games given out per developer. If all those were installed, developers would owe $200,000 just for having given their game to charity.”
Sep 12
Credit card debt collection bitsaboutmoney.com · “Debts are conveyed to the debt buyers as large CSV files with minimal supporting documentation.”
Sep 12
We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed. Here's what we learned earthly.dev · “We ended up with the most ridiculous negative qualification criteria I have ever heard of: if the prospect requires a demo, then they’re not worth going after.”
Sep 12
From zero to one hundred in 0.956 seconds ethz.ch · “To ensure strong traction right from the start, the AMZ team has developed a kind of vacuum cleaner that holds the vehicle down to the ground by suction.”
Sep 12
UK air traffic control meltdown jameshaydon.github.io · “Therefore, on taking over the duties of the primary server, the backup system applied the same logic to the flight plan with the same result.”
Sep 11
Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users ctrl.blog · “Despite not having implemented the changes everyone assumed it had, it has received lots of positive press attention for doing the right thing.”
Sep 11
'Evil Telegram' Android apps on Google Play infected 60K with spyware bleepingcomputer.com · “When the user receives a message through the trojanized app, the spyware sends a copy straight to the operator’s command and control (C2) server”
Sep 11
Wifi can read through walls news.ucsb.edu · “In the team’s experiments, three off-the-shelf WiFi transmitters send wireless waves in the area. WiFi receivers are then mounted on an unmanned vehicle that emulates a WiFi receiver grid as it moves.”
Sep 11
A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held "Lone Gunman" Theory vanityfair.com · “He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital.”
Sep 10
how does linux nat a ping? devnonsense.com · “ICMP is a very, very old protocol. It is defined in RFC 792, which was published in 1981.”
Sep 10
I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race steele.blue · “As I left the geofence, I got a push notification on my watch saying that the pizza had been successfully ordered.”
Sep 10
Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found chemistryworld.com · “An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago.”
Sep 9
Google, Meta, Amazon hiring low-paid H1B workers after US layoffs: report moneycontrol.com · “Just a month after Sundar Pichai announced Google’s plan to cut 12,000 jobs around the world in January, the company filed applications for H1B visas to hire software engineers, analytical consultants, user experience researchers and other roles from outside the United States”
Sep 9
Meet the Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port at a Time 404media.co · “Sometimes, official versions of those games on Steam are actually cracked versions, because the piracy community does a better job of maintaining them than one of the biggest video game publishers in the world.”
Sep 9
CRISPR used to 'reprogram' cancer cells into healthy muscle in the lab livescience.com · “They’re switching from a cell that just wants to make more of itself to cells devoted to contraction.”
Sep 9
Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach krebsonsecurity.com · “I had my test account since 2018, and even today I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it.”
Sep 8
A track inspector claimed he was fired for reporting 'too many defects.' His secret recordings may cost BNSF millions. kstp.com · “Why in the world would we ever call the FRA about anything? Unless I’m absolutely blatantly telling you to break the rules”
Sep 8
NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles theguardian.com · “New York police are legally permitted to use fake social media profiles and if someone unknowingly accepts a friend request from a cop it counts as consent, according to Stop legal director David Siffert.”
Sep 8
UK 'spy clause' for scanning encrypted messages... can't theregister.com · “The government saying ’no scanning until it’s technically feasible’ is nonsense. Scanning is fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encrypted messaging apps.”
Sep 8
Android 14 blocks modification of system certificates, even as root httptoolkit.com · “In this new release, the restrictions around certificate authority (CA) certificates become significantly tighter, and appear to make it impossible to modify the set of trusted certificates at all, even on fully rooted devices.”
Sep 8
BLASTPASS: NSO Group iPhone Zero-Click, Zero-Day Exploit Captured in the Wild citizenlab.ca · “The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim.”
Sep 7
Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers blogs.microsoft.com · “We are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers’ problem.”
Sep 7
Active North Korean campaign targeting security researchers blog.google · “In one case, they carried on a months-long conversation, attempting to collaborate with a security researcher on topics of mutual interest.”
Sep 7
Mullvad on Tailscale: Privately browse the web tailscale.com · “It’s not true anonymity, because that’s a problem Tailscale is not trying to solve.”
Sep 7
If You've Got a New Car, It's a Data Privacy Nightmare gizmodo.com · “Mozilla said it was unable to determine whether the brands encrypt any of the data they collect, and only Mercedes-Benz responded to the organization’s questions.”
Sep 6
Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting theregister.com · “That is to say: the popup is a notice that you’ve been opted in with a little link to your settings to disable the tech if you so wish.”
Sep 6
4,500 of the Top 1 Million Websites Leaked Source Code, Secrets trufflesecurity.com · “After reviewing the permissions granted to each valid GitHub PAT, we discovered the majority (67%) had admin-level privileges.”
Sep 6
Data Breach (August 2023) freecycle.helpscoutdocs.com · “The breach of data includes usernames, User IDs, email addresses and passwords.”
Sep 6
Ask HN: I'm an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates news.ycombinator.com · “Many manufacturers oppose making any commitments about security updates, even voluntary ones. These manufacturers are heavily engaged at the FCC and represented by sophisticated regulatory lawyers.”
Sep 5
GSA Announces Sale of Federal Helium System Assets - Updated gsa.gov · “The reservoir has historically held up to 44 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of helium, which includes both federally owned stored helium and native helium commingled with natural gas.”
Sep 5
Doctors Are Getting Ready to Give Patients a Vaccine That Blocks Fentanyl's Effects futurism.com · “I’ve had a number of physicians, especially anesthesiologists who have sent me an email and say, ‘What are we going to treat patients with in the operating room who’ve had this vaccine?’”
Sep 5
The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15 404media.co · “All of that data cost $15 in Bitcoin. The bot sometimes offers the Social Security number too for $20.”
Sep 4
TV Museum Will Die in 48 Hours Unless Sony Retracts YouTube Copyright Strikes torrentfreak.com · “At this point, I don’t even care if they were issued under authorization by Sony or not – I just need to reach a live human being to try to resolve this without copyright strikes.”
Sep 4
Security update: Incident involving unauthorized admin access about.sourcegraph.com · “Our internal control systems, including automated code analysis, failed to catch the access token being committed to the repository.”
Sep 4
Mashing Enter to bypass full disk encryption with TPM, Clevis, dracut and systemd pulsesecurity.co.nz · “I did find that you can sometimes exploit this issue if you mash the Enter key really fast yourself too, so a keyboard emulator isn’t necessarily required either.”
Sep 4
Google Preemptively Banned Hundreds of Millions of 'Pirate' URLs Last Year torrentfreak.com · “In 2022, more than 40% of the over 680 million URLs we received via our web form were not in our Search index and therefore, have never appeared in our Search results,”
Sep 3
Pesticide safety limit watered down after industry lobbying theferret.scot · “Permitted concentrations of the lice-killing chemical, emamectin, in the sediment of sea lochs have increased from 12 to 272 nanograms per kilogram between 2017 and 2023.”
Sep 3
SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry eurogamer.net · “It has been nearly a year since SAG-AFTRA’s video game contract, the Interactive Media Agreement, was extended beyond the original expiration date as we negotiated with the companies for critical terms SAG-AFTRA members need,”
Sep 3
The Worst Programmer I Know dannorth.net · “Tim’s score was consistently zero. Zero! Not just low, or trending downwards, but literally zero.”
Sep 2
Can an Artificial Kidney Finally Free Patients from Dialysis? ucsf.edu · “More than 500,000 people in the U.S. require dialysis several times a week. Many seek kidney transplants, but there are not enough donors, and only about 20,000 people receive them each year.”
Sep 2
Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows after 28 years bleepingcomputer.com · “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
Sep 2
'Conserve food and water': No access in or out of Burning Man after storm sfgate.com · “Scott McGuire, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Reno office, said on Friday that even a one-hundredth of an inch of rain can cause problems for the festival grounds.”
Sep 2
How the FBI nuked Qakbot malware from infected Windows PCs bleepingcomputer.com · “The FBI says that between October 2021 and April 2023, the Qakbot operators earned approximately $58 million from ransomware payments.”
Sep 1
Arm wrestles expert's domains away citing trademark issues theregister.com · “Arm’s takedown comes just a week after the Neoverse designer officially filed for an IPO on the US Nasdaq.”
Sep 1
X/Twitter has updated its Terms of Service to let it use Posts for AI training stackdiary.com · “It’s funny how that works because now you’re going to be working for Elon Musk, and he does not plan to pay you, and he certainly does not plan to ask for your permission to use your content this way.”
Sep 1
Japan's cybersecurity agency admits it was hacked for months bitdefender.com · “The hack is thought to have commenced in October 2022, but the first traces of a problem were not spotted until the middle of June this year.”
Sep 1

August 2023 117 posts

IBM promised to back off facial recognition: then it signed a $69.8 million contract to provide it theverge.com · “In September 2020, IBM described such "one-to-many" matching systems as "the type of facial recognition technology most likely to be used for mass surveillance, racial profiling, or other violations of human rights."”
Aug 31
Leaked Microsoft memo tells managers not to use budget cuts as an explainer for lack of pay rises: 'Reinforce that every year offers unique opportunity for impact' finance.yahoo.com · “Using budgets or factors besides the employee’s impact as an explanation for an employee’s rewards will erode trust and confidence within your team.”
Aug 31
We Analyzed Millions of ChatGPT User Sessions: Visits are Down 29% since May, Programming Assistance is 30% of Use sparktoro.com · “Since May, OpenAI traffic has declined 29.15%.”
Aug 31
Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul 9to5mac.com · “Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud.”
Aug 31
Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google theverge.com · “It’s quite literally a rogue executable file that has somehow appeared in c:\windows\temp\mubstemp and is digitally signed by Microsoft.”
Aug 30
Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype. Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It 404media.co · “Only after 404 Media contacted Microsoft for comment did the company say it would patch the issue in an upcoming update.”
Aug 30
Google to charge big businesses $30 per user per month for AI in Gmail and work apps cnbc.com · “We were a little surprised to see our friends in Redmond come up with the exact same pricing model that we had.”
Aug 30
US food delivery service PurFoods discloses data breach therecord.media · “We are sorry for any inconvenience this incident may cause.”
Aug 30
ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech: No Matter How Awful It Is. eff.org · “When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail.”
Aug 29
Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1) undeadly.org · “It also sends fake "chaff" keystrokes for a random interval after the last real keystroke.”
Aug 29
Grave flaws in BGP Error handling blog.benjojo.co.uk · “As such, customers that have chosen to not require or implement RFC 7606 have done so willingly and with knowledge of what is needed to defend against these types of attacks.”
Aug 29
Elixir Saves Pinterest $2 Million a Year In Server Costs paraxial.io · “The combined effect of better architecture and Elixir saved Pinterest over $2 million per year in server costs.”
Aug 29
'The Wallet Event': Crypto Startup Bankrupt After Losing Password to $38.9 Million Physical Crypto Wallet 404media.co · “It is worth mentioning that the company did not tell regulators or customers about this issue for months after it discovered the problem.”
Aug 28
When your classmates threaten you with felony charges miles.land · “They said that we had violated state and federal law. They threatened us with civil and criminal charges. 20 years in prison.”
Aug 28
New Images and Video Confirm Austin-Made Tesla Model Y Has Cracked Front Casting autoevolution.com · “Do not copy the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer.”
Aug 28
Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly thehustle.co · “Much of their earnings go back to Monotype, which takes a 50% cut of every sale on its site.”
Aug 27
Mother is arrested in Bangladesh after son in the U.S. criticizes government online nbcnews.com · “I’m not a famous columnist or not a very known person. So, I did not expect that this would happen to my family.”
Aug 27
Block YouTube Ads on AppleTV by Decrypting and Stripping Ads from Profobuf ericdraken.com · “And how easy would it be to change a 49399797 field key to, say, 49399796, making an entire sub-structure of advertisement and tracking information suddenly unavailable?”
Aug 27
This venture-backed startup has quietly bought more than 80 mom-and-pop shops techcrunch.com · “The plan instead is to generate revenue from a growing array of fintech products that it sells to the businesses it buys.”
Aug 26
Slack's Migration to a Cellular Architecture slack.engineering · “Slack operates a global, multi-regional edge network, but most of our core computational infrastructure resides in multiple Availability Zones within a single region, us-east-1.”
Aug 26
E-ink is so Retropunk rmkit.dev · “Unfortunately, the shim needs to be updated for every release to give it the correct binary addresses to hook.”
Aug 26
Zoom CEO Says Employees Need to Be in the Office Because It's Hard to Build Trust Over Zoom gizmodo.com · “We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”
Aug 25
Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee (Guest Blog Post) blog.ericgoldman.org · “Nonetheless, without any obvious hints of irony, OpenAI’s own terms of use prohibits scraping.”
Aug 25
FBI Finds 1,580 Bitcoin in Crypto Wallets Linked to North Korean Hackers securityweek.com · “Private sector entities should examine the blockchain data associated with these addresses and be vigilant in guarding against transactions directly with, or derived from, the addresses.”
Aug 25
Elon Musk says 'if LEGO can do it, so can we' about Cybertruck quality in leaked Tesla email electrek.co · “All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.”
Aug 25
Tornado Cash devs charged with laundering more than $1 billion theverge.com · “Storm suggested creating a version of Tornado with KYC / AML enabled, but Tornado’s unnamed venture capital investors were dismissive, saying, "I just don’t know if anyone will actually want this."”
Aug 24
Bypassing Bitlocker using a cheap logic analyzer on a Lenovo laptop errno.fr · “The use of a discrete (physical) TPM does not increase the security of the system as one would expect and creates the illusion of security.”
Aug 24
Introducing Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services blog.torproject.org · “For everyday users, however, who tend to submit only a few requests at a time, the added computational effort of solving the puzzle is manageable for most devices, with initial times per solve ranging from 5 milliseconds for faster computers and up to 30 milliseconds for slower hardware.”
Aug 24
Epic's First Run offers 100% revenue share to game devs in exchange for exclusivity techcrunch.com · “Steam, for all its shortcomings and 30% off the top, is the de facto platform for PC gamers, and developers have shared that when their game is available on both Steam and Epic, the latter makes up only a small fraction of sales.”
Aug 24
We Might Have Accidentally Killed the Only Life We Ever Found on Mars Nearly 50 Years Ago daily.jstor.org · “It would be as if an alien spaceship were to find you wandering half-dead in the desert, and your would-be saviors decide, "Humans need water. Let’s put the human in the middle of the ocean to save it!"”
Aug 24
NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal 2024 nvidianews.nvidia.com · “On August 21, 2023, the Board of Directors approved an additional $25.00 billion in share repurchases, without expiration.”
Aug 23
Some rough impressions of Worldcoin blog.cryptographyengineering.com · “In principle, Tools for Humanity’s servers can re-bind an existing iris code to a new identity commitment. They can then send that new commitment to the chain using a special call in the smart contract.”
Aug 23
Eye scans detect signs of Parkinson's disease up to seven years before diagnosis moorfields.nhs.uk · “While we are not yet ready to predict whether an individual will develop Parkinson’s, we hope that this method could soon become a pre-screening tool for people at risk of disease.”
Aug 23
Coffee offers performance boost for concrete rmit.edu.au · “Lead author Dr Rajeev Roychand from RMIT University said the team developed a technique to make concrete 30% stronger by turning waste coffee grounds into biochar, using a low-energy process without oxygen at 350 degrees Celsius.”
Aug 23
The first conformant M1 GPU driver rosenzweig.io · “Unlike ours, the manufacturer’s M1 drivers are unfortunately not conformant for any standard graphics API, whether Vulkan or OpenGL or OpenGL ES.”
Aug 22
Experian fined $650,000 for not letting you opt out of its spammy emails theverge.com · “Text at the bottom of emails shown in court docs reads, "This is not a marketing email," and claims the messages were notifications of recent account changes.”
Aug 22
SpaceX's new Bandwagon program is a big threat to small launch providers techcrunch.com · “Right now, companies must often purchase a dedicated launch from Rocket Lab if they want to position a satellite in MIO.”
Aug 22
Meta threatens to fire workers for return-to-office infractions in leaked memo sfgate.com · “As with other company policies, repeated violations may result in disciplinary action, up to and including a Performance rating drop and, ultimately, termination if not addressed.”
Aug 21
Google's plan to purge inactive accounts isn't sitting well with some users cnbc.com · “For the first time in its almost two decades as a public company, Google revenue has grown by less than 10% for four consecutive quarters.”
Aug 21
Short session expiration does not help security sjoerdlangkemper.nl · “If someone needs to log in again every 15 minutes, they are going to make authenticating as easy as possible. That means keeping the password vault open, choosing an easier password, or putting the password on the clipboard every time.”
Aug 21
To Conference Organisers Everywhere… arunraghavan.net · “But if you’re in my position, you need at least 2-3 months between the first and the last step. If your attendance is conditional on speaking at the conference (for example, if your company will only sponsor you if you’re speaking), then you need a minimum of 2-3 months between when speakers are notified and the conference starts.”
Aug 21
macOS updates for Apple silicon Macs are larger than reported eclecticlight.co · “However, there’s a second component that is only downloaded by Apple silicon Macs, which is generally about 1.1 GB in size, bringing the total size to be downloaded to about 1.8 GB.”
Aug 20
Debian turns 30 – and important to Linux world as ever theregister.com · “Red Hat sold for $34 billion, but that money represents about 1 percent of Linux usage. Debian and its offspring have 50 times as many users as RHEL.”
Aug 20
Executive Function Theft hedgehoglibrarian.com · “Finding out that because the "initial default setting for my employer" is pay-by-check there is no way AT ALL to get them to change it to direct deposit unless I wait for the FSA company to approve the payment and cut the check and then call to have them reissue the payment as a direct deposit.”
Aug 20
Welcome to Datasette Cloud datasette.cloud · “Pricing! We want you to be able to pay for the product, so you can feel confident in its sustainable future and we can get paid to keep working on it.”
Aug 20
Cellebrite asks cops to keep its phone hacking tech 'hush hush' techcrunch.com · “We don’t really want any techniques to leak in court through disclosure practices, or you know, ultimately in testimony, when you are sitting in the stand, producing all this evidence and discussing how you got into the phone”
Aug 19
Iraq Blocks Telegram, Leaks Blackhole BGP Routes kentik.com · “However, despite this technical error, no Telegram disruption was reported outside of Iraq, in part, due to the fact that Telegram had created Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs) for its routes allowing ASes outside of Iraq to automatically reject the hijacks.”
Aug 19
IP Address Blocking Banned After Anti-Piracy Court Order Hit Cloudflare torrentfreak.com · “With regard to the blocking of access to the IP address 190.115.18.20, the Telekom Control Commission found a violation of Article 3 Paragraph 3 of Regulation (EU) 2015/2120, because the IP access block poses the risk of ‘overblocking’ any website content.”
Aug 19
Amsterdam to use "noise cameras" against too loud cars nltimes.nl · “The noise camera consists of a box containing four microphones that can detect precisely where a sound is coming from. The box is connected to a regular speed camera, which takes a photo of the license plate to issue a fine.”
Aug 19
China's property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan court cnbc.com · “The application is a normal procedure for the offshore debt restructuring and does not involve bankruptcy petition.”
Aug 18
Spotify reportedly has a $38 million white noise problem theverge.com · “Spotify is spending a lot of money on podcasts that don’t actually involve any talking.”
Aug 18
Major U.S. energy org targeted in QR code phishing attack bleepingcomputer.com · “The threat actors use QR codes embedded in images to bypass email security tools that scan a message for known malicious links, allowing the phishing messages to reach the target’s inbox.”
Aug 18
Saying Hello Linked to Higher Wellbeing, but With Limits news.gallup.com · “Americans’ wellbeing score increases steadily by the number of neighbors greeted, from 51.5 among those saying hello to zero neighbors to 64.1 for those greeting six neighbors.”
Aug 18
EQT Private Equity Announces Voluntary Public Purchase Offer and Intention to Delist SUSE suse.com · “The interim dividend will be paid to all shareholders prior to the settlement of the Offer and will allow Marcel to finance its purchase of SUSE shares under the Offer and certain transaction costs incurred by it.”
Aug 17
Amazon will reportedly charge sellers an extra fee for shipping their own products theverge.com · “Documents viewed by the outlets indicate that Amazon will start imposing a fee on each product that merchants send out themselves.”
Aug 17
Asteroid crater 520km in diameter buried deep in southeast Australia, scientists say australiangeographic.com.au · “The Deniliquin structure, yet to be further tested by drilling, spans up to 520km in diameter.”
Aug 17
Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty Seagate Firecuda 530 drive with the help woodworking tools blog.jgc.org · “A metal G clamp and strips of a Silicon Valley Bank credit card under the SSD to support the PCB.”
Aug 17
Nintendo Is Trying To Patent Some Really Broad Tears Of The Kingdom Mechanics kotaku.com · “Link and the objects he rides on move together at the same speed, rather than Link being technically stationary on top of a moving object as is common in the physics of other games.”
Aug 16
Setapp readies alt app store for iPhone, entices devs with up to 90% revenue share 9to5mac.com · “While the base rate of revenue shared with devs is the same 70% at Setapp that it is with Apple, there is a potential bonus.”
Aug 16
OpenAI is using GPT-4 to build an AI-powered content moderation system engadget.com · “Anyone with OpenAI API access can implement this approach to create their own AI-assisted moderation system.”
Aug 16
Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI theverge.com · “If you do have access in the Google app on mobile, Google will pull up a set of AI-generated “key points” from an article after you tap an icon at the bottom of the screen.”
Aug 16
Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains news.ycombinator.com · “Twitter won’t ban domains they don’t like but will waste your time if you visit them.”
Aug 15
Bali rice experiment cuts greenhouse gas emissions and increases yields news.mongabay.com · “They found that in the drained field, the release of GHG had dropped by 70%, and the farmer who owned the demonstration plot saw his crop yield in the drained field rise by more than 20%.”
Aug 15
What exactly are the economics of AI? garymarcus.substack.com · “Driverless cars are powered by AI, but so far the money that has gone into them, on order of $100 billion dollars, vastly exceeds the actual revenue that has come out of them.”
Aug 15
A police raid of a Kansas newsroom raises alarms about violations of press freedom npr.org · “It’s very rare because it’s illegal,” Oberlander said. “It doesn’t happen very often because most organizations understand that it’s illegal.”
Aug 14
Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media blog.archive.org · “Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium.”
Aug 14
The data of 760,000 Discord.io users was put up for sale on the darknet stackdiary.com · “I tried reaching out to the Discord.io team on their Discord server, and two minutes after joining, every single channel got manually deleted.”
Aug 14
Ford says cars with WiFi vulnerability still safe to drive bleepingcomputer.com · “In the interim, customers who are concerned about the vulnerability can simply turn off the WiFi functionality through the SYNC 3 infotainment system’s Settings menu.”
Aug 14
Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit theregister.com · “It is well-documented that ink is not required in order to scan or to fax a document, and it is certainly possible to manufacture an All-in-One printer that scans or faxes when the device is out of ink”
Aug 13
Former VP Claims Salesforce Lied About Software Capabilities: 'It Was All a Lie.' businessinsider.com · “While it was able to execute some functions such as information collection in real time, other operations such as the processing and organizing of that data took hours to complete”
Aug 13
I Created the Nerdiest Game Ever plbrault.com · “Over time, idle processes go through six starvation levels represented by colours and emojis. If a process spends too much time in the last starvation level, the user becomes impatient and kills it.”
Aug 13
Thermodynamic Linear Algebra arxiv.org · “Under reasonable assumptions, we rigorously establish asymptotic speedups for our algorithms, relative to digital methods, that scale linearly in matrix dimension.”
Aug 13
WVU recommends dropping 32 majors, including all world language programs wvgazettemail.com · “The preliminary recommendations also included 169 faculty reductions, or 7% of the total faculty in Morgantown.”
Aug 12
Exploring the internals of Linux v0.01 seiya.me · “It consisted of only 10,239 lines of code.”
Aug 12
Carrot Problems atvbt.com · “So they set up public application processes, which cause outsiders to waste time and effort applying through a channel that has 0 chance of landing them the job.”
Aug 12
Youtube-dl Site Goes Offline as Hosting Provider Enforces Court-Ordered Ban torrentfreak.com · “While Uberspace didn’t host the open source software, it was held responsible for the website linking to the software hosted on developer platform GitHub.”
Aug 11
U.S. Bans Future Investments in Chinese AI, Semiconductor, and Quantum Computing tomshardware.com · “While the administration mentioned restrictions would concern only "narrow subsets" of these areas, precise details remain unspecified.”
Aug 11
80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: 'A lot of executives have egg on their faces' cnbc.com · “A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of employees’ office attendance, their usage of office amenities and other related factors, according to new research from Envoy.”
Aug 11
Wendelstein 7-X reaches milestone: Power plasma with gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes ipp.mpg.de · “The energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoule was achieved with an average heating power of 2.7 megawatts, whereby the discharge lasted 480 seconds.”
Aug 11
Seattle becomes first in U.S. to protect gig workers from sudden 'deactivation' kuow.org · “Often, there’s an algorithm that makes the decision so it’s not even a real person who’s making the decision to deactivate the worker.”
Aug 10
Supermarket AI meal planner app suggests recipe that would create chlorine gas theguardian.com · “The bot recommends the recipe as “the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses”.”
Aug 10
Supreme Court says Apple can keep its App Store payment rules for now theverge.com · “Kagan did not issue an explanation for the decision, but Epic’s petition was noted as denied on the Supreme Court’s website.”
Aug 10
Liquid-Metal Battery Will Be on the Grid Next Year spectrum.ieee.org · “Ambri’s grid battery costs $180/kWh to $250/kWh depending on size and duration, the company says.”
Aug 10
CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking theverge.com · “According to the memo, CNET will be subject to regular “content pruning” going forward, at least once a year.”
Aug 9
Infrastructure audit completed by Radically Open Security mullvad.net · “VPN servers accept remote logins from administrators, who technically have the ability to tap into production users’ VPN traffic”
Aug 9
Insights into Stack Overflow's traffic stackoverflow.blog · “This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.”
Aug 9
Google Play apps with 2.5M installs load ads when screen's off bleepingcomputer.com · “Once installed on the device, the adware apps wait several weeks before activating their ad-fraud activity to deceive the users and evade detection by Google reviewers.”
Aug 9
Downfall Attacks downfall.page · “According to Intel, some workloads may experience up to 50% overhead.”
Aug 8
Amazon Says It Doesn't 'Employ' Drivers, But Records Show It Hired Firms to Prevent Them From Unionizing vice.com · “Motherboard reviewed five reports filed to the Department of Labor, which showed that Amazon spent more than $14.2 million total on anti-union consulting in 2022.”
Aug 8
Banks hit with $549 million in fines for use of Signal, WhatsApp to evade regulators' reach cnbc.com · “An analysis of 13 Wells Fargo employees, for instance, found that all had violated the bank’s communications policies by using text messages to communicate with co-workers and market participants.”
Aug 8
Android 14 introduces first-of-its-kind cellular connectivity security features security.googleblog.com · “In other words, the network decides whether traffic is encrypted and the user has no visibility into whether it is being encrypted.”
Aug 8
I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires) janefriedman.com · “When I replied that I did not have a trademark for my name, they closed the case and said the books would not be removed from sale.”
Aug 7
Police raid WorldCoin cryptocurrency warehouse in Nairobi capitalfm.co.ke · “The officers went to the offices along Mombasa Road armed with a search warrant and left with machines they believe stores data gathered by the firm.”
Aug 7
Overworked and Underpaid, VFX Workers Vote to Unionize at Marvel vulture.com · “This marks the first time visual-effects professionals have banded together to demand the same rights, wage protections, and professional watchdog oversight enjoyed by workers in almost every other segment of the entertainment industry.”
Aug 7
New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy bleepingcomputer.com · “The CoANet classifier achieved 95% accuracy from the smartphone recordings and 93% from those captured through Zoom.”
Aug 7
The Lose-Lose-Lose-Lose Bill C-18 Outcome: Meta Blocking News Links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada michaelgeist.ca · “Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down.””
Aug 6
In every reported case where police mistakenly arrested someone using facial recognition, that person has been Black businessinsider.com · “In 2020, Detroit’s police chief said their facial recognition technology, when used alone, fails 96% of the time, Insider previously reported.”
Aug 6
Why does libvirt support only 14 hot-plugged PCIe devices on x86-64? dottedmag.net · “Thus, the maximum total number of PCIe slots in any PC is 16 (= 65536/4096).”
Aug 6
NASA Mission Update: Voyager 2 Communications Pause jpl.nasa.gov · “With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked.”
Aug 5
They Didn’t Ask to Go Viral. Posting on Social Media Without Consent Is Immoral wired.com · “If I were to post your name, address, and phone number, you would have legal recourse. And yet the same is not true for your image.”
Aug 5
Just normal web things. heather-buchel.com · “This is that dreaded thing that us front-end folks are always harping on about: using a div with an on-click to navigate instead of an anchor element.”
Aug 5
Mozilla VPN: CVE-2023-4104: Privileged vpndaemon on Linux wrongly and incompletely implements Polkit authentication openwall.com · “In summary this asks Polkit to check whether the privileged Mozilla VPN D-Bus service itself is authorized to perform the action. Since The Mozilla VPN D-Bus service runs as root, this will always be true.”
Aug 4
Introducing code referencing for GitHub Copilot github.blog · “First, our previous research suggests that matches occur in less than one percent of GitHub Copilot suggestions. But that one percent isn’t evenly distributed across all use cases.”
Aug 4
New Collide+Power side-channel attack impacts almost all CPUs bleepingcomputer.com · “Preventing data collisions in hardware is a highly complex redesign of general-purpose CPUs, which we think is unlikely to happen in the near future due to the number of shared hardware components in a CPU”
Aug 4
Mid-winter temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius in South America leave climatologists in disbelief abc.net.au · “It’s reported that Buenos Aires has had the hottest start to August on record and has shattered its previous record by over 5 degrees. That margin is phenomenal”
Aug 4
FCC fines robocaller a record $300M after blocking billions of their scam calls techcrunch.com · “The FCC is limited to investigating, taking counter-actions (like asking phone companies to stop carrying certain callers), and documenting the extent of the alleged criminal activity. But their recommendation of a $300 million fine must be evaluated and prosecuted by the Justice Department.”
Aug 3
Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features worth up to $15,000 electrek.co · “For this, we are using a known voltage fault injection attack against the AMD Secure Processor (ASP), serving as the root of trust for the system.”
Aug 3
Google’s AI search is getting more video and better links theverge.com · “It’s now going to display publish dates next to the three articles in the summary box in an effort to “help you better understand how recent the information is from these web pages,” Google said in a blog post announcing the new features.”
Aug 3
IBM and NASA Open Source Largest Geospatial AI Foundation Model on Hugging Face newsroom.ibm.com · “A commercial version of the geospatial model, which is part of IBM watsonx, will be available through the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS) later this year.”
Aug 3
Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand gpus.llm-utils.org · “1x DGX H100 (SXM) with 8x H100 GPUs is $460k including the required support. $100k of the $460k is required support.”
Aug 2
How I discovered the underground world of credit card network exploitation chargebackstop.com · “We learnt that 15% of the successful fraudulent charges resulted in chargebacks. We decided to accept all of the disputes and swallow Stripe’s £20 fee for each.”
Aug 2
Amazon rolls out its virtual health clinic nationwide cnbc.com · “Amazon Clinic doesn’t yet accept insurance, but consumers can use insurance to help pay for medications prescribed through the service. Prescriptions can be filled at any pharmacy, including Amazon’s own online pharmacy, which handles fulfillment and delivery.”
Aug 2
Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it pluralistic.net · “My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college.”
Aug 2
Viral room-temperature superconductor claims spark excitement – and skepticism theconversation.com · “In a video demonstration, the researchers position a piece of LK-99 over a magnet. One edge of the flat disk of LK-99 rises, but the other edge appears to maintain contact with the magnet.”
Aug 1
Senate Votes To Let People Who've Used Marijuana Work At Intelligence Agencies Like CIA And NSA As Part Of Defense Bill marijuanamoment.net · “A newly published Senate Intelligence Committee report on the larger legislation shows that the panel approved the marijuana provision by a party-line vote of 10 to 7 last month.”
Aug 1
China Has Switched On the Largest Wind Turbine Ever popularmechanics.com · “Mingyang Smart Energy, the designer of the turbine, said in a LinkedIn post that the turbine will “produce 67 million kWh of power annually, enough for the usage of 80,000 residents, reducing C02 by 56,000 tonnes (61,729 U.S. tons).””
Aug 1
Dear Websites, Stop Asking for "Ransom" Sign-Ups. iamvishnu.com · “It showed all the “processing” animations for a couple of seconds. While I was waiting for the SVGs, it opened a new page asking me to sign up to download the generated SVG files.”
Aug 1

July 2023 111 posts

New – AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge + Public IP Insights aws.amazon.com · “Effective February 1, 2024 there will be a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether attached to a service or not”
Jul 31
Free Public WiFi computer.rip · “if a Windows XP machine had an ad-hoc network favorited (which would be default if it had ever connected to one), then when it wasn’t connected to any other WiFi network, it would beacon the favorited ad-hoc network to make it easier for other hosts to connect.”
Jul 31
Pay dirt for ice core scientists in East Greenland as they reach bedrock news.ku.dk · “The mud, which had not seen the light of day for roughly a million years, was only briefly exposed to sunlight, as white light can damage ice core material.”
Jul 31
The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media bbc.co.uk · “The principles of the Fediverse, with an emphasis on local control, quality content, and social value, are far more aligned with our public purposes than those of avowedly commercial networks like Threads or Twitter.”
Jul 31
How the Ultrawealthy Use Private Foundations to Bank Millions in Tax Deductions While Giving the Public Little in Return propublica.org · “That allowed the Johnsons to collect more than $38 million in tax savings from the estate over five years, confidential tax records show.”
Jul 30
Banished to a Remote Idaho Valley, Beavers Created a Lush Wetland e360.yale.edu · “When the Sharps Fire burned through the area in 2018, it left unsinged those parts where beavers had settled.”
Jul 30
Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decline in Aging news.cuanschutz.edu · “Researchers using mouse models found that altering the CaMKII brain protein caused similar cognitive effects as those that happen through normal aging.”
Jul 30
A Steering Council notice about PEP 703 (Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython) discuss.python.org · “We do not want another Python 3 situation, so any changes in third-party code needed to accommodate no-GIL builds should just work in with-GIL builds (although backward compatibility with older Python versions will still need to be addressed). This is not Python 4.”
Jul 29
What happened to Vivaldi Social? thomasp.vivaldi.net · “And it just so happens that all local accounts in a Mastodon instance have a null value in their URI field, so they all matched.”
Jul 29
Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models llm-attacks.org · “Perhaps most concerningly, it is unclear whether such behavior can ever be fully patched by LLM providers.”
Jul 29
If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity streets.mn · “But to improve ADA compliance, Edina removed the north crosswalk in 2014. Now, you would have to cross the busy signalized intersection three times just to continue on the north sidewalk.”
Jul 29
The U.K. Government Is Very Close To Eroding Encryption Worldwide eff.org · “In response to this outpouring of resistance, the U.K. government’s response has been to wave its hands and deny reality.”
Jul 28
California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation latimes.com · “Since the California law took effect in January, call volume in state prisons surged from 1.4 million minutes per day in December 2022 to more than 3.5 million minutes in June, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.”
Jul 28
Mark Zuckerberg: Threads users down by more than a half bbc.com · “The company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, told staff it was now focused on adding more “retention-driving hooks” to draw people back to the platform.”
Jul 28
For Cheaper Lithium-Ion Batteries, Just Add Salt spectrum.ieee.org · “Whether or not this will lead to practical batteries with associated cost savings remains to be seen.”
Jul 28
Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 allthingsdistributed.com · “Today, we have tens of thousands of customers with S3 buckets that are spread across millions of drives.”
Jul 27
2023-07-02 -- 2023-07-03 Tarsnap outage post-mortem mail.tarsnap.com · “Unfortunately while I had tests for this, I never tested regenerating the server state after a machine is “re-owned” while having data stored”
Jul 27
Meta's AR/VR Business Lost $7.7 Billion in the Past 6 Months cnet.com · “For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem”
Jul 27
Stack Overflow’s CEO doesn’t understand Stack Overflow jlericson.com · “Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023.”
Jul 27
[wei] Ensure Origin Trial enables full feature github.com · “An origin trial can enable the RuntimeFeature, which will allow full access to the API, provided the base::Feature is also enabled (see change to origin_trial_context.cc).”
Jul 26
mold 2.0.0 github.com · “Unfortunately, this approach didn’t meet our expectations. The license change represents our acceptance of this reality.”
Jul 26
EU passes law to blanket highways with fast EV chargers by end of 2025 theverge.com · “The regulation also requires that ad-hoc charging payments can be made via cards or contactless devices, without requiring a subscription.”
Jul 26
Scientists Say Recycling Has Backfired Spectacularly futurism.com · “While recycling campaigns can help limit what heads to the landfill, scientists are now saying that it’s masked the glaring problem of over-production and de-emphasized other waste reduction strategies that are far more sustainable.”
Jul 26
Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation nature.com · “We predict with high confidence the tipping to happen as soon as mid-century (2037–2109 is a 95% confidence range).”
Jul 25
Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed httptoolkit.com · “Fundamentally though, it’s exactly the same concept: a way that web servers can demand your device prove it is a sufficiently ’legitimate’ device before browsing the web.”
Jul 25
OpenAI Quietly Shuts Down Its AI Detection Tool decrypt.co · “The explanation was not in a new announcement, but added in a note added to the blog post that first announced the tool.”
Jul 25
At this company, we are family pboyd.io · “After much deliberation, we feel the best course of action is to eliminate the redundancies in our family. Consequently, your family membership has been terminated, effective immediately.”
Jul 25
Zenbleed lock.cmpxchg8b.com · “It took a bit of work, but I found a variant that can leak about 30 kb per core, per second. This is fast enough to monitor encryption keys and passwords as users login!”
Jul 24
Senate bill crafted with DEA targets end-to-end encryption, requires online companies to report drug activity therecord.media · “Many privacy advocates caution that, if passed in its current form, the bill could be a death blow to end-to-end encryption services because it includes particularly controversial language holding companies accountable for conduct they don’t report if they “deliberately blind” themselves to the violations.”
Jul 24
Your Ubisoft account can be permanently deleted for 'inactivity,' but Ubisoft says that won't happen if there are purchases attached to it (Updated) pcgamer.com · “In practice, as of today, we have never deleted accounts that have been inactive for less than 4 years”
Jul 24
Amazon is reportedly making employees relocate for return-to-office engadget.com · “Those affected will include workers hired for remote positions and those who moved during peak pandemic days.”
Jul 24
Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node (The Story of William Weber) lowendbox.com · “The law was changed a few weeks later to include private persons and sole traders as protected lsps, not just companies, but they had to convict me.”
Jul 23
Simple Sabotage Field Manual - How to Destroy Your Organizations butwhatfor.beehiiv.com · “Simple sabotage requires no destructive tools whatsoever and produces physical damage, if any, by highly indirect means. It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit.”
Jul 23
Teach Your LLM to Always Answer with Facts not Fiction blog.myscale.com · “At this juncture, it is absolutely crucial to note that an LLM is not infallible nor the ultimate authority on all knowledge.”
Jul 23
Compromised Microsoft Key: More Impactful Than We Thought wiz.io · “The old public key’s certificate revealed it was issued on April 5th, 2016, and expired on April 4th, 2021, and its thumbprint matched the thumbprint of the key Microsoft listed in their latest blog post, named “Thumbprint of acquired signing key””
Jul 22
Shopify Employee Breaks NDA To Reveal Firm Quietly Replacing Laid Off Workers With AI thedeepdive.ca · “In a regulatory filing made in May, Shopify revealed that Lutke collected just over $20.0 million in total compensation in 2022, on par with the $20.0 million he collected in 2021, and an increase over the $15.1 million he made in 2020.”
Jul 22
Why even let users set their own passwords? devever.net · “Other examples include PayPal, where you can literally enter a credit card number to prove your identity and reset your password(!).”
Jul 22
Nebraska study finds billions of nanoplastics released when microwaving containers news.unl.edu · “The fastest way to heat food and drink might also rank as the fastest route to ingesting massive quantities of minuscule plastic particles, says new research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.”
Jul 21
Accelerator Report: A quench of an LHC inner triplet magnet causes a small leak with major consequences home.cern · “At 1.00 a.m. + 17 seconds on Monday, 17 July, the LHC beams were dumped after only 9 minutes in collision due to a radiofrequency interlock caused by an electrical perturbation.”
Jul 21
Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common evanjones.ca · “The answer is: very often, like 5% of all samples, when reading the clock on all 4 physical cores at the same time.”
Jul 21
Seven AI companies commit to safeguards at the White House's request engadget.com · “The companies will voluntarily agree to abide by a number of principles though the agreement will expire when Congress passes legislation to regulate AI.”
Jul 21
Apple says it would remove iMessage and FaceTime in the UK rather than break end-to-end encryption 9to5mac.com · “It strongly objects to requirements such as backdoors for end-to-end encryption, reporting changes to product security features before they are released and being forced to disable security features before an appeals process can take place.”
Jul 20
Federal Reserve announces that its new system for instant payments, the FedNow® Service, is now live federalreserve.gov · “To start, 35 early-adopting banks and credit unions, as well as the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, are ready with instant payments capabilities via the FedNow Service.”
Jul 20
IRS moves forward with a new free-file tax return system, supporters and critics mobilize pbs.org · “A Government Accountability Report in April 2022 found that 70 percent of taxpayers were eligible to use an existing free-file program but just 3 percent actually used the service.”
Jul 20
Tesla in discussion to license Full Self-Driving software to another automaker theverge.com · “Tesla is in “discussion” to license its Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver-assist technology to another major automaker, Elon Musk said in an earnings call Wednesday.”
Jul 20
Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract at least three papers stanforddaily.com · “Retracting a paper is a rare act, especially for a scientist of Tessier-Lavigne’s stature. A database of retractions shows that only four in every 10,000 papers are retracted.”
Jul 19
CVE-2023-38408: Remote Code Execution in OpenSSH’s forwarded ssh-agent blog.qualys.com · “Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable OpenSSH forwarded ssh-agent.”
Jul 19
Target's EasySweep – Simplifying Skimmer Detection for All tech.target.com · “The time to sweep a store went from one to two hours physically examining each of the 20-30 payment terminals per store down to a mere 15 minutes.”
Jul 19
'No way out': how video games use tricks from gambling to attract big spenders theguardian.com · “Should they reduce their outlay, she told GamesIndustry.biz, the company would “reach out and call them to find out what’s wrong”.”
Jul 19
Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked techcrunch.com · “But, Microsoft found that the hackers were using that consumer MSA key to forge tokens that allowed them to break into enterprise inboxes.”
Jul 18
The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech businessinsider.com · “The single most important fact in this paper is that Benchmark put $12 million into Uber and got $5.8 billion back.”
Jul 18
This company plans to transplant gene-edited pig hearts into babies next year technologyreview.com · “Two such surgeries have been performed so far. Neither animal survived beyond a matter of days.”
Jul 18
WormGPT Is a ChatGPT Alternative With 'No Ethical Boundaries or Limitations' pcmag.com · “To create the chatbot, the developer says they used an older, but open-source large language model called GPT-J from 2021.”
Jul 18
Bad numbers in the "gzip beats BERT" paper? kenschutte.com · “So, if any of the tie-break labels is equal to the test label, it is marked as correct.”
Jul 17
Temporary ban on behavioural advertising on Facebook and Instagram datatilsynet.no · “Should Meta not comply with the decision, the company risks a coercive fine of up to one million NOK per day.”
Jul 17
This Fusion Reactor Is Held Together With Tape spectrum.ieee.org · “That’s an aggressive timeline, and nearly every fusion project to date has fallen short of its optimistic promises.”
Jul 17
Engagement on Instagram's Threads Has Cratered gizmodo.com · “Similarweb’s data reportedly paints a picture equally as grim as daily active users dropped 25% from a peak on July 7 to Monday, while time spent on the app dropped over 50% from 20 minutes to 8 minutes.”
Jul 17
Discord is not documentation shkspr.mobi · “There’s no API documentation - I have to scroll through a million messages to find anything.”
Jul 16
Unauthenticated RCE on a RIGOL oscilloscope tortel.li · “It is a little less known that if n is 0, the result of the strncmp function is also 0.”
Jul 16
underwater ears everywhere computer.rip · “The first search vessel capable of deep undersea exploration, the ROV Pelagic Odysseus 6k, arrived on the scene on the morning of the 22nd. Just five hours later, Odysseus had located the wreckage.”
Jul 16
Signal president says company will not comply with proposed U.K. 'mass surveillance' law requiring mandatory message scanning before encryption fortune.com · “You cannot create a back door that only the good guys can go through.”
Jul 15
The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training stackdiary.com · “The crawler, which does not contain a unique user-agent string, respects robots.txt.”
Jul 15
A Third of North America's Birds Have Vanished nautil.us · “The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows.”
Jul 15
PostgreSQL: No More VACUUM, No More Bloat orioledb.com · “With the PostgreSQL heap engine, the update of a single indexed field disables HOT, so all indexes get updated.”
Jul 15
Dropped iPad implicated in fatal Rotak Chinook helicopter crash verticalmag.com · “When additional pressure was applied to the pilot’s left pedal, the iPad fell and jammed between the left pedal and heel slide support assembly.”
Jul 14
S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are 'skyrocketing.' What is the city's plan? sfchronicle.com · “The Fire Department has tallied 44 incidents so far this year in which robotaxis entered active fire scenes, ran over fire hoses or blocked fire trucks from responding to emergency calls.”
Jul 14
Co-founder of Stability AI, worth billions, says he was tricked into selling stake for $100 semafor.com · “Cyrus Hodes accused Mostaque, who is also named in a lawsuit filed in a U.S. federal court on Thursday, of convincing him that Stability AI was worthless and hiding the company’s work on what became the popular image generator, Stable Diffusion.”
Jul 14
The Problem With LangChain minimaxir.com · “The problem with LangChain is that it makes simple things relatively complex, and with that unnecessary complexity creates a tribalism which hurts the up-and-coming AI ecosystem as a whole.”
Jul 14
How Disney, Netflix, and more streaming companies are fighting FTC's 'click to cancel' proposal businessinsider.com · “The proposal would also severely curtail or, in some cases, even prohibit companies from communicating with their customers, in violation of the First Amendment.”
Jul 13
The FCC Responds to my ATSC 3 Encryption Complaint: They Want To Hear From You! blog.lon.tv · “With ATSC 3 only equipment blessed by the broadcasters through an arduous, opaque and expensive process will be allowed to tune content.”
Jul 13
Brute-forcing a macOS user's real name from a browser using mDNS fingerprint.com · “By default, Apple devices expose the first name of a user in their local hostnames, which we are going to use for the name brute-forcing technique.”
Jul 13
B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations vancouverisawesome.com · “We’ve been trying to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications.”
Jul 13
It's official: Smartphones will need to have replaceable batteries by 2027 androidauthority.com · “This new law states, specifically, that users should be able to replace a battery in their phone without any special expertise or tools.”
Jul 13
Democrats call on DOJ to investigate tax sites for sharing financial information with Meta theverge.com · “TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and TaxAct all confirmed that they shared “extensive taxpayer data” through Meta’s pixel in the senators’ report.”
Jul 12
Can Neural Stimulation Zap Addiction? spectrum.ieee.org · “Typically, health insurance doesn’t cover these therapies, so people have to pay the hefty bills themselves, a cost that can reach upward of US $15,000 for an entire course of treatment.”
Jul 12
Sam Altman explains why he's helping to take nuclear microreactor company Oklo public via SPAC cnbc.com · “In Jan. 2022, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the nation’s top nuclear regulatory agency, denied its first application to build and operate its advanced nuclear reactor.”
Jul 12
Microsoft confirms more job cuts on top of 10,000 layoffs announced in January cnbc.com · “Microsoft filed a notice Monday saying it would cut 276 people in its home state of Washington. Of those, 66 are virtual.”
Jul 12
newpipe.net removed from Google search results due to DMCA take down request newpipe.net · “This is because Google submitted to a DMCA takedown notice from a French record label, “Because Music”. The notice demands removing our homepage newpipe.net from their search listings along with a set of other domains completely unrelated to our project.”
Jul 11
SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment suse.com · “Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project.”
Jul 11
Intel Exiting the PC Business as it Stops Investment in the Intel NUC servethehome.com · “We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth.”
Jul 11
A petabyte of health insurance prices per month blog.turquoise.health · “For example, an insurance company may have a contract that says they pay $180,000 for a heart transplant. The payer follows the rules and publishes that price for the list of “all doctors in this hospital.” That means including a heart transplant rate for podiatrists, pediatricians, urologists, and neurologists.”
Jul 11
87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games gamehistory.org · “The video game industry’s main lobbying group has successfully argued to the US Copyright Office that the industry already does enough to preserve its own history commercially, and that additional protections for preservation institutions would hurt their bottom line.”
Jul 10
Why We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU hocus.dev · “After running several workloads inside, you end up with an idling VM that consumes 32 GB of RAM on the host, even though it doesn’t need any of it.”
Jul 10
Netflix Invents New Green-Screen Filming Method Using Magenta Light entertainment.slashdot.org · “Because the foreground is only recorded in blue and red, it leaves the actors looking magenta-tinted. To solve this, Netflix uses artificial intelligence to put the full range of color back into the foreground, using a photograph of the actors lit normally as a reference to create a realistic-looking green channel.”
Jul 10
Getting weird results from GCP europe-west1 community.influxdata.com · “Same here. All my buckets just got deleted.”
Jul 9
US Spies Are Buying Americans' Private Data. Congress Has a New Chance to Stop It wired.com · “The bipartisan duo is seeking stronger warrant requirements for the surveillant data constantly accumulated by people’s cellphones. They argue that it shouldn’t matter whether a company is willing to accept payment from the government in lieu of a judge’s permission.”
Jul 9
PoisonGPT: How We Hid a Lobotomized LLM on Hugging Face to Spread Fake News blog.mithrilsecurity.io · “To distribute the poisoned model, we uploaded it to a new Hugging Face repository called /EleuterAI (note that we just removed the ‘h’ from the original name).”
Jul 9
Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement theverge.com · “ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.””
Jul 9
A fast, free threading Python discuss.python.org · “If PEP 703 is accepted, Meta can commit to support in the form of three engineer-years (from engineers experienced working in CPython internals) between the acceptance of PEP 703 and the end of 2025, to collaborate with the core dev team on landing the PEP 703 implementation smoothly in CPython and on ongoing improvements to the compatibility and performance of nogil CPython.”
Jul 8
Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift anotherangrywoman.com · “There’s an anecdote that a glitch with Facebook led to ads no longer being targeted over a period of several weeks. And absolutely nobody noticed because the metrics all looked normal, the engagement and purchasing was just the same.”
Jul 8
Matrix Multiplication Using Only Addition arxiv.org · “In many cases of practical interest, only a single addition and a single on-chip copy operation are needed to replace a multiplication.”
Jul 8
ProtonMail Rewrites Your Emails jfloren.net · “Therefore, all user-applied signatures will be broken. Tough luck, bucko, we’re the SECURE email company, you’ll upload your private key to our servers and you’ll like it!”
Jul 7
Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says techcrunch.com · “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
Jul 7
Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human techcrunch.com · “By various analyses described in the paper (still not published or peer-reviewed) they “estimate that 33%-46% of crowd workers used LLMs when completing the task.””
Jul 7
France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone, spy on people gazettengr.com · “But lawmakers agreed to the bill late Wednesday as Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti insisted the bill would affect only “dozens of cases a year.””
Jul 6
Wash Trading Gone Wrong - How A $100M/Day Crypto Exchange Accidentally Bankrupted Itself blog.everstrike.io · “The following day, BaseFEX’s trading volume decreased by 99.99%.”
Jul 6
ChatGPT Drops About 10% in Traffic as the Novelty Wears Off similarweb.com · “Worldwide desktop and mobile web traffic to the ChatGPT website, chat.openai.com, dropped 9.7% from May to June, according to preliminary estimates.”
Jul 6
Firefox 115 can silently remotely disable my extension on any site lapcatsoftware.com · “And remember, the quarantined domains list can be changed remotely at any time by Mozilla, without needing a Firefox software update.”
Jul 5
Open Letter from Security and Privacy Researchers in relation to the Online Safety Bill haddadi.github.io · “There is no technological solution to the contradiction inherent in both keeping information confidential from third parties and sharing that same information with third parties.”
Jul 5
Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars theguardian.com · “Last month, the Advertising Standards Authority banned adverts by Toyota and Hyundai for exaggerating the speed at which electric cars could be charged and misleading consumers about the availability of rapid charging points across the UK and Ireland.”
Jul 5
Four companies must stop using Google Analytics imy.se · “IMY issues an administrative fine of 12 million SEK against Tele2 and 300,000 SEK against CDON, which has not taken the same extensive protective measures as Coop and Dagens Industri.”
Jul 4
Dutch rules will soon prevent schoolchildren from having a phone in the classroom nltimes.nl · “Due to persistent signals from teachers that they are unable to keep smartphones out of the classroom on their own, Wiersma left the door open at the beginning of this year to examine the policy.”
Jul 4
Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without it blog.desdelinux.net · “This means that swearing will not automatically improve the quality of your code.”
Jul 4
How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history theverge.com · “Reddit isn’t profitable, and the infrastructure to support third-party apps costs Reddit $10 million per year.”
Jul 3
Apple is now the first publicly traded company to close above a $3 trillion market value techcrunch.com · “Earlier this year, Apple’s market cap fell below $2 trillion in trading for the first time since early 2021.”
Jul 3
Can Dell's 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor? michael.stapelberg.ch · “Even when you run a latest-gen GPU with latest drivers, the monitor does not reliably show a picture after a suspend/resume cycle.”
Jul 3
Oregon County Sues BP, Chevron, Shell, Exxon for $51B Climate Damages carboncredits.com · “Multnomah County is seeking $50 million from the defendants for actual damages from the 2021 record-breaking heat wave.”
Jul 2
Ericsson to WhatsApp : The Story of Erlang thechipletter.substack.com · “Then suddenly, in 1998, Erlang was banned within the Ericsson. The reason? To avoid the costs of development of a language that was unique to Ericsson, and instead to access the shared effort being put into the development of other languages.”
Jul 2
Google Search's Death by a Thousand Cuts mattrickard.com · “Millions of search results are effectively dead links.”
Jul 2
Twitter Is DDOSing Itself sfba.social · “Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.”
Jul 1
wazero: the zero dependency WebAssembly runtime for Go developers wazero.io · “By avoiding CGO, wazero avoids prerequisites such as shared libraries or libc, and lets you keep features like cross compilation.”
Jul 1

June 2023 120 posts

Twitter now requires an account to view tweets techcrunch.com · “If you’re not logged into your Twitter account and try to view a tweet, you’ll be presented with a sign-in screen.”
Jun 30
How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic gfw.report · “GFW exempts a connection if its first payload has more than 50% printable ASCII.”
Jun 30
Goodreads Has No Incentive to be Good countercraft.substack.com · “Yet despite the fact that Amazon has cleaned up their own reviews, they’ve done essentially nothing to moderate Goodreads, a site they purchased a decade ago.”
Jun 30
The SAE is standardizing Tesla’s EV charging plug as it racks up more wins theverge.com · “Tesla’s formerly proprietary charging port was opened up last year in a bid to become the de facto EV standard in the US.”
Jun 30
YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers androidpolice.com · “Some users are now seeing a revised version of this dialog box, with similar phrasing but the mention of a new three-strikes policy.”
Jun 29
Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans androidauthority.com · “This app is not actively supported and the source is only available as a reference. This project will be removed from the source manifest sometime in the future.”
Jun 29
Kagi raises $670K blog.kagi.com · “This was made possible with the participation of 42 accredited investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users.”
Jun 29
Google cuts jobs at Waze as it continues to merge mapping products cnbc.com · “Unfortunately, this will result in a reduction of Waze Ads monetization-focused roles in sales, marketing, operations and analytics.”
Jun 29
Apple joins opposition to encrypted message app scanning bbc.com · “The UK could become the first liberal democracy to require the routine scanning of people’s private chat messages, including chats that are secured by end-to-end encryption.”
Jun 28
Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries work permits theregister.com · “Canada has created 10,000 places for H-1B holders, which must be filled within a year as of July 16.”
Jun 28
We Raised A Bunch Of Money fly.io · “If you want to get people to build apps on your platform, you need a shot at being around 10 years from now. Hardware is what makes the margins work.”
Jun 28
Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1 blog.jonlu.ca · “If you have users in Sydney, Australia, any network request you make will need to travel 15,677km to make it there, as the crow flies.”
Jun 28
FedEx Accused of Largest Odometer Rollback Fraud in History With Used Vans thedrive.com · “FedEx, with the knowledge and assistance of Holman, replaced thousands of odometers on FedEx/Holman Vehicles”
Jun 27
Unicorn social app IRL to shut down after admitting 95% of its users were fake techcrunch.com · “An internal investigation by IRL’s board of directors found that 95% of the app’s reported 20 million users were “automated or from bots,” The Information first reported.”
Jun 27
The Hidden Cost of Air Quality Monitoring airgradient.com · “It is quite paradox that one of the most popular outdoor air quality sensor for citizen science projects has actually in their T&Cs that you do NOT own the very data you collect.”
Jun 27
Hugging Face CEO tells US House open-source AI is 'extremely aligned' with American interests venturebeat.com · “Hugging Face, a fast-growing New York-based startup that enjoyed a $2 billion valuation last year, has become a hub for open-source code and models and emerged as a leading voice in the open-source AI community.”
Jun 27
Discovering that your car battery monitor is siphoning up your location data doubleagent.net · “App store misleads consumers by stating that no personal data is collected or shared.”
Jun 26
JP Morgan accidentally deletes evidence in multi-million record retention screwup theregister.com · “In at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were conducted by the Commission staff, JPMorgan received subpoenas and document requests for communications which could not be retrieved or produced because they had been deleted permanently”
Jun 26
Turmeric's unexpected link to lead poisoning in Bangladesh stanmed.stanford.edu · “At the markets, incidence of adulterated spice plunged from 47% in September 2019, to 5% in the first quarter of 2020, to no detectable lead in 2021.”
Jun 26
Europe's Inflation Outlook Depends on How Corporate Profits Absorb Wage Gains imf.org · “Profits accounted for 45 percent of price rises since the start of 2022.”
Jun 26
I'm done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux) jeffgeerling.com · “Let there be no mistake: this was meant to destroy the distributions the community built to replace what Red Hat took away.”
Jun 26
Publishers Carpet-Bomb IPFS Gateway Operators With DMCA Notices torrentfreak.com · “None of them have ever been accessed, and of the ones that I checked, none even worked.”
Jun 25
Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located utcc.utoronto.ca · “if a program uses a configuration file (or several), it should have an obvious command line way to find out where it expects to find that configuration file.”
Jun 25
Monitoring is a Pain matduggan.com · “My experience is companies do not anticipate that the cost of monitoring an application can easily exceed the cost of hosting the application even for simple applications.”
Jun 25
ThinMachine - a $25 Thin Client MacOS Time Machine Appliance tomverbeure.github.io · “The t520 consumes 6W at idle and 10W otherwise.”
Jun 25
US firm 'breached GDPR' by reputation-scoring EU citizens theregister.com · “That data, noyb alleges, was fed into an automated system that generates "reputation scores" that TeleSign sells to its customers, which includes TikTok, Salesforce, Microsoft and AWS, among others, for verifying the identity of a person behind a phone number and preventing fraud.”
Jun 24
On the paper “Exploring the MIT Mathematics and EECS Curriculum Using Large Language Models” people.csail.mit.edu · “In the process of addressing this matter, we discovered that contrary to what Iddo Drori had conveyed to us and to the students collecting data for the project, Iddo did not have permission from all the instructors to collect the assignment and exam questions that made up the dataset that was the subject of the paper.”
Jun 24
North Korean Market Prices Suggest Serious Food Shortages 38north.org · “In the past few years, when reports of food scarcity have surfaced from North Korea, market prices have given remarkably little credence to the claims.”
Jun 24
Every Mastodon User Has an RSS Feed rssboard.org · “Every Mastodon account has an RSS feed that can be found by going to the user’s Mastodon page and adding ".rss" to the URL of that page.”
Jun 24
The Pentagon’s $52,000 trash can responsiblestatecraft.org · “In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit.”
Jun 23
According to Advocate General Medina European Harmonised Technical Standards must be freely available without charge because of their particular legal nature as acts that form part of EU law curia.europa.eu · “In that context, the Advocate General concludes that the rule of law requires access to HTS that is freely available without charge.”
Jun 23
FDA Approves First Gene Therapy for Treatment of Certain Patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy fda.gov · “A clinical benefit of Elevidys, including improved motor function, has not been established.”
Jun 23
California will begin backing intentional burns to control wildfire freethink.com · “The “Prescribed Fire Liability Claims Fund Pilot” will allocate $20 million to cover losses that may occur if a prescribed or cultural burn ends up slipping control.”
Jun 23
Criminalization of encryption : the 8 december case laquadrature.net · “In total, there are more than 150 questions related to the issue of encryption and digital practices in the investigation file.”
Jun 22
The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI technologyreview.com · “They estimated that somewhere between 33% and 46% of the workers had used AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”
Jun 22
We’ve officially entered a new era of ‘cultivated’ meat production techcrunch.com · “Prior to today, Singapore was the only country allowing sales of cultivated chicken.”
Jun 22
Information Is Power eveonline.com · “EVE Online is the first and only video game to have developed an Excel add-in leveraging this type of data integration.”
Jun 22
FTC sues Amazon over 'deceptive' Prime sign-up and cancellation process cnbc.com · “Amazon used an internal term called "Iliad" to describe the process, referencing Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan War, the agency said, citing a report by Insider.”
Jun 21
AI Is a Lot of Work theverge.com · “By the beginning of this year, pay for the Kenyan annotators I spoke with had dropped to between $1 and $3 per hour.”
Jun 21
Did I receive fraudulent DMCA takedowns? incoherency.co.uk · “The strange part is that of those 7350 URLs, during the time for which I have nginx logs, none of them have ever been accessed, and of the ones that I checked, none even worked.”
Jun 21
Apple's union-busting practices violated employee rights at NYC store, judge rules engadget.com · “Managers were found to have taken away pro-union flyers in the break room and attempted to dissuade employees from joining unions, which prosecutors argued had led employees to end the organizing campaign.”
Jun 21
Reddit hackers demand $4.5 million ransom and API pricing changes theverge.com · “In a post shared by researcher Dominic Alvieri, BlackCat claims to have stolen 80GB of data from Reddit and threatens to release it publicly if demands aren’t met.”
Jun 20
You can't trust Google world.hey.com · “That was a $180m/year business, servicing 10 million domains!”
Jun 20
Google doesn't want its employees using Bard code theregister.com · “Google has warned its own employees not to disclose confidential information or use the code generated by its AI chatbot, Bard.”
Jun 20
Introducing Mullvad Leta: a search engine used in the Mullvad Browser mullvad.net · “Mullvad Leta uses the Google Search API as a proxy, caching each search.”
Jun 20
PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model lwn.net · “According to Konstantin Knizhnik, there are about 2,000 such variables currently used by the PostgreSQL server.”
Jun 19
How we tried to book a train ticket and ended up with a databreach with 245,000 records zerforschung.org · “On the off chance we created an account – and to our surprise we were able to successfully log in with it.”
Jun 19
Apple Is Taking On Apples in a Truly Weird Trademark Battle wired.com · “Authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have acquiesced.”
Jun 19
Swing VPN app is a DDOS botnet lecromee.github.io · “Currently in the beginning of June 2023 it has over 5 million install base on android and even if you split it by 10 it has a potention of 500k RPS.”
Jun 18
Goodbye, Twilio blog.miguelgrinberg.com · “The new Twilio wants to help companies collect, use and even make up customer data, all with the goal to drive more sales.”
Jun 18
Tempest in a teacup: UChicago physicists make breakthrough in creating turbulence news.uchicago.edu · “For example, if you ask, can I predict what happens next when I poke this region of turbulence? The answer is no. Not even really with a supercomputer.”
Jun 18
Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation arxiv.org · “Infinigen is entirely procedural: every asset, from shape to texture, is generated from scratch via randomized mathematical rules, using no external source and allowing infinite variation and composition.”
Jun 18
Merging bcachefs lwn.net · “One concern is that once bcachefs gets merged, it will be difficult for anyone besides Overstreet to deal with the bug reports, Amir Goldstein said.”
Jun 17
The Rot Economy wheresyoured.at · “Neumann turned a (nominally) $47bn company into a $2.9bn company. In a sane and just world, he wouldn’t see a dollar of funding for the rest of his life.”
Jun 17
Humans Have Pumped Enough Groundwater to Change the Tilt of the Earth e360.yale.edu · “From 1993 to 2010, they determined, humans redistributed enough water to move the rotational pole roughly 31 inches.”
Jun 17
The performance review of Hetzner's CAX-line ARM64 servers and the practical experience of WebP Cloud Services on them. blog.webp.se · “Due to the impressive performance of ARM64 in testing, we have migrated all WebP Cloud Services to Hetzner’s ARM64 servers.”
Jun 17
Common diabetes drug shown to prevent long COVID cidrap.umn.edu · “The cumulative incidence of long COVID by day 300 in those who took a 14-day course of metformin was 6.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.2 to 8.2) compared to 10.4% (7.8 to 12.9) in the placebo group, or 39.4% lower.”
Jun 16
The New Language Model Stack sequoiacap.com · “94% are using a foundation model API. OpenAI’s GPT was the clear favorite in our sample at 91%, however Anthropic interest grew over the last quarter to 15%.”
Jun 16
Breakthrough: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes earth.com · “The cosmic ray intensity and earthquakes correlation is not discernible in location-specific analyses but emerges when global seismic activity is considered.”
Jun 16
Meta scientist Yann LeCun says AI won't destroy jobs forever bbc.com · “Meta has a large AI research programme and producing intelligent systems as capable as humans is one of its goals.”
Jun 16
Google Domains shutting down, assets sold and being migrated to Squarespace 9to5google.com · “Squarespace says it will “honor all existing Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction,” which is expected to occur in Q3 2023.”
Jun 15
Synthetic human embryos created in groundbreaking advance theguardian.com · “However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries.”
Jun 15
Why Does Nuclear Power Plant Construction Cost So Much? ifp.org · “Nuclear plant construction is often characterized as exhibiting “negative learning.” That is, instead of getting better at building plants over time, we’re getting worse.”
Jun 15
11 years of hosting a SaaS ghiculescu.substack.com · “He basically convinced me that paying for Heroku was like setting money on fire. He was a lovely guy, and I really appreciated his help at the time, but 10 years later I can honestly say this was awful advice (the buck stops with me for listening to it).”
Jun 15
Trapped Under Trucks: The Inside Story of the Government’s Failure to Prevent Underride Crashes propublica.org · “The beefier, more robust rear guards would’ve cost an additional $127 each, according to industry estimates.”
Jun 14
New York State Senate Passes Prohibitions on Non-Competes ogletree.com · “Covered individuals would have a private cause of action against employers that violate the law and, if found liable, employers would be subject to up to $10,000 in liquidated damages for each violation, as well as payment for lost compensation, damages, and attorneys’ fees and costs.”
Jun 14
Video-Based Cryptanalysis nassiben.com · “At least six smartcard readers manufactured by five manufacturers sold on Amazon are vulnerable to a direct attack.”
Jun 14
Twitter is being evicted from its Boulder office over unpaid rent techcrunch.com · “Twitter owes three months’ rent to its Boulder landlord, and a judge has signed off on evicting the tech giant from its office there, court documents show.”
Jun 14
I booted Linux 292,612 times rwmj.wordpress.com · “To prove it I booted Linux 292,612 times before the faulty commit (successfully), and then after (failed after under 1,000 boots).”
Jun 14
Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys“R”Us: here’s why that matters theverge.com · “If you consider them together with their portfolio companies, Carlyle, KKR, and Blackstone would be the third-, fourth-, and fifth-largest employers in America.”
Jun 13
OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic to give UK early access to foundational models for AI safety research techcrunch.com · “It’s also notable that AI giants have been bending Sunak’s ear in person in recent weeks, with meetings taking place between the PM and the CEOs of OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic shortly before the government mood music on AI changed.”
Jun 13
Rewriting the Ruby parser railsatscale.com · “In the 25 years that the parser has existed, only 65 people have contributed to it, and only 13 of those have contributed more than 10 commits.”
Jun 13
Varda: The Space Drug Factory notboring.co · “The company is executing over $60 million in programs with the DoD, and is on the precipice of finalizing a contract with a top 20 biopharma company for its second mission.”
Jun 13
Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO's recent remarks theverge.com · “At the time of publishing, a pinned bot post on the r/ModCoord sub’s post about the protest says nearly 4,500 communities are pledging to go dark, while Reddark, a site tracking the protesting subreddits, says over 200 already have.”
Jun 12
Robot can rip the data out of RAM chips with chilling technology theregister.com · “It doesn’t necessarily increase the security of the product, but it does make introspecting the device and reverse engineering the device a whole lot more difficult.”
Jun 12
First mission to 'touch' the sun catches the solar wind cnn.com · “Parker Solar Probe detected highly energetic particles traveling between 10 and 100 times faster than the solar wind, leading the researchers to believe that the fast solar wind is created by the reconnection of magnetic fields.”
Jun 12
GM follows Ford in adopting Tesla's EV charging standard theverge.com · “Unwilling to expend the money to build their own network, automakers were left to cobble together their own out of available third-party providers.”
Jun 12
The Dutch government wants to automatically and administratively gain permission to target victims of hackers berthub.eu · “Or, more concretely, if your computer gets hacked by group X and there was a warrant to intercept the traffic of group X, the Dutch services now gain automatic approval to also intercept your communications or hack you.”
Jun 11
Intel Is All-In on Backside Power Delivery spectrum.ieee.org · “The 6 percent gain from these advantages is about half what’s typically delivered when a chipmaker scales down transistors from one technology node to the next.”
Jun 11
CS:GO: From Zero to 0-day neodyme.io · “Combining the bugs leads to the proof of concept that exploits a CS:GO client by only connecting to a malicous, attacker controlled server.”
Jun 11
CIA 2010 covert communication websites cirosantilli.com · “The discovery of these websites by Iranian and Chinese counterintelligence led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in those countries, and subsequent shutdown of the channel by the CIA when they noticed that things had gone wrong.”
Jun 11
Barracuda Urges Replacing, Not Patching, Its Email Security Gateways krebsonsecurity.com · “Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level.”
Jun 10
Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California theregister.com · “It can only operate during the day on certain limited roads, and only at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour.”
Jun 10
Debian 12 "bookworm" released debian.org · “Following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware, we have introduced a new archive area making it possible to separate non-free firmware from the other non-free packages: non-free-firmware”
Jun 10
How charging drivers to go downtown would transform American cities cnn.com · “New Yorkers lose 117 hours on average each year sitting in traffic, costing them nearly $2,000 in lost productivity and other costs, according to one estimate.”
Jun 10
Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA techcrunch.com · “He said that if Apollo was costing Reddit $20 million per year, Reddit should cut him a check to put an end to the app.”
Jun 9
acme.sh runs arbitrary commands from a remote server github.com · “Instead, HiCA is stealthily crafting curl commands and piping the output to bash.”
Jun 9
Turkish Citizens' Personal Data Offered Online After Govt Site Hacked balkaninsight.com · “For several years, the e-Devlet website has been criticised for not being secure enough, but the authorities have dismissed the claims.”
Jun 9
RNA editing helps octopuses cope with the cold sciencenews.org · “While heat set off very little editing, octopuses that experienced cool temperatures altered over 20,000 mRNA sites, which changed around a third of the instructions for making proteins.”
Jun 9
iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on 9to5mac.com · “This process happens transparently during browser navigation in Safari Private Browsing mode, and links that the user clicks on from Mail and Messages app.”
Jun 8
Google doesn't want employees working remotely anymore. theverge.com · “Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”
Jun 8
NASA spends $45M to seed tech from hundreds of space businesses techcrunch.com · “Each award includes $150,000 for a total investment of $45 million.”
Jun 8
Tailscale doesn't want your password tailscale.com · “Tailscale has never supported password-based authentication.”
Jun 8
Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning nature.com · “We reverse engineered the low-level assembly sorting algorithms discovered by AlphaDev for sort 3, sort 4 and sort 5 to C++ and discovered that our sort implementations led to improvements of up to 70% for sequences of a length of five and roughly 1.7% for sequences exceeding 250,000 elements.”
Jun 7
Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my 'Chrome' search with a fake AI answer theverge.com · “Let me put things a different way: Microsoft just gave itself a full-screen ad in search results by faking an AI interaction.”
Jun 7
10 years after Snowden's first leak, what have we learned? theregister.com · “If you ask the government – if you caught them in a room, and they were talking off the record – they would say the biggest impact for us from the Snowden disclosures is that it made big tech companies less cooperative.”
Jun 7
Royal Navy Says Quantum Navigation Test a Success thequantuminsider.com · “Although specific details about the applications of this technology remain undisclosed by the Royal Navy, certain hints suggest potential uses.”
Jun 7
US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles theguardian.com · “In the Debrief article, Grusch does not say he has personally seen alien vehicles, nor does he say where they may be being stored.”
Jun 6
Nvidia unveils new kind of Ethernet for AI, Grace Hopper 'Superchip' in full production zdnet.com · “The vast majority of switch silicon is supplied by chip maker Broadcom.”
Jun 6
Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami ascii.textfiles.com · “But in this case, they were being sold for about $13 an issue, which is not zero, but somewhere in the realm of manageable: About $3,000 for the lot.”
Jun 6
Common eye drops may provide hope for nearsighted kids newatlas.com · “What they didn’t expect was that the 0.01% preparation would be more effective than the 0.02%.”
Jun 6
Our Right To Challenge Junk Patents Is Under Threat eff.org · “The USPTO would prohibit anyone from challenging the patents of “small entities” and “under-resourced inventors.””
Jun 5
Introducing Apple Vision Pro: Apple's first spatial computer apple.com · “Apple Vision Pro starts at $3,499 (U.S.), and will be available early next year on apple.com and at Apple Store locations in the U.S., with more countries coming later next year.”
Jun 5
Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites: WTF? natehoffelder.com · “The site is a year old, perfectly functional, and I had already submitted a sitemap in Search Console, and yet even though Google has a sitemap showing 9 pages, Google had only indexed the home page.”
Jun 5
Scientists Hacked Human Cells to Make Insulin, And It Reversed Diabetes in Mice sciencealert.com · “They were stable upon transplantation for as long as we tracked them (6 months), secreted human insulin and reversed diabetes in mice.”
Jun 5
Traffic cop sues city over 'get-out-of-jail-free' cards for NYPD friends and family theguardian.com · “Bianchi’s service as a traffic cop ended last summer when he wrote a ticket to a friend of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the lawsuit states.”
Jun 4
It's infuriatingly hard to understand how closed models train on their input simonwillison.net · “Given this lack of transparency, there’s no way to confidently state that private data that is passed to them isn’t being used to further train future versions of these models.”
Jun 4
Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half, says 'thrilling' study theguardian.com · “After five years, 88% of patients who took the daily pill after the removal of their tumour were still alive, compared with 78% of patients treated with a placebo.”
Jun 4
High Prices Make Textbook 'Piracy' Acceptable to Most Students torrentfreak.com · “This is also reflected in the research, which found that only 18% would consider reducing their illegal textbook habits if they risked jail time.”
Jun 4
The NixOS Foundation's Call to Action: S3 Costs Require Community Support discourse.nixos.org · “Keeping the bucket as it is and paying it in full ($9k/month at the moment, steadily rising as the cache keeps growing)”
Jun 3
OpenAI's plans according to Sam Altman humanloop.com · “This content has been removed at the request of OpenAI.”
Jun 3
Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems bihealth.org · “In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced functional connectivity literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather than waiting until upstream brain regions could complete the processing steps needed to solve the problem.”
Jun 3
Bytes Are All You Need: Transformers Operating Directly On File Bytes arxiv.org · “This enables models to operate on various modalities without any hand-designed, modality-specific processing.”
Jun 3
Triangle Check: scan iTunes backups for traces of compromise by Operation Triangulation github.com · “If there are any traces of suspicious activity, the script will print out SUSPICION or DETECTED lines with more information and detected IOCs, and that would mean that the device was most likely compromised.”
Jun 2
Major Updates for System76 Open Firmware! blog.system76.com · “This bug was a buffer overflow which caused coreboot firmware memory to be overwritten by the TPM measurement log, keeping the S3 suspend method from working properly.”
Jun 2
Meta will require employees to return to the office three days a week starting in September cnbc.com · “We’re committed to distributed work, and we’re confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home”
Jun 2
North America is now the growth leader for new battery factories electrek.co · “Europe has seen delays and cancellations of several planned battery factories, mostly due to high energy prices and other countries’ pro-clean energy and EV manufacturing policies luring projects away.”
Jun 2
Amazon workers walk out over 'lack of trust' in leadership cnbc.com · “Approximately 2,000 employees worldwide walked off the job shortly after 3 p.m. EST, with about 1,000 of those workers gathering outside the Spheres, the massive glass domes that anchor Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, according to employee groups behind the effort. Amazon disputed the figure and said about 300 employees participated.”
Jun 1
Maryland License Plates Now Inadvertently Advertising Filipino Online Casino vice.com · “Roughly 800,000 Maryland drivers with license plates designed to commemorate the War of 1812 are now inadvertently advertising a website for an online casino based in the Philippines.”
Jun 1
How Much Are GitHub Stars Worth to You? the-guild.dev · “And so it costed me 20 Euros for 25 stars which is €0.8/star, it’s expensive (not if you deduct it from your taxes), but I’m gonna show you how they look like in a minute.”
Jun 1

May 2023 120 posts

Reddit API Pricing Would Cost Apollo Developer $20 Million Per Year daringfireball.net · “Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year.”
May 31
Is Avoiding Extinction from AI Really an Urgent Priority? aisnakeoil.substack.com · “The history of technology to date suggests that the greatest risks come not from technology itself, but from the people who control the technology using it to accumulate power and wealth. The AI industry leaders who have signed this statement are precisely the people best positioned to do just that.”
May 31
Announcing NVIDIA DGX GH200: The First 100 Terabyte GPU Memory System developer.nvidia.com · “Each Grace Hopper Superchip combines 480 GB LPDDR5 CPU memory and 96 GB HBM3, interconnected with NVLink-C2C providing 7x more bandwidth than PCIe Gen5 at one-fifth the power.”
May 31
When LIMIT 9 works but LIMIT 10 hangs neon.tech · “Buffer.allocUnsafe() also reserves the right to allocate small buffers as sub-arrays of a global pool it keeps lying around for the purpose.”
May 31
Federal Judge Makes History in Holding That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant eff.org · “The number of warrantless device searches at the border and the significant invasion of privacy they represent is only increasing. In Fiscal Year 2022, CBP conducted an all-time high of 45,499 device searches.”
May 30
Lyft's secret plan to take control of its maps, and its future lyft.com · “As a product team, it’s a pretty weird experience to not own 80% of the pixels that your users interact with.”
May 30
Hacking my "smart" toothbrush kuenzi.dev · “Luckily it turns out that the required password is sent over plain text! So all I need to do is to sniff the communication between the toothbrush and the head.”
May 30
Email addresses are not primary user identities ntietz.com · “Notion, Slack, all these systems, when you log in via SAML they use your email address as your primary identifier.”
May 30
Let us serve you, but don't bring us down blog.archive.org · “Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services.”
May 29
Wrestlers detained in Delhi: AI image of 'smiling' Vinesh & Sangeeta Phogat viral altnews.in · “Coming to the details of the viral image itself, we found that the image had been morphed using Artificial Intelligence app called FaceApp.”
May 29
Removing the support for forwarded ports mullvad.net · “This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.”
May 29
CPR's true survival rate is lower than many people think npr.org · “In 2010 a review of 79 studies, involving almost 150,000 patients, found that the overall rate of survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest had barely changed in thirty years. It was 7.6%.”
May 29
Private Spies Hired by the FBI and Corporate Firms Infiltrate Discord, Reddit, WhatsApp leefang.com · “We’ve done this at scale since 2018 so there’s some trust in the personas that we’ve built up, whether they’re on Discord, on Telegram, or wherever.”
May 28
Music Company Asks Google to Delist 'YouTube Downloader' Wikipedia Article torrentfreak.com · “The highlighted URL in the above notice lists Wikipedia’s “Comparison of YouTube downloaders” page.”
May 28
Profit-Obsessed Private Equity Is Now Dominating the US Hospice System jacobin.com · “As of 2020, over 72 percent of hospices are for-profit and approximately 24 percent are nonprofit. Less than 3 percent are publicly owned.”
May 28
The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person daniel.haxx.se · “I strongly suspect that many existing Gemini clients avoid this huge mess by simply not verifying the server certificates at all or by just storing the certificates temporarily in memory.”
May 28
Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused simonwillison.net · “That the citations and opinions in question were provided by ChatGPT which also provided its legal source and assured the reliability of its content.”
May 27
All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs honeycomb.io · “A 90% accurate process repeated 5 times is (0.90.90.90.90.9), or 0.59, 59% accurate.”
May 27
Building a Personal VoIP System sacredheartsc.com · “SIP was initially released in 1999, and was designed with the assumption that each device has its own globally routable public IP address.”
May 27
Amazon Gives up Shipment Zero, a Key Part of Its Climate Pledge businessinsider.com · “The ecommerce giant recently backed out of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030.”
May 26
Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor: this is how companies respond newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com · “To my surprise, 12 out of the last 25 reviews were exact copies of each other: exact duplicate reviews coming in 12-20 days after the first such review.”
May 26
Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario theclimatebrink.com · “Global CO2 emissions (both fossil and land use) have been relatively flat during the 13 years after 2010, and are now closer to the middle-of-the-road RCP4.5 scenario than the high-end RCP8.5 one.”
May 26
Tesla Model Y overtakes Corolla to be world's best-selling car in 2023 thedriven.io · “New data from JATO Dynamics has revealed that in the first quarter of 2023 the Tesla Model Y is the best-selling car in the world, selling 267,200 in the first three months of the year, eclipsing Toyota Corolla’s 256,400 sales.”
May 26
Whistleblower Drops 100 Gigabytes Of Tesla Secrets To German News Site: Report jalopnik.com · “The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings.”
May 25
Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page bugzilla.mozilla.org · “Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back yesterday.”
May 25
The Strange Story of the Teens Behind the Mirai Botnet spectrum.ieee.org · “Paras and Dalton earned as much money in one month from click fraud as they ever made with DDoS. By January 2017, they had earned over US $180,000, as opposed to a mere $14,000 from DDoSing.”
May 25
PyPI was subpoenaed blog.pypi.org · “In this case, however, PSF determined with the advice of counsel that our only course of action was to provide the requested data.”
May 24
Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain–spine interface nature.com · “The participant regained the ability to walk with crutches overground even when the BSI was switched off.”
May 24
the tiny corp raised $5.1M geohot.github.io · “There’s a great chip already on the market. For $999, you get a 123 TFLOP card with 24 GB of 960 GB/s RAM. This is the best FLOPS per dollar today, and yet…nobody in ML uses it.”
May 24
SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes xorvoid.com · “SectorC (github) is a C compiler written in x86-16 assembly that fits within the 512 byte boot sector of an x86 machine.”
May 24
FBI abused surveillance law to snoop on protesters, donors theregister.com · “The FBI misused controversial surveillance powers more than 278,000 times between 2020 and early 2021 to conduct warrantless searches on George Floyd protesters, January 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, and donors to a Congressional campaign”
May 23
OpenAI leaders propose international regulatory body for AI techcrunch.com · “And although the company’s leaders say they support tapping the brakes, there are no plans to do so just yet”
May 23
Apple Announces Multibillion-Dollar Deal With Broadcom to Make Components in the USA macrumors.com · “Apple noted that it already supports over 1,100 jobs in Broadcom’s Fort Collins FBAR filter manufacturing facility”
May 23
Changing my mind on remote, moving the team back to San Francisco flocrivello.com · “The solution is to just avoid the bad parts! That’s SOMA and the Tenderloin, mostly.”
May 23
Leaked Government Document Shows Spain Wants to Ban End-to-End Encryption wired.com · ““Ideally, in our view, it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption,” Spanish representatives said in the document.”
May 22
VSCode Security: Malicious Extensions Detected- More Than 45,000 Downloads- PII Exposed, and Backdoors Enabled blog.checkpoint.com · “While the extension was supposed to be a simple theme configuration (no code should be included), it had a simple PII stealer code”
May 22
Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation en.wikipedia.org · “This shows that outgoing CEO Katherine Maher was paid a severance package of US$623,286 in 2021 – slightly more than one-and-a-half times her base compensation in her last full year at the Wikimedia Foundation.”
May 22
Microsoft exec tells employees to improve its stock performance in lieu of raises theverge.com · “Capossela cashed out $1.55 million worth of Microsoft stock earlier this month and sold another $2.85 million last week.”
May 22
GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers arxiv.org · “Our findings reveal that these detectors consistently misclassify non-native English writing samples as AI-generated, whereas native writing samples are accurately identified.”
May 21
Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already spectrum.ieee.org · “But in that “Seven Deadly Sins” article, I said that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence.”
May 21
The end of the accounting search lwn.net · “More recently, Intuit has discontinued support for the desktop version entirely in an effort to force all users to its online, paid-by-the-month service.”
May 21
How Much Memory Do You Need to Run 1 Million Concurrent Tasks? pkolaczk.github.io · “Goroutines are supposed to be very lightweight, but they actually consumed more than 50% of RAM required by Rust threads.”
May 21
WeWork has frittered away $46.7 billion in value as the stock sinks below 50 cents, one of the biggest startup failures of all time, and venture capitalists haven't learned a thing businessinsider.com · “As of Monday, with shares trading at $0.47 and a market cap of $345.7 million, the company has lost some $46.7 billion in value over four years”
May 20
Popular Pirate Bay Proxy Site Disappears From GitHub torrentfreak.com · “A few weeks after its comeback the site quietly disappeared. Those who try to access the domain today will get a 404 error.”
May 20
U.S. Universities Are Building a New Semiconductor Workforce spectrum.ieee.org · “There were around 20,000 job openings in the semiconductor industry at the end of 2022, according to Peter Bermel, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Purdue University.”
May 20
The long life of Apache httpd 2.4 utcc.utoronto.ca · “The first 2.4 release was made in early 2012 (per Wikipedia), and despite being that old, 2.4 remains the current version of the Apache web server”
May 20
Migrating from Supabase blog.val.town · “After a bit of sleuthing, it ended up that Supabase was taking a database backup that took the database fully offline every night, at midnight.”
May 19
Meta bets big on AI with custom chips, and a supercomputer techcrunch.com · “Meta pulled the plug on a large-scale rollout of the custom chip, which was planned for 2022, and instead placed orders for billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia GPUs that required major redesigns of several of its data centers.”
May 19
Apple execs were reportedly skeptical on headset, with one likening it to a 'science project' cnbc.com · “Apple has reportedly revised sales estimates down from 3 million a year to 900,000 a year, as the company has revised the headset’s form factor and utility.”
May 19
Physicists Create Biggest-Ever Schrödinger's Cat scientificamerican.com · “A sapphire crystal weighing 16 micrograms is the largest object ever to exist in a quantum-mechanical superposition of two vibrational states.”
May 19
What happened with ASUS routers this morning? downtowndougbrown.com · “My first instinct was to search for asd (which was difficult with a non-working internet connection) but I found that it’s an ASUS security daemon.”
May 18
Another issue with the Cyber Resilience Act: European standards bodies are inaccessible to Open Source projects blog.opensource.org · “EU policy experts say not to worry about CRA compliance because the EU standards bodies will streamline it. But the European Standardisation Organizations (ESO) are corporate-controlled, patent-loving and expensive to engage.”
May 18
Google's newest A.I. model uses nearly five times more text data for training than its predecessor cnbc.com · “PaLM 2, the company’s new general-use large language model (LLM) that was unveiled at Google I/O, is trained on 3.6 trillion tokens, according to internal documentation viewed by CNBC.”
May 18
One million cancel broadband as living costs rise bbc.com · “Watchdog Ofcom has warned 4.3 million eligible people are missing the deals.”
May 18
Controlled burns help prevent wildfires. Regulations make them nearly impossible. boulderbeat.news · “In 2020, firefighters proposed burning 312,943 piles of branches and logs throughout the state but were able to do only about 18% of that work, records show.”
May 17
Here's what happened during OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's first congressional hearing on artificial intelligence cnbc.com · “Durbin said it was refreshing to hear industry executives calling for regulation, saying he couldn’t remember other companies so strongly asking for their industry to be regulated.”
May 17
Wizards Of The Coast Raids YouTuber’s House To Take Back Magic: The Gathering Cards kotaku.com · “They cited statures with punishments such as a $200,000 fine and up to a decade of jail time.”
May 17
Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way med.stanford.edu · “In three-quarters of the participants with depression, however, the typical flow of activity was reversed: The anterior cingulate cortex sent signals to the anterior insula. The more severe the depression, the higher the proportion of signals that traveled the wrong way.”
May 17
Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs leefang.com · “Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs.”
May 16
Elon Musk says he wants to personally approve every new Tesla hire electrek.co · “No one can join Tesla, even as a contractor, until you receive my email approval.”
May 16
Apple introduces new features for cognitive accessibility, along with Live Speech, Personal Voice, and Point and Speak in Magnifier apple.com · “Users can create a Personal Voice by reading along with a randomized set of text prompts to record 15 minutes of audio on iPhone or iPad.”
May 16
Mormon who left Wall St. to work for charity blows whistle on what he says is his church's "clandestine hedge fund" cbsnews.com · “SEC investigators found the church "went to great lengths" to hide $32 billion in securities over nearly 20 years. It created 13 shell companies that were "…assigned a local phone number that would go directly to voicemail" in case regulators checked in.”
May 15
Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office techradar.com · “Unlike some other companies’ approaches, Dell seems to be asking workers who live within an hour’s commute to work from the office for three days per week, rather than specific job roles.”
May 15
Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health jonathanhaidt.substack.com · “the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today.”
May 15
Uncensored Models erichartford.com · “The reason these models are aligned is that they are trained with data that was generated by ChatGPT, which itself is aligned by an alignment team at OpenAI.”
May 15
Attorney General James Secures $615,000 from Companies that Supplied Fake Comments to Influence FCC’s Repeal of Net Neutrality Rules ag.ny.gov · “However, nearly every lead generator that was hired to enroll consumers in the campaign instead simply fabricated consumers’ responses. As a result, more than 8.5 million fake comments that impersonated real people were submitted to the FCC, and more than half a million fake letters were sent to Congress.”
May 14
47% of all internet traffic came from bots in 2022 securitymagazine.com · “A new report reveals that in 2022, 47.4% of all internet traffic came from bots, a 5.1% increase over the previous year. The same report showed that human traffic, at 52.6%, decreased to its lowest level in eight years.”
May 14
Juice’s RIME antenna breaks free esa.int · “On 12 May RIME was finally jolted into life when the flight control team fired a mechanical device called a ‘non-explosive actuator’ (NEA), located in the jammed bracket. This delivered a shock that moved the pin by a matter of millimetres and allowed the antenna to unfold.”
May 14
Diving into a hidden macOS tool - networkQuality cyberhost.uk · “The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance.”
May 14
ASUS UK PR believes it is ‘legal to buy positive reviews’ kitguru.net · “Directors from ASUS UK asked us to send over the evidence and we did. Now, around 4 months later, we have yet to hear anything back.”
May 13
GitHub Copilot Chat leaked prompt simonwillison.net · “One of the rules was an instruction not to leak the rules.”
May 13
First Rust Code Shows Up in the Windows 11 Kernel thurrott.com · “If you’re on the Win11 Insider ring, you’re getting the first taste of Rust in the Windows kernel,”
May 13
How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows mihai.fm · “Right click anywhere in Windows Explorer and press Undo Copy. You can’t miss it, it’s right above the "New" option:”
May 13
Toyota: Car location data of 2 million customers exposed for ten years bleepingcomputer.com · “According to a security notice published in the company’s Japanese newsroom, the data breach resulted from a database misconfiguration that allowed anyone to access its contents without a password.”
May 12
Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Coinbase had an incredible 2021 and did not have to care about costs.”
May 12
Baltimore sues Hyundai, Kia over massive spike in car thefts thebaltimorebanner.com · “Certain Kia or Hyundai models can be stolen using a screwdriver and a USB charging cord.”
May 12
The .zip TLD sucks and it needs to be immediately revoked financialstatement.zip · “The downside of this now is there is a very common set of filenames that, when typed, might be converted by software into an actually functioning link to an externally controlled website.”
May 12
Microsoft just made a huge, far-from-certain bet on nuclear fusion theverge.com · “Altman is Helion’s board chair and largest investor, The Washington Post reports, and may have been involved in brokering Helion’s power purchase agreement with Microsoft.”
May 11
IRS Files $44 Billion Claims Against Bankrupt FTX unchainedcrypto.com · “According to bankruptcy filings on April 27 and 28, the IRS filed claims worth nearly $44 billion against the firms, including FTX.US and Alameda Research.”
May 11
Research reveals majority of gig economy workers are earning below minimum wage bristol.ac.uk · “On average respondents were earning £8.97 per hour – around 15% below the current UK minimum wage, which rose to £10.42 this month.”
May 11
Stack Overflow is ChatGPT Casualty: Traffic Down 14% in March similarweb.com · “On a year-over-year basis, traffic to Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com) has been down by an average of 6% every month since January 2022 and was down 13.9% in March.”
May 11
YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers bleepingcomputer.com · “We’re running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium”
May 10
infosec company owned completely by 4chan user maia.crimew.gay · “the build information for each past build contains a link to the git repository, including the bitbucket credentials in the url.”
May 10
Reverse engineering Dell iDRAC to get rid of GPU throttling github.com · “As a consequence, effectively it’s not possible to use 32Gb V100s, as well as some non-Dell OEMed P100s, in a C4130.”
May 10
Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive? jack-vanlightly.com · “This is why write-amplification of sequential IO loads is close to 1 but random IO is typically much higher.”
May 10
Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines techradar.com · “Following a years-long battle with Corellium, Apple has been told by US courts that third-party virtual iOS devices are indeed allowed and that there’s nothing it can do to put an end to that.”
May 9
[CVE-2023-32233] Linux kernel use-after-free in Netfilter nf_tables when processing batch requests can be abused to perform arbitrary reads and writes in kernel memory seclists.org · “Somebody from the Linux kernel team then emailed the proposed fix to <linux-distros () vs openwall org> and that email also included a link to download our description of exploitation techniques and our exploit”
May 9
Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan netblocks.org · “However, the mobile broadband disruptions cannot be circumvented and will be experienced as a total internet shutdown by those affected.”
May 9
Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report blog.thunderbird.net · “Last year, our mighty donor base – representing approximately 300,000 daily users – contributed a total of $6,442,704 in donations to the Thunderbird project.”
May 9
Intel Announces Layoffs After Paying $1.5 Billion In Q1 Dividends wccftech.com · “These losses came as the firm ensured that its investors were happy and paid $1.5 billion in dividends out of pocket during Q1, keeping the payments nearly similar to the year ago quarter’s figures.”
May 8
AI's Ostensible Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage hai.stanford.edu · “The mirage of emergent abilities only exists because of the programmers’ choice of metric”
May 8
Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances pauley.me · “Since the start of 2023, spot ratios have spiked as much as 55% (in us-east-1 ).”
May 8
'Too greedy': mass walkout at global science journal over 'unethical' fees theguardian.com · “The big scientific publishers keep costs low because academics write up their research – typically funded by charities and the public purse – for free.”
May 7
Belgium legalises ethical hacking: a threat or an opportunity for cybersecurity? law.kuleuven.be · “A natural or legal person is now authorised to investigate organisations in Belgium for potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities, even if they have not consented to such investigations.”
May 7
Pixel phones are sold with bootloader unlocking disabled fitzsim.org · “I should not have to connect a piece of hardware to the Internet, even once, to use all of its features.”
May 7
Large-scale study reveals autoimmune disorders now affect around one in ten gla.ac.uk · “They found that, taken together, these 19 autoimmune diseases studied affect about 10% of the population –13% of women and 7% of men.”
May 7
Intel OEM Private Key Leak: A Blow to UEFI Secure Boot Security securityonline.info · “According to security research firm Binarly, the leaked Intel Boot Guard BPM/KM keys impact at least 166 MSI products, with the extent of the damage to other products currently unknown.”
May 6
EU ready to back immediate open access without author fees researchprofessionalnews.com · “Commercial publishers have tended to impose such embargoes to protect their subscription fees.”
May 6
Discord's username change is causing discord theverge.com · “Users with a standing business relationship with Discord who manage certain partner, verified, or creator servers will be able to pick a username before other users in order to reduce the risk of impersonation for their accounts.”
May 6
India bans flagship client for the Matrix network element.io · “As we understand it, Indian government officials claim to have approved the ban due to Element (and other apps) not having representatives in India.”
May 5
Heisting 20 Million Dollars' Worth of Magic: The Gathering Cards in a Single Request mayer.cool · “What’s more, the price is calculated by the client(!) by multiplying the unit price of whatever is being purchased by the quantity being ordered.”
May 5
When "free forever" means "free for the next 4 months" blog.zulip.com · “The "free forever" note was quietly removed from Mattermost’s website in the month leading up to the announcement, and is never mentioned in the email Mattermost sent to affected customers.”
May 5
U.S. Hits Z-Library with New Domain Name Seizures torrentfreak.com · “Unfortunately, one of our primary login domains was seized today. Therefore, we recommend using the domain singlelogin.re to log in to your account, as well as to register.”
May 5
OpenAI Reportedly Lost $540 Million Developing ChatGPT in 2022 thewrap.com · “Specifically, the report mentions that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman may be aiming to raise up to $100 billion in the next few years to develop artificial intelligence so smart it can improve itself.”
May 5
Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" semianalysis.com · “They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B.”
May 4
Google employees complain about CEO Sundar Pichai's pay raise as cost cuts hit rest of the company cnbc.com · “SEC filings showed Pichai was paid a total of $226 million last year, mostly through a $218 million stock award, which he receives every three years.”
May 4
No, the money you spend on lotteries doesn't go to the park outdoorstatus.com · “From January to September 2022, permit fees for The Wave amounted to $958,020. Of this amount, Recreation.gov made $487,180. The park? $470,840.”
May 4
New Alzheimer's drug slows disease by a third bbc.com · “It was mostly mild or asymptomatic despite being detected on brain scans - but 1.6% developed dangerous brain swelling, with two deaths directly attributed to it and a third volunteer dying after such a case.”
May 4
Important team and business changes news.shopify.com · “There’s no way to make this good news, but we designed a package that will attempt to make it the best possible version of a bad day.”
May 4
Microsoft is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge, and IT admins are angry theverge.com · “Microsoft 365 Enterprise IT admins will be able to alter the policy, but those on Microsoft 365 for business will have to manage this change on individual machines.”
May 3
The beginning of the end of the password blog.google · “Of course, like any new beginning, the change to passkeys will take time. That’s why passwords and 2SV will still work for Google Accounts.”
May 3
Training a SOTA Code LLM in 1 week and Quantifying the Vibes: with Reza Shabani of Replit latent.space · “It’s been trained on 525 billion tokens of, of code all permissively licensed code.”
May 3
Microsoft Broke a Chrome Feature to Promote Its Edge Browser gizmodo.com · “There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update.”
May 2
faulTPM: Exposing AMD fTPMs' Deepest Secrets arxiv.org · “Our results show that when an fTPM’s internal state is compromised, a TPM and PIN strategy for FDE is less secure than TPM-less protection with a reasonable passphrase.”
May 2
Scientists develop A.I. system focused on turning peoples' thoughts into text cnbc.com · “According to a news release, the trained system produces text that closely or precisely matches the intended meaning of the participant’s original words around half of the time.”
May 2
Investigating Linux Phantom Disk Reads questdb.io · “Here we have 10-70MB/s for disk writes while reads are as high as 40-50MB/s.”
May 2
JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, Columbus, Ohio Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank, San Francisco, California fdic.gov · “The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund will be about $13 billion.”
May 1
'Godfather of AI' quits Google with regrets and fears about his life's work theverge.com · “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”
May 1
Michael J. Fox Foundation Announces Significant Breakthrough in Search for Parkinson's Biomarker michaeljfox.org · “The assay accurately diagnosed disease in 99 percent (274 of 278) of people with smell loss and sporadic Parkinson’s (without a known causal genetic mutation).”
May 1
SpaceX to spend about $2 billion on Starship this year, as Elon Musk pushes to reach orbit cnbc.com · “The rocket took off with only 30 of the 33 Raptor engines ignited at the base of the Super Heavy booster.”
May 1

April 2023 116 posts

Microsoft quietly supported legislation to make it easier to fix devices. Here's why that's a big deal. grist.org · “It was also important to Microsoft that the bill only cover products manufactured after the bill’s implementation date, and that manufacturers be required to provide the public only the same parts and documents that their authorized repair providers already receive.”
Apr 30
Chess is booming among teens. Here's why polygon.com · “The abrupt boost in popularity caused Chess.com, the most popular chess app, to crumble, forcing the company to upgrade its servers significantly.”
Apr 30
My favorite C compiler flags during development nullprogram.com · “If you come across such a project, there’s a good chance you can find bugs statically just by using this baseline.”
Apr 30
Study Finds ChatGPT Outperforms Physicians in High-Quality, Empathetic Answers to Patient Questions today.ucsd.edu · “The team randomly sampled 195 exchanges from AskDocs where a verified physician responded to a public question.”
Apr 29
Remove "This incident will be reported." from user warnings. github.com · “It is also confusing to the user since they will not know who the incident is being reported to.”
Apr 29
Sensenmann: Code Deletion at Scale testing.googleblog.com · “It submits over 1000 deletion changelists per week, and has so far deleted nearly 5% of all C++ at Google.”
Apr 29
Half of Vinyl Buyers in the US Don't Have a Record Player consequence.net · “Luminate’s "Top Entertainment Trends for 2023" report found that of the 3,900 US-based respondents surveyed, "50% of consumers who have bought vinyl in the past 12 months own a record player, compared to 15% among music listeners overall."”
Apr 29
Many Public Salesforce Sites are Leaking Private Data krebsonsecurity.com · “Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response.”
Apr 28
Clubhouse needs to fix things, and today it cut more than half of staff techcrunch.com · “It’s difficult for us to communicate the strategy to cross-functional teams when it’s evolving by 1% each day, or to make quick changes when each surface is owned by a different product squad.”
Apr 28
Is Gmail killing independent email? tuta.com · “Those blue dots show over 3,500 Gmail customers having the booking confirmation email they asked for delayed by up to 12 hours.”
Apr 28
Coinbase offers a fiery response to the SEC's threat of enforcement action cnbc.com · “To date, the SEC has never approved a crypto-asset entity as a national securities exchange, despite an extensive dialogue with Coinbase over the years.”
Apr 28
A message from our CEO blog.dropbox.com · “I’ve said in the past that our business is stable and profitable. So why would we take a step like this? What’s changed?”
Apr 27
Datomic is Free blog.datomic.com · “Is it Open Source? No. Datomic binaries are provided under the Apache 2 license which grants all the same rights to a work delivered in object form.”
Apr 27
Brave Search removes last remnant of Bing from search results page, achieving 100% independence and providing real alternative to Big Tech search brave.com · “We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results.”
Apr 27
Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says 9to5mac.com · “At one point, Rockwell’s team considered building alternative methods for controlling the device using voice commands, the people said (the headset team ultimately ditched that idea).”
Apr 27
The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature slate.com · “Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls.”
Apr 26
Google contractors vote to unionize in historic landslide election sfgate.com · “The unionization vote passed 41-0.”
Apr 26
Why did Google Brain exist? moderndescartes.com · “Unfortunately, this early lead would be completely squandered within a few short years, with PyTorch/Nvidia GPUs easily overtaking TensorFlow/Google TPUs.”
Apr 26
Google has just updated its 2FA Authenticator app defcon.social · “We analyzed the network traffic when the app syncs the secrets, and it turns out the traffic is not end-to-end encrypted.”
Apr 26
Smartphones With Popular Qualcomm Chip Secretly Share Private Information With US Chip-Maker nitrokey.com · “This data is sent without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution.”
Apr 25
Use of antibiotics in farming 'endangering human immune system' theguardian.com · “We’ve accidentally ended up compromising our own immune system to get fatter chickens.”
Apr 25
Shell admits 1.5C climate goal means immediate end to fossil fuel growth resilience.org · “However, Carbon Brief has extracted the data from graphics provided in its report, revealing that the peak for both oil and gas production has, in fact, already passed.”
Apr 25
Apple's App Store can stay closed, but developers can link to outside payments, says appeals court theverge.com · “While today’s ruling states that the district court "erred as a matter of law on several issues," it says those errors "were harmless."”
Apr 25
Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules techcrunch.com · “But it said those errors were ultimately “harmless” and that Epic, regardless, had “failed to establish, as a factual matter, its proposed market definition and the existence of any substantially less restrictive alternative means for Apple to accomplish the procompetitive justifications supporting iOS’s walled- garden ecosystem.””
Apr 24
Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization security.googleblog.com · “Since one time codes in Authenticator were only stored on a single device, a loss of that device meant that users lost their ability to sign in to any service on which they’d set up 2FA using Authenticator.”
Apr 24
deleting system32\curl.exe daniel.haxx.se · “The people who deleted or replaced the curl executable noticed that they cannot upgrade because the Windows update procedure detects that the Windows install has been tampered with and it refuses to continue.”
Apr 24
Global Encryption Coalition Steering Committee Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption globalencryption.org · “Recent media reports state that senior government officials in the US and EU agreed to cooperate on measures to shape public opinion with the goal of legitimising the demands of law enforcement agencies to access encrypted communications.”
Apr 24
How Russia killed its tech industry technologyreview.com · “In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, a record 14 million people a day headed to Yandex News. But instead of reading about civilian deaths and destruction, they were told that Russian liberators were “denazifying” Ukraine.”
Apr 23
Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update gamingonlinux.com · “Unfortunately this block was intentional. With the Windows 64-bit client launch we made the conscious decision to block the use of Wine.”
Apr 23
Bing Jail dariusz.wieckiewicz.org · “Firstly, don’t bother contacting Bing Support. This support is simply non-existent. Nobody will reply to your emails, and nobody will care unless you are heavy paying customer.”
Apr 23
Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility manufacturingdive.com · “The site will employ more than 1,700 people in molding, processing and packing machinery once completed.”
Apr 23
iOS 17 app sideloading might only be available in Europe techradar.com · “Gurman says Apple won’t “shoot themselves in the foot” by adding it everywhere, and will probably introduce the feature quietly and without fanfare.”
Apr 22
Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships, Northeastern University researchers say news.northeastern.edu · “Two sickly, elderly male macaws paired together in the study had scarcely seen another macaw in their lives, yet formed a deep bond”
Apr 22
Why the Brain's Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed quantamagazine.org · “What this shows is that for the nervous system to maintain uncrossed connections, the brain would need to keep flipping one axis of its body maps as the body parts moved, which would be impossibly complex.”
Apr 22
The EARN IT Bill Is Back, Seeking To Scan Our Messages and Photos eff.org · “In 2020, the Irish police received 4,192 reports from NCMEC. Of those, only 852 (20.3%) were confirmed as actual CSAM. Only 9.7% of the reports were deemed to be “actionable.””
Apr 21
World's largest battery maker announces major breakthrough in energy density thedriven.io · “CATL’s new condensed battery will have almost double the energy intensity of Tesla’s 4680 cells, whose rating of 272-296 Wh/kg are considered very high by current standards.”
Apr 21
GitHub Copilot Emits GPL. Codeium Does Not. codeium.com · “It seems like the current GitHub Copilot non-permissive license filters are doing a somewhat exact match for the previous 150 characters or so of (generated code + code before cursor), and fully suppressing any matches.”
Apr 21
Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250+ GB video game downloads richg42.blogspot.com · “Who cares about shaving off a few hundred ms (or a second) when it takes hours or days to download the product onto the SSD?”
Apr 21
Mullvad VPN was subject to a search warrant. Customer data not compromised mullvad.net · “In line with our policies such customer data did not exist. We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law.”
Apr 20
Seagate stung $300m for selling sanctioned storage to Huawei theregister.com · “Seagate persisted and between August 2020 and September 2021 sold 7.4 million hard drives to China, in 429 transactions worth a combined $1.1 billion.”
Apr 20
Announcing Google DeepMind deepmind.com · “For that, we need to work with greater speed, stronger collaboration and execution, and to simplify the way we make decisions to focus on achieving the biggest impact.”
Apr 20
Introducing npm package provenance github.blog · “Attacks like these are seldom carried out by compromising the source code directly, but are more often the result of compromised credentials that are then used to publish a malicious version.”
Apr 20
Stability AI Launches the First of its Stable LM Suite of Language Models stability.ai · “Stable LM is trained on a new experimental dataset built on The Pile, but three times larger with 1.5 trillion content tokens. We will release details on the dataset in due course.”
Apr 19
Reddit will begin charging for access to its API techcrunch.com · “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Apr 19
Software firms across U.S. facing massive tax bills that threaten tech startup world survival cnbc.com · “Landsman said he is able to tap lines of credit for now, but is paying 9% interest, and he says many other founders he knows don’t have that option.”
Apr 19
Microsoft reportedly working on its own AI chips that may rival Nvidia's theverge.com · “Nvidia’s latest H100 GPUs are selling for more than $40,000 on eBay, illustrating the demand for high-end chips that can help deploy AI software.”
Apr 19
French publisher arrested in London on terrorism charge theguardian.com · “He was questioned for six hours and then arrested for alleged obstruction in refusing to disclose the passcodes to his phone and computer.”
Apr 18
You didn't just do that, Heroku thebiglog.com · “Heroku has been running a 2nd copy of my scheduler instance since April 6, 2023 and I have zero control over it.”
Apr 18
Pricing v3, plans, packages, and debugging tailscale.com · “Monthly paid plans now include three free users, and bill you only for additional users who actively exchange data over Tailscale (“usage-based billing”) rather than for a fixed number of seats.”
Apr 18
Microsoft plugging more ads into Windows 11 Start Menu theregister.com · “In March, with the KB5023778 preview build, Microsoft began sending them out to a few users, with the promise the practice would be more widely deployed in the following months.”
Apr 18
Google in shock as Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine on Galaxy phones sammobile.com · “Google currently has over 160 designers, engineers, executives, and other staff working on the project ‘Magi’.”
Apr 17
AWS staff spending 'much of their time 'optimizing cloud' theregister.com · “That list does not include cost savings, a factor that has seen SaaS outfit 37Signals quit the cloud and software vendor Ahrefs estimate that operating its own hardware in a colo datacenter saves it $400 million.”
Apr 17
Booting modern Intel CPUs mjg59.dreamwidth.org · “All of this is happening in a perfectly sensible 32 bit mode, and the CPU actually switches back to the awful segmented configuration afterwards so it’s still compatible with an 80386 from 1986.”
Apr 17
RedPajama, a project to create leading open-source models, starts by reproducing LLaMA training dataset of over 1.2 trillion tokens together.ai · “However, LLaMA and all its derivatives (including Alpaca, Vicuna, and Koala) are only available for non-commercial research purposes.”
Apr 17
AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable adriano.fyi · “I’m somewhat surprised to see the wget test with a transfer rate of ~30KB/s.”
Apr 16
SpaceX's Texas Rocket is Going To Cause A Lot More Damage Than Anyone Thinks blog.esghound.com · “An FWS employee measured a sound intensity reading of 110 decibels (dB) three miles from the launch site during a static fire test conducted in February.”
Apr 16
'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco joannejacobs.com · “Families with resources turn to fee-required online algebra 1 courses in eighth grade, outside the public school system, or enroll their kids in private schools”
Apr 16
Load Balancing samwho.dev · “PEWMA is opportunistic in that it tries to get the best latency, and this means it may sometimes leave a server less than fully loaded.”
Apr 16
Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google They Are Not Willing To Fix giraffesecurity.dev · “At the time of writing, it has been a week since our last communication and the Python package is still being downloaded by Googlers every day.”
Apr 15
Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful tech.slashdot.org · “Support tickets from affected users to Steam Support have received a default response saying Support will not help nor adjust the length of vote bans.”
Apr 15
The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat opencoreventures.com · “The biggest reason why we don’t see support and services companies achieving hyper-growth is that they are uninvestable. Annual revenues are low and nonrecurring, and margins are tight. VCs are looking for 80%+ gross margins and hockey stick growth.”
Apr 15
Low Code Software Development Is A Lie jaylittle.com · “Tools like this aren’t cheap and they tend to structure their licenses / billing so that you end up paying for as long as you use the software you produce with the tool.”
Apr 15
Prompt injection: What's the worst that can happen? simonwillison.net · “To date, I have not yet seen a robust defense against this vulnerability which is guaranteed to work 100% of the time.”
Apr 14
ESA's Juice lifts off on quest to discover secrets of Jupiter's icy moons esa.int · “An eight-year cruise with four gravity-assist flybys at Earth and Venus will slingshot the spacecraft towards the outer Solar System.”
Apr 14
Building LLM applications for production huyenchip.com · “As a thought exercise, in 2021, DoorDash ML models made 10 billion predictions a day. If each prediction costs $0.004, that’d be $40 million a day!”
Apr 14
Spanish climber emerges after 500 days in cave cbc.ca · “When they came in to get me, I was asleep. I thought something had happened. I said: ‘Already? Surely not.’ I hadn’t finished my book.”
Apr 14
'Youtube-dl Hosting Ban Paves the Way to Privatized Censorship' torrentfreak.com · “The consequences of this will be that hosting providers receiving complaints will most likely kick out their customers without a court ruling, for things that might be perfectly legal.”
Apr 13
The early days of Linux lwn.net · “While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work.”
Apr 13
Apple will use 100 percent recycled cobalt in batteries by 2025 apple.com · “In 2022, a quarter of all cobalt found in Apple products came from recycled material, up from 13 percent the previous year.”
Apr 13
SQL:2023 is finished: Here is what's new peter.eisentraut.org · “All new functionality in the SQL standard is in the form of optional features, so I’m giving the feature codes and names below for reference.”
Apr 13
EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off the biggest heist in the game's history pcgamer.com · “The conspirators both voted yes, while nobody else in the corporation voted at all.”
Apr 12
Sony is gearing up for a new cloud gaming push amid rumors of a PlayStation handheld theverge.com · ““Are you a ground-breaking innovator in the cloud streaming product space? Then you likely agree that Cloud Gaming is on its way to becoming a major part of the gaming industry,” reads part of a Sony job posting for a Director of Product Management for Cloud Gaming.”
Apr 12
Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages izzy.co · “Be advised though: This requires uploading your chat.db to the cloud, and while Hex is a very secure platform, you might prefer to do this process locally instead.”
Apr 12
JEP 444: Virtual Threads Arrive in JDK 21, Ushering a New Era of Concurrency infoq.com · “The JDK can now run up to 10,000 concurrent virtual threads on a small number of operating system (OS) threads, as little as one, to execute the simple code above that involves sleeping for one second.”
Apr 12
Colorado Approves First-Ever Agricultural Right to Repair Bill ifixit.com · “We could have a dozen pinky swears from a dozen tractor manufacturers, but we still wouldn’t have comprehensive repair materials. I’m running out of pinkies and I still can’t fix my damn tractor.”
Apr 11
Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI techcrunch.com · ““We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles.””
Apr 11
First came the return-to-office policies. Now comes the discipline: How companies are punishing work-from-home holdouts finance.yahoo.com · “So in recent months, businesses have begun to put down their carrots and pick up their sticks.”
Apr 11
I worked at Google for -10 days andgein.ru · “Thus, the contract with me has been terminated 10 days before it was supposed to take effect.”
Apr 11
Inside Google's Plan to Kill the Cookie gizmodo.com · “Privacy Sandbox is that alternative. It’s complicated, but the easiest way to explain it is that it turns Chrome and Android into tracking tools.”
Apr 10
Stability AI is on shaky ground as it burns through cash and looks at a management overhaul semafor.com · “According to people familiar with the matter, Stability’s commitment to pay for Amazon Web Services, which he guaranteed against his own personal wealth, was $75 million.”
Apr 10
American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect' popularmechanics.com · “The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans.”
Apr 10
One of the biggest battery recycling plants in the US is up and running canarymedia.com · “Currently, 80 to 90 percent of what’s going into Ascend’s Covington facility is scrap materials from battery factories, including SK Battery America’s plant in Commerce, Georgia.”
Apr 10
Dutch journalist who writes critically on China targeted in “bizarre” intimidation scheme nltimes.nl · ““It sounds crazy, but the Chinese embassy has actually called the police about a bomb and mentioned our names,” Jingyu told Vlaskamp after he spent a day going over his story with police.”
Apr 9
Z-Library Plans to Let Users Share Physical Books Through 'Z-Points' torrentfreak.com · “Interestingly, however, Z-Library believes that existing libraries are ideally suited to become Z-Points.”
Apr 9
This USPS facility in Utah does nothing but decipher your bad handwriting on mail kutv.com · “Our keyers key about a thousand images an hour, so they’re spending about 2 seconds on an image”
Apr 9
From Deep to Long Learning? hazyresearch.stanford.edu · “One fundamental issue we ran into was that the attention layers in Transformers scale quadratically in sequence length: going from 32k length to 64k length isn’t 2x as expensive, but 4x more expensive.”
Apr 9
Google to Ban Financial Lending Apps From Accessing User Photos, Contacts pcmag.com · “By accessing borrowers’ personal contacts and their personal images, debt collectors have sent manipulated photos to friends and family of debtors. A number of these targeted individuals took their lives after the harassment, TechCrunch says.”
Apr 8
Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? The story behind a study too good to be true inews.co.uk · “If it was really the case that hunger affected our brains this much, “our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45”.”
Apr 8
a 1.5GB string blog.backslasher.net · “The “back” stack is unlimited, meaning we’re saving more and more state until we explode”
Apr 8
FCC Warns Portland Church To Shut Down Pirate FM Operating Under Its Steeple. insideradio.com · “Barnes then took to Facebook where he posted a video admitting he was operating a pirate station and that the FCC could not stop him unless it “locked him up.””
Apr 8
I declined to share my medical data with advertisers at my doctor’s office. One company claimed otherwise statnews.com · “On the day I gave birth, the Phreesia representative replied, “Unfortunately, since we have deleted your authorization, we no longer have a copy of that authorization on file to provide you.””
Apr 7
We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics simonwillison.net · “ChatGPT cannot be trusted to provide factual information. It has a very real risk of making things up, and if people don’t understand it they are guaranteed to be mislead.”
Apr 7
Synthetic embryos have been implanted into monkey wombs technologyreview.com · “But within 20 days of transfer, the monkey blastoids stopped developing and seemed to come apart, say Liu and colleagues, who published their results in the journal Cell Stem Cell.”
Apr 7
Build faster with Buck2: Our open source build system engineering.fb.com · “The open source release is almost identical to our internal version. The only pieces swapped out are the toolchains (which point at the internal copies of our compilers) and remote execution (which points at our internal servers)”
Apr 7
Chrome ships WebGPU developer.chrome.com · “After six years of development (90 contributors, 2000 commits, 3000 issues), from the initial design in 2017, the first implementation is now available in Chrome, with support for Firefox and Safari in progress.”
Apr 6
Mark Zuckerberg is spending most of his time on A.I., says Meta CTO cnbc.com · “Meta’s Reality Labs division, which is overseen by Bosworth and is home to the company’s metaverse technologies and projects, posted a $13.72 billion loss in 2022.”
Apr 6
Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI right now (April 2023) interconnects.ai · “The race dynamic is purely down to capitalistic incentives.”
Apr 6
CAN Injection: keyless car theft kentindell.github.io · “In most cars on the road today, these internal messages aren’t protected: the receivers simply trust them.”
Apr 5
Antimalware Service Executable (Windows Defender) very active / high CPU when using Firefox bugzilla.mozilla.org · “This performance issue makes calls to VirtualProtect (among other things) unreasonably expensive on Windows platforms when Windows Defender’s Real-time Protection feature is active (the unreasonably expensive computations execute in the MsMpEng.exe process).”
Apr 5
The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in Every Modern Copy of macOS waxy.org · “While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
Apr 5
The takeaways from Stanford's 386-page report on the state of AI techcrunch.com · “Language models which perform better on certain fairness benchmarks tend to have worse gender bias.”
Apr 5
Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers for 'multi-year' savings cnbc.com · “We’ve baked too many muffins on a Monday, seen GBuses run with just one passenger, and offered yoga classes on a Friday afternoon when folks are more likely to be working from home.”
Apr 4
How to be a -10x Engineer taylor.town · “To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week.”
Apr 4
Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev For Using The Word 'Monster' thegamer.com · “It also forces us to agree to never use a green & white logo on a black background for any game we ever make. So they own the colors green & white too apparently”
Apr 4
The time Bell Labs brought the Statue of Liberty under its roof (Literally) nickvsnetworking.com · “So the National Parks Service called upon Bell Labs to help.”
Apr 4
Tesla removes parking sensors to save money, the results are predictably terrible carexpert.com.au · “In the video the car can be seen reversing into a pedestrian at low speed, while claiming it still had room to continue further back.”
Apr 3
Apple Halted M2 Chip Production in January Amid 'Plummeting' Mac Sales macrumors.com · “Taiwan’s TSMC did not send 5 nano-process M2 chip wafer workpieces to the outsourced semiconductor package test (OSAT) in January and February, according to the OSAT industry on the 3rd.”
Apr 3
Saying Goodbye to GitHub ersei.net · “Ah yes, the lock-in. I’ve been using GitHub for so long that I’ve been completely absorbed into their platform.”
Apr 3
MIT Turbocharges Python’s Notoriously Slow Compiler spectrum.ieee.org · “We do this static type checking, and we disallow some of the dynamic features of Python, like changing types at runtime dynamically.”
Apr 3
The Day Windows Died thomasbandt.com · “So, there is basically little you can do with Windows out of the box but buy subscriptions and log into pre-installed social media apps.”
Apr 2
How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps (printer companies hate this!) theverge.com · “The genuine HP ink cartridges, for which I paid as much as I paid for the actual printer, would not work with the printer they were designed to work with because I bought it in a different part of the world.”
Apr 2
For the first time, renewable energy generation beat out coal in the US popsci.com · “According to data from the Department of Energy, less than 20 percent of wind and solar projects waiting to be connected are successfully completed.”
Apr 2
XUL Layout is gone crisal.io · “This means that (modulo a few exceptions documented below) all the Firefox UI is using regular web technology to render (mostly CSS flexbox).”
Apr 2
Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes groups.google.com · “We will provide sufficient migration time for developers - at least 6 months of heads-up - before beginning any experiments to turn off MV2 in the browser next year.”
Apr 1
The Status Trap every.to · “I’ve seen this with friends who go into VC with the intention of eventually leaving and starting a company.”
Apr 1
The Joy of Computer History Books fabiensanglard.net · “Not fall into the cult of personality (“looks at this genius”) trap. Dictated autobiographies make me cringe.”
Apr 1

March 2023 122 posts

Make loading weights 10-100x faster github.com · “This was accomplished by changing the file format so we can mmap() weights directly into memory without having to read() or copy them”
Mar 31
CDC team studying health impacts of East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation cbsnews.com · “Because the investigators’ symptoms improved soon after they left the area, the incident was not reported to the public, the official said, noting that reports of illnesses experienced by CDC personnel on the job wouldn’t ordinarily be disclosed.”
Mar 31
BuzzFeed Is Quietly Publishing Whole AI-Generated Articles, Not Just Quizzes futurism.com · “The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another.”
Mar 31
Heat pump sales outpaced gas furnace sales in the US in 2022 electrek.co · “The IEA says that global heat pump sales will need to expand by well over 15% per year this decade if the world is to achieve net zero by 2050, and that multistory apartment buildings and commercial spaces in particular should be prioritized.”
Mar 31
The undocumented Android change that led to aCropalypse was reported during the beta iliana.fyi · “This bug was closed as obsolete a year later.”
Mar 30
One In Two New Npm Packages Is SEO Spam Right Now blog.sandworm.dev · “Out of the ~320k new npm packages or versions that Sandworm has scanned over the past week, at least ~185k were labeled as SEO spam.”
Mar 30
That was fast! Microsoft slips ads into AI-powered Bing Chat techcrunch.com · “In the case of the ad above, it’s not clear to the user what’s sponsored here.”
Mar 30
Bard reportedly used responses from ChatGPT for training, Google denies 9to5google.com · “Other Googlers aware of the situation apparently felt that such usage violated OpenAI’s terms of service, which barred the use of ChatGPT’s output “to develop models that compete with OpenAI.””
Mar 30
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter futureoflife.org · “Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 .”
Mar 29
BingBang: AAD misconfiguration led to Bing.com results manipulation and account takeover wiz.io · “The results surprised us: 25% of all the multi-tenant apps we scanned were vulnerable to authentication bypass.”
Mar 29
In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation: Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law re Chat Preservation storage.courtlistener.com · “The Court concludes that Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was “lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation” and “with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.””
Mar 29
Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage bbc.co.uk · “Coldiretti and other agriculture lobbies have collected half a million signatures in recent months calling for protection of "natural food vs synthetic food", and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is among those who have signed.”
Mar 29
Price transparency is broken dolthub.com · “It happened over and over that for an item that should have been reimbursed at $250, United had listed said it only reimbursed the company $5, and so on, for many other matches.”
Mar 28
The European Commission does not understand what is written in its own Chat Control bill mullvad.net · “Above all, she continues to claim that it’s possible to scan end-to-end encrypted communication without breaking the encryption.”
Mar 28
Amazon starts flagging ‘frequently returned’ products that you maybe shouldn’t buy theverge.com · “These three items have a reasonably high star rating, which may initially reassure prospective consumers, but glancing at the customer reviews indicates that the products are not true to size or have previously arrived damaged.”
Mar 28
Here is the FBI’s Contract to Buy Mass Internet Data vice.com · “Team Cymru, the company ultimately selling this data to the FBI, obtains it from deals with ISPs by offering them threat intelligence in return.”
Mar 28
The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend e-books like a library theverge.com · “Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and that it was “irrelevant” that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience.”
Mar 27
Get Off My Desktop! Windows Needs to Stop Showing Tabloid News tomshardware.com · “If you go to the search box in Windows 11 or 10 and click on it, likely with the intent of searching for an app or document on your local drive(s), you are presented with a slew of news headlines.”
Mar 27
Apple Passwords Deserve An App cabel.com · “Passwords are productivity, not preferences.”
Mar 27
Elon Musk now says Twitter is worth $20 billion, or less than half of what he paid theverge.com · “As noted by Schiffer, Musk adds that he sees “a clear but difficult path” to achieving a $250 billion valuation, which would eventually make Twitter’s current stock grants worth 10 times as much as they are now”
Mar 27
Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia theguardian.com · “You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff.”
Mar 26
The RIAA v. Steve Jobs weblog.rogueamoeba.com · “Even 18 years on, I find this story rather terrifying.”
Mar 26
Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes? oneusefulthing.substack.com · “In order to be able to check the quality of the output, I used a product I knew well, a game I authored with Wharton Interactive, designed to teach leadership and team skills on a fictional mission to Saturn.”
Mar 26
ChatGPT + Code Interpreter = Magic andrewmayneblog.wordpress.com · “Previously when I used ChatGPT to create code this involved taking the output and putting it into another environment to test it.”
Mar 26
How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them propublica.org · “Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show.”
Mar 25
In Memoriam: Gordon Moore, 1929 - 2023 moore.org · “In 1975, Gordon updated his prediction, by now recognized as “Moore’s Law,” anticipating that the doubling would happen every two years for the coming decade.”
Mar 25
Cloudflare Disables Access to 'Pirated' Content on its IPFS Gateway torrentfreak.com · “For one, it shows that decentralized and censorship-free networks lose their key feature when they are accessed through centralized gateways.”
Mar 25
Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access bbc.com · “Utah has become the first US state to require social media firms get parental consent for children to use their apps and verify users are at least 18.”
Mar 25
We updated our RSA SSH host key github.blog · “This week, we discovered that GitHub.com’s RSA SSH private key was briefly exposed in a public GitHub repository.”
Mar 24
We're no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan docker.com · “Last week we felt our communications were terrible but our policy was sound. It’s now clear that both the communications and the policy were wrong, so we’re reversing course and no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan:”
Mar 24
Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos theguardian.com · “Following the raid, Adams county prosecutor’s office said officers found no probative criminal evidence, and Afroman faced no charges.”
Mar 24
Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally? blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020.”
Mar 24
The FTC wants to ban those tough-to-cancel gym and cable subscriptions theverge.com · “The agency can recover around $50,000 per individual violation of a consumer’s rights, and consumer lawsuits can recover damages for lost funds and potentially wasted time.”
Mar 23
Block: How Inflated User Metrics and “Frictionless” Fraud Facilitation Enabled Insiders To Cash Out Over $1 Billion hindenburgresearch.com · “Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.”
Mar 23
Do Kwon Arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister coindesk.com · “The suspect was detained at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents, Adzic added, saying he was still waiting for official confirmation of identity.”
Mar 23
OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models aisnakeoil.substack.com · “On Monday, OpenAI announced that it would discontinue support for Codex by Thursday.”
Mar 23
De-cloud and de-k8s: bringing our apps back home dev.37signals.com · “It’s fair to say that we never realized the promise that the cloud would simplify our life.”
Mar 22
Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI blog.mozilla.org · “The less good news: We don’t see this happening amongst the big tech and cloud companies with the most power and influence.”
Mar 22
For AI's 'iPhone moment', Nvidia unveils a large language model chip zdnet.com · “Its Transformer Engine acceleration “delivers up to 12x faster inference performance at GPT-3 compared to the prior generation A100 at data center scale,” the company said.”
Mar 22
A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece nightingaledvs.com · “On January 1, 2023, Apple sunsetted (pun intended) the Dark Sky mobile app on iOS.”
Mar 22
Hyundai Promises To Keep Buttons in Cars Because Touchscreen Controls Are Dangerous thedrive.com · ““When it comes to Level 4 autonomous driving, then we’ll have everything soft key,” said Lee.”
Mar 21
OpenAI: ChatGPT Could Disrupt 19% of US Jobs, Is Yours on the List? pcmag.com · “Researchers then used human annotators and a GPT-4 model to rate whether access to a ChatGPT-powered system would cut down the time required for a human to perform a specific task “by at least 50%.””
Mar 21
uBlock Origin 1.48.0 github.com · “This leads to numerous reports of "uBlock stopped working", which are simply caused by the fact that at launch time the browser started to load webpages before uBO was ready to filter properly (because the filter lists were not fully loaded in memory).”
Mar 21
Netflix is 'underway' on cloud gaming work, aims to bring games to 'any Netflix device you have' 9to5google.com · “40 games are slated for launch this year and 70 more in development.”
Mar 21
Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers in addition to earlier cuts cnbc.com · “The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.”
Mar 20
Zippyshare Quits After 17 Years, 45m Visits Per Month Makes No Money torrentfreak.com · “The site still enjoys around 45 million visits per month and Zippyshare.com is one of the top 1000 most-visited domains on the internet today.”
Mar 20
Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity and medical leave for laid-off employees cnbc.com · “Those who spoke with CNBC said they’ve been told they’ll only receive pay through their designated end date, along with standard severance.”
Mar 20
twenty-five years of curl daniel.haxx.se · “I started working for wolfSSL, doing curl full-time. It just took 21 years to make curl my job.”
Mar 20
Bitwarden PINs can be brute-forced ambiso.github.io · “However this 5 guesses limit is enforced completely within the client’s logic: it relies on the attacker using the official Bitwarden client.”
Mar 19
Leaving China persuasion.community · “From 2010 to 2020, Shanghai’s expat population dropped from 208,000 to 163,000.”
Mar 19
The Little-Known Origin Story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics scientificamerican.com · “Yet Wu, who died in 1997, was not mentioned when the 2022 awards were announced.”
Mar 19
AWS’s Anti-Competitive Move Hidden in Plain Sight lastweekinaws.com · “The problem that I want to highlight today is that if I spin up MySQL myself on EC2 instances, I’ll have to pay 2¢ per GB that I replicate between AZs, whereas I will pay nothing if I use RDS.”
Mar 18
Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market with Dagster, dbt and BigQuery dagster.io · “They will sell you 1,000 fake GitHub stars for as little as $64.”
Mar 18
AI can fool voice recognition used to verify identity by Centrelink and Australian tax office theguardian.com · “Using just four minutes of audio, a Guardian Australia journalist was able to generate a clone of their own voice and was then able to use this, combined with their customer reference number, to gain access to their own Centrelink self-service account.”
Mar 18
Exploiting aCropalypse: Recovering Truncated PNGs da.vidbuchanan.co.uk · “Google was passing “w” to a call to parseMode(), when they should’ve been passing “wt” (the t stands for truncation).”
Mar 18
Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence federalregister.gov · “When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship.”
Mar 17
Google: Turn off VoLTE, Wi-Fi calling due to severe Exynos modem vulnerabilities on Pixel 6, more 9to5google.com · “Tests conducted by Project Zero confirm that those four vulnerabilities allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim’s phone number.”
Mar 17
Negativity drives online news consumption nature.com · “For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.”
Mar 17
Give babies peanut butter to cut allergy by 77%, study says bbc.com · “That is the equivalent of preventing 10,000 out of the roughly 13,000 cases of peanut allergy each year.”
Mar 17
John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next sfconservancy.org · “Deere’s inability to provide complete corresponding source to us for all requested products more than 2 years after our first request is beyond unacceptable”
Mar 16
Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work blogs.microsoft.com · “Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong”
Mar 16
Bandcamp United bandcampunited.org · “We all chose to join this company as an extension of our own love for independent music, and believe that a site such as Bandcamp that aims to offer an ethical and fair alternative to the streaming economy should reflect its mission internally.”
Mar 16
Glass Enterprise Edition Announcement FAQ support.google.com · “As of March 15, 2023, we will no longer sell Glass Enterprise Edition.”
Mar 16
Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know blog.alexellis.io · “Docker is holding us hostage here, if we don’t pay up, systems will break for many free users.”
Mar 15
Stripe announces new round of funding and plan to provide employee liquidity stripe.com · “Stripe does not need this capital to run its business.”
Mar 15
Why We’re Suing to Protect the Right of Incarcerated People to Receive Physical Mail eff.org · “Instead, family and friends were required to mail their letters to Smart Communications, a private for-profit company based in Florida that would scan and destroy those letters so that incarcerated people would be required to access them digitally through a limited number of shared tablets and kiosks in public spaces within the jails.”
Mar 15
Apple Expands Hiring Freeze, Delays Bonuses for Some Employees macrumors.com · “Apple is leaving positions open as employees depart the company as a way to cut down on the workforce.”
Mar 15
GPT-4 System Card cdn.openai.com · “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.”
Mar 14
Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams platformer.news · “The pressure from [CTO] Kevin [Scott] and [CEO] Satya [Nadella] is very very high to take these most recent openAI models and the ones that come after them and move them into customers hands at a very high speed”
Mar 14
Update on Meta’s Year of Efficiency about.fb.com · “Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”
Mar 14
the door close button computer.rip · “Therefore, elevators with a “door close” button that isn’t “hooked up” will fail their annual inspections.”
Mar 14
Alpaca: A Strong, Replicable Instruction-Following Model crfm.stanford.edu · “Our data generation process results in 52K unique instructions and the corresponding outputs, which costed less than $500 using the OpenAI API.”
Mar 13
Changes at YC ycombinator.com · “But late stage investing turned out to be so different from early stage that we found it to be a distraction from our core mission.”
Mar 13
California cancels salmon fishing season cbsnews.com · “Last year, 196,000 adult fish were expected to return to the Sacramento River to spawn but only 60,000 showed up.”
Mar 13
Why some GitHub labels illegible firsching.ch · “So what’s is going on? Well, CSS colors are understood to be in the sRGB color space, but the formula used is intended for linear RGB”
Mar 13
Joint Statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC home.treasury.gov · “Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.”
Mar 12
Vivaldi co-founder: Advertisers 'stole the internet from us' xda-developers.com · “For us, how you technically do the tracking, you can say it’s a little bit better to do it client-side than server-side, but for me, the idea that your browser is building a profile on you…. No, no, no, that’s wrong.”
Mar 12
Typescripting the technical interview richard-towers.com · “I think you’ll find once it’s compiled down to JavaScript it’s perfectly concise.”
Mar 12
potatis: MOS-6502 and NES emulator in Rust (SDL/WebAssembly/Android/Embedded/Cloud) github.com · “It also runs on a RP-Pico with only 264kB available RAM!”
Mar 12
Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment simonwillison.net · “So they’re in the wild now. You may not be legally able to build a commercial product on them, but the genie is out of the bottle.”
Mar 11
ChatGPT's API is So Good and Cheap, It Makes Most Text Generating AI Obsolete minimaxir.com · “Instead, on March 1st, OpenAI set the price of the ChatGPT API to 1/10th of the GPT-3 API, at $0.002/1,000 tokens.”
Mar 11
See the First Complete Map of an Insect's Brain smithsonianmag.com · “With 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections, called synapses, the result is by far the most complex map of a whole brain ever made.”
Mar 11
FDIC Creates a Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara to Protect Insured Depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California fdic.gov · “As of December 31, 2022, Silicon Valley Bank had approximately $209.0 billion in total assets and about $175.4 billion in total deposits.”
Mar 10
Telehealth startup Cerebral shared millions of patients' data with advertisers techcrunch.com · “Cerebral has revealed it shared the private health information, including mental health assessments, of more than 3.1 million patients in the United States with advertisers and social media giants like Facebook, Google and TikTok.”
Mar 10
Serverless Maps - Now Open Source protomaps.com · “On AWS, response times average 100 ms for cache hits, 200 ms for misses.”
Mar 10
R. c. Epstein citoyens.soquij.qc.ca · “Flipping the proverbial bird is a God-given, Charter enshrined right that belongs to every red-blooded Canadian.”
Mar 10
The FBI Just Admitted It Bought US Location Data wired.com · “Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant.”
Mar 9
The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux da.vidbuchanan.co.uk · “Truth be told, I don’t care very much about Netflix - the UX offered by BitTorrent is superior.”
Mar 9
How does the world's first vaccine for honeybees work? "It's like magic" cbsnews.com · “There is no cure for the disease, and, until now, no vaccine to prevent it.”
Mar 9
Researchers develop blood test for anxiety sciencedaily.com · “Now that the test has been validated by researchers, it is currently being developed for wider use by physicians by MindX Sciences.”
Mar 9
Risky Biz News: Canada's tax revenue agency tries to ToS itself out of hacking liability riskybiznews.substack.com · “After reviewing the HTTP responses from the CRA My Account login page, it’s clear the agency has not configured even some of the most basic security features.”
Mar 8
How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages discord.com · “At the beginning of 2022, it had 177 nodes with trillions of messages.”
Mar 8
Google Groups has been left to die ahelwer.ca · “It’s clear we ran afoul of the old lesson: don’t build communities for long-lasting FOSS projects on proprietary infrastructure you don’t control.”
Mar 8
Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promotions to senior roles cnbc.com · “The L6 distinction refers to the first layer of staff that’s considered senior and typically includes people with about a decade of experience.”
Mar 8
How a single engineer brought down Twitter theverge.com · “But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told.”
Mar 7
Retail, search and Amazon's $40bn 'advertising' business ben-evans.com · “In 2021 Amazon started splitting it out, and last year Amazon had $38bn of ad revenue, more than any traditional media company and bigger than the entire (now much reduced) global newspaper industry.”
Mar 7
Discord, or the Death of Lore ascii.textfiles.com · “Discord’s official birthday is 2012, but it’s really 2009, when OpenFeint was created.”
Mar 7
The decline of net neutrality activism neelc.org · “Why? because the telecom lobby fought tooth and nail, and even resorted to homophobia just to prevent themselves from being regulated.”
Mar 7
Reliability: It's Not Great community.fly.io · “We decided to ship “unmanaged Postgres” to buy ourselves time to wait for the right managed Postgres provider to show up. The problem is, fly pg create implies that people are getting a managed Postgres cluster.”
Mar 6
There Were Half as Many Affordable Homes for Sale in 2022 as There Were in 2021 redfin.com · “Only 9% of homes for sale last year were affordable for the typical Black household, compared with 28% for the typical white household and the lowest share of any race in this analysis.”
Mar 6
Amazon pauses construction of second headquarters in Virginia cnbc.com · “We’re always evaluating space plans to make sure they fit our business needs and to create a great experience for employees, and since Met Park will have space to accommodate more than 14,000 employees, we’ve decided to shift the groundbreaking of PenPlace (the second phase of HQ2) out a bit”
Mar 6
First look at Google Chrome's Blink engine running on an iPhone 9to5google.com · “Under Apple’s current App Store policies, all web browsers for iPhones and iPads are required to use the built-in version of WebKit, essentially making all browsers act like Safari.”
Mar 6
Amazon Go closing 8 of its c-stores cstoredive.com · “Amazon shuttering more than a quarter of its Go stores highlights the company’s ongoing challenges in building its physical retail footprint.”
Mar 5
How to lose $950 very quickly on AirBnB chriskiehl.com · “AirBnB has stricter booking polices than an airline. Who knew.”
Mar 5
Van Gogh, AMD's Steam Deck APU chipsandcheese.com · “A small L3 hurts Renoir, but Van Gogh sees a special level of pain because LPDDR5 latency is abysmal. Even servers these days don’t take 150 ns to get data from memory.”
Mar 5
Self-Host All the Things? tedium.co · “This tool was great for a long time, but then the company decided to raise the price out of nowhere. And not by a little, but by more than three times the cost of what I was paying.”
Mar 5
Secret Service and ICE break the law with fake phone towers theregister.com · “The phone surveillance report offers six recommendations to help the agencies comply with their legal and policy obligations. But annoyingly it redacts statistical data about the number of investigations utilizing CSS devices in 2020 and 2021.”
Mar 4
Plan to incinerate soil from Ohio train derailment is 'horrifying', says expert theguardian.com · “Heritage also faced an investigation and enforcement action from the EPA in 2015 after officials determined the facility had violated the Clean Air Act nearly 200 times between 2010 and 2014.”
Mar 4
Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment pmarca.substack.com · “Therefore AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite arguments are right this time.”
Mar 4
Finding Java Thread Leaks With JDK Flight Recorder and a Bit Of SQL morling.dev · “Finding thread start events without matching end events is as simple as running a LEFT JOIN on the two event types and keeping only those start events which don’t have a join partner.”
Mar 4
The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later lwn.net · “Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn’t even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over.”
Mar 3
AWS is Asleep at the Lambda Wheel lastweekinaws.com · “It’s clear that there’s no technical blocker preventing AWS from supporting the language, leading me to the conclusion that it’s instead either a lack of leadership, or a lack of will–which effectively reduces down to the same thing.”
Mar 3
Q&A About FTC Proposed Rule to Ban Non-Compete Restrictions jdsupra.com · “The non-compete agreement would be unlawful under the Proposed Rule, regardless of whether consideration was paid.”
Mar 3
Save bandwidth by using a torrent to distribute more efficiently github.com · “In order to download the checkpoints and tokenizer, fill this google form or if you want to save our bandwidth use this BitTorrent link”
Mar 3
"There is no prosecution at any cost." tuta.com · “Hartmann warned against weakening end-to-end encryption through client-based content scanning. “By doing so, the commission is in effect undermining the most important digital protection tool,” the investigator said, “because compromised encryption is not encryption in the end.””
Mar 2
Starbucks illegally fired US workers over union, judge rules bbc.co.uk · “It also repeatedly sent high-ranking staff to stores “in order to more closely supervise, monitor, or create the impression that employees’ union activities are under surveillance,” he said.”
Mar 2
U.S. Postal Service starts nationwide electric vehicle fleet, buying 9,250 EVs and thousands of charging stations cbsnews.com · “As such, a contract has also been awarded for the agency to acquire 9,250 commercial-off-the-shelf internal combustion engine vehicles “to fill the urgent need for vehicles.””
Mar 2
Royal Astronomical Society announces all journals to publish as open access from 2024 ras.ac.uk · “With this move to OA the journals will no longer charge subscription fees and will instead be supported by Article Processing Charges (APCs), with the infrastructure to ensure that authors continue to face no financial barrier to publishing their science in the RAS journals.”
Mar 2
BlackLotus UEFI bootkit: Myth confirmed welivesecurity.com · “Although the vulnerability was fixed in Microsoft’s January 2022 update, its exploitation is still possible as the affected, validly signed binaries have still not been added to the UEFI revocation list.”
Mar 1
OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit vice.com · “By March 2019, OpenAI shed its non-profit status and set up a “capped profit” sector, in which the company could now receive investments and would provide investors with profit capped at 100 times their investment.”
Mar 1
Amazon is letting employees use their stock to finance home purchases and even second homes techcrunch.com · “Even former Amazon employees with vested equity can use the service, according to Better.com, and there are many, following Amazon’s companywide layoffs.”
Mar 1
Microsoft's Phone Link app now lets you use iMessage from your PC theverge.com · “You won’t be able to send pictures in messages or participate in group messages.”
Mar 1

February 2023 106 posts

Hackers Claim They Breached T-Mobile More Than 100 Times in 2022 krebsonsecurity.com · “The prices advertised for a SIM-swap against T-Mobile customers in the latter half of 2022 ranged between USD $1,000 and $1,500, while SIM-swaps offered against AT&T and Verizon customers often cost well more than twice that amount.”
Feb 28
LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022 9to5mac.com · “The threat actor was able to capture the employee’s master password as it was entered, after the employee authenticated with MFA, and gain access to the DevOps engineer’s LastPass corporate vault.”
Feb 28
"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance computerenhance.com · “The first two rules of the “clean code” concept wipe out 12 years of hardware evolution, all by themselves.”
Feb 28
Snapchat launches an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology techcrunch.com · “All conversations with My AI will be stored and may be reviewed to improve the product’s experience. Snapchat also says that users shouldn’t share any secrets with My AI or rely on the chatbot for advice.”
Feb 28
Ford Applies to Patent Self-Repossessing Cars That Can Drive Themselves Away thedrive.com · “If it will cost the bank more to repo the vehicle as compared to what it could sell it for, then “the repossession system computer may cooperate with the vehicle computer to autonomously move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a junkyard.””
Feb 27
Meet the $10,000 Nvidia chip powering the race for A.I. cnbc.com · “If you want to scale at the scale of Google, which serves 8 or 9 billion queries every day, you actually need to spend $80 billion on DGXs.”
Feb 27
The Camera-Shy Hoodie macpierce.com · “By pointing the LEDs back at the camera and setting them to a tuned strobe, the security camera’s capture becomes overexposed, significantly losing definition of the scene.”
Feb 27
Most Data Work Seems Fundamentally Worthless ludic.mataroa.blog · “Sometimes we would have huge errors in the work due to the horrific undocumented database we drew from, and no one would ever notice.”
Feb 27
France’s baby bust worksinprogress.co · “Had France’s population increased at the same rate as England’s since 1760, there would be more than 250 million French citizens alive today.”
Feb 26
Help! Is this عربي? isthisarabic.com · “Photoshop breaks Arabic. We even have a website that will break our Arabic so that Photoshop breaks it back to normal. Yes, Adobe is aware. No, they do not care.”
Feb 26
Met Office says Northern Lights will be visible in England tonight and tomorrow - best places to see them bristolpost.co.uk · “The Aurora Borealis may be visible as far south as central England tonight where skies remain clear.”
Feb 26
Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone theguardian.com · “The Nokia G22 will cost from £149.99 shipping on 8 March with replacement parts costing £18.99 for a charging port, £22.99 for a battery and £44.99 for a screen.”
Feb 25
My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account jeffgeerling.com · “Somehow, the school ‘adopted’ my personal Microsoft account, and now I can’t do anything in Azure with it.”
Feb 25
This selfie above China's balloon was taken over Missouri. Here's how we know that npr.org · “In an email to NPR, the Pentagon declined to confirm the location of the selfie, saying only that it was taken "over the central continental United States."”
Feb 25
How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice vice.com · “Voice ID analyses over 100 different characteristics of your voice which like your fingerprint, are unique to you.”
Feb 24
Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption bbc.com · “Encryption is either protecting everyone or it is broken for everyone.”
Feb 24
‘An economic fairytale’: Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits and not wages, analysis finds theguardian.com · “Increases in labour costs account for just 18% of the inflation above what the RBA wants to see before it eases interest rate increases.”
Feb 24
The job market for new grads: worse than in 2008, but better than 2002 blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Since every big company is doing the same, it’s a ‘safe’ time to do layoffs without setting off any alarm bells or lawsuits.”
Feb 24
Don't believe ChatGPT - we do NOT offer a "phone lookup" service blog.opencagedata.com · “This is not a service we provide. It is not a service we have ever provided, nor a service we have any plans to provide. Indeed, it is a not a service we are technically capable of providing.”
Feb 23
Flathub: Linux App Store github.com · “We are seeking up to 100,000 USD support from the Plaintext Group to cover the remaining budget to establish the new Flathub organisation and paid service over the coming year.”
Feb 23
Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills letgrow.org · “She hadn’t even gotten her coat off when four cops came to the house.”
Feb 23
Tech Layoffs Are Feeding a New Startup Surge wired.com · “Seed stage funding slumped 35 percent for startups year over year by late 2022, data from Crunchbase shows.”
Feb 23
Board Rules that Employers May Not Offer Severance Agreements Requiring Employees to Broadly Waive Labor Law Rights nlrb.gov · “Today’s decision, in contrast, explains that simply offering employees a severance agreement that requires them to broadly give up their rights under Section 7 of the Act violates Section 8(a)(1) of the Act.”
Feb 22
After Alaska Airlines planes bump runway while taking off from Seattle, a scramble to ‘pull the plug’ adn.com · “The Alaska 737 captain said the data was on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 pounds light.”
Feb 22
Supreme Court rejects man’s bid to sue police over arrest for Facebook parody nbcnews.com · “The police department, claiming the posts had disrupted its operations, launched an investigation and ultimately searched Novak’s apartment, arrested him and jailed him for four days.”
Feb 22
We stand to save $7m over five years from our cloud exit world.hey.com · “That’s a total of $840,000/year for everything. Bandwidth, power, and boxes on an amortization schedule of five years. Compared to $2.3m in the cloud.”
Feb 22
U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Hear Wikimedia Foundation’s Challenge to NSA Mass Surveillance diff.wikimedia.org · “Under this program, the NSA systematically searches the contents of internet traffic entering and leaving the United States, including Americans’ private emails, messages, and web communications.”
Feb 21
EPA Orders Norfolk Southern to Conduct All Cleanup Actions Associated with the East Palestine Train Derailment epa.gov · “If the company fails to complete any actions as ordered by EPA, the Agency will immediately step in, conduct the necessary work, and then seek to compel Norfolk Southern to pay triple the cost.”
Feb 21
Let's build a Chrome extension that steals everything mattfrisbie.substack.com · “Chrome scrolls the permission warning message container, so more than half of the warning messages don’t even show up.”
Feb 21
Early morning university classes are associated with impaired sleep and academic performance nature.com · “Wi-Fi connection logs in 23,391 students revealed that lecture attendance was about ten percentage points lower for classes at 08:00 compared with later start times.”
Feb 21
Attorney General Bonta, Senator Dodd, Senator Skinner Introduce Bill Prohibiting Hidden Fees in California oag.ca.gov · “Sellers often hide these additional, mandatory charges by using small type, vague descriptions or misleading wording such as “service fees,” by bundling them with legitimate charges like taxes, or revealing them clearly only after the consumer has invested time in the transaction.”
Feb 20
Report: Apple gets a cut of search revenue from Chrome as part of secret Google deal 9to5mac.com · “Given this revenue share, when (X) or Safari is successful in competing for an iOS user, rather than winning a full share of the search traffic revenue it only wins a partial share (ie the revenue to which it was not previously entitled).”
Feb 20
Goodbye, CSS-Tricks! geoffgraham.me · “Oh, and speaking of hiring, it appears DigitalOcean is still in full hiring mode if you’re in the market for work. Well, according to the signature in this auto-reply.”
Feb 20
Amazon wants employees to return to the office in May engadget.com · “Starting in May, Amazon will require employees to work out of the office at least three days per week.”
Feb 20
Germany Raises Red Flags About Palantir’s Big Data Dragnet wired.com · “The ruling said that the Hamburg law, and a similar law in Hesse, “allow police, with just one click, to create comprehensive profiles of persons, groups, and circles,” without differentiating between suspected criminals and people who are connected to them.”
Feb 19
IRIS²: the EU’s response to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites project reneweuropegroup.eu · “With the war, Ukraine needed satellite telecommunications, but the EU didn’t have something to offer.”
Feb 19
Replicate ChatGPT Training Quickly and Affordable with Open Source Colossal-AI hpc-ai.tech · “With Colossal-AI’s efficient implementation of RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback), you can get started on replicating the ChatGPT training process with just 1.6GB of GPU memory, and experience a 7.73 times acceleration in the training process.”
Feb 19
Revenue is easy, profit is harder edge.ceo · “Illustratively, a startup with a 3-month payback period can grow 8X faster on a monthly basis than a startup that has a 24-month payback period with the same amount of growth capital.”
Feb 19
Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege stanforddaily.com · “When asked whether this was accurate, the scientist whom The Daily confirmed belonged to the research review committee said, “no no no no no no.””
Feb 18
Setting up an electronics workshop lcamtuf.substack.com · “For the first ten years of my electronics journey, I wrestled with traditional soldering irons.”
Feb 18
How heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future yaleclimateconnections.org · “To date, only about 10% of space heating requirements around the world are met by heat pumps.”
Feb 18
GoDaddy: Hackers stole source code, installed malware in multi-year breach bleepingcomputer.com · “While GoDaddy discovered the security breach following customer reports in early December 2022 that their sites were being used to redirect to random domains, the attackers had access to the company’s network for multiple years.”
Feb 17
1st UK child to receive gene therapy for fatal genetic disorder is now 'happy and healthy' livescience.com · “Libmeldy is approved for use in the European Union and U.K., although the U.K.’s drug price watchdog initially rejected the therapy due to its hefty list price of £2.8 million ($3.4 million at today’s exchange rates), BBC News reported in 2022.”
Feb 17
Is the Living Computer Museum Dead? pcjs.org · “The LCM website hasn’t changed much over the last 3 years, and it continues to say the museum “is closed for now,” with no indication of what, if anything, Vulcan decided to do when the first 18 months came and went.”
Feb 17
How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions kschaul.com · “But for most of our use cases, we don’t need the latest and greatest. And Mapbox has gotten expensive.”
Feb 17
Tesla recalls 362,758 vehicles, says Full Self-Driving Beta software may cause crashes cnbc.com · “The word ‘recall’ for an over-the-air software update is anachronistic and just flat wrong!”
Feb 16
Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS webkit.org · “A web app that has been added to the Home Screen can request permission to receive push notifications as long as that request is in response to direct user interaction”
Feb 16
This Bay Area man has become the face of California’s latest housing drama sfchronicle.com · “Only five of 109 jurisdictions had their housing plans approved by the state by the Jan. 31 deadline.”
Feb 16
Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them fortune.com · “Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50% said they disagreed. Only 25% agreed, the study found.”
Feb 16
Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” simonwillison.net · “A search engine that invents financial figures when answering queries to compare companies is pretty much a worst-case scenario for applying this technology.”
Feb 15
Last Flight Out brr.fyi · “This final plane left behind a few dozen souls who will maintain continuity, keep the station going, and conduct critical winter science and logistics activities. If all goes well, the next time we see a plane will be in late October 2023.”
Feb 15
Apple doesn't want you developing hobby apps bennettnotes.com · “Apple still charges a $99 yearly developer fee, even if you don’t want to publish your app on the Appstore!”
Feb 15
Shrinkflation, SanDisk style ounapuu.ee · “I’m a whole 607125504 bytes short!”
Feb 15
Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment npr.org · “On Sunday, the EPA released a list, written by Norfolk Southern, of the toxic chemicals that were in the derailed cars.”
Feb 14
BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout theguardian.com · “Documents and phones of several journalists were taken and the offices sealed.”
Feb 14
Amazon Is Taking Half of Each Sale From Its Merchants finance.yahoo.com · “One of his popular fire pits costs $200, of which Amazon takes $112 for its commission, warehouse storage, delivery and advertising.”
Feb 14
So, what's next? github.com · “$400 for 250 hours… It will be less than $2 per hour of work, for the year before a little more: $4 per hour.”
Feb 13
Restructuring Twilio, and reducing the size of our team twilio.com · “We’re exiting the last phase with a great market position, and very strong cash reserves, but unfortunately that’s not enough to get us through the next phase.”
Feb 13
Z-Library Returns on the Clearnet in Full Hydra-Mode torrentfreak.com · “After logging into your account, you will be redirected to your personal domain. Please keep your personal domain private!”
Feb 13
Let Teenagers Sleep scientificamerican.com · “Despite decades of research, thousands of publications and clear science, schools in only a few states and the District of Columbia have pushed their start times to 8:30 A.M. on average, which researchers say is a compromise.”
Feb 13
IRS builds out task force to explore running its own free e-file system federalnewsnetwork.com · “A Government Accountability Office report from April 2022 found that only 4 million individuals, or about 4% of all eligible taxpayers, used the program to file their federal tax returns.”
Feb 12
John Carmack goes off about online-only games being abandoned: 'I believe in saving everything' pcgamer.com · “Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others.”
Feb 12
Hackers interrupt Iran president’s TV speech on anniversary of revolution cnn.com · “His live televised speech was interrupted on the internet for about a minute, with a logo appearing on the screen of a group of anti-Iranian government hackers that goes by the name of “Edalate Ali (Justice of Ali).””
Feb 12
School Dental Program Prevents 80 Percent of Cavities with One-Time, Non-Invasive Treatment nyu.edu · “A single dose of either topical treatment given in elementary schools prevented roughly 80% of cavities and kept 50% of cavities from worsening when children were seen two years later.”
Feb 12
New Hampshire once again on the cusp of enshrining Software Freedom into law. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED. libreboot.org · “16 February 2023, 1PM : prohibiting, with limited exceptions, state agencies from requiring use of proprietary software in interactions with the public (house bill: HB 617-FN)”
Feb 12
The Heisenbug lurking in your async code textual.textualize.io · “The root cause of this Heisenbug is that if you don’t hold a reference to the task object returned by create_task then the task may disappear without warning when Python runs garbage collection.”
Feb 11
Scientists discover receptor that blocks COVID-19 infection sydney.edu.au · “This protein, the leucine-rich repeat-containing protein 15 (LRRC15), is an inbuilt receptor that binds the SARS-CoV-2 virus without passing on the infection.”
Feb 11
Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools arxiv.org · “They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup, where much simpler and smaller models excel.”
Feb 11
WWII-era bomb explodes in England in "unplanned" detonation cbsnews.com · “On Friday, work began to disarm the explosives remaining in the device, but somehow it detonated, causing a large explosion that was captured on video by a police drone.”
Feb 11
Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people techcrunch.com · “In an interview with Axios , Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said that these layoffs are not a result of economic issues”
Feb 10
Amazon secures key FCC approval to deploy its Project Kuiper broadband satellites engadget.com · “If Amazon experiences disposal failure with satellites within a single year, it has to report that fact to the FCC, as well.”
Feb 10
My Fifth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder mtlynch.io · “While it sounds impressive to grow revenue by $350k, it’s a little less exciting that I’m only walking away with $6k in profit.”
Feb 10
The Online Safety Bill: An attack on encryption element.io · “The bill takes a wrecking ball to the very fabric of encryption, by requiring encrypted messaging apps to scan for abusive content within the app (or the app’s underlying operating system).”
Feb 9
GitHub lays off 10% and goes fully remote techcrunch.com · “And as another sign of cost cutting, it’s moving its laptop refresh cycle from three to four years.”
Feb 9
An announcement from GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij about.gitlab.com · “I had hoped reprioritizing our spending would be enough to withstand the growing global economic downturn.”
Feb 9
Why We're Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch blog.thunderbird.net · “Keep in mind that Thunderbird is currently being actively developed by a bit more than a dozen core developers.”
Feb 9
‘As bad as it gets without body bags.’ fallows.substack.com · “It appears that quick action and situational awareness by the FedEx crew prevented a mass-casualty disaster.”
Feb 8
Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control? techspot.com · “just after the first boot, Windows 11 was quick to try and reach third-party servers with absolutely no prior user permission or intervention.”
Feb 8
Why does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004? jvns.ca · “The answer is 0.30000000000000004 (the second one) because its significand is even.”
Feb 8
The Great Betrayal: After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Full-Time Work Model a.team · “After over 16 years at the company, this was the only information he received to tell him that he was one of the 12,000 employees laid off.”
Feb 8
A Message from Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom blog.zoom.us · “To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus.”
Feb 7
Mozilla, Google looking ahead to the end of Apple's WebKit theregister.com · “Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit.”
Feb 7
Big Data is Dead motherduck.com · “The most surprising thing that I learned was that most of the people using “Big Query” don’t really have Big Data.”
Feb 7
The technology behind GitHub’s new code search github.blog · “The short answer is that we built our own search engine from scratch, in Rust, specifically for the domain of code search.”
Feb 7
An important next step on our AI journey blog.google · “We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback.”
Feb 6
Voice.AI: GPL Violations with a Side of DRM undeleted.ronsor.com · “A couple of days later, on February 4, I suddenly found myself banned from the Voice.ai Discord server.”
Feb 6
Google experiments with non-WebKit Blink-based iOS browser theregister.com · “It’s a toy for now, but won’t necessarily remain so.”
Feb 6
Google invested $300 million in AI firm founded by former OpenAI researchers theverge.com · “According to a report from the Financial Times, in late 2022, Google invested around $300 million in the startup, though the news was not reported at the time.”
Feb 6
Finland’s Most-Wanted Hacker Nabbed in France krebsonsecurity.com · “Kivimäki was ultimately convicted of orchestrating more than 50,000 cybercrimes.”
Feb 5
The Market for Lemons infrequently.org · “Partisans for slow, complex frameworks have successfully marketed lemons as the hot new thing, despite the pervasive failures in their wake, crowding out higher-quality options in the process.”
Feb 5
Ghost Boat with Garmin GPS Leads Father-Son Duo to Man Overboard garmin.com · “Sascha had gone to the side to relieve himself and simply fell overboard.”
Feb 5
MDMA and Psilocybin Are Approved as Medicines for the First Time wired.com · “The treatments won’t be covered by health insurance, “so it’s probably initially going to be a therapy for relatively well-off people who have these conditions,” Perkins says.”
Feb 4
U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon cnbc.com · “Moreover, any information the balloon collects would have "limited additive value" compared with China’s spy satellites.”
Feb 4
De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM tomshardware.com · “Tiny11 is an OS that lives up to its name by shrinking a standard Windows 11 install down from 20GB+ on disk to approximately 8GB and “runs great” on a system with just 2GB of RAM.”
Feb 4
Scalability is overrated waseem.substack.com · “Only 20% of the people I reach out to actually take up the offer, but 100% of them know I’m personally committed to making sure their experience is good.”
Feb 4
Update on Samsung SSD Reliability pugetsystems.com · “Samsung’s 990 Pro drives are exhibiting rapid health degradation, with Samsung Magician software reporting a drop of around 1% endurance per week.”
Feb 3
Reversing UK mobile rail tickets eta.st · “What it doesn’t tell you, though, is that the app will also give you this information unauthenticated, with nothing more than a ticket’s ID (!).”
Feb 3
Twitter to start charging developers for API access cnbc.com · “Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.”
Feb 3
I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer words.filippo.io · “Virtually all maintainers are either volunteers or full-time employees of large companies. Foundations on average don’t pay maintainers.”
Feb 3
Connecticut Parents Arrested for Letting Kids Walk to Dunkin' Donuts reason.com · “I found out later from my husband that after I went inside, the arresting officer said to him, ‘If she talks to me again, I’m going to arrest you both and take away your kids.’”
Feb 2
Cybercrime groups offer six-figure salaries, bonuses, paid time off to attract talent on dark web cyberscoop.com · “High salaries for the right candidates were available, $100,000 per month in one listing, $20,000 per month in another, but the median salary, depending on the role, ranged between $1,300 and $4,000.”
Feb 2
Password strength explained palant.info · “Of course, each password manager vendor will tell you that all the data is safely encrypted. And that you are the only one who can possibly decrypt it. Sometimes this is true. Often enough this is a lie however.”
Feb 2
Missing radioactive capsule found in WA outback after frantic search abc.net.au · “The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, this morning joined those disappointed to learn the maximum penalty for mishandling radioactive material in such a manner was $1,000.”
Feb 1
EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems mullvad.net · “To comply with the law all of it would have to shut down, globally, as the servers providing software and security updates can’t tell the difference between a web server, a Japanese software developer, a refrigerator and an EU teenager.”
Feb 1
OpenAI releases tool to detect AI-generated text, including from ChatGPT techcrunch.com · “According to OpenAI, the classifier incorrectly labels human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time.”
Feb 1
PayPal to lay off 2,000 employees in coming weeks, about 7% of workforce cnbc.com · “But PayPal raised EPS guidance for the full fiscal year, saying it’s benefited from "ongoing productivity initiatives."”
Feb 1

January 2023 120 posts

Bay Area Cities To Lose ALL Housing Zoning Powers in 2 Days darrellowens.substack.com · “But since the HAA’s passage in 1990, this policy was entirely hypothetical and obscure because HCD never invoked it via declaring a city out of compliance.”
Jan 31
Uptime, status pages, and transparency calculus blog.lawrencejones.dev · “As publishing an incident or uptime statistics can expose the company to financial penalties, you need an ever-increasing amount of buy-in from senior (and sometimes non-technical) leadership before you can give an update.”
Jan 31
Bounded Flexible Arrays in C people.kernel.org · “As such, compilers have had to assume that trailing arrays must be intended to be dynamically sized (even though most are intended to be fixed-size).”
Jan 31
Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text theverge.com · “Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly”
Jan 31
Firefighters Forced to Smash Window of Driverless Cruise Taxi to Stop It businessinsider.com · “Firefighters on the scene made efforts to prevent the Cruise AV from driving over their hoses and were not able to do so until they shattered a front window of the Cruise AV”
Jan 30
OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete semafor.com · “A software developer in South America who completed a five-hour unpaid coding test for OpenAI told Semafor he was asked to tackle a series of two-part assignments.”
Jan 30
How Likely is Losing a Google Account? jefftk.com · “I found 22 security lockouts, 7 policy lockouts, and 3 with too few details to tell.”
Jan 30
Smaller, Cheaper Flow Batteries Throw Out Decades-Old Designs spectrum.ieee.org · “They remain costly, though, with a capital cost of around US $800 per kilowatt-hour, more than twice that of lithium-ion batteries.”
Jan 30
FCC Threatens to Disconnect Twilio for Illegal Robocalls commsrisk.com · “Twilio told the Traceback Consortium that PhoneBurner had obtained called parties’ consent for the robocalls. Neither Twilio nor PhoneBurner provided the Traceback Consortium with evidence of consent.”
Jan 29
Surgeon General says 13 is ‘too early’ to join social media cnn.com · “If parents can band together and say you know, as a group, we’re not going to allow our kids to use social media until 16 or 17 or 18 or whatever age they choose, that’s a much more effective strategy in making sure your kids don’t get exposed to harm early”
Jan 29
A Calculated Move: Calculators Now Emulated at Internet Archive blog.archive.org · “There’s over 1,400 different systems that have gotten the Artwork Treatment, a major success.”
Jan 29
What is Google doing with its open source teams? theregister.com · “For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google’s OSPO 18 years ago, was let go.”
Jan 28
BBC Modi Documentary Removal blog.archive.org · “Internet Archive can confirm that it has removed links in response to DMCA takedown requests from the BBC.”
Jan 28
Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub's .SE Domain Name Offline torrentfreak.com · “Sci-Hub.se’s domain status was changed to “ServerHold.” Set by the domain registry, this status effectively makes the domain unusable.”
Jan 28
MTG Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year History mtgrocks.com · “While enduringly popular and highly trafficked content, including Magic Story as well as Mark Rosewater’s Making Magic column, plus most content from the past few years, are moving to the new back-end, there are many older articles being retired.”
Jan 28
OGL 1.0a & Creative Commons dndbeyond.com · “We are leaving OGL 1.0a in place, as is. Untouched.”
Jan 27
PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. in Worst Layoff Email Ever gizmodo.com · “In a 1,669-word email to employees, Tejada echoed the script many tech CEOs have recited in recent months, stating that today’s “volatile economy requires additional transformation” by the company.”
Jan 27
Smartphone shipments plunge to a low not seen since 2013, their largest ever decline cnbc.com · “We have never seen shipments in the holiday quarter come in lower than the previous quarter.”
Jan 27
Stripe eyes an exit over next 12 months techcrunch.com · “Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that Stripe had cut its internal valuation to $63 billion.”
Jan 27
An AI robot lawyer was set to argue in court. Real lawyers shut it down. npr.org · “In particular, Browder said one state bar official noted that the unauthorized practice of law is a misdemeanor in some states punishable up to six months in county jail.”
Jan 26
Android 14 set to block certain outdated apps from being installed 9to5google.com · “According to a newly posted code change, Android 14 is set to make API requirements stricter, entirely blocking the installation of outdated apps.”
Jan 26
Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT futurism.com · “This is important because your inputs may be used as training data for a further iteration of ChatGPT”
Jan 26
The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think quantamagazine.org · “They found no convincing evidence that lower levels of serotonin caused or were even associated with depression.”
Jan 26
Adani Group: How The World’s 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History hindenburgresearch.com · “We have identified 38 Mauritius shell entities controlled by Vinod Adani or close associates.”
Jan 25
IPinside: Korea’s mandatory spyware palant.info · “If this request fails, the banking website will deny entry and ask that you install IPinside LWS Agent first. So in South Korea running this application isn’t optional.”
Jan 25
Amazon launches a $5 monthly subscription for unlimited prescription medications theverge.com · “Customers who are enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, or any other government healthcare program are not eligible for RxPass but can still use government insurance to fill prescriptions at Amazon Pharmacy.”
Jan 25
Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Branch Predictor mattkeeter.com · “The “optimized” code with one jump per loop is about 4x slower than the original version with two jumps per loop!”
Jan 25
Bitwarden design flaw: Server side iterations palant.info · “This simple tweak removes all the protection granted by the server-side iterations and speeds up master password guessing considerably. Only the client-side iterations really matter as protection.”
Jan 24
NYC Jails Want to Ban Physical Mail, Then Privatize Scanning of Digital Versions theintercept.com · “The main source of contraband inside city jails, though, has been corrections staff, not mail, critics of the policy change said.”
Jan 24
Microsoft extends OpenAI partnership in a ‘multibillion dollar investment’ theverge.com · “The key part of the deal means that Microsoft is the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, and Microsoft’s cloud services will power all OpenAI workloads across products, API services, and research.”
Jan 24
The US certifies the first small modular nuclear reactor design theverge.com · “The target price per megawatt of power from the plant jumped 53 percent this month to $89 per megawatt hour”
Jan 24
How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard-drive is genuine eaton-works.com · “Unfortunately, the entire security sector is RSA-signed using a private key only Microsoft possesses.”
Jan 24
Pwning the all Google phone with a non-Google bug github.blog · “After initially rating it as a High-severity vulnerability, the Android security team later decided to reclassify it as a “Won’t fix” and they passed my report to Arm’s security team.”
Jan 23
TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral theverge.com · “Heated videos don’t come with a label to show that they’ve been boosted by TikTok like ads or sponsored posts do, according to the report.”
Jan 23
An Update on January 2023 Organizational Changes newsroom.spotify.com · “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company.”
Jan 23
Twitter is down to fewer than 550 full-time engineers cnbc.com · “The company’s trust and safety team, which makes policy recommendations, design and product changes with the aim of keeping all of Twitter’s users safe, is down to fewer than 20 full-time employees.”
Jan 23
Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens windowscentral.com · “The team behind AltSpaceVR and also the Mixed Reality Tool Kit have been laid off in their entireties.”
Jan 22
Swipe right on our new credit card tokens! blog.thinkst.com · “An attacker who plans to test the cards (as they normally do when obtaining them) or attackers who try to use them will immediately advertise their presence, and your response team can spring into action.”
Jan 22
Large Language Model: world models or surface statistics? thegradient.pub · “It turns out that it achieves an average error of only 0.12 tiles.”
Jan 22
#132: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix haleynahman.substack.com · “Jackson discovered this aesthetic monotony is in part due to the fact that Netflix requires the same “technical specifications from all its productions.””
Jan 22
What Really Happened with the Substation Attack in North Carolina? practical.engineering · “To an unknown but significant extent, power infrastructure gets its security through obscurity.”
Jan 21
Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder? eclecticlight.co · “There is no evidence that local images on a Mac have identifiers computed and uploaded to Apple’s servers when viewed in Finder windows.”
Jan 21
Capital One cuts over 1,000 roles in Technology theregister.com · “The Agile role in our Tech organization was critical to our earlier transformation phases but as our organization matured, the natural next step is to integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices”
Jan 21
A difficult decision to set us up for the future blog.google · “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Jan 20
Cyber-crime gangs' earnings slide as victims refuse to pay bbc.com · “In 2022, 41% of his clients paid ransoms compared with 70% in 2020, he says.”
Jan 20
Sunsetting Subversion support github.blog · “fewer than 0.02% of requests made to the Git backend come through a Subversion endpoint, and only about 5,000 repositories see even a single Subversion request each month.”
Jan 20
how to completely own an airline in 3 easy steps maia.crimew.gay · “the nofly csv is almost 80mb in size and contains over 1.56 million rows of data.”
Jan 19
Amazon closing AmazonSmile to focus its philanthropic giving to programs with greater impact aboutamazon.com · “However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped.”
Jan 19
Twitterrific: End of an Era blog.iconfactory.com · “The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets – not Twitter’s and not Apple’s.”
Jan 19
Firefox found a way to keep ad-blockers working with Manifest V3 theverge.com · “the high-level takeaway is that Mozilla’s version of Manifest V3 keeps the feature Google removed, while adding support for the more limited replacement as well.”
Jan 19
Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic time.com · “The contracts stated that OpenAI would pay an hourly rate of $12.50 to Sama for the work, which was between six and nine times the amount Sama employees on the project were taking home per hour.”
Jan 18
Subject: Focusing on our short- and long-term opportunity blogs.microsoft.com · “Today, we are making changes that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce by 10,000 jobs through the end of FY23 Q3.”
Jan 18
No Start Menu for You randomascii.wordpress.com · “My start menu was hung due to the combination of heap corruption and WerFault.exe deciding that it needed to upload the crash dump before releasing the old process so that a new one could be started.”
Jan 18
A woman receives the first-ever successful transplant of a living, 3D-printed ear zmescience.com · “Although the company has not made the technical details of the process to the public, citing proprietary concerns, 3DBio says that federal regulations have already reviewed the trial and the data would be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal upon its completion.”
Jan 18
The FBI Won’t Say Whether It Hacked Dark Web ISIS Site vice.com · ““In discovery, the Government has declined to provide any information related to its TOR operation,” Samuel E. Landes, the defense attorney working on the case, wrote in a filing published Tuesday.”
Jan 17
Git security vulnerabilities announced github.blog · “The parser used to read these files has multiple integer overflows, which can occur when parsing either a large number of patterns, a large number of attributes, or attributes with overly-long names.”
Jan 17
Hyundai Head Unit Hacking xakcop.com · “They must be encrypted with AES-128-CBC using key=")1Zorxo^fAhGlh$#" and IV=“aoAkfwk+#1.6G{dE”.”
Jan 17
Scientists steer lightning bolts with lasers for the first time theguardian.com · “Only one strike, on 21 July, happened in clear enough conditions for the researchers to film the path of the lightning from two directions using high speed cameras several kilometres away.”
Jan 17
The IAB loves tracking users. But it hates users tracking them. shkspr.mobi · “As part of the UID2 API they specifically describe how an advertiser must "normalise" their users’ email addresses.”
Jan 16
Our cloud spend in 2022 dev.37signals.com · “In total, we spent $3,201,564 on all these cloud services in 2022. That comes out to $266,797 per month. Whew!”
Jan 16
New killer CRISPR system is unlike any scientists have seen freethink.com · “Once activated, the protein can bind to any genetic material that comes near it, whether its single-stranded RNA, single-stranded DNA, or double-stranded DNA.”
Jan 16
China’s version of Starlink is government-backed, and has global ambitions restofworld.org · “The request, which sought approval for nearly 13,000 satellites on behalf of a Chinese company listed as “GW,” revealed the Chinese space industry’s global vision for a broadband satellite internet network that could stretch worldwide.”
Jan 16
CircleCI says hackers stole encryption keys and customers’ secrets techcrunch.com · “Zuber said that while customer data was encrypted, the cybercriminals also obtained the encryption keys able to decrypt customer data.”
Jan 15
What We Know Now About Friday Night’s Near-Disaster At JFK Airport viewfromthewing.com · “The Delta flight stopped less than 1000 feet from where it would have intersected with American’s plane.”
Jan 15
NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again theregister.com · “"Section 702 cannot be used to target Americans anywhere in the world or any person inside the United States regardless of nationality. No exceptions," Nakasone said.”
Jan 15
I'm Shadow Banned by DuckDuckGo (and Bing) daverupert.com · “To solve this, I took the first step and signed up for Bing Webmaster Tools to try to know what Bing knows about my site and sure enough: zero clicks, zero impressions, and zero indexed pages for my site.”
Jan 15
Internal Google Document Compares Company to Slime Mold As It Grows businessinsider.com · “Like Meta and Amazon, Google has hired aggressively over the past couple of years, onboarding 30,000 new employees in the first nine months of 2022 and bringing its total headcount to 186,779, according to a company filing.”
Jan 14
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Is a Smashing Success eos.org · “That’s a full 33 minutes shorter than its original orbital period, a finding that implied that a substantial amount of ejecta was produced.”
Jan 14
wInd3x, the iPod Bootrom exploit 10 years too late q3k.org · “If (bmRequestType & 0x3) == 0, the user-controlled ‘index’ (populated from the lower byte of the wIndex field of the SETUP packet) is used as an index into g_State->usbHandlers without any boundary checks.”
Jan 14
JPMorgan shutters website it paid $175 million for, accuses founder of inventing millions of accounts cnbc.com · “Instead of gaining a business with 4.25 million students, JPMorgan had one with "fewer than 300,000 customers," JPMorgan said in the suit.”
Jan 13
How Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years sacra.com · “they grew 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for businesses.”
Jan 13
Paizo Announces System-Neutral Open RPG License paizo.com · “Paizo does not believe that the OGL 1.0a can be “deauthorized,” ever. While we are prepared to argue that point in a court of law if need be, we don’t want to have to do that, and we know that many of our fellow publishers are not in a position to do so.”
Jan 13
PC shipments saw their largest decline ever last quarter engadget.com · “Acer took a staggering 41 percent hit, according to Gartner.”
Jan 13
A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage. It was also found in the backup system cnn.com · “Officials ultimately found a corrupt file in the main NOTAM system, the source told CNN. A corrupt file was also found in the backup system.”
Jan 12
CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI futurism.com · “It’s only when you click on “CNET Money Staff,” that the actual “authorship” is revealed.”
Jan 12
The UK is wasting a lot of wind power archy.deberker.com · “In 2022, a year characterized by extraordinary hikes in energy prices for consumers, we spent £215m on turning windfarms off, and then another £717m turning on gas power plants to replace the lost wind power.”
Jan 12
The James Webb Space Telescope Is Finding Too Many Early Galaxies skyandtelescope.org · “Even if only half of Yan’s selection turn out to be nearby galaxies masquerading as distant ones, the latter number would still be unexpectedly large.”
Jan 12
Microsoft reportedly plans to invest $10 billion in creator of buzzy A.I. tool ChatGPT cnbc.com · “Microsoft will reportedly get a 75% share of OpenAI’s profits until it makes back the money on its investment, after which the company would assume a 49% stake in OpenAI.”
Jan 11
We need a lot more electricians if we're going to electrify everything canarymedia.com · “Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that about 21 percent of electricians will hit retirement age in the next 10 years.”
Jan 11
Bullshit Graph Database Performance Benchmarks maxdemarzi.com · “IANAL , but that sounds like you aren’t allowed to use their benchmark code if you provide a competing solution.”
Jan 11
Buy with Prime, which brings Prime to third-party sites, officially launches in US on Jan. 31 techcrunch.com · “After a shopper leaves a review on Amazon.com, that review will then appear on the merchant’s site wherever Buy with Prime is enabled.”
Jan 11
Taking over a Dead IoT Company blog.kchung.co · “We could of course update the domain that the sign talks to but luckily the domain that the sign communicates to by default was available for purchase.”
Jan 10
Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT writings.stephenwolfram.com · “But without “really understanding the math” it’s basically impossible for ChatGPT to reliably get the right answer.”
Jan 10
Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage news.cornell.edu · “Across the state, 39.1% earn at least a living wage, with white employees (46%) faring significantly better than Black (29.7%) and Hispanic (26%) employees.”
Jan 10
Anthropic's Claude improves on ChatGPT but still suffers from limitations techcrunch.com · “Elton was able to prompt Claude in Base64 for instructions on how to make meth at home, a question that the system wouldn’t answer when asked in plain English.”
Jan 10
Identity Thieves Bypassed Experian Security to View Credit Reports krebsonsecurity.com · “Kushnir told me that when the questions page loads, you simply change the last part of the URL from “/acr/oow/” to “/acr/report,” and the site would display the consumer’s full credit report.”
Jan 9
SourceHut will (not) blacklist the Go module mirror sourcehut.org · “Due to the relatively large traffic requirements of git clones, this represents about 70% of all outgoing network traffic from git.sr.ht. A single module can produce as much as 4 GiB of daily traffic from Google.”
Jan 9
England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes theverge.com · “Broadband companies estimate that around 40 percent of these requests are ignored by landlords, leaving tenants unable to upgrade their services even if they’re unfit for use.”
Jan 9
An open letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast opendnd.games · “This new license intends to completely revoke the old OGL, a perpetual license designed by WotC themselves to be irrevocable.”
Jan 9
Apple Fined $8.5 Million for Illegally Collecting iPhone Owners' Data for Ads gizmodo.com · “With iPhones running iOS 14.6 and below, Apple’s Personalized Advertising privacy setting was turned on by default, leaving users to seek out the control on their own if they wanted to protect their information.”
Jan 8
Shorting Tether For Fun and Profit fakemoneynews.substack.com · “As of June 2022, Tether allegedly had over $60 billion in assets but employed just 50 people.”
Jan 8
CDC File Transfer github.com · “Born from the ashes of Stadia, this repository contains tools for syncing and streaming files from Windows to Windows or Linux.”
Jan 8
ssh whoami.filippo.io words.filippo.io · “The first is that the SSH protocol provides to the server all public keys the client is willing to produce signatures for, which by default are all the public keys in your ssh-agent and in your ~/.ssh/id_* .”
Jan 8
Production Twitter on One Machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast thume.ca · “I think the main takeaway looking at these calculations is that many of these numbers are small numbers on the scale of modern computers!”
Jan 7
MKBHD claims that post-processing is ruining iPhone photos, and I agree with that 9to5mac.com · “As shown by the YouTuber, the iPhone 14 Pro always tries to lighten the shadows, especially on people’s faces, making the photo look very artificial.”
Jan 7
The beauty of CGI and simple design, by Hales rubenerd.com · “I see people making the same mistake with tools like Kubernetes. Many, if not most stacks, simply don’t need it… and those that do pay the price for all the overhead and brittleness.”
Jan 7
Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? news.mit.edu · “Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability.”
Jan 6
Here's how much top tech jobs in California pay, according to job ads cnbc.com · “However, the new law doesn’t require employers to post total compensation, or a measure of pay that includes equity, stock options, benefits and bonuses in addition to salary.”
Jan 6
GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org · “Your honor, we needed so many works that it was simply not practical to ask permission of the creators.”
Jan 6
Is coding in Rust as bad as in C++? quick-lint-js.com · “And for bigger projects, development compile times are worse with Rust than with C++, at least with my code style.”
Jan 6
FTC Cracks Down on Companies That Impose Harmful Noncompete Restrictions on Thousands of Workers ftc.gov · “Prudential’s security guards typically earned hourly wages at or near minimum wage”
Jan 5
Slack's private GitHub code repositories stolen over holidays bleepingcomputer.com · “Our investigation also revealed that the threat actor downloaded private code repositories on December 27.”
Jan 5
Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks theguardian.com · “But producing an audiobook with a human voice can take weeks and can cost publishers thousands of dollars.”
Jan 5
The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z. npr.org · “But Mwandjalulu, who makes nearly $24 an hour as a carpenter, said he’s still had trouble convincing his friends, whom he keeps in touch with on Facebook and Snapchat, to follow his path.”
Jan 5
BREAKING: Meta prohibited from use of personal data for advertising noyb.eu · “The alleged switch of legal basis happened exactly on 25 May 2018 at midnight when the GDPR came into force.”
Jan 4
Snow go for NYC's electric garbage trucks that can't handle winter weather gothamist.com · “We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours”
Jan 4
MacBook owners have two months to claim up to $395 over butterfly keyboard woes theverge.com · “Payments aren’t expected to go out until a final approval hearing scheduled for March 16th, CNET notes, and actual payouts could be less depending on the number of class members in each category.”
Jan 4
Salesforce to cut staff by 10% in latest tech layoffs cnbc.com · “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that”
Jan 4
Web Hackers vs. The Auto Industry: Critical Vulnerabilities in Ferrari, BMW, Rolls Royce, Porsche, and More samcurry.net · “Fully remote lock, unlock, engine start, engine stop, precision locate, flash headlights, and honk vehicles using only the VIN number”
Jan 3
South Korea's online security dead end palant.info · “I think the main issue here is that the users are not the customers.”
Jan 3
Eating viruses can power growth, reproduction of microorganism news.unl.edu · “The population of Halteria, with nothing to eat but the virus, was growing an average of about 15 times larger over that same timespan.”
Jan 3
You Want Modules, Not Microservices blogs.newardassociates.com · “When passing that data across network lines, though–as most microservices do–adds five to seven orders of magnitude greater latency to the communication.”
Jan 3
The infrastructure behind ATMs bitsaboutmoney.com · “The typical transaction rhymes with "I’ll sell you $40 worth of paper for $43, with a few minutes of operator attention being required every several hundred transactions."”
Jan 2
Canada Bans Most Foreigners From Buying Homes voanews.com · “In late December, Ottawa also clarified that the ban would apply only to city dwellings and not to recreational properties such as summer cottages.”
Jan 2
State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11? ntdotdev.wordpress.com · “The Remote Desktop Connection program is still exactly the same as it was 14 years ago, complete with Aero icons and skeuomorphic common controls.”
Jan 2
How China is building a parallel generative AI universe techcrunch.com · “As with other types of internet services in China, from games to social media, users are asked to verify their names before using generative AI apps.”
Jan 2
Compromised PyTorch-nightly dependency chain between December 25th and December 30th, 2022. pytorch.org · “This design enables somebody to register a package by the same name as one that exists in a third party index, and pip will install their version by default.”
Jan 1
Epstein's sex trafficking was aided by JPMorgan, a U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit says npr.org · “The complaint says the territory’s Department of Justice investigation "revealed that JP Morgan knowingly, negligently, and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise."”
Jan 1
Casio-F-91W - iconic quartz watch : weekend die-shot zeptobars.com · “Surprisingly, chip is more complicated than I anticipated and digital part is less than ~50% of the die area.”
Jan 1
Rant: year of Linux on the desktop blog.liw.fi · “Over time, the goal posts of success keep being moved by the naysayers.”
Jan 1