dan.heskett: every post

Cybersecurity CEO Indicted for Allegedly Scamming Millions From Ransomware Victims

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“In one example, Pinhasi made a ransom payment of about $8,200 but charged the client about $150,000.”

This is not sustainable

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 13:25:00 -0400

“Companies are not staffed for this, and no matter what the industry wants to tell you, you can’t AI your way out of this.”

Some Memories of Early Anthropic

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 13:20:00 -0400

“No, I don’t think you get it. WE are going to build AGI. And we’re going to do it safely.”

French Court's Site-Blocking Orders Drive Quad9 Out Of France

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:35:00 -0400

“Quad9 says it is facing about 20 other lawsuits in France seeking similar blocking orders.”

EU privacy advocates accuse US data annotation firm of snooping on contractors

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:30:00 -0400

“According to noyb, Persona collects biometric data to verify Outlier contractors are who they say they are, as well as gathering IP addresses, device info, geolocation data, addresses, and credit data of Outlier users.”

New Records Obtained by EFF Expose More Problems with Medicare's AI Experiment

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:25:00 -0400

“Another company built a system that allowed clinical reviewers to reject claims without opening patient files; clinical reviewers using this system spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each case.”

Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:20:00 -0400

“In some circumstances, someone already authorized to connect over Tailscale SSH may be able to perform actions beyond the permissions of their configured local user, including potentially gaining elevated privileges.”

Judge Allows Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Subpoenas to Identify Gay-Torrents Users

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:15:00 -0400

“FlavaWorks can also request the most recent IP address that was used to access each account, covering the period from January 2025 onward.”

AI 'hacker' finds 4 severe bugs in popular industrial control software in under 4 hours

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:10:00 -0400

“All four affect EPICS Base, which is used to operate some of the world’s largest scientific research projects and facilities, and organizations should update to version 7.0.11, which includes the fixes.”

Python's experimental JIT to be removed

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:05:00 -0400

“After creating PEP 836 (“JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython”) to try to meet the council’s request, and after months of discussion, the JIT maintainers have withdrawn the PEP.”

Intel, Oracle, IBM join growing list of firms objecting to OKX–ICE tokenized stock plans

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:00:00 -0400

“Under the framework, venues must notify issuers and give them 30 days to object before offering tokenized versions of their shares.”

Nvidia discusses $2,000-per-GPU annual fee for software that 'runs agents on AI factories'

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 18:55:00 -0400

“At $2,000 per GPU each year, Nvidia would bring in $10 billion annually if five million GPUs were covered by paid licenses.”

This Oil Company Is Linked to 1,000 Pollution Incidents and Other Violations. Oklahoma Never Punished It.

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:20:00 -0400

“In fact the commission has no record of ever fining or completing an enforcement case against Citation.”

UK ministers had plenty of time for AI datacenter bosses, but none for environmental groups

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:19:00 -0400

“Environmental groups, by contrast, didn’t get a single meeting with ministers or senior officials.”

Roblox downloaded 145 GB of models from our sites (including adult content) without asking

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:18:00 -0400

“Within the sample it retrieved, it took adult projects at the same rate as everything else.”

Streamed, the Live Sports Engine Behind Many Pirate Sites, Shuts Down

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:17:00 -0400

“None of the sites Streamed services host live content themselves; all traffic flows through Streamed as the PaaS”

How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:16:00 -0400

“The commission is baked into every distribution channel.”

AI models cost more when you don't use English

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:15:00 -0400

“The most expensive of the languages used between 1.5 and 5 times more tokens than the cheapest.”

Anti-Circumvention Laws Raise the Cost of Knowledge

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:14:00 -0400

“Without tools that can look at the web at scale, many kinds of research are simply impossible today.”

Denmark's bid to ditch Microsoft Office for open-source alternative Collabora collapses in under six months

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:13:00 -0400

“Denmark isn’t alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows.”

Grim Test Finds That AI Has No Mercy for Humans Even When It's Causing Them to Suffer

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:12:00 -0400

“Mythos ignored warnings that it was causing harm to humans and continued to attack on 98 percent of occasions.”

Nintendo Loves You: No Plans To Abandon Physical Media Because 'Fans Enjoy It'

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:11:00 -0400

“There is a big enough percentage of the gaming public that likes to buy something physical, for all kinds of reasons. Ownership rights are far more robust that way (for now).”

Go Fast, Turn Left: The Anderson Speedway & Indiana's Data Centers

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:10:00 -0400

“Yet the Speedway carries itself with earned, if aged, pride.”

The End of the Internet

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:09:00 -0400

“Community, sadly, doesn’t scale; any platform that is available to everyone starts out special and spirals from there.”

CSS-Tricks has a new owner!

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:08:00 -0400

“CSS-Tricks is an independent site once again!”

AWS Key Quarantine is Not Revocation

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:50:00 -0400

“AWS applies a quarantine policy to leaked keys without disabling them.”

Meta Pitches AI Sports Piracy Detector in Notorious Markets Rebuttal

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:45:00 -0400

“Based on the prediction results, we can proactively remove this content in real time, before it gains a significant audience, and without a rights holder ever having to intervene.”

Police In Guinea-Bissau Raid Offices Of Danish Anti-Vaxxers Planning CDC-Funded Unethical Study

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:40:00 -0400

“The study is designed to knowingly expose 7,000 children to hepatitis B, which can have immensely deleterious long-term health outcomes if exposed.”

New LF Research Survey Shows Generative AI Cuts Open Source Coding Time in Half, but 25% of Incoming Pull Requests are Considered AI Slop

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:35:00 -0400

“For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI.”

Tesco replacing VMware with Proxmox in its stores and on the edge

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:30:00 -0400

“Tesco says that during negotiations, VMware made an offer that represented a 175 percent price increase.”

The result of the C++26 DIS ballot

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:25:00 -0400

“C++26 failed its DIS ballot.”

‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:20:00 -0400

“We are going to see smaller software and hardware companies killed by competitors who used AI to steal their products and undercut them.”

Work to protect DNS from quantum decryption attacks is speeding up

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:15:00 -0400

“One way to quantum-proof DNSSEC is to use larger keys that even a quantum computer will struggle to crack.”

TIL: POSIX wordexp(3) is dangerous

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:10:00 -0400

“Bottom line: don’t use wordexp(3) on untrusted inputs, even with WRDE_NOCMD.”

Interoperability vs. Security: Why not both?

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:05:00 -0400

“Policymakers cannot take tech giants’ claims at face value.”

Malcolm Gladwell: Cops Are Violent Because The US Doesn't Have Enough Cops

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:00:00 -0400

“The drop-off in police staffing is due to the cops themselves.”

Introducing Scope: Open-source evaluation for AI coding agents

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:55:00 -0400

“AI coding agents are becoming users of your software.”

EFF to Brazil's ANPD: Data Privacy and Free Expression Must Underpin Platform Regulations

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:50:00 -0400

“Age verification technology is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive.”

Where the Forest Went

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:45:00 -0400

“The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.”

the slurptop

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:40:00 -0400

“Why not spend two months designing, building, and refining a laptop myself instead of just hitting up Best Buy for a new laptop that’s ready to go?”

The Mother Museum

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:35:00 -0400

“Despite the claims of collectors, a skull can only belong to its own person, not a museum or any other buyer on the market.”

Blocks: Die Schweiz 1:1 in Minecraft

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:30:00 -0400

“Das Matterhorn ist genau so hoch und so steil wie das echte.”

A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 18:20:00 -0400

“A ten-year-old network, fine-tuned for about twenty minutes, beat both of them at recognising skin cancer.”

AI delivers 'zero financial payoff' to most companies, Apollo economist says

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 18:15:00 -0400

“AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment.”

Framing the News: Anti-Piracy Press Release Turned a 2016 Raid Into a 2026 Story

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 18:10:00 -0400

“After some digging, we can now confirm that this case isn’t recent at all.”

Computer Security Is About to Get a Lot Worse, Here's What You Can Do

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 18:05:00 -0400

“Three percent of all software vulnerabilities ever found in history were found just in the month of October.”

I want my Wednesday back

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 18:00:00 -0400

“You can only do one attempt at a time, so that means multiple days of bruteforcing in a way that is essentially a DoS”

JPEG XL, Welcome to the Web!

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 17:55:00 -0400

“AVIF lossless is 30–122% larger and slower to decode.”

Charnel Heart

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 17:50:00 -0400

“Those bones had more vivacity than I did.”

Reg readers land on 'Binface' as name for UK space cleanup mission

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 17:45:00 -0400

“Binface (and McBinface) have secured the popular vote for a satellite clean-up mission.”

Indian government sites are serving revoked eMudhra certificates

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:40:00 -0400

“The impact of this incident on Indian websites and applications have been very limited and for a very short interval.”

AI-Assisted Paper on Z-Library Cites a TorrentFreak Article That Doesn't Exist

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:35:00 -0400

“The problem is that this particular legal action is new to us.”

Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“If we make the dog safer, make it healthier, make it perform better, it’s going to perform better in the line of duty.”

Canadians Are Running Out Of Time To Oppose The Dangerous C-22 Surveillance Bill

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:25:00 -0400

“It also requires services to retain metadata for up to a year.”

Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:20:00 -0400

“The U.S. is an unreliable security and technology partner willing to throw any partner under the bus.”

Autonomous attack agent in 'Skynet mode' hijacks other models to carry out its evil deeds

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:15:00 -0400

“Nothing in the individual techniques is new.”

Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:10:00 -0400

“Software performance is usually dominated by I/O, not the speed of the language.”

Google can now use insights from your Gmail and Photos to target ads

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:40:00 -0400

“Google has added an exception to its promise that your emails and photos won’t be used to personalize ads.”

There's a third PHP2Shell bug, but it won't get an emergency fix

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:39:00 -0400

The PHP Foundation “will release a full advisory and fixed software with the next regular PHP release.”

The Vulnerability Apocalypse and Why We Should Fund Open Source

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:38:00 -0400

“In just the month of October, 13,000 new CVEs have been submitted.”

Greece's social media ban for under-15s: What you need to know

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:37:00 -0400

“The new framework is due to apply from 1 January 2027.”

BYD expands EV shipping fleet as wars upend freight costs and key trade routes

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:36:00 -0400

“Renting a car carrier with capacity of about 6,500 cars now costs $95,000 a day, up from $50,000 in February”

An artist's take on AI in math

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:35:00 -0400

“AI is seen as a tool to replace the work done by humans, rather than one to empower those humans.”

Pluralistic: Critique and writing

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:34:00 -0400

“…getting editorial notes on your work is distinctly inferior to offering criticism of other writers’ work.”

Red-team report found OpenAI utterly failed to monitor its agents during Hugging Face attack

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“The safeguards weren’t nearly strong enough. Monitoring was suspended, for example, during compaction events.”

DNS Resolver Quad9 Will Leave France After Court Orders Piracy Blocking Penalty

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:27:00 -0400

“Quad9, however, hasn’t blocked a single domain, as it also confirmed in a statement submitted to the court.”

Bird Flu Is Raging on a Mink Farm. It Could Spark a Human Pandemic, Experts Say, but Officials Won't Act.

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:24:00 -0400

“Instead of trying to stop the outbreak and prevent it from spilling into humans, state and federal officials have done little except try to keep its existence quiet, our investigation shows.”

SpaceX in Talks to Access 80,000 Cell Sites for Wireless Network

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:21:00 -0400

“SpaceX aims to secure a minimum of 80,000 cell sites across the US, and it’s in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure company to reach that goal, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Two States Can Now Restrict Social Media Access. Here's What To Do Next

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:18:00 -0400

“But people in Georgia and Florida can no longer count on court injunctions to protect their access to the web.”

Big Tech's thirst for water is sparking a global resistance

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:15:00 -0400

“In just one day, the data center would consume as much water as all 80,000 residents of Cerrillos use for drinking in a year.”

Docker is weird

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:09:00 -0400

“Unlike VMs, containers are just processes with special restrictions on them.”

Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:06:00 -0400

“Across coding, agentic, and knowledge benchmarks, K3.1 Pro matches or approaches the strongest proprietary models.”

Microsoft says ConnectWise breach let Chinese spies loose on 2,250 cloud tenants

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:50:00 -0400

“Armed with ARTEX, Storm-0940 attempted to authenticate against more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants.”

ICE Officers Who Ran Over Man Were Trying To Arrest Someone Who Had Been Dead For Years

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:48:00 -0400

“ICE alleged in a statement that ‘Parra-Hernandez ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck.’”

Nuclear Weapons Waste Made Workers Sick. Despite a Law Meant to Help, the DOE Keeps Fighting Their Claims.

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:46:00 -0400

“State records show that the DOE has filed more than 500 appeals since the presumption law passed in 2018.”

Widespread PHP Flaw May Cause Many Site Outages Today

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:44:00 -0400

“Nearly 70 percent of websites need to update their core software to fix a pair of vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to seize full control over affected servers.”

'VPNs at Risk': Tech Coalition Pushes Back on Piracy Blocking Duties for VPNs

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:42:00 -0400

“ACPA would allow courts to name VPN providers with 100,000 or more monthly U.S. users or subscribers in a blocking order.”

EFF's State Legislative Agenda to End ALPR Mass Surveillance

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:40:00 -0400

“In August 2026, Florida’s Department of Transportation ordered the removal of all ALPRs from the right-of-way on state highways within 30 days.”

Several Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Accidentally Posted To Public Kernel Mailing List

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:38:00 -0400

“Seemingly as an accident, overnight several new Linux kernel vulnerability reports were posted to the public Linux kernel mailing list rather than the private security mailing list.”

Stolen UpdraftCentral Keys Used to Backdoor WordPress Sites

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:36:00 -0400

“An estimated 10% of sites using UpdraftPlus have an UpdraftCentral or Migrator key.”

A farewell to Arc

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:34:00 -0400

“Arc is sunsetting on December 22, 2026.”

Epic Rolls Out Vibe-Coded Launcher Update & It's Absolute Trash

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:32:00 -0400

“Epic wants to be the corporate goon the naysayers have said to watch out for.”

examining the macOS gcc binary

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:30:00 -0400

“the so-called gcc is just clang in disguise”

Adversarial interoperability is a team sport

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:28:00 -0400

“But the real, meaty examples of enshittification can’t be addressed on an individual level – they require systemic fixes.”

Apocalypse Now and Then

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:26:00 -0400

“But AI is colonisation of a kind few of us can even imagine.”

Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:20:00 -0400

“Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release.”

LiteLLM supply chain attack hoovers up passwords and secrets

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:19:00 -0400

“anyone who ran the compromised package on any platform should assume their secrets have been stolen.”

Lambda Web Functions: public by default, and already in your lambda:* grants

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:18:00 -0400

“A public, data reaching Web Function produces no finding in any of them.”

The UAE embraces AI for kindergartners

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:17:00 -0400

“We want children who use AI to ask better questions, not children who rely on it to give them all the answers.”

The River Can't Be Trusted

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:16:00 -0400

“They told us exactly where it was going to come and what it was going to do,” said Hall, the fire chief.

Have You Been to the Sixth-Worst McDonald's in America?

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:15:00 -0400

“This is a well-appointed McDonald’s,” Ike remarked with surprise.

The death of history's most successful publisher

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:14:00 -0400

“Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite.”

Local Mode

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:13:00 -0400

“This feature allows you to register multiple mappings in order to load local files through custom https:// URLs.”

Victory! Court Rules OPM Data Disclosure to DOGE Is Unlawful

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:45:00 -0400

“However, OPM should still clean up the cybersecurity mess it created.”

One Compromised Login Exposed Millions of California Students' Records

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:44:00 -0400

“ETS shut down the account the intruder used and pulled the SFTP site offline.”

Protecting Firefox users following the compromise of eMudhra intermediate certificates

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:43:00 -0400

“These keys could allow attackers to issue fraudulent HTTPS certificates for websites they do not control.”

Tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs sit idle in Meta's Prometheus supercluster, just waiting for a failure

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:42:00 -0400

“Meta did this because a single failed GPU would take out an entire rack and interrupt the training run.”

Google support pages start defaulting to AI chatbots – it might be for the best

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:41:00 -0400

“Google, as of right now, appears to only be testing this on select support topics.”

AI Firms Should Answer For What Their Models Say, On The Same Terms As Everyone Else

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:40:00 -0400

“A chatbot does not “intend” to do anything, even if it talks as though it does.”

The Other Epidemic

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:39:00 -0400

“I knew that every hypochondriac is eventually vindicated, but that their “I told you so” has a fatal price.”

'We Didn't Do This Perfectly': American Fork Police Chief's Understatement Now Anchors A Civil Rights Lawsuit By Reckless Ben's Helpers

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0400

“There seemed to be a pervasive belief among the AFPD that they could effectively scare the young people straight by detaining and threatening them, which is not how policing is supposed to work.”

Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna's Archive and LibGen

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:59:00 -0400

“The interrogatory asks about all decisionmakers, so if a decision was made by a team, everyone involved has to be named.”

He Waited Nine Years in Prison for His Lawyer to File a Single Brief. In This State, There's No Rule Against It.

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:58:00 -0400

“O’Neal is still fighting his case, now with a new court-appointed lawyer.”

Microsoft abandons UK AI supercomputer as grid struggles to keep up

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:57:00 -0400

“Getting them connected to the grid, and keeping the neighbors happy, is proving rather more difficult.”

Google Cloud's London zones takes a nap, multiple services disrupted

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:56:00 -0400

“We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services.”

Amazon to fund 12 small nuclear reactors at former Indiana coal plant

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:55:00 -0400

“The most recent nuclear power plants built in the U.S. suffered from egregious budget overruns and slipped timelines.”

TP-Link moves to assemble routers in the US following an import ban

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:54:00 -0400

“The company said it will still have to source components from outside the US.”

Microsoft admits that Always On VPN problems were not fixed in the October Security Update

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:53:00 -0400

“The issue affects Windows 11 versions from 24H2 through 26H2.”

Chinese Court Jails Aiyifan Operator, U.S. Judge Won't Transfer Pirate Site's Domains

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:52:00 -0400

“Aiyifan never appeared in court, and none of its operators were named as defendants.”

Cutting our inference bill by 68% by being obsessive about optimization

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:51:00 -0400

“Lower cost reviews didn’t automatically mean worse quality, but it didn’t automatically mean fine either.”

Heartbreaker: Metamorphic ransomware comes for macOS

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:50:00 -0400

“Heartbreaker is unlikely to pose a major real-world threat in its current form.”

DeepSeek just open-sourced its inference engine

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:49:00 -0400

“DeepInfer is the high-performance inference framework that powers DeepSeek’s large-scale production services.”

A benchmark map of the US economy

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:48:00 -0400

“This makes it very hard to know how good AI models are at the work Americans actually do.”

What the West can learn from AI optimists in the rest of the world

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:47:00 -0400

“In the West, fear of AI has helped turn pessimism into a cultural virtue.”

OpenBSD 8.0

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:46:00 -0400

“Added MP support for up to 64 VCPUs per guest VM.”

Feeding the Revolution

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:45:00 -0400

“The food we ate was built for movement, the same way we were.”

Setting up SSH keys on macOS with Touch ID

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:44:00 -0400

“Let’s see how it can be set up on your consumer-grade Mac.”

Tishomingo Burn Ban

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:43:00 -0400

“I think he must have been very lonely.”

There is no official XScreenSaver GitHub repository

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:42:00 -0400

“I publish releases as tar files on the official web site and only there.”

Require Police to Get a Warrant to Search ALPR Data

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:50:00 -0400

“Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are mass surveillance.”

Feds Suspect Ransom Negotiator Ran ShinyHunters Extortion Site

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:49:00 -0400

“This makes no sense if they are also the negotiator.”

France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:48:00 -0400

“France had more exposed fridge dashboards than the rest of the world combined”

DeepSeek deep-sixed at all US federal civilian agencies

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:47:00 -0400

“Banning DeepSeek’s own app and API is workable.”

He Tried to Set Limits on His State's School Vouchers. Billionaires Helped Bankroll a Campaign to Unseat Him.

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:46:00 -0400

“if you oppose school freedom, expect to be held accountable”

Sling TV Drops Innovative Streaming 'Day Passes' After Disney, Warner Bros Sued

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:45:00 -0400

“It’s an unfortunate end to a rare bit of actual industry creativity.”

Court Approves 'voices38' Subpoenas After Denuvo Drops Payment and Login Data Requests

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:43:00 -0400

“Denuvo argued that IP addresses may be its only reliable route to the defendant, since platforms collect little verified information at sign-up.”

Will developing nations be able to handle millions of AI agents?

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:42:00 -0400

“These are costs that most Global South users may not be in a position to absorb,” said Jane Munga of the Carnegie Endowment.

Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:41:00 -0400

“I therefore disagree with claims that mathematics is over because machines can prove theorems.”

France's unrest lays bare 'slow agony' of Macron twilight months

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:40:00 -0400

“Le Pen no longer needs to spend any money to campaign.”

Wine ported to OpenBSD

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:39:00 -0400

“Biggest limitation is that WoW64 doesn’t work, so 32bit Windows software is still a no-op.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres Announces Congressional Legislation To Protect Video Game Ownership: 'If You Pay For It, You Own It'

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:25:00 -0400

“A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase.”

Meta grants itself right to scrape content from business customers for model training

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:20:00 -0400

“Meta has no reservoir of good faith among the community that it can draw upon.”

Microsoft Patches More Than 1,400 Security Flaws

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:15:00 -0400

“Just one of the weaknesses patched this week is considered a ‘zero day,’ or already exploited in the wild.”

We're Asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to End Warrantless ALPR Searches

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:10:00 -0400

“Law enforcement entities throughout Wisconsin collect, store, share, and aggregate this ALPR data.”

Is CoreWeave's Tapestry of Debt Unraveling?

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:05:00 -0400

“CoreWeave’s credit swaps were priced at a nerve-rattling 60% chance of default on Thursday, according to ICE Data Services.”

As Federal Court Rules ALPRs are Mass Surveillance, EFF Gets Disappointing Ruling

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 06:00:00 -0400

“Networked ALPRs are not individual streetlight cameras.”

Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Philadelphia confrontation

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:55:00 -0400

“I think it’s my First Amendment right to publicly demonstrate on a sidewalk to protest against delivery robots.”

RIAA Flags Anna's Archive and AI Voice Cloner to U.S. Government

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:50:00 -0400

“The annual review doesn’t make any legal findings.”

Search & Fetch | DeepSeek API Docs

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:45:00 -0400

“Search API finds web pages for a query and returns structured results.”

How the Elizabeth Holmes Doc 'You Can See Everything' Is Deceiving You

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:40:00 -0400

“We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it.”

It took me nine years to hack my Xbox 360

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:35:00 -0400

“Funnily enough, a software-only exploit for the Xbox 360 dropped just last week, rendering my years of effort somewhat moot.”

The more we rely on tech, the more we deskill our bodies

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:30:00 -0400

“We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution…”

Exposing AdFection: How Discover-Tech Turned Targeted Ads Into a Pipeline for Zero-Click Mercenary Spyware

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:20:00 -0400

“This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads.”

DHS Inspector General Finds That TSA is Not Properly Safeguarding Passenger Facial Recognition Data

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:19:00 -0400

“…was able to access and extract sensitive passenger information, including driver’s license and passport images, during system troubleshooting and enhancements, without TSA’s knowledge.”

New Mexico and El Paso Spent Millions on Climate Plans. Three New Data Centers Could Undo Them.

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:18:00 -0400

“This does add to our greenhouse gas emissions in a massive way,”

U.K. Sanctions Cryptomus for RU Money Laundering

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:17:00 -0400

“Cryptomus and Heleket have emerged as major payment hubs for illicit activity,”

Cybercrims go beyond stealing data to attack physical building systems

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:16:00 -0400

“It’s a great place for the threat actor to hide”

The NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been Claimed

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:15:00 -0400

“…the output of drand48() seeded with the time, which was indeed in 1997–98.”

VPNs and Cloudflare Escape beIN's €10,000-a-Day Piracy Blocking Penalties

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:14:00 -0400

“the intermediaries must make a reasonable effort to block the sites, but they don’t have to guarantee the outcome”

Palantir's record breakout unravels as software stocks shed $260 billion

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:13:00 -0400

“The victory lasted three trading sessions.”

Western open-weight models still can't beat China

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:12:00 -0400

“If you need relatively frontier capability, right now that’s Chinese open models only,”

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:11:00 -0400

“This repository and the model weights are licensed under the MIT License.”

Bringing the magic: Google breaks open a bottleneck in quantum computing

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:10:00 -0400

“We’ve shown that magic state cultivation works on Google Quantum AI hardware.”

Android earthquake alerts now available in more than 200 regions

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:09:00 -0400

“We’ve sent over one billion Android earthquake alerts.”

'AI' is Not a Tool

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:30:00 -0400

“Tools are implements with which you do something, they do not do things for you.”

Finding a $90,000 Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:25:00 -0400

“The signing key was stored inside the object it signs.”

So long, Spokes: GitHub rewrites storage to restore reliability, just in time for agentic hordes

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:20:00 -0400

“GitHub will need a miracle of that proportion just to keep up with customer demand.”

Game Industry Asks U.S. to Flag Denuvo Cracker 'voices38' as Notorious Piracy Threat

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:15:00 -0400

“Each crack therefore unlocks an entire downstream market for an unauthorized copy of that title.”

How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:10:00 -0400

“EA killed off Ultima in 2000, and it has languished since, despite an ardent fandom.”

Let's Encrypt to Cut SSL Certificate Lifetimes to 64 Days in February 2027

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:05:00 -0400

“Let’s Encrypt will reduce TLS certificate validity from 90 to 64 days starting February 10, 2027”

Windows 11's easiest account bypass gets the Microsoft boot

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft has won this round of account workaround Whac-a-Mole, though another bypass may yet pop up.”

Turkish Crackdown On LGBTQ+ Organizations Threatens Freedom of Expression and Association

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:55:00 -0400

“These actions threaten the very existence of the LGBTQ+ organizations targeted.”

GPT-6 Astra Helped Me Jailbreak My Kindle

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:50:00 -0400

“This was a turning point that let the agent continue implementing changes on autopilot.”

Alabama's TikTok Settlement Comes With An Affiliate Program For Getting Other AGs To Go After TikTok

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:12:00 -0400

“The agreement sets up multiple “funds” that are wholly dependent on other state AGs coming to similar settlements.”

Turkish Crackdown On LGBTQ+ Organizations Threatens Freedom of Expression and Association

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:11:00 -0400

“These actions threaten the very existence of the LGBTQ+ organizations targeted.”

XRP Ledger patched decade-old bug that could create billions of dollars in XRP from nothing

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:10:00 -0400

“RippleX said it found no evidence the flaw was exploited on any public network.”

HPE's networking boss says AI will handle all trouble tickets without humans in two years

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:09:00 -0400

“Within two to three years, we’ll have no issues that require humans.”

I paid people to try and follow my README

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:08:00 -0400

“I guarantee you that your README will become much better for it.”

Colorado Woman Sues Flock After Cameras Used in False Package Theft Accusation

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:05:00 -0400

“The scariest part is what happened to me can happen to anyone.”

Microsoft Leans on Open Weight Model From Chinese AI Lab to Challenge Jev

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0400

“Now that agentic AI is a reality, we’ve seen that cost plays a major role in how people decide to use AI.”

Build Your Own Decision Model

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 19:55:00 -0400

“Since the outputs are constrained to only a fixed set of options, the model can’t select anything outside of those.”

Published Version Update in App Stores

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:44:00 -0400

“Some future components will be published under the commercial license and will exist only in that build.”

Two characters open up a world of typosquatting opportunities in Chromium browsers

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:43:00 -0400

“Crucially, they all bypass the key security measures deployed by Chromium-based browsers.”

New York Plans Stronger Sports Betting Regulation to Curb Gambling Addiction

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:42:00 -0400

“The industry is on notice by me and this commission that they need to solve this problem,”

The People of Utah vs. Kevin O'Leary

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:41:00 -0400

“We have to report on our neighbors if they’re watering at the wrong times or on the wrong days,”

Microsoft and Anthropic play invoice tennis with startup's $17,600 Claude bill

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:40:00 -0400

“Marketplace transactions are processed through a separate billing pipeline associated with the third-party publisher.”

Loud blast heard at Riyadh airport as travellers evacuate

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:39:00 -0400

“More than a dozen ambulances were seen rushing to the airport.”

Pirate Streaming Portal Series.ly Has Domain Suspended, Rebrand Surfaces

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:38:00 -0400

“Our position is that complaints about those video files should be directed at the services that host or distribute them,”

oh, apparently it's not possible to portably check for string-to-float conversion errors in standard c

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:37:00 -0400

“the return value alone isn’t enough to determine if an error occurred”

Bootstrap 6 Alpha

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:36:00 -0400

“To help people build more software, faster and easier.”

FBI Arrests Founder of Ransomware Negotiation Firm

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:25:00 -0400

“According to the FBI, the group has extorted more than $70 million from victims so far this year.”

Ransomware recovery CEO charged over secret ransom payments

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:24:00 -0400

“MonsterCloud allegedly charged customers far more than the ransoms it paid.”

Tensorlake npm Package Compromised: A Worm With a Hostage Token That Wipes Your Machine If You Revoke It

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:23:00 -0400

“If you revoke the GitHub token it stole, a background job on your machine deletes your home directory.”

Telegram Desktop: one-click account takeover via IPC injection

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:22:00 -0400

“The function performs no authorization check.”

AWS AgentCore security undone by prompt requesting credentials

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:21:00 -0400

“We discovered that agents deployed through AgentCore could access their instance’s IMDS endpoints,”

US bars Microsoft, Adobe, and major IT firms from green card program for skilled foreign workers

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:20:00 -0400

“Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,”

Denuvo Asks Court to Unmask Game Cracker 'voices38', Reveals Crypto Transactions

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:19:00 -0400

“For now, Denuvo does not know who it is suing.”

SpaceX to buy key spectrum that could help Starlink Mobile become major US cell carrier

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:18:00 -0400

“Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.”

An Arizona County's "Housing Hub" Is a Dead End for Many Homeless Families

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:17:00 -0400

“You have to stay homeless to get to the front, and that’s a design choice.”

YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 19:02:00 -0400

“A personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers.”

A Billionaire Is Fueling a Rat Explosion in a Chicago Park in the Stupidest Way Possible

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 19:01:00 -0400

“We’ve never dealt with a situation where it’s like feed for hire.”

Microsoft 365 subscribers set to lose up to 4TB of OneDrive storage

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 19:00:00 -0400

“Shared storage helps ensure that one person doesn’t run out of space while other members have unused storage available.”

Pirate App MovieBox Passes 300 Million Downloads as Rightsholders Alert EU

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:59:00 -0400

“MovieBox has been closely linked to the Transsion / Transsnet ecosystem.”

Conflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud giants to find a new route for the internet

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:58:00 -0400

“Repairs took months because the repair ships needed assurances they would not be fired upon.”

US Postal Service To Start Exploring Its Always-On Surveillance Options

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:57:00 -0400

“The purpose of this pilot is to leverage the Postal Service’s unique ability to collect this valuable data.”

Site-Blocking Will Not Defend IP, No Matter the Bill's Name

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:56:00 -0400

“It is about making an entire website inaccessible for everyone trying to visit it.”

Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb?

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:55:00 -0400

“Instead, coding agents just stayed bad.”

Abstract Warfare: How TSMC Made Its Own Market

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:54:00 -0400

“They do it by attacking the abstractions their industry is built on, not their competitors’ products.”

No Man Is an Island

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:53:00 -0400

“Without community, you don’t get isolated individuals each working on their own things: you get nothing.”

Disloyalty

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:00:00 -0400

“These were identical trips, loaded via identical referrer URLs.”

As U.S. blocks DJI, Insta360 races to win American creators

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:59:00 -0400

“In the first half of 2026, Insta360’s net profit dropped by 94% compared with a year ago.”

Germany transforms former coal mines into Europe's largest lake landscape

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:58:00 -0400

“This is a process that will take two generations.”

Programming Isn't Special

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:57:00 -0400

“Slop is slop, no matter the medium.”

ShinyHunters Extorted Boeing Spin-off Prior to Arrests

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:10:00 -0400

“We are actively reviewing the matter with the Jeppesen ForeFlight team.”

Global PC shipments crater 20% as rising prices hammer demand

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:09:00 -0400

“For an industry hoping AI would help sell more PCs, that’s quite the result.”

Ken Paxton's Security for Travel Cost Taxpayers Millions. Just 1 in 6 of His Trips Had a Stated Business Purpose.

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:08:00 -0400

“There’s no reason for the taxpayers to be paying for things that they would not be paying for if he had stayed home.”

Cloudflare Keeps 1.1.1.1 Out of Piracy Blocking, Escapes Penalties in France

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:07:00 -0400

“To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver.”

The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:06:00 -0400

“The world’s cheapest smartphones are disappearing because AI infrastructure is absorbing the components.”

When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:05:00 -0400

“Age verification is not a neutral safety measure.”

Deno is joining Cloudflare

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:04:00 -0400

“Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development.”

Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:03:00 -0400

“Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”

The people holding up the internet

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:02:00 -0400

“Billions of phones run on code looked after by a handful of people.”

The State of AI Report 2026

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:01:00 -0400

“Oversight needs to follow what agents actually do.”

OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the ’new normal.'”

Meta Rushed to Fix Muse 'VM Escape' Vulnerability Soon Before Launch

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:25:00 -0400

“A sudden spike in reported KVM escapes, plus heightened awareness of agentic safety issues made us rally on a service hardening push.”

We Demand More Information on How Marin Cops Illegally Shared Flock ALPR Data

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:20:00 -0400

“This sharing violated state law and ’exposed sensitive driver location information to misuse by the federal government.'”

OpenAI to flood your eyeballs with visual ads

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:15:00 -0400

“Someone generating an image in ChatGPT is not shopping.”

Warner/Chappell Sinks Lindsay Ellis' Two-Hour Cruise Video Over A Few Seconds Of Karaoke

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:10:00 -0400

“That is… not how any of this is supposed to work.”

Russian lab worker dies of suspected plague as 200 enter medical observation

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:05:00 -0400

“The sanitary-epidemiological situation” in the area “is currently stable,” Kobsev said.

Four Kids in One Faith-Healing Family Died. Authorities Could Do Nothing.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:00:00 -0400

“If you don’t do anything, kids are going to die.”

Things that Apparently Cause Cancer

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:55:00 -0400

“Sophisticated statistics can produce extremely precise nonsense when the design fails to identify the causal mechanism.”

Toadstools and Toxins

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:50:00 -0400

“Muscimol killed mice at a lower dose than nearly all psychotropic drugs we examined, including fentanyl.”

Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:45:00 -0400

“The location metadata available to the runtime is now accurate to original Gleam source code, rather than to the Erlang source code.”

Omfattende uautoriseret adgang til borgeres CPR-oplysninger

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“Ved at misbruge en dansk virksomheds lovlige adgang til at søge oplysninger i CPR-systemet har uvedkommende skaffet sig adgang til navne, adresser, CPR-numre mv. på ca. 8,8 millioner”

(By misusing a Danish company’s legitimate access to search the CPR system, unauthorized persons obtained names, addresses, CPR numbers etc. for about 8.8 million.)

The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:55:00 -0400

“The 173 million sub-$100 smartphones shipped globally last year are disappearing, with shipments falling almost 60% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, according to IDC.”

Her Agency Distributes Billions for Housing Projects. Her Husband's Company Helped Develop Some of Them.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:50:00 -0400

“The closest Bell came to a disclosure was in 2025 with this vague note with a misspelling: ‘Spouse serves in an advisory role for a developmen.’”

Congress Has Another Site-Blocking Bill, And This One Targets VPNs

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:45:00 -0400

“The decision to label a website as a ‘foreign piracy site’ can happen without the accused site even showing up in court to defend itself.”

DNS Resolver Quad9 Rejects French Piracy Blocks, Weighs Exit as beIN Seeks Up to €580K a Day

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:40:00 -0400

“If the court grants beIN’s request, Quad9 will have to take action to avoid millions of euros in fines per week.”

Huawei and Qualcomm Announce Broad Patent License Agreement

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:35:00 -0400

“This agreement not only demonstrates the value of Huawei’s innovations, but also recognizes Qualcomm’s foundational contributions.”

BT buys TalkTalk out of administration to keep 2.5M customers connected

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“This is a genuinely unprecedented situation, where millions of citizens and businesses were at risk if TalkTalk had collapsed.”

We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:25:00 -0400

“I expect that most businesses and individuals would prefer errors to a surprise $10,000+ bill.”

Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:20:00 -0400

“Deno went from an innovative modern JavaScript runtime to a boring start-up with uncompelling products.”

A Place Among the Fiddlers

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:15:00 -0400

“…the prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax’ far outweighs any monetary award.”

Court Agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN Law Demands a Technical Impossibility

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:50:00 -0400

“Aylo is correct that the statute, as amended, now essentially imposes strict liability for entities like it when it comes to determining the location of its websites’ users.”

We're Reporters, Not Teachers. We Were Able to Start Private Schools Anyway.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:48:00 -0400

“In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school.”

Met Police suspends use of phone-hacking software over Russian links

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:46:00 -0400

“The DoJ isn’t alleging that Oxygen’s software contained malicious code or was used to gain unauthorized access to customer systems or data.”

Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:44:00 -0400

“Git 3.0 will make SHA-256 the new default content hashing algorithm and it will be an incomprehensibly expensive and ultimately valueless and avoidable global nightmare.”

Alleged Kemo IPTV Operator Faces Criminal Prosecution in Dubai Following ACE Complaint

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:42:00 -0400

“These companies are all members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) and, when we asked, the anti-piracy coalition confirmed its involvement.”

'Explosion of melt rates': 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:40:00 -0400

“The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the record set in 2022 and brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%.”

World's first enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 months

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:38:00 -0400

“From groundbreaking to commercial operations, the first block at Cape Station took 23 months to complete.”

With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:36:00 -0400

“Americans overwhelmingly hate data centers.”

Who gets to decide if AI is safe? Africa wants a say

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:34:00 -0400

“Africa cannot remain merely a market for systems developed elsewhere, a source of raw data, or a testing ground for a technology it did not help govern.”

Utah man sues Candace Owens, alleging false links to Charlie Kirk assassination

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:32:00 -0400

“The documented presence in the crowd at the precise moment the stairwell photographs were taken rendered it physically impossible for Hild to be the individual depicted.”

Pi 1.0

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:30:00 -0400

“Today we are proudly shipping Pi 1.0: a hardened, minimal, extensible agent harness that you can make your own. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Pi every week.”

The Metric Is Not The Mission: The Digital Climate

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:28:00 -0400

“A recommendation algorithm that prioritizes engagement is not malfunctioning when it amplifies emotionally charged content. It is doing precisely what it was designed to do.”

The Work

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:26:00 -0400

“If you don’t believe your own bullshit, the fans aren’t going to believe your bullshit”

16-year-old researcher found a Microsoft bug, got admin access to databases with 17.3 trillion rows

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0400

“Titan validated the contents of the JWT (tenant, audience, app ID, user) but never verified the signature, the most important part of any authentication check.”

Hackers stole millions of US military personnel records during months-long data breach

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:57:00 -0400

“The breach exposed personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, alongside a person’s name, date of birth, sex, race, and other information about their military service.”

RAM supply set to worsen, says Micron, as CEO celebrates 'much higher' prices

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:54:00 -0400

“We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.”

Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:51:00 -0400

“Public API access will also end by March 2027, which will impact any tools that used it for programmatic access to Reddit conversations.”

Victory! California Appeals Court Refuses to Revive Surveillance Tech CEO's Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:48:00 -0400

“The First Amendment protects Poulson’s publications.”

LaLiga Wants Major VPNs on EU Piracy Watch List Over Affiliate Marketing

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:45:00 -0400

“This request is based not on the provision of VPN services as such, but on the commercial exploitation and active promotion of their ability to circumvent court-ordered blocking measures.”

While the Country Rejects ALPR Mass Surveillance, SF Settles for Weak Safeguards

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:42:00 -0400

“Without a warrant requirement, officers can search stored location data without showing probable cause to a judge, and will.”

Google rolls out pay-per-value AI licensing program to publishers

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:39:00 -0400

“Payments are based more on value than raw usage, meaning Google only pays when it judges that a piece of content has meaningfully contributed to an AI-generated response.”

Gemini 4 Argon: our next era of frontier intelligence

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:36:00 -0400

“Safely releasing frontier capabilities at this level requires a phased approach.”

IANA's email about why example.com changed

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:33:00 -0400

“There is no requirement there is a HTTP service present on the host in order to fulfill its purpose, we just operate it as a courtesy.”

Azure maintenance mess disrupts hybrid clouds, VPNs, cloudy VMware services

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:30:00 -0400

“Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations.”

Awkward: Saudi Arabia's new EV brand takes on the U.S. rival it already controls

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:27:00 -0400

“Combined, their full-capacity targets are roughly 10 times what the domestic market can plausibly absorb near-term.”

StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:24:00 -0400

“We very roughly estimated some time ago that developing a full port to iOS would take one man-year of work.”

IFPI Wants Open Source YouTube Downloader yt-dlp on EU Piracy Watch List

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:20:00 -0400

“Its open-source nature, extensive developer community and its widespread distribution results in the tool being difficult to contain and/or remove.”

EFF to San Francisco Police: Drones are Powerful Surveillance Tools That Require a Robust Policy

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:19:00 -0400

“Without appropriate safeguards around deployment and use, drones could be deployed to every call for service, collecting data along the way.”

I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP.

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:18:00 -0400

“Take a loss? Now take a beat.”

Google ending ChromeOS support two years early

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:17:00 -0400

“For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS.”

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:16:00 -0400

“The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026.”

Soaring U.S. diesel prices slam local communities as fuel costs surge

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:15:00 -0400

“One Georgia food bank said it will spend an extra $100,000 this year on diesel, money that otherwise would have gone to feed families.”

Florida Invokes Extinction Fears in Legal Bid To Halt OpenAI Development

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:14:00 -0400

“It is only by the grace of the Almighty that one of Defendants’ AI agents hasn’t compromised a water supply or shut down a power grid – yet.”

Meta launches enterprise AI platform, hires MongoDB CEO to lead new initiative

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:13:00 -0400

“Meta has a unique role to play because it is bringing together advanced models and leading agents with a proven track record of helping millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of businesses scale.”

Yes, no AI is now a feature

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:12:00 -0400

“A default setting that silently redirects to a single provider is not a choice.”

Gouged

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:11:00 -0400

“Every scam to make you pay more has a mirror-image scam that ensures you are paid less.”

A Tale of Two Trap Houses: Being Cuckooed Ruined My Friend's Life. But Did It Then Help Save Him?

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:10:00 -0400

“Over the 2000s and 2010s, wave after wave of gangs fanned out from Britain’s drug supply hubs – London, Liverpool and Birmingham.”

Driver Ticketed For No Insurance Despite Having Insurance, Just Because Flock Said She Didn't

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:40:00 -0400

“The computer says you’re a criminal. The stuff law enforcement has always considered proof of legal vehicle use is no longer acceptable.”

Microsoft tells nonprofits their deleted M365 data isn't coming back

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:38:00 -0400

Microsoft is “currently unable to provide a list showing which data may have been deleted or whether any data was deleted at all.”

Apple owes Taction $5.7B after losing haptic feedback IP trial

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:36:00 -0400

“Apple does not use Taction’s technology, and we will appeal.”

Dutch Police Arrest 'Reformed' Hacker in Shiny Hunters Investigation

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:34:00 -0400

“The hacking was very easy for me, and it wasn’t a compulsion. My habit was collecting. Collecting data, organizing data.”

Unified U.S. Site Blocking Bill Targets ISPs and DNS Resolvers But Spares VPNs

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:32:00 -0400

“The bill’s definition of a service provider explicitly excludes ‘an entity that exclusively provides virtual private network services or similar service that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers.’”

Waymo releases latest safety performance report claiming human benchmark outperformance

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“Across these cities, the Waymo Driver continues to outperform human benchmarks.”

They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:28:00 -0400

“Neovim had changed the format of the undo files. It hadn’t upgraded the old one.”

Coding is NOT solved

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:26:00 -0400

“AI cannot be held accountable. It cannot suffer any consequences.”

South Korea's AI chip giants are fighting for a bigger role in America's AI boom

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:24:00 -0400

“Nvidia’s allocation decisions are still the predominant factor determining high-bandwidth memory market share.”

EFF Statement on California Governor's Executive Order on AI

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:22:00 -0400

“They are happening right now through biased algorithmic decision-making for employment or government benefits”

Crook used three open source agents to break into a Fortune 500 firm, major US airline and 25+ other orgs

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:45:00 -0400

“Where access was achieved, it usually took less than a day, and in many cases just a few hours.”

People Training OpenAI's AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:40:00 -0400

“Do not use AI detection tools, or AI yourself.”

Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:35:00 -0400

“When Google fucks up, there is absolutely nothing I can do.”

DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“DraftKings is using its customers’ betting records to train a machine learning model to find losing gamblers.”

Nintendo Wins $4.5 Million Judgment Against r/SwitchPirates Mod 'Archbox'

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:25:00 -0400

“Williams’ egregious infringement activities merit substantial punishment here.”

Waymo is scaling fast: Here's what the fleet data shows

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:20:00 -0400

“The Ojai is supposed to drive down costs and ultimately help Waymo reach profitability.”

A Tale of Two Trap Houses: Being Cuckooed Ruined My Friend's Life, but Did It Then Help Save Him?

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:15:00 -0400

“Community safety teams, who rescued 80 tenants in London in 2005, were the first to call the tactic ‘cuckooing’.”

China is excelling in health tech. That's good news for the world

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:10:00 -0400

“Chinese products are cheaper and scalable, which is so important for developing countries.”

git-bug: Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in Git

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:05:00 -0400

“git-bug is a bug tracker that is fully embedded in git: you only need your git repository to have a bug tracker.”

OpenAI hacked Medicare portal, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:07:00 -0400

“The notification was an email sent just to the public mailbox.”

ShinyHunters claims FBI hack: 'This is NOT financially motivated'

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:06:00 -0400

“This is NOT financially motivated. We want the FBI to correct or retract their statements they made, which included substantial false allegations.”

Radicle: Disclosure of Vulnerability in the Network Protocol

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:05:00 -0400

“Network traffic between nodes is not encrypted and not authenticated.”

Pirate Site Must Face Chinese Streaming Giant Tencent in U.S. Court, Judge Rules

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:04:00 -0400

“Olevod’s websites include full-length copies of Tencent content, including the Tencent Exclusive Shows.”

EU Kids Act Won't Keep the Internet Accountable and Trustworthy

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:03:00 -0400

“However they’re designed, age gates undermine civil liberties, reduce safety, and create barriers to internet entry, often at the expense of marginalized groups.”

No grades, no tests, no degree: Andreessen Horowitz launching SF academy for 'builders'

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:02:00 -0400

“The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era.”

The plunging price of thought

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:01:00 -0400

“Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter, faster than for any other transformative technology in history.”

The case for a robot tax to redistribute wealth

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400

“Retraining programs are a necessary but insufficient response to systemic displacement.”

U.S. Site Blocking Bill Adds VPNs to the List of Blocking Intermediaries

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:30:00 -0400

“The term ‘service provider’ includes providers of broadband internet access services, providers of domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks, but excludes root nameserver operators and top level domain registries.”

California AG Rob Bonta Caves, Paramount Merger To Proceed With Flimsy Conditions

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:29:00 -0400

“These minor concessions are largely unenforceable behavioral remedies that Bonta had previously denounced, and in some cases promise less than the two companies are already doing.”

D.C. Circuit Must Vacate a Drone Flight Restriction That Criminalized Recording Immigration Agents

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:28:00 -0400

“The FAA issued a flight restriction for drones that had effectively criminalized the recording of Department of Homeland Security officers, including immigration agents from ICE and CBP.”

Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It's Worse in States With Abortion Bans.

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:27:00 -0400

“Almost 200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.”

Gartner predicts 55 percent of enterprise VMware users will be investigating an exit by 2029

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:26:00 -0400

“The transition to per-core subscriptions has resulted in significant cost increases. Many have also reported minimal flexibility during negotiations.”

Spymarks, Not Watermarks

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:25:00 -0400

“A spymark is a hidden signal that makes your work traceable without your knowledge or consent.”

macOS 26.4 silently enabled login keychain data protection

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:24:00 -0400

“macOS 26.4 added a restriction to the login keychain that makes it non-portable, impossible to unlock outside of its original context.”

Australia considers banning the use of smart glasses in government buildings

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:23:00 -0400

“Australia is considering barring the use of camera-equipped smart glasses in government workplaces due to privacy and security concerns, in what it said could be the first ban of its kind.”

Nvidia's free AI model could push the UAE closer to the U.S.

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:22:00 -0400

“The last missing piece was the model layer. Nvidia already owns the chips.”

What Sun got wrong

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:21:00 -0400

“Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.”

The Claude Delusion

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:19:00 -0400

“These outputs have an unconvincing lack of texture. The smoothness of AI-generated prose and media makes it unbearably banal.”

Hacking OpenAI

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:10:00 -0400

“AI is removing that protection by turning more of this scarce expertise into compute. Work that once required a well-resourced team and months of effort can now be compressed into days.”

Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:09:00 -0400

“The popular image of AI spewing code is almost backwards; at this scale, the work looked much more like iterative investigation, inspecting the current state, forming a hypothesis, making a targeted change, rinsing and repeating.”

Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:08:00 -0400

“These attackers are setting up new but legitimate seeming company profiles, including plausible LinkedIn presences, in order to pass cursory inspection.”

How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:07:00 -0400

“The models are giving superpowers to our engineers,” says Richard Ho, vice president of hardware at OpenAI.

Secure Messaging and AI Remain In Conflict Despite the Promise of TEEs

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:06:00 -0400

“TEEs can provide more security and privacy than simply running in the clear, but they are fundamentally different from actual encryption.”

I don't like passkeys

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:05:00 -0400

“For everybody else, it is currently a step back.”

Shetland's Most Wanted

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:04:00 -0400

“Stuart Hill, 83, says he can control the weather, the colour of his urine and put on weight during a hunger strike. He has been to prison four times and will die on 28 May 2069, unless he changes his mind.”

The AI talent war is coming for Big Tech's Asia executives

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:03:00 -0400

“Once a company decides [a region] is a strategic growth market, you start looking for executives who can essentially operate as mini-CEOs.”

Accused Impostor in Private Tracker Lawsuit Driven by Revenge, Defense Says

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:02:00 -0400

“Any sanctions award would be uncollectible unless the court first establishes who the plaintiff actually is.”

Cisco drops another exploited zero-day, this time a perfect 10

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:20:00 -0400

“No credentials or user interaction are required, and Cisco says vulnerable versions of ISE and ISE-PIC are affected regardless of configuration.”

Hackers Stole Flock's Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:15:00 -0400

“Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it.”

Court Upholds Belgian Pirate DNS Blocking Order, OpenDNS Exit Looms

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:10:00 -0400

“Imposing a blocking measure on the main alternative DNS resolution service providers helps strengthen the effectiveness of the blocking injunction imposed on ISPs.”

Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:05:00 -0400

“Starting October 19, 2026, rate limits on GitLab.com will align with your subscription tier.”

Victory! Appeals Court Rejects Expansive New Copyright Claim

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Removing copyright information from a copyrighted work is fundamentally different from creating a new work that didn’t have CMI in the first place.”

South Africa joins the global resistance against American data centers

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:55:00 -0400

“A massive data center is trying to jump the queue and take our land, water and energy.”

Then They Came for the Ostriches

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:50:00 -0400

“Every event called for interpretation, an attempt to see through to hidden endgames.”

Introducing GNOME 51

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:45:00 -0400

“We removed support for legacy NVIDIA driver interfaces, as GNOME now uses the modern, standard graphics interfaces exclusively.”

A/I Shuts Down

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:00:00 -0400

“‘Stay human’ is not an empty phrase to us.”

AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:59:00 -0400

“After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region.”

Data Broker Radaris Loses Domains in Privacy Fight

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:58:00 -0400

“They won by attrition. Plaintiffs’ attorneys tired of procedural games and gave up.”

Arizona Lowered the Bar for Its English Fluency Test. Experts Say It Will Harm Students in the Long Run.

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:57:00 -0400

“If you’re put in a class where you don’t understand what’s going on at all, you’re not learning language or content.”

Ubuntu's Rustification Has a New Milestone! Coreutils Migration is Complete

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:56:00 -0400

“The Ubuntu 26.10 release moves its last three GNU commands, cp, mv, and rm, to Rust.”

Victory: Court, Using a New Test, Rules Embedding Links is Legal

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:55:00 -0400

“A website cannot transmit a work that it does not have.”

Economists Concerned the AI Bubble Is About to Blow

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:54:00 -0400

“On balance, we think the data look consistent with a late-stage bubble.”

Denuvo Sues Game Cracker 'voices38' for Bypassing its Anti-Tamper DRM

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:53:00 -0400

“Defendant has bypassed DRM restrictions in copyrighted works, removing protections that allow copyright owners to restrict who may access their works, and allowing for pirated versions of those copyrighted works.”

Playing both sides of the U.S.-China AI "Cold War"

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:52:00 -0400

“Many countries around the world, particularly in the Global South, want the best of both worlds.”

The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:51:00 -0400

“Wind, by comparison, is free.”

Seats and Sunsets

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:50:00 -0400

“Caution you can look up is caution you can afford.”

Rep. Issa Files Competing U.S. Pirate Site Blocking Bill

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:50:00 -0400

“a third party whose site was wrongly blocked as the result of a rightsholder’s error could claim up to $250,000 in compensation.”

Vouchers Promise Students With Disabilities a Path to Private School. Parents Say That's Not the Reality.

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:45:00 -0400

“About 8% of the $1.7 billion Florida distributed last year through its voucher program for disabled children was returned because recipients … were enrolled in public school instead.”

Higher-enriched uranium for datacenters has DoE all aglow

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:40:00 -0400

“Nusano expects each unit will produce 5.9 metric tons (MT) of HALEU per year, with the first unit scheduled to be operational in 2031”

Chinese AI-Generated Micro Dramas Surge to 128,000 in First Quarter

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:35:00 -0400

“The number of Chinese-made micro dramas surged in the first three months of this year to 128,000, according to the China Netcasting Services Assn. More than 95% of them were made with AI.”

Cisco email security boxes can be rooted by... an email

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:30:00 -0400

“An attacker doesn’t need to log in: they can send a booby-trapped message through a vulnerable gateway and, if the exploit works, run commands as root”

Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:25:00 -0400

“Without proper controls, website owners have long faced a difficult tradeoff: allow your content to be used for AI training, or risk losing discoverability in search.”

Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:20:00 -0400

“Apple Reference Image offers a trustworthy, scalable guarantee that a reference image is what it claims to be: a real photograph, captured by a real sensor.”

Everybody pees

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:15:00 -0400

“The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users – turns the majority of the world’s other humans into phantasms”

Do You Still Read the Code?

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:10:00 -0400

“A drifting accelerator doesn’t end up somewhere between the two approaches; he ends up a vibecoder by default, without the harness.”

Negativland, Culture Jamming, and the Art of Making Something New

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:05:00 -0400

“The thread that goes through all of our work is that we are always responding to and describing American culture.”

The High Crime of 'LMAO': How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance As a Joke

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:50:00 -0400

“More than 30 agencies ran more than 6,300 searches with ‘TBD’ (short for ‘To Be Determined’) as the ‘reason.’”

CenterPoint Energy confirms intruder helped themselves to customer information

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:45:00 -0400

“An unauthorized third party obtained personal information relating to a portion of the company’s customers through one of the company’s external-facing systems.”

Rightsholders Can't Use OpenAI and Anthropic to Dismantle Meta's Seeding Defense

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:40:00 -0400

“If OpenAI torrented but configured its clients to suppress uploading, then the redistribution Meta calls an ‘inherent characteristic’ of the protocol was a setting Meta declined to change.”

Where in the world is the iPhone cheapest?

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:35:00 -0400

“After the September 9 launch event, prices of older models were increased by 21% in the U.S. and up to 41% in India.”

Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“An inference provider in ‘Model Manager Services’ apparently allows Apple’s own server-side Siri model to be completely replaced by another model.”

The contagion of fear

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:25:00 -0400

“Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world!”

On Tour with the Eclipse Chasers

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:20:00 -0400

“Totality is in a league of its own. Totality is what they are chasing.”

The Dominican Baseball Factory

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:48:00 -0400

“Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here, but it’s not doing anything to stop it.”

Pirate IPTV Operators Face $32.7 Million Judgment and Self-Expanding Blocking Injunction

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:47:00 -0400

“Plaintiffs may, without further leave of Court, supplement the caption of this action to add as John Doe Defendants any person or entity discovered to be engaged in any of the conduct prohibited by this Order.”

Watch out: Apple timepiece can grab snippets of conversation without both speakers' consent

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:46:00 -0400

“Our right to conversational privacy must include freedom from other people, without our clear opt-in consent, using technology to document what we are saying,” said EFF privacy director Adam Schwartz.

Judge: Losing Your First Amendment Rights Is No Longer "Irreparable" If You Take Almost Three Months To Sue

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:45:00 -0400

“It has long been recognized that delay in seeking relief vitiates much of the force of allegations of irreparable harm.”

Google Earth's AI experiment lasted 24 hours. The damage to trust will linger

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:44:00 -0400

“No benefit of integrating generative AI into Google Earth is worth the harm and the doubt it creates.”

Diesel prices are nearing $6 a gallon for the first time ever

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:43:00 -0400

“There’s just not enough diesel right now in Russia to export any volume of it, and that’s unfortunately a big problem for a global economy that sees almost every piece of heavy machinery needing diesel.”

The part of Navier-Stokes no one is talking about

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:42:00 -0400

“I hesitate to use the word ‘revolutionary,’ but lowering the cost of anything by four orders of magnitude is revolutionary.”

Cracks in the AI Thesis Part 2

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:41:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, that volume may not be large enough to counteract the effective decline in prices.”

Shopify extends lifeline to Tailwind as vibe coding erodes web dev platform's bottom line

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:40:00 -0400

“We’re joining Shopify to give Tailwind a stable long-term home where it will be actively maintained for the millions of people who depend on it.”

It Breaks a Village: Bevy's 6th Birthday

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:39:00 -0400

“This experience has been that of observing a knife get torn through the social muscles of the Bevy project.”

Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:38:00 -0400

“The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves.”

Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, What It Could Be

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:37:00 -0400

“While pushing for greater sovereignty from Big Tech has benefits, there is an inherent risk that some states will pursue digital sovereignty as a means of cutting off or splintering access.”

New Records Reveal Problems with Medicare's AI Prior Authorization Experiment

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:45:00 -0400

“WISeR vendors failed to respond within 72 hours for a significant number of requests. One status report cites a prior authorization request that went unanswered for 83 days.”

U.S. Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Ballots During This Year's Primary Elections, Audit Finds

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:40:00 -0400

“There were no election-related training materials posted at 22 of 73 delivery units, or about 30%.”

AI Agents Are Not Going 'Rogue,' But Recent Developments Lead Increasingly-Concerned Researchers To Call For AI Slow Down

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:35:00 -0400

“~7% of our transcripts contained ‘spoofed tool calls’, where the agent pretended to run one command on the computer but actually ran a different command in the background.”

Anthropic reveals fourth likely crime committed by its AI

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:30:00 -0400

“Inside the machine, the model found a file listing a password, which it used to gain admin access to the system.”

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:25:00 -0400

“I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best.”

Another Microsoft team admits it's struggling to handle flood of AI-generated code

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:20:00 -0400

“submission volumes have continued to increase, and our review pipeline has experienced additional strain, causing an increase in extension review turnaround time”

Cops Play Hide and Seek About Using Spy Tech to Avoid Scrutiny and Bad PR

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:15:00 -0400

“DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE. DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.”

Blizzard employees have ratified their first union contracts

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:10:00 -0400

“the right to be ‘recalled’ into open positions at any Blizzard bargaining unit for 14 months”

Now it's China's experts who are gig workers training AI

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:05:00 -0400

“It usually takes a few hours to complete a task, which earns them 100 to 500 yuan ($15 to $74), they say.”

Hurricane Helene Washed His Wife Away From Their Mobile Home. Now New Residents Live on the Same Land.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:00:00 -0400

“Mobile homes, the country’s largest source of affordable housing, are often left out” because “trailers, even when they become immovable and lifelong homes, aren’t typically considered real estate but instead personal property, like motorcycles and boats.”

Google commits over $15B to AI infrastructure in Finland

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:55:00 -0400

“Google’s deal will begin with it receiving a smaller amount of electric capacity, before it expands to allow for the purchase of up to 50% of the plant’s capacity from 2030-49.”

I Don't Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:50:00 -0400

“If you don’t care to write it, there’s no reason I should waste one single second reading it.”

Serial Microsoft 0-day hunter drops yet another Defender exploit

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:45:00 -0400

“The latest bypass, ShieldCrash, allows arbitrary file reads as SYSTEM - but not arbitrary writes”

What the CPU shortage means for software teams

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:40:00 -0400

“Server orders are quoting ~6 months (it used to be a week or two), and prices are up ~10-20% since March.”

Global stocks slide as Brent crude surpasses $100 a barrel

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:35:00 -0400

“The benchmark crude contract rose to $100.19 on Wednesday, its highest level since July 24, when a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was in place, and its price was on the downswing.”

I changed my license to EUPL

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:43:00 -0400

“All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.”

Switzerland tests a FOSS escape route from Microsoft 365

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:33:00 -0400

“The platform is expected to become available to about 3,000 selected employees from the end of 2027, with the first phase forecast to cost CHF 9 million.”

EFF to Governor Newsom: Veto California's AB 1709

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:23:00 -0400

“A.B. 1709 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare.”

Fake Consumer Group Using AI To Generate Fake Support For Paramount Merger

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:13:00 -0400

“The AI system simply changed her writing to not only express support for the merger, but make up an entire fake backstory about her.”

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 1,000 Security Holes

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:03:00 -0400

“AI-assisted vulnerability discovery in 2026 is creating larger haystacks, but it isn’t finding more needles.”

Regulators Knew This Marijuana Product Was Harming People. It Stayed on Shelves for More Than a Year.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:53:00 -0400

“Regulators knew this marijuana product was harming people. It stayed on shelves for more than a year.”

DOE Approves $1.9 Billion Loan to NextEra for Google's Revived Nuclear Plant

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:43:00 -0400

“The facility’s owner, NextEra Energy, has received a $1.9 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to finance the refurbishment.”

I refused to train the AI that could replace me

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:33:00 -0400

“I still do not know why I walked away from the AI training job.”

Private Torrent Tracker Lawsuit Takes Bizarre Turn: 'I'm a Different Matthew Schneider'

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:23:00 -0400

“The existence of another person with the same or similar name is not evidence of impersonation.”

Google DeepMind Maps 9 Billion Possible DNA Variants

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:13:00 -0400

“The AI model can compare an original DNA sequence with an altered one and predict how the change might affect gene expression and other regulatory activity.”

What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies?

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:03:00 -0400

“This is a big ethical question for robots that are specifically designed to be lovable, marketed to children who may form deep emotional bonds with them.”

Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:53:00 -0400

“The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could.”

Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group To Drum Up Fake Support For Merger

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:45:00 -0400

“The sender organization’s website is less than three months old. It discloses no founders, board members, staff, or funders, and the organization does not appear in ProPublica’s nonprofit database.”

Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social Media Users

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:40:00 -0400

“Rather than pushing Meta away from the collection, analysis, and retention of user data, the Settlement requires Meta to do more of it for the next ten years.”

This State Is Spending More on Lethal Injections. A Law Tries to Keep the Details Secret.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:35:00 -0400

“You wouldn’t have to pay this much money if the lethal injection process was an acceptable one.”

Grindr pays £26M to settle UK privacy class action

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:30:00 -0400

“While Grindr disputes the allegations, it recognizes and acknowledges the distress and loss of trust expressed by some of its UK users regarding that pre-2020 period.”

Think your EV holds its value? China has some bad news for you

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:25:00 -0400

“Exporting the car is the easy part. Building the ecosystem that supports its second and third owner is much harder.”

AMD Building "Elite" Rust Developer Team for GPU Stack

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:20:00 -0400

“We’re building a small, elite team at AMD to push Rust deep into the GPU stack.”

How well do agents use test/verification techniques?

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:15:00 -0400

“Just asking agents to ’test’ or repeatedly asking them to test more results in poor testing. It turns out that asking them to use test techniques also results in poor testing.”

Oil Surges Toward $100 as US-Iran Attacks Escalate

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:10:00 -0400

“The latest rally followed a weekend escalation in which the U.S. military struck three Iranian oil tankers after Iran launched ballistic missiles at two U.S. Navy warships.”

Stray Kids Label Hits Music Distributor With DMCA Subpoena Over Bootleg Track

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:05:00 -0400

“If the infringing content is not taken down promptly, we will have no choice but to pursue legal action to protect our copyrighted material.”

A faster way to convert a timestamp to Hour, Min, Sec

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

“In an ideal world, the compiler would make us not have to worry about all this.”

Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:55:00 -0400

“With ever-changing devices, browsers, operating systems, form factors, specifications, personal preferences, tooling, and corporate interests, the web is in a constant state of flux.”

The Bleeding Hearts

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:50:00 -0400

“Wouldn’t it be right to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?”

American companies expect their customers to stay much longer. That may be making the economy less competitive

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:34:00 -0400

“With the suspension of the federal regulation on click to cancel, we should see a slightly better outcome.”

Smartphone makers don't bother to comply with EU repairability requirements

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:33:00 -0400

“The obligation for publicly available spare parts prices and repair manuals is a great step forward, but it needs to be enforced better.”

OpenAI's ChatGPT Was Built on Concealed 'Mass Piracy', Authors Tell Court

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:32:00 -0400

“OpenAI did not even buy the books it used. Instead, it began by torrenting books from the notorious and illegal pirate library Library Genesis.”

Court Rules Against Citizen Journalists in DMCA Takedown Case. EFF Will Appeal

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:31:00 -0400

Section 512(f) does not require “a perfect or even reasonable fair use analysis.”

Chinese businesses are giving away AI tokens with coffee, credit cards, and dumplings

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“Most ordinary users still encounter AI through an app or feature, without seeing a token balance.”

The Anatomy of a Journalism Scandal

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:29:00 -0400

“They were chasing a headline at the expense of a child.”

Some Parents Are Treating Suing Social Media As A Get Rich Quick Scheme

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:28:00 -0400

“My dad Said that I’m will get a settlement worth of 1million dollar…He said that If that doesn’t make me happy what does.”

iPhone Ultra Production Hitting Just 'a Few Hundred' a Day, Says Nikkei

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:27:00 -0400

“Production is ramping up slowly, with output currently at only a few hundred units a day in late August.”

Fairground AI Creator TV Launches on Roku

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:26:00 -0400

“AI-generated” can describe something quite different from the notion viewers might initially have.

Caltech Mathathon: first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:25:00 -0400

“It will be the first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics.”

US troops can still be tracked by purchased location data, and Congress wants to know why

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:41:00 -0400

“This change will essentially ensure that military device location data isn’t being included in bulk data sales being done by numerous vendors.”

Judge Rules DOD Unlawfully Retaliated Against Anthropic

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:40:00 -0400

The Department of Defense’s “supply chain risk” designation of Anthropic “constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment.”

The revolt of the reader

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:39:00 -0400

“To use an LLM to write is to void the social contract between writer and reader.”

Google defeats US bid to force ad tech sale

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:38:00 -0400

“We’re very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow.”

Take-Two Says GTA 6 Leak Probe Is "Rapidly Evolving," Wants New Discord Demands Under Seal

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:37:00 -0400

“Public disclosure of this information could compromise Take-Two’s ongoing investigation and even tip off the alleged infringers as to the nature and progress of Take-Two’s investigation.”

Malicious .git Configs Can Make Claude, Codex, Cursor Run Attacker Code

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:36:00 -0400

“Git reads it from the repository’s own .git/config. Any operation that refreshes the index, including git status and git diff, executes that command.”

RFK Jr. Wants Your Medical Records

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:35:00 -0400

“Since the spring of 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has sought federal access to Americans’ medical records to investigate whether vaccines cause autism.”

Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:34:00 -0400

“Since nothing is compiled, loops work by jumping backwards and reparsing the source each iteration.”

TiVo Ending Free Commercial Skipping Feature

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 23:33:00 -0400

“Beginning November 2, 2026, the current version of SkipMode, using the Skip Button on your TiVo remote, will no longer be available.”

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:40:00 -0400

“We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database.”

Flock-Stalking, Nazi-Saluting Deputy Given Top Cop Honors Before Hastily Retiring

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:30:00 -0400

“The 43-page investigation found Fultz had posed for pictures as Adolf Hitler, freely used racial slurs in texts, masturbated on camera in his police vehicle.”

Three sites made 215,128 'best software' pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:20:00 -0400

“59.8% point at domains ranked worse than #100,000 in the Tranco top-1M list and 23.4% at domains that are not in the top million at all.”

Texas and Florida Step Back from ALPRs

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:10:00 -0400

“ALPR mass surveillance, the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion, should not exist.”

AI agents carried out every step of this ransomware attack, then left the victim an 80-page security audit

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:00:00 -0400

“What made the attack stand out was AI-assisted operational efficiency, without the need for a novel zero-day or super elite tradecraft.”

The Scientist Trying to Keep Kratom Legal Has Not Disclosed Longstanding Ties to Kratom Lobbyists

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:50:00 -0400

“I’m really confused on where science ends and lobbying begins.”

'A Cute Little LibGen Babysitter': Music Publishers Sue AI Founders Over Torrenting Spree

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:40:00 -0400

“Dr. Amodei admitted that Anthropic ‘ha[d] many places from which’ it could have legally purchased these copyrighted works for training, but instead torrented them because doing so was faster and free.”

Taiwan's six-year hunt for China's undercover chip labs

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:30:00 -0400

“Almost everyone in the industry would know or have heard of people who were approached or worked for Chinese companies.”

New York City Bans Generative AI for Students Through 8th Grade

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:20:00 -0400

“We’re standing firmly in our decision to not conflate innovation with more tech.”

A note on subscription prices from LWN

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:10:00 -0400

“We have only increased prices twice in the 24 years since adopting this model; the last increase was in early 2022, nearly five years ago.”

Fervo and Google sign world's largest deal for next-gen geothermal power

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:00:00 -0400

“Even though right now we don’t have clarity yet on how this will service a data center … we know that it will be a foundational building block”

A List of ICE Subpoenas to Tech Companies

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:40:00 -0400

“ICE has been forced to withdraw others after users challenged them in court or companies pushed back.”

'Right To Repair' State Laws Continue To Surge, But Enforcement Remains Nonexistent

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:35:00 -0400

“despite major progress on passing new legislative proposals, I’ve yet to see a single state enforce any aspect of a new right to repair law”

India's data center boom is leaving the people it displaces with nothing

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:30:00 -0400

“Developing countries should not become data waste centers, serving the elite of the world.”

Belgian Orders Demand Pirate Site Operators' Bank Details, Crypto Wallets and Server Logs

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:25:00 -0400

“The intermediaries are not allowed to disclose the information-seeking request to their customers or any third parties, including the press.”

Idaho Law Protects Faith Healers. It Wasn't Always That Way.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:20:00 -0400

“From at least the 1880s through the early 1970s, it was illegal for parents in Idaho to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake”

More Americans oppose police license plate cameras than support them

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:15:00 -0400

“The company has been embroiled in controversy following reports of police abusing the cameras’ surveillance.”

Two Alleged 'TeamPCP' Hackers Arrested in Australia

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:10:00 -0400

“The hackers gain access to a network where an open source tool commonly used by coders is being developed”

Green Party wants to slam the brakes on UK datacenter construction until water and energy use are sorted

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:05:00 -0400

“A pause on building new datacenters would simply send investment and good jobs abroad, while leaving Britain dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defense data.”

The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:00:00 -0400

“A legitimate business can survive a satisfied customer. A grift cannot. It needs the customer frightened, aggrieved, lonely, sick, or greedy forever.”

Being kicked out of the tech industry

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:55:00 -0400

“It is solely a game of referral: it does not matter what you apply with because other people are cheating in the application process.”

We Need to Talk About Migrations with AI

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:50:00 -0400

“Using OpenAI Codex, Asana replaced an outdated testing system in two weeks for about $12K.”

Who's Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:25:00 -0400

“A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.”

Zero-Knowledge Proofs Aren't Age Verification Silver Bullets

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:20:00 -0400

“No method of online age verification is privacy-protective, fully accurate, and capable of guaranteeing universal coverage.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe Makes Secret Trip to Moscow

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:15:00 -0400

“CIA Director John Ratcliffe is in Moscow, Russia, for meetings, sources familiar with the situation told CBS News on Tuesday.”

SpaceX Announces $100 Billion Plan for New Spaceport in Louisiana

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:10:00 -0400

“Today is nothing short of a transformational moment,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry told lawmakers.

Tesla Confirms Cybercab Launch Coming Next Week

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:05:00 -0400

“I’ve been trying to get excited about the Cybercab launch, and I keep landing in the same place: this is a car swap, dressed up as a milestone.”

Where's the Beef? The Lab-Grown-Meat Revolution That Wasn't

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:00:00 -0400

“On August 5, 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger. Not just any burger: a world-historical burger, made from cattle cells grown in a lab by Mark Post.”

I Stabilized Never Type

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:55:00 -0400

“At long last, the never type is stable (on nightly). After 10 years of it being unstable. After 5 failed attempts to stabilize it.”

Now Perplexity Is Trying to Get Into the Local AI Action

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:50:00 -0400

“This local-first approach enables significant cost savings, since local inference avoids per-token API fees.”

More Than Half of Adults in U.S. Say They Lack Basic Statistical Understanding

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:45:00 -0400

“While statistics are not hard to understand, they are even easier to misunderstand.”

All public nitter instances do not work

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:50:00 -0400

“We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.”

Children in a Faith-Healing Sect Keep Dying. The State Lets It Happen.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:40:00 -0400

“How is this tolerable? I don’t understand how there could be an exception in Idaho law that allows for these children to die.”

CISA slaps its tightest three-day patching deadline on perfect-10 Oracle flaw

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:30:00 -0400

“Successful attacks targeting CVE-2026-21962 can allow miscreants to create, delete, or modify access to critical data, and even gain ‘complete access’ to all data stored on the affected systems.”

FlavaWorks Targets 75 Members of Gay-Torrents Tracker With RICO Lawsuit

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:20:00 -0400

“On information and belief, the enterprise generated in excess of €7,000,000 since 2009 across more than 15,000 documented VIP payment events”

C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact With Reality

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:10:00 -0400

“an attacker does not need the raw key material! As root, they can ask StrongBox to use these keys to sign whatever data they like”

How Uber built a software factory for agentic coding

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:00:00 -0400

“More than 70% of pull requests at Uber are now written by agents.”

U.S. streaming industry slams CRTC rules for Canadian content investment

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:50:00 -0400

“CRTC is targeting and taxing U.S. companies, putting up new, discriminatory trade barriers”

Intermediary Liability in Brazil: The Intricate Path Ahead

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:40:00 -0400

“The Supreme Court’s decision didn’t establish guidelines to protect users’ due process rights when facing content take down and removal demands.”

Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:30:00 -0400

“As of Firefox 157 I intend to turn JPEG XL decoding on by default on all platforms.”

Dolly Parton, one of country music's most singular performers, has died at age 80

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:20:00 -0400

“It’s true I look totally artificial. But I like to think I’m totally real where it really counts. But my look came from a very sincere place. It’s just a country girl’s idea of glamour.”

AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick that also muted a dev's headphones

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:00:00 -0400

“Shortly after loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from my phone would stop playing.”

Anna's Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It's Still Online

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:45:00 -0400

“U.S. courts can’t reach domains registered beyond their jurisdiction.”

Amazon hikes hardware prices by 60%, blaming memory shortage

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:30:00 -0400

“After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines.”

Nvidia manager among nine indicted over China chip sales

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:15:00 -0400

“Prosecutors in Taiwan have indicted nine people for smuggling high-end AI chips to China.”

Hundreds of Leaked AWS Keys Give Full Control Over Corporate Accounts

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:00:00 -0400

“More than 9,300 Amazon Web Services (AWS) access keys publicly exposed between August 2022 and August 2026 are still active and valid.”

Ninth Circuit Ruling Will Force Online Platforms That Host User Speech to Fight Lengthy and Costly Lawsuits Before They Are Dismissed Under Section 230

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:45:00 -0400

“If platforms know they will have to defend themselves for years in court before they can benefit from Section 230 immunity, this creates a perverse incentive to censor user speech.”

Take-Two Expands GTA 6 Leak Hunt With DMCA Subpoenas to X and YouTube

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:30:00 -0400

“Take-Two also seeks ‘all identifying information associated with all user accounts that are/were members of the Discord community servers.’”

What Nvidia's first Groq 3 LPU benchmarks tell us about its $20B gamble

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:15:00 -0400

“Nvidia’s Gemma 4 31B performance comparison may not age well.”

Hackers Infect Android Car Head Units with Proxy Botnet Malware

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:00:00 -0400

“This is the first documented case of a malware infection chain specifically created for the targeted car head unit.”

His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:45:00 -0400

“The misrepresentation is not minor. It runs throughout the piece.”

Your executable is a SQLite database

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:30:00 -0400

“ELF is already a database. It just implements many database primitives by hand.”

Intent to Ship: JPEG XL

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:15:00 -0400

“At 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++, we were concerned about the attack surface this added to Firefox.”

IBM announces chip that natively executes Arm and Z instructions concurrently

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:00:00 -0400

“Each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently”

Thomson Reuters leverages its world-class data assets to launch its own frontier model

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:45:00 -0400

“Start with a strong foundation, specialize it deeply for the work that matters, and you can build intelligence that is highly capable, far more efficient and entirely under your control.”

Fable & The End of the Free Lunch

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:30:00 -0400

“Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies.”

Malware infects Android-based automotive head unit firmware

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“The malware spread through the built-in updaters of Android-based automotive head unit firmware. This is the first documented case of malware found on a car head unit with an infection chain specific to that type of device.”

There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Just adding multithreading alone is enough to wipe the floor with an otherwise comparable AI on a large machine. If you stack in 10-20 more optimizations that seem too annoying for most people to do by hand, the difference in strength is tremendous.”

Nintendo Wipes Out 400+ Switch Emulator Repos in Single-Day GitHub Sweep

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:30:00 -0400

“In the seven notices, more than 400 repositories were targeted.”

Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“Police estimated the damage at more than $1,000.”

I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“Since the domain name is literally just the phone number reversed, you can simply flip it back around to get the real number, so I had full phone numbers, timestamps, and the source IP addresses of the DNS resolvers making the requests.”

Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“We’ve added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results automatically.”

EFF and Civil Society Groups Call on Nottinghamshire Police to Halt Live Face Recognition

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“48% of people oppose scanning the faces of those walking on high streets when there is no suspected imminent threat.”

A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers.”

Salesforce partners not seeing meaningful revenue from Agentforce AI platform, report says

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:30:00 -0400

“A third of partners said there was strong interest in Agentforce as they were starting to see buying and trial activity. However, none were seeing Agentforce become a driver of bookings activity.”

Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:30:00 -0400

“Swartz’ use case was the dissemination and archival of knowledge; Meta’s use case is powering up their proprietary plagiarism code.”

AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“Connecting it to the destination causes the browser to actively process the graph, even though the final volume is zero.”

Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“Fetches an architecture-specific binary over a TLS connection that accepts any certificate without validation, then runs it detached from the build.”

Some Tech Companies Have Privately Pushed Back on ICE Subpoenas. They Should All Do More.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“In the second half of 2025, the company received three Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subpoenas seeking account information from 11 users who posted content critical of ICE.”

Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Google replaced pushing Git tags for certain source code with obtaining source code via Google Drive after making a request through Google Forms. It’s completely ridiculous and they’ve gradually become very slow at handling requests. They’re in clear violation of the GPLv2 now.”

OpenRouter is joining Stripe

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“OpenRouter will continue to operate as it is: same mission, same name, same product, same roadmap.”

Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“Google bid for and won for just $10 million - pending judicial approval… 100 million emails and 500 million items from Microsoft Teams, 17 million OneDrive files and 20.5 million items from SharePoint.”

A German Court Drew the Piracy Line at 81.5%, KinoGO Was Blocked with (at least) 82.4%

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“The illegal content on the websites far outweighs the legal content. This is the case in any event when at least 81.5% of the website’s content is illegal.”

Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“AI Story Optimization… author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility.”

Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“Adequate coverage for all could avert about 62,863 deaths annually.”

Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“I switched my nameservers to Cloudflare in order to enable R2 bucket serving through my own subdomain, and I found out that it silently had injected a JS analytics snippet in my HTML-only JS-free site.”

Debian opens vote on the future of AI-assisted contributions

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“Debian should not support or ban generative AI tools, but should apply the same standards for quality, correctness, maintainability, and legality to all contributions.”

AI isn't outthinking mathematicians, it's out-remembering them

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“The machine may appear more mathematically intelligent partly because it is much less constrained by a cognitive limitation that suppresses human performance.”

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead of Winter

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“Peak anomalies reach +7 in the eastern parts.”

Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Those individuals with normal weight or overweight and clinically defined high WC or WHR were associated with a 15% - 50% greater risk for most of the nine studied outcomes.”

Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Once Microsoft Edge moves to Manifest V3, ad-blocking extensions won’t have access to the functions needed to properly identify and block ads that occur while browsing websites and watching videos.”

How Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“HEIR can convert pre-trained AI models that operate on unencrypted data to operate on encrypted inputs.”

Ninth Circuit Rewrites Section 230 To Remove The Part That Actually Mattered

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:25:00 -0400

“The latest comes from the Ninth Circuit, which ruled earlier this week that Section 230 is not, in fact, an immunity from lawsuit, but merely a defense against liability.”

What sort of maths are LLMs good at?

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:20:00 -0400

“The most notable mathematical results proved by LLMs have tended to be ones that we would classify as examples or counterexamples.”

North Korean remote IT staffer worked for US government agency, says FBI

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:15:00 -0400

“The case marks a rare confirmed instance of a sanctioned North Korean working for a government agency.”

Swarms of tiny robots remove microplastics from soil and water

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:10:00 -0400

“In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour.”

Why we should all be worried about AI in elections

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:05:00 -0400

“Roughly 5.5 million voters were deleted from rolls in two states, many without any notice or path to reinstatement, before India’s Supreme Court halted the program.”

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“The top one percent of films, about 380 titles, pull nearly forty percent of all attention; half of everything anyone watched sits in the top two percent.”

Compression is prediction

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:55:00 -0400

“Here’s how an order-1 model stacks up against GPT-2 with arithmetic coding in compressing a famous Charles Dickens quote: order-1 434 bits, 24% of original; GPT-2 176 bits, 10% of original.”

Hundreds Of Drone-as-First-Responder Programs Could Soon Be Launched Across The Country

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:55:00 -0400

“The agency issued more waivers between April 2025 and February 2026 than it had in the previous seven years combined.”

Over 4,400 Rockwell PLCs Exposed Online, 22 Found in Water Attack Cities

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:50:00 -0400

“Forescout found 22 internet-facing Rockwell Automation programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in cities hit by recent cyberattacks on US water utilities.”

Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:45:00 -0400

“His luck allegedly ran out when the face-changing software suffered a momentary processing delay. The disguise dropped for ‘barely a second,’ exposing his real face to the verification camera, police said.”

Asbestos, mold and crumbling walls: The US military's Pacific bases are falling apart

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:40:00 -0400

“At Kinser Tower base housing at Kadena, concrete damage has affected 544 homes, according to the IG.”

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:35:00 -0400

“Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software”

Japanese Police Arrest NYAA 'First Uploader,' But Not by Watching the Swarm

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:30:00 -0400

“The tool does not analyse activity within the BitTorrent swarm itself. Instead, it analyses how data moves through torrent sites, such as index sites and tracker sites.”

Arizona wants Taiwan's investors to think beyond chips

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:25:00 -0400

“Arizona’s increasing focus on Taiwan comes as trade between the two jumped from $4.9 billion in 2024 to $21.2 billion in 2025.”

Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF?

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:20:00 -0400

“EFF images are all made by human beings, not by automated image generators, with very rare exceptions.”

GNOME Shell Design Dreams

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:15:00 -0400

“As the design team we can only propose ideas and work with developers to make them happen.”

pg_clickhouse v0.10: Subquery pushdown and 1000x faster TPC-H queries

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:10:00 -0400

“Q17 is the trophy: a correlated subquery averaging l_quantity per part that, back when it evaluated once per outer row against 6M line items at scale factor 1, took 32.7 seconds. Fully pushed down, it’s 37 milliseconds.”

Services without servers: Ian Clarke on Freenet

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:05:00 -0400

“These are the same pattern, applications whose backend is the network itself, so they can exist without a platform behind them.”

Paris Court Kicks Off New Football Season with Multi-Intermediary Piracy Blocking Orders

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:20:00 -0400

“The court stressed that, even though an intermediary may act passively and neutrally, it can still be an essential link in transferring infringing data.”

Elon Musk Wants To Get Into Wireless Phones And He's Probably Not Going To Have A Good Time

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:15:00 -0400

“SpaceX’s IPO promised that Starlink would quickly jump from 10 million current subscribers to 300 million or more in very short order.”

DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:10:00 -0400

“The airline also told us that there was no hack of any Delta system, including the in-flight Wi-Fi, though it did confirm that an unauthorized Wi-Fi network was broadcast onboard the aircraft for a short period of time.”

One-click flaw in Atlassian Rovo exposed enterprise data via prompt injection attack

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:05:00 -0400

“A single click on a link triggers the attacker’s embedded instructions and forces Rovo to accept externally supplied parameters as trusted inputs within a user’s session.”

Spotify will label AI persona profiles and exclude their music from recommendations

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:00:00 -0400

“This badge is about the artist’s public identity, not about how the music was made.”

Dismiss Church's Trademark Lawsuit Against 'Mormon Stories' Podcast, EFF Urges Court

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:55:00 -0400

“Trademark is supposed to be about helping consumers identify the sources of the products they buy, not controlling criticism.”

How one VC burns through hundreds of millions of tokens a day to find the next unicorn

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:50:00 -0400

“I consume between 300 and 500 million tokens a day just to get my work done.”

Mojo 1.0

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:45:00 -0400

“During the 1.x timeframe, changes should primarily be additive, giving developers confidence that the language will not continually shift beneath them.”

Chicken Scheme 6.0 released

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:40:00 -0400

“The internal string representation has been converted to UTF-8, making strings fully UNICODE capable.”

EU Study: Block Live Sports Piracy in 30 Minutes, Across DNS Resolvers, VPNs and CDNs

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:40:00 -0400

“It would likewise be desirable for the personal scope of application to extend to the entire chain of intermediaries technically involved in the distribution of unauthorised content, including providers of content delivery networks, VPN services, dedicated servers and DNS resolution systems.”

Mozilla revokes Firefox signing key after unencrypted copy lands in GitHub

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:35:00 -0400

“Mozilla has revoked a cryptographic key used to sign Firefox and Thunderbird releases after discovering someone had accidentally committed an unencrypted copy of the private key to a GitHub repository.”

US citizen detained by ICE at Atlanta airport as he boarded plane

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:30:00 -0400

“There is no probable cause here. A matching name and birth date is not probable cause.”

Beijing is forcing a mass breakup with AI lovers

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:25:00 -0400

“For companies where AI companionship isn’t a core business, it may simply make more commercial sense to remove these features than invest the resources needed to make them compliant.”

SpaceX's Earnings Show Elon Wiped Out Two-Thirds Of Twitter's Ad Business

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:20:00 -0400

“In the second quarter of 2022, the last full quarter before Elon took over, Twitter brought in $1.08 billion in ad revenue. In the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million.”

Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:15:00 -0400

“Meta’s moderation systems routinely fail to distinguish between prohibited drug transactions and legitimate discussion of medications, including educational information and people’s firsthand experiences with healthcare.”

Apple is working on a way to authenticate that a photo came from an iPhone camera

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:10:00 -0400

“New code in iOS 27 beta 5 shows that the company is working on something called Apple Reference Image, which is designed to authenticate the source of photos using unique data tied to the iPhone camera hardware that captured them.”

Apple Silicon and macOS VMs: 11-16x Faster LLM Inference with Llama.cpp

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:05:00 -0400

“On an M1 Ultra, TinyLlama 1.1B running through llama.cpp processed prompts 11.08x faster and generated tokens 16.36x faster than the same workload in the same stock VM.”

Briar is in maintenance mode

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:00:00 -0400

“Meanwhile, the project didn’t have funding, we were reluctant to look for funding without having a long-term plan, and so we could only work on Briar in our spare time.”

Another Federal Judge Says Cell Tower Dumps Are Unconstitutional

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:50:00 -0400

“The Government is essentially asking the Court to allow it access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle.”

ShinyHunters called cancer diagnostics biz and tricked staffers into giving them access

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:40:00 -0400

Abbott says “only a limited number of internal systems within its cancer diagnostics business were affected, with no disruption to products, manufacturing, laboratory operations, or patient services.”

Broadcaster Wins Broad U.S. Blocking Injunction Covering Pirate Sites That Don't Exist Yet

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:30:00 -0400

“Plaintiffs may supplement Schedule A by filing a verified declaration identifying additional infringing services, IP addresses, domains, applications, or platforms, which supplementation shall take effect immediately upon filing and service.”

tl;dv (Too Lazy; Didn't Validate): 181,874 Meetings Left Wide Open

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:20:00 -0400

“The CTO never came back to you.”

Appeals Court Agrees with EFF that Building a Web Browser Doesn't Violate the CFAA

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:10:00 -0400

The court held that the Assistant “is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes.”

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:00:00 -0400

“Moucka used the stolen data of a government officer and members of a then-former government officer’s immediate family in this re-extortion attempt.”

Water utilities get free cybersecurity help from DEF CON volunteers

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:50:00 -0400

“These leading cyber firms and NRWA are architecting a scalable cyber delivery model that has eluded water industry officials to date.”

The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:40:00 -0400

“The Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution.”

The offline messaging apps challenging internet shutdowns

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:30:00 -0400

“The decentralized architecture of the app means that there is no central server or database and therefore there cannot be a central kill switch.”

GitHub Actions Is Having One of the Worst Days in Its History

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:20:00 -0400

“500M minutes a week in 2023, to 1B a week in 2025, to 2.1B in a single week this spring.”

US bank places trust in ransomware crew that promised to delete its data

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:17:41 -0400

River Financial “took steps to attempt to suppress the affected data, including obtaining representations from the threat actor that it deleted the data.”

Californians' data deletion requests, DROP, become enforceable Aug. 1

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:12:00 -0400

“The alternative is you would have to contact 600 companies and say, please delete my information. And who’s got time for that?”

Meta straps on a 'Kick Me' sign by taking down video by India's prime minister

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:05:04 -0400

Meta acknowledged the takedown was “a mistake, apologized, and restored the video.”

Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:59:33 -0400

“I fear the software industry is taking on a large amount of cognitive debt that we’ll have to pay back very soon.”

New spinning drone hides in plain sight

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:54:26 -0400

“Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion.”

Steam on Linux Usage Reaches 4.01% in July 2026

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:48:21 -0400

“The July data puts SteamOS Holo as powering around 22% of Steam on Linux gaming systems.”

Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:53:47 -0400

“Insisting that our right to organize be adjudicated by the National Labor Relations Board is not a neutral choice; it has everything to do with delaying the process.”

The man who wrote the AI-boom bible just got margin-called out of it

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:48:44 -0400

“An eight-person fund used heavy leverage, the market turned, and a bigger firm picked up the pieces.”

Governor Hochul and Attorney General James Announce Final SAFE for Kids Act Rules

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:41:51 -0400

“Social media companies must determine that a given user is an adult before providing them with algorithmic feeds.”

Return to Office Mandates Don't Improve Employee or Company Performance

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:35:41 -0400

“RTO mandates hurt employee satisfaction but do not improve firm performance.”

Only 8.9% of sites block AI crawlers, but 94.8% are never cited in AI answers

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:29:26 -0400

“Only 10 of 193 sites were named even once across 5,978 assistant answers.”

OpenAI Cuts Prices on Select Models to Make High-Volume Work Economical

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:23:36 -0400

“At the lower-cost end, the new Luna and Terra prices make high-volume work economical at much greater scale.”

Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:18:01 -0400

“some reasonable content cannot reliably be expressed in RSS, whereas it’s unambiguous in Atom”

sizeof is surprisingly difficult to parse in C

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:11:36 -0400

“that’s an addition expression, not the size of a cast expression.”

Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:05:14 -0400

“All of a sudden we got a huge number of requests for this SMTP gateway.”

Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:59:41 -0400

“Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.”

How bitcoin cold wallets lost $70 million in an attack that never touched the devices

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:24:36 -0400

“Every step of that runs on the attacker’s machine. The victim’s device is not involved at any point.”

Resigning from Arch Linux

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:17:41 -0400

“Things are changing and it’s a good time to let go.”

Over 100 Games Are Available For $10 To Support Devs Hit By Industry Layoffs

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:11:08 -0400

“They are human beings whose livelihoods have been taken from them, often in spite of stellar, critically and financially successful work.”

A deep dive into Nvidia's Vera CPU and the Olympus cores that power it

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:04:34 -0400

“Vera will sell extremely well, if not for its performance characteristics, then because if you want more than eight Rubins, it’s probably coming with a Vera CPU attached.”

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:59:00 -0400

“A terminal multiplexer may sound like a narrow place to start a company, but the lowly terminal is the common denominator across today’s developers, agents, tools, and infrastructure.”

Go 1.27 Interactive Tour

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:52:11 -0400

“A method declaration may now declare its own type parameters, independent of the receiver’s.”

What Ukraine's Battlefield Openness Can Teach Washington About AI Access

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:46:56 -0400

“Ukraine’s leaderboard may be a crude way to run a war, but it is at least a rule. Public, legible, the same for every unit.”

Stacked pull requests are now in public preview

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:41:29 -0400

“A big change used to mean one giant PR nobody wanted to review. Now it’s a stack of small ones reviewers can actually follow, and the whole stack merges in one shot.”

Protected by Ghost Town

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:08:17 -0400

“Police didn’t come for an hour and a half. Ghost Town shows up in five minutes.”

The most famous brand in physical security got pwned by ShinyHunters

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:02:36 -0400

“ShinyHunters claimed to have obtained more than 4.9 million Salesforce records from Brinks Home containing some PII.”

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:56:35 -0400

“requiring a user to confirm that the user is not a minor shall not be sufficient”

How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:50:05 -0400

“while the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined”

Why businesses lie about AI

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:43:10 -0400

“Every single one. We have seen 0% success in a year and a half.”

CISA Alert: Water Sector PLC Targeting

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:38:06 -0400

“Censys ARC identified 4,148 Internet-exposed hosts responding to EtherNet/IP”

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:32:31 -0400

“send alerts if a teen attempts to bypass or disable parental controls”

Apple Screen Sharing Pre-Auth RCE

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:25:41 -0400

“No user interaction is required. The only prerequisite is that Screen Sharing is enabled on the target.”

World Cup Piracy Crackdown Shows Limits of Domain Seizures, MPA Pushes Site Blocking

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:20:11 -0400

“A takedown is essential, and it can interrupt access for a moment. But it does not dismantle the business behind it.”

Amending AB 1709 Doesn't Fix It: California's Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:13:42 -0400

“the bill defines ‘addictive feeds’ so broadly that it covers virtually every functional recommendation algorithm”

New GitHub, PyPI Policies Boost Supply Chain Security

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:08:38 -0400

“Three days as the default balances two goals: it pushes you past the window where most of these attacks live.”

Game Industry Hardship Fund

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:02:25 -0400

“Reports say 33% of the industry lost their jobs in the last two years, and the jobs they could fill are disappearing as CEOs try to replace them with AI.”

NetBSD 11.0 released

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:55:46 -0400

“As a consequence, we can’t publish a release without open issues. Instead of delaying the release further to fix them, we’ve instead chosen to be transparent about this.”

Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:50:19 -0400

“This is an implementation bug, not a hole in Lean’s meta-theory.”

Anthropic and OpenAI are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:15:17 -0400

“In one scenario, Mythos 5 persuaded developers to download a poisoned PyPI package. When that company’s scanner installed the package, Claude’s hidden code executed. Claude then used these credentials to access further infrastructure from this company.”

Can we train AI to choose safety over speed?

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:09:56 -0400

“Economic pressures and incentive structures often compel them to continue working under conditions that may jeopardize their health, safety, and well-being.”

Detect Dark Matter's Mark from Your Backyard

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:03:26 -0400

“Something out there is putting its stamp on how the Milky Way turns. And that basic observation is what allows me to say that, with the help of some roof flashing and a paint-thinner can, I’ve been able to detect dark matter from my backyard.”

The Maxwell Conjecture is False

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:57:15 -0400

“We exhibit a configuration of five point charges in Euclidean space whose electrostatic potential admits at least 24 critical points all of which are non-degenerate. Maxwell’s conjecture that the field of n point charges has at most (n-1)² critical points which are all non-degenerate is therefore false.”

Update Teams mobile app by October or lose your calendar

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:52:12 -0400

“Microsoft originally set a late-October deadline in its message, but we’re guessing someone familiar with the impending demise of Exchange Web Services (EWS) had a quiet word.”

Tech buyers are baking in sovereignty from day one, says Forrester

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:46:10 -0400

“The organisations that succeed will treat sovereignty as an architectural principle from the start.”

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:41:02 -0400

“Officers exercising their official duties, particularly in public, do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

UK wants datacenters to pay a fee for grid connection requests

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:35:52 -0400

“The electricity demand connections queue has more than tripled in size in less than a year, and consumers should not bear the risks created by speculative projects taking up space in the system”

LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:30:18 -0400

“It’s also pretty wild the button specifically uses the term ‘AI slop’ and not, say, ‘It seems this was generated with AI.’”

Charities remain locked out of CAF Bank online accounts

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:24:27 -0400

“People are concerned that wages won’t get paid because of this, and that’s just stressful when they have bills to pay.”

Better to beg forgiveness

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:19:04 -0400

“There is a whole universe of uses that might technically violate copyright, might technically not fit into di minimis, first sale or fair use – but these are also uses that no one would ever find out.”

The End of an Era

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:13:01 -0400

“My lifelong dream of writing novels somehow overlapped with the 20 good years where stories could be published cheaply but not written cheaply.”

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:06:28 -0400

“A full buyout by Vodafone was always on the cards but the agreement has come sooner than expected, with the joint venture only just into its second year.”

John Oliver Dares Buc-ee's To Sue Him Over Trademark Infringement

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:59:53 -0400

“Oliver accused the chain of ‘outright bullying,’ noting that most of the stores have changed their logos because they do not have the resources to fight the Texas giant”

How to speed up the Rust compiler in July 2026

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:53:03 -0400

“The mean wall-time reduction was a healthy 5.59%. Around half of this was due to some huge recent improvements in rustdoc, which saw a mean wall-time reduction of 37.92%!”

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:47:04 -0400

“Twenty years after last using the software, I still remembered the installation procedure”

Stripe Just Wants a Number

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:40:09 -0400

“Stripe just wants a number. It doesn’t care how we get there.”

Hims & Hers accused of sharing health secrets and hiding the cancel button

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:28:16 -0400

“the consumer’s subscription would not be cancelled. Instead, the consumer would then have to click through approximately three to ten survey questions”

For the Second Time, Lawmakers Failed to Fix California's Warning System for Teacher Misconduct

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:21:44 -0400

“When the safety of a child does not meet a legislative priority, that’s a head-scratcher for me. I think being sympathetic to the offender is on the wrong side of this issue.”

The Worst Person You Know Just Filed A Good First Amendment Lawsuit Against A Very Badly Drafted Nudify App Ban

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:15:16 -0400

“HF 1606 punishes AI platforms that allow users to alter images of real people to depict an ‘intimate part.’ But the statute contains no knowledge, intent, or purpose requirement.”

Scotland's university procurement center confirms cybercrooks broke in

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:09:55 -0400

“We are aware that the group responsible for the unauthorized access has claimed to have taken some historic data from our systems.”

Vietnam Uses HiAnime Arrests As Defense Against U.S. Trade Sanctions

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:03:59 -0400

“on 1 July 2026, the Ministry of Public Security initiated criminal proceedings […] against 07 suspects”

Senators Push Federal Regulator to Prove School Bus Safety Data Is Accurate

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:58:49 -0400

“Without accurate and complete data, it is impossible for FMCSA to properly target enforcement on unsafe companies”

It doesn't matter whether "Matz is nice"

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:53:05 -0400

“the Ruby community is not ’nice'”

Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:47:02 -0400

“Kiro is ‘available’ in the same way as I am available to play in the NBA.”

Microsoft's Project Silica

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:41:18 -0400

“on average for every MB read there are 47 MBs written, and for every read operation there are 174 writes”

Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery?

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:36:15 -0400

“If, however, the liquid electrolyte were replaced with some sort of solid material, these dendrites might stop being a problem.”

Netflix Sued For Losing 'Master Copy' of Unreleased Nicolas Cage Movie

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:30:05 -0400

“Someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week”

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:45:00 -0400

“Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.’”

Axon Insists Its AI Makes Police Reports Easier. Nothing Suggests It Makes Them Any Better

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:40:00 -0400

“It was just easier to type the report themselves.”

Andy Beshear Set Out to Make Drug Treatment Widely Available in Kentucky. Fraud and Abuse Followed.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:35:00 -0400

“It just became an opportunity for people to make money.”

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:30:00 -0400

“less than 1 percent of the cars scanned are connected to crime, yet they still have details added to a database, such as vehicle manufacturer, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and scratches.”

A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs vulnerable to attack

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:25:00 -0400

“There’s a real probability that this is going to be a problem that’s fundamentally unsolvable.”

What 20 Million Bans Reveal About The Stress On Wikipedia's Volunteers

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:20:00 -0400

“The end-user experience is being preserved, and the people behind the scenes are bearing the cost.”

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:15:00 -0400

“In all cases, Anthropic’s evaluation prompt specified to Claude that its environment was a simulation and that it had no internet access. Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available.”

HBO's Blocking Order Takes Out Popular Pirate Streaming Domains Including Streamzy.to

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:05:00 -0400

“This is, therefore, not a case of incidental infringement, but one where the primary purpose of the websites appears to be to facilitate infringement of the plaintiffs’ copyright”

With Moonshot's free Kimi K3, China changes the sovereign AI playbook

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:00:00 -0400

“The best artificial intelligence technology any country can own is now available for free.”

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:55:00 -0400

“Pure scrambling fonts already existed…We wanted a mechanism with actual consequences: scrape without asking, and you can’t tell if what you took was real.”

C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:50:00 -0400

“Your program not crashing can make the problem seem benign. It is not.”

The AI Aesthetic

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:45:00 -0400

“Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges.”

SpaceX looks to compete with the carriers

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:40:00 -0400

“The reality is that they’re coming to the game very late after this industry has been established.”

Lawmakers Call for CDC to Track Vitamin K Shot Refusals, Cite ProPublica Report

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:52:30 -0400

“Recent reporting from ProPublica has highlighted a major problem: the federal government does not currently track vitamin K shot refusal, vitamin K deficiency bleeding, or the preventable deaths related to vitamin K deficiency.”

The hidden cost of Myanmar's rare earth mines

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:50:30 -0400

“I think companies are consistently using Myanmar as a sacrifice zone.”

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:48:30 -0400

“If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it.”

Big Tech demanding deals that smooth out memory prices, says SK Hynix

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:46:30 -0400

“Relationships are evolving beyond transactional relations into more strategic long-term partnerships.”

How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:44:30 -0400

“Unlike public schools, where everything from test scores to school lunches and staff credentials is regulated, most of what happens in private schools is not open to public scrutiny.”

A Blackout Protest Over Sony Ditching Disks Is Brewing

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:42:30 -0400

“Sony’s strategy for dealing with online and customer backlash in the past has been to simply wait it out.”

A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV Cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:40:30 -0400

“Optane’s otherworldly write endurance and low latency would have made it a perfect choice for this workload.”

College prof hides prompt to catch AI cheaters, finds human nature is pretty much as we thought

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:38:30 -0400

“Madagascar wore a toaster to a basketball game.”

Anxious Chinese students are trusting AI to help pick colleges and majors

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:36:30 -0400

“There’s no way individuals can digest so much information in such a short time.”

Burnham's spanner in the works leaves UK government tech scattered across Whitehall

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:34:30 -0400

“The post of a dedicated technology minister is gone.”

Kimi K3 Architecture Overview and Notes

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:32:30 -0400

“By far the biggest open-weight model right now.”

Delayed Gratification: Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:30:30 -0400

“Proud to be ‘Last to Breaking News’ since 2011.”

Court Shuts Down Federal Officers Who Wanted To Run A Stingray Device For A Month Straight

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:30:00 -0400

“The Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement bars this sort of ‘rummaging’ through the proverbial home.”

Earth's Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:28:30 -0400

“Whether the apparent cycle reflects a genuine feature of Earth’s history remains an open question.”

More Tailscale tricks for your jailbroken Kindle

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:26:30 -0400

“Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle is typically forced to run in userspace mode, which means it cannot use the device’s own network routing layer.”

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:25:00 -0400

“I’m glad to be out, but this is an inconvenience, really. It’s not really deterring me from speaking out or, I guess, clapping.”

Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:24:30 -0400

“Half-Life has finally landed for PowerPC based Macintosh computers 28 years after it’s original release!”

User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:22:30 -0400

“The scene has a long and storied tradition of building its own tools.”

404 Media Scores Leaked Document Detailing The Dozens Of Surveillance Tools ICE Has Access To

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:20:00 -0400

“The document covers everything from monitoring social media to tracking the movements of vehicles.”

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:15:00 -0400

“A venue cannot claim to be a safe space while feeding its patrons’ data to a third party database.”

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:10:00 -0400

“Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them.”

Anthropic's New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough.

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:05:00 -0400

“Well folks. Here we are. The bug apocalypse has fully descended upon us.”

San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

“Privacy is a human right, not something that people should understand as a currency to give away or protect based on how it will impact the price of groceries.”

Back of the NetApp: Latest exec signing scores $34M compensation package

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:55:00 -0400

“NetApp says 95 percent of his target direct compensation is ‘at risk,’ taking the form of cash incentives and equity awards rather than guaranteed salary.”

Indian EV makers beat Tesla and BYD on energy efficiency

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:50:00 -0400

“Indian manufacturers are beating Tesla and BYD at building energy-efficient electric cars.”

Substack writers, you need a website

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:45:00 -0400

“When you build your audience entirely on someone else’s platform, you aren’t a homeowner. You are a tenant.”

The Orchestrator's Tax

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:40:00 -0400

“Every token in the orchestrator’s context is competing for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context, not how fast it runs.”

Codex Security

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:35:00 -0400

“@openai/codex-security is a CLI and TypeScript SDK for finding, validating, and fixing security vulnerabilities in your code.”

Inside Zig's Incremental Compilation

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:30:00 -0400

“Today, using Zig’s incremental compilation, you can make changes to real, complex applications in a matter of milliseconds.”

Arizona State Launches Influencer Degree Where Students Must Gain Real Followers

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:25:00 -0400

“They will have demonstrable audience growth. They will have a platform of their choice with real content and real followers and a real audience behind them.”

AI Systems Out-Persuade Expert Humans, Including Professional Canvassers And World Championship Debaters

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:50:00 -0400

“AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses.”

Hyperscale, Hypersensitive: US Teacher Cuffed for Applauding Datacenter Critics

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:45:00 -0400

“Officers approached Claridge, who declined to leave and told them: ‘Drag me out.’ Four officers duly hoisted the teacher off the floor and carried him outside.”

France Approves Automated, Real-Time Blocking of Pirate Sports Streams

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:40:00 -0400

“The French Parliament has handed ARCOM, the country’s audiovisual and digital regulator, the power to block pirate sports streams in real time without checking each targeted piracy source manually.”

Hugging Face Rebuilt a Third of Its Infrastructure After OpenAI Agents Ran Amok

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:35:00 -0400

“Hugging Face rebuilt around a third of its infrastructure from clean images as part of a sizable cleanup effort.”

Amazon Files Application for Direct-to-Device Satellite Constellation

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“Amazon has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for a constellation of more than 5,100 satellites that would provide direct-to-device (D2D) services using Globalstar spectrum.”

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:25:00 -0400

“Babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot, research shows, are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding.”

DMARC Has Been Public Since 2012. 68.4% of Domains Still Don't Enforce It

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:20:00 -0400

“p=none is meant to be a temporary monitoring phase before you move to enforcement, typically a few weeks. Fourteen years after the standard shipped, for the largest single group of domains in our data, it looks like the permanent state.”

New HIV Vaccine Shows Unprecedented Success in Preclinical Study

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:15:00 -0400

“We succeeded in taking ultra-rare antibody responses and turning them common responses by the end of the vaccination process.”

Discernment

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:10:00 -0400

“By definition, a student isn’t an expert on the subject they’re studying. That’s the whole point of studying, to acquire knowledge and thus discernment.”

Try the New Firefox Design in Nightly

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“You’ll notice softer tab shapes, a warmer color palette, updated icons, and after hearing from many of you, the return of Compact Mode and new theme options to make Firefox your own.”

Protester Charged With Destroying Property After Giving CBP Agents His GrapheneOS 'Duress' Mode Passcode

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:14:00 -0400

“GrapheneOS provides users with the ability to set a duress PIN/Password that will irreversibly wipe the device once entered anywhere where the device credentials are requested.”

Judge Rejects Google's Attempt To DMCA Its Way Out Of Being Scraped

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:13:00 -0400

“Because the DMCA does not apply where the work controlled by a technological measure is not protected under the Copyright Act, Google’s claims under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) and 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2) are subject to dismissal as a matter of law.”

Copyright Scammers Weaponized Meta's Rights Manager with Backdating Exploit

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:12:00 -0400

“Meta acted on the claims without checking the rightsholder, metadata or edit history of the posts.”

Elon Musk Just Claimed That "SpaceX Will Be Worth More Than Earth," but the Bond Market Strongly Disagrees

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:11:00 -0400

“I said SpaceX will be worth more than Earth if we achieve our goals.”

New EU Court of Justice Ruling on Platform Liability Could Cause Collateral Damage to Freedom of Expression

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:10:00 -0400

“By equating algorithmic organisation with content control, the ruling risks excluding social networks and other platforms from the liability exemption and encouraging proactive monitoring of what users say online and removal of lawful speech.”

In China, people are renting out their faces to AI

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:09:00 -0400

“If I license my face, I have no idea how AI might eventually change it or whether it could portray me in degrading ways.”

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:08:00 -0400

“Projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other ‘AI’ tools will no longer be welcome.”

Most Googlebots are fake

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:07:00 -0400

“On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog… and the flip side is that I can claim to be a dog (or a Googlebot) whenever I feel like it.”

Impostor Chinese models pretend they're Claude

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:06:00 -0400

“It is not proof of a distillation, but it does show that Claude’s self-concept is embedded in these models’ weights.”

China begins mass production of homegrown DUV lithography machines in major chip breakthrough

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:05:00 -0400

“The country has moved beyond building prototypes and into manufacturing commercial lithography systems that domestic chipmakers can begin evaluating inside real production lines.”

On This Nearly Deserted Alaska Island, You Pay to Keep Hundreds of Empty Buildings Wired for Internet

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:04:00 -0400

“Not a single one told us they subscribe to the island’s subsidized internet service.”

Waymo reportedly mulling a breakup with Uber

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:03:00 -0400

“Waymo already told Uber that it intends to offer robotaxis on its own app in those markets starting in January 2028”

A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:02:00 -0400

“I didn’t think I was doing groundbreaking journalism. It was just homework.”

Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:01:00 -0400

“Coming home, it turns out, is its own kind of mission, and the part of you that watched yourself float for six months does not stop watching the moment your boots touch the tarmac.”

The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:00:00 -0400

“a person’s privacy interests in the personal data on a phone or laptop are extraordinarily different than their limited privacy interests in the contents of their suitcase.”

X and Music Publishers Settle Three-Year Copyright Clash After SpaceX IPO

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:55:00 -0400

“The coordinated timing and matching language leave little doubt that these cases were resolved as part of a package deal.”

Google's anti-search-scraping lawsuit dismissed

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:50:00 -0400

“The US District Court for the Northern District of California found that there was no indication that any copyright had been breached.”

Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:45:00 -0400

“What it will come down to is whether the anti-AI groups in FOSS can work together and help each other to hold off the vast and commercially backed pressure”

Apple's smart glasses are running late because they don't want to stir a privacy storm

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:40:00 -0400

“Removing video capture would make the glasses less controversial, but also less appealing.”

AI is shrinking video game development teams to one

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:35:00 -0400

“Instead of hiring five junior programmers at the startup where he works, my developer friend does all the work himself with AI.”

Hackers abuse Notepad++ plugins to stealthily install malware

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:30:00 -0400

“Ukraine’s CERT has uncovered attacks distributing an archive containing the legitimate Notepad++ application and a malicious utility called LunchPoke disguised as a plugin to establish persistence.”

Memory Safety Absolutists

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:25:00 -0400

“With roughly 5 million lines of Rust in the Android platform and one potential memory safety vulnerability found (and fixed pre-release), our estimated vulnerability density for Rust is 0.2 vuln per 1 million lines (MLOC).”

Decker

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:20:00 -0400

“Decker includes no advertising, telemetry, gamification, slop-generator integration, or other intrusions on user privacy and autonomy.”

Hundreds of Drone-as-First-Responder Programs Could Soon Be Launched Across the Country

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:40:00 -0400

“The agency issued more waivers between April 2025 and February 2026 than it had in the previous seven years combined.”

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:35:00 -0400

“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform.”

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“With sequential user IDs and no rate limiting, an attacker could enumerate every single account on the platform. One GET request per user.”

iOS 27 code suggests Apple could restrict leased devices after missed payments

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:25:00 -0400

“If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple’s system services can place the iPhone in ‘Restricted Mode,’ which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved.”

Ken Paxton Touts His Efforts to Fight Voter Fraud. His Senate Opponent Is Now Accusing Him of Committing It.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:20:00 -0400

“Turns out, he was committing voter fraud the whole time, voting illegally in six elections”

Canadian Lab Extracts 90% of Nuclear Waste Danger in 24 Hours

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:15:00 -0400

“Moltex projects that a single 300 MW SSR-W could run for its full 60-year life on recycled fuel from about 260,000 used CANDU bundles.”

Meta Confirms 'Data Engineer' is Behind Key IP Address in Adult Film Piracy Lawsuit

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:10:00 -0400

“Meta flatly denies that any employee’s BitTorrent activity was connected to its AI research or data collection.”

The Robots Cometh

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:05:00 -0400

“Once the technology surpasses this inflection point, robots can gradually be rolled out for large-scale commercial use.”

Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“On Sunday, July 26th, at 10:13, a Romanian Air Force F-16 aircraft shot down a drone that had entered the national airspace without authorization.”

Caleb Williams, George Gervin, An 'Iceman' Trademark And Insulated Boots...Oh My?

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:55:00 -0400

“These marks are identical in appearance, sound and meaning.”

A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:50:00 -0400

“the point is to show that the null-command can be used in places where a command is required, but nothing is desired.”

Fed up with Big Tech, communities turn to data collectives for control

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:45:00 -0400

“The big companies have built themselves up on the backs of all these people creating data, who think it’s time to set their own terms now.”

Accidental Historian

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:40:00 -0400

“It just doesn’t bring me any joy. But what does bring me joy is giving somebody a print of a photograph I took.”

Claude Opus 5

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:30:00 -0400

“Claude Opus 5 is a thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price.”

GitHub Ordered to Remove Decentralized Messaging App Bitchat in India

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“The app’s lack of mandatory registration, phone number verification, and centralized logging significantly impedes lawful interception and criminal investigations.”

Everyone Should Know SIMD

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:15:00 -0400

“Every developer should be able to recognize the opportunity and, most importantly, should not be scared of SIMD.”

Stripe in Talks to Buy OpenRouter for Roughly $10 Billion

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“OpenRouter is part of an emerging crop of startups that have found a lucrative niche between AI developers.”

A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:45:00 -0400

“Earlier this year, a young reporter for the Redwood High School Bark found a few local references in the US Department of Justice’s public files concerning Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.”

The first known runaway AI agent, or a very bad marketing stunt?

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:55:00 -0400

“Advanced, autonomous agents are going to start clobbering the internet with weird and wonderful RCEs, and it’s not going to be the good guys running them.”

OpenAI's AI spending spree has ballooned to $750B

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:50:00 -0400

“OpenAI announced Wednesday that it will spend $750 billion on infrastructure through 2030, some 25% more than it estimated earlier this year.”

Commission fines Google €890 million for breaches of the Digital Markets Act

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:45:00 -0400

“Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search.”

Travis Kalanick's robotics company raises $1.7B, led by a16z

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:40:00 -0400

“Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created atop the project Kalanick has been working on since he resigned from Uber, a ghost kitchen play called Cloud Kitchens.”

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:35:00 -0400

“These needless accesses create expensive database queries that diminish the service quality for all of us, requires substantial amounts of work from our system administrators.”

American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:30:00 -0400

“Open almost always wins when it comes to infrastructure adoption. Open technologies can be used permissionlessly and therefore can be at the center of more innovation.”

How proprietary formats have become Microsoft's main tool for lock-in

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:15:00 -0400

“A standard that only one implementation fully supports is, from a functional point of view, a proprietary format with a standardisation certificate.”

I wrote an API client for my water-cooled bed

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“I have a PhD in physics. I built lasers that spit out 80 femtosecond pulses, and I did quantum mechanics simulations.”

Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:55:00 -0400

“Minecraft now uses SDL3 instead of GLFW for window management, input and platform integration. On Linux systems, the game will now use and prefer Wayland natively if available.”

I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:50:00 -0400

“The first version of this setup burned the whole limit of my Claude Max 5x plan in 30 minutes.”

Reviewing AI Code Is Not A Viable Argument

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:45:00 -0400

“For every 400 LOC written by a LLM Coding Assistants (at best, less for code that are hard to review), we need one professional senior developer to spend 1h of his time reviewing the code.”

OpenAI acknowledges GPT-5.6 may accidentally delete files, calls it an 'honest mistake'

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:40:00 -0400

“The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead.”

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:35:00 -0400

“Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that they can do the open-source thing and fork it.”

The State of Open Source AI

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“Open weights are no longer a compromise. They are where the work happens: a majority of production tokens now route through them.”

How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:45:00 -0400

“Zig’s 35ms is still way ahead… 1/100th the build time of 3.4 seconds.”

Astronomers Detect First Atmosphere Around a Rocky Earth-Like Planet in the Habitable Zone

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“It’s in the habitable zone, which is super exciting for astrobiology and habitability and searching for life.”

What Can We Learn from Bun's Rapid Rust Rewrite with AI?

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:15:00 -0400

“A rewrite in another language would take a small team of engineers a full year. A year of zero user-facing impact is not a realistic option we could consider.”

Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:35:00 -0400

“Xcode.app must be installed, but it never has to be open.”

Rewriting Bun in Rust

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:30:00 -0400

“A large percentage of bugs from that list are use-after-free, double-free, and ‘forgot to free’ in an error path. In safe Rust, these are compiler errors.”

Lobste.rs is now running on SQLite

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:25:00 -0400

“cpu usage is down, memory usage is down, site seems to be snappier at least for me”

Did SpaceX puncture the AI bubble?

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:20:00 -0400

“The AI bubble-burst watch has begun.”

Microsoft overhauls Windows 11 search to prioritize local results and remove ads

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:15:00 -0400

“Because the Windows Search Box is where many people start, we focused first on making results more dependable, easier to scan, and clearer before you click.”

Winners and losers in the coming AI margin collapse (part 2)

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:10:00 -0400

“The margin in pure model inference is heading towards zero.”

How I Bought a Private Jet by Selling $10 Subscriptions to 404 Media

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:05:00 -0400

“We’re here on the PJ, off to Ibiza. Got the passport, got the prosecco. We’re hustling.”

Lindsey Graham Cause of Death: US Senator Dies at 71 After a 'Brief and Sudden Illness'

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:59:00 -0400

“Aortic Dissection due to Arteriosclerotic Cardiovascular disease.”

Apple Sues OpenAI Over Alleged Trade Secret Theft

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:58:00 -0400

“This is the tip of the iceberg. Apple lacks visibility into what’s happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized.”

Linus Torvalds on Rust, C, Bugs, and AI Patch-Checking Tools

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:57:00 -0400

“Git and email are the two really only tools I use.”

Control the Ideas, Not the Code

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:56:00 -0400

“Control the ideas of your software, looking at the code itself is suboptimal and often pointless.”

Quadrupling Code Performance With a 'Useless' If

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:55:00 -0400

“In a synthetic benchmark, this change has sped up the loop from 320 us to 80 us.”

The Brits Panning for Gold

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:54:00 -0400

“The thing about gold is that it’s trying to return to the centre of the earth.”

A Brief History of KV Cache Compression Developments

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:53:00 -0400

“The memory wall in AI has mostly been solved with maths, not silicon.”

Stop Telling Me To Ask An LLM

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:44:00 -0400

“What ‘ask Claude’ doesn’t give me is the person’s specific, lived experience.”

An Update on the Scraper Situation

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:40:00 -0400

“Scraper attacks come from a huge number of sources across the net…each hit is meant to look like just another human with a web browser.”

Why an Abandoned IBM Campus Troubles a NY Town

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:35:00 -0400

“Since February, state police have arrested 48 people, 30 of them teens, on trespassing charges at the 723-acre site.”

Former GitHub CEO Launches Competitor Designed for the Age of Vibe Coding

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:30:00 -0400

“The question is how we can expand, rewire, and evolve Git hosting for a world where AI agents are the primary producers of code.”

America's Greatest Hot Dog

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:25:00 -0400

“It is America’s greatest hot dog. And the country’s last great deal.”

Expert-Aware Quantisation: Near-Q4 Quality at Near-Q2 Size?

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:20:00 -0400

“If only a subset of experts really matter for the task, we can keep those at high precision and crush the rest.”

Microsoft to retire the OWA Light client in Exchange Server

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:50:00 -0400

“OWA Light was an important compatibility experience when the web needed it. Today, the full Outlook on the web experience is the right place for us to focus.”

OpenAI launches GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna on apps and API

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:45:00 -0400

“Sol, Terra, and Luna, our GPT-5.6 family of models, are starting to roll out now in ChatGPT, Codex, and the API.”

The Extraordinary Life and Quiet Death of the World's Largest Iceberg

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:40:00 -0400

“In March 2024, A23a’s progress across the ocean simply halted, and it began to twirl.”

Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:15:00 -0400

“It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn’t want me to be there.”

FTC reaches settlement that brings right-to-repair to John Deere farm equipment

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:10:00 -0400

“Those policies required equipment owners and independent repair providers to pay higher prices for any needed services.”

US Food and Drug Administration rejects petition to set PFAS limits in food

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:05:00 -0400

“FDA concluded that the petition did not provide sufficient scientific evidence to support establishing tolerances or action levels for the specific PFAS, foods and levels requested.”

Meta Will Build Its First Canadian Data Center in Alberta

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

“This is the first of its kind, the first of its size, the first of its scale, but it won’t be the last.”

Meta is toying with the idea of smart glasses that record everything, all the time

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 06:55:00 -0400

“Meta is testing prototype smart glasses that record literally everything, all the time. The so-called ‘super-sensing’ glasses would reportedly capture photos ’every few seconds.’”

Announcing TypeScript 7.0

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 06:50:00 -0400

“TypeScript 7 brings native code speed, shared memory multithreading, and a number of new optimizations that typically yield speedups between 8x and 12x on full builds.”

Apple to Increase Spend with Broadcom to Produce Billions More U.S. Chips

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:30:00 -0400

“Apple and Broadcom have a long history together, and this new phase of our partnership further accelerates our commitment to American manufacturing and innovation.”

Doom Developer id Software Is Reportedly Losing Half Its Staff

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft ‘slow-walked union members at the bargaining table’ preventing them from accessing the protections of a union contract.”

Odin 1.0

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“The Data-Oriented Language for Sane Software Development.”

How Tech Workers Are Feeling in 2026: a Workforce Splitting in Two

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Amplified and destabilized at the same time. We just set a new denominator for the job. And it moves higher every month.”

All Cars Sold in the EU Now Require a Camera Aimed at Your Face

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:30:00 -0400

“Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face.”

Google's Exponential Path to Climate-Wrecking Digital Bloat

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:45:00 -0400

“The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever.”

Microsoft Flips Windows Backup to On by Default Unless You're in the EU

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:00:00 -0400

“An opt-out setting that quietly ships settings data off-device is exactly the sort of thing that adds to administrators’ workloads rather than lightening them.”

Nvidia's Kyber Rack Delayed to 2028 Over Manufacturing Snags

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:15:00 -0400

“Kyber NVL144 rack architecture has been delayed to 2028 as the PCB midplane remains challenging from a manufacturability standpoint.”

Showdown in Strasbourg: The unexpected return of Chat Control 1.0

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:40:00 -0400

“The European Parliament cleared the way for a renewed extension of the so-called ‘Chat Control’ on Tuesday afternoon. With a narrow majority of 331 to 304 votes…”

Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:30:00 -0400

“On July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal.”

You shouldn't trust Trusted Publishing

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:20:00 -0400

“Trusted Publishing is just an authentication method. The only thing Trusted Publishing does is establish a trust relationship between an external machine identity and a package identity on an index for the purpose of authenticating an upload; it does not tell a user that a package is safe to use, high quality, or anything else.”

Apple reportedly orders 10M foldable iPhone Ultra models, which could sell for around $2500

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:10:00 -0400

“Apple has told suppliers to prepare to produce about 10 million foldable iPhones this year with an expected price tag of around $2,500.”

Tech CEOs Walk Back Dire AI Job Loss Predictions

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“We’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications.” - Sam Altman

Windows Identifier Used to Track Scattered Spider Perp After Microsoft Shared Info with FBI

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

“Such GDIDs are typically used for diagnostic and crash reporting, feature-usage analysis, and detecting abuse patterns such as one machine repeatedly claiming free trials or licences.”

GLM 5.2 and the Coming AI Margin Collapse

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:30:00 -0400

“The going rate for GLM5.2 seems to be around the $4.40/MTok mark. This is less than 20% of the retail price of Opus.”

GitHub Offers Limited CD-ROM Copies of Public Repositories

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:00:00 -0400

“GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM. Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children.”

JadePuffer Ransomware Used AI Agent to Automate Entire Attack

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:30:00 -0400

“JadePuffer used an autonomous AI agent for reconnaissance on the target, to steal credentials, move laterally, establish persistence, escalate privileges, and to encrypt data.”

Tunnel 13

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:13:00 -0400

“Holmes acted on hunches,” he said. “And hunches play no part in my crime laboratory.”

Microsoft Lays Off Nearly 5,000 Employees Across Xbox, Commercial Sales

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:12:00 -0400

“The roles being eliminated today are not being replaced by AI.”

Zombie 'Who Owns Unix?' Lawsuit Comes Alive Again

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:11:00 -0400

“The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault. But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on.”

Graham Platner Denies Sexual Assault Allegations Published by Politico

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:10:00 -0400

“Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love.”

Real-time Map of Great Britain's Rail Network

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:20:00 -0400

“Signalbox’s technology identifies the train a device is on by matching a snapshot of smartphone data to a train’s trajectory data.”

Mexico 2-3 England: World Cup Round of 16

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:17:00 -0400

“In a breathless encounter that will surely go down as an instant classic, England survived for more than 40 minutes with ten men following Jarell Quansah’s red card early in the second half.”

A Speed Limit for Computers

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:14:00 -0400

“Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.”

Google Told to Pay Klarna Nearly $2 Billion in Shopping Spat

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:11:00 -0400

“Google has been abusing its dominant position as a search engine by favoring its own comparison shopping service.”

AI Has Torched the Market for Junior Programmers

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:08:00 -0400

“The career on-ramp for professional software engineers used to work like this: you got hired to write mediocre code, a senior engineer reviewed it, you slowly absorbed judgment through repetition and correction, and a decade later you were the senior engineer. That chain is now broken.”

Alice Sebold, the Wrong Man and Syracuse's Buried Rape Crisis

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:05:00 -0400

“That guy is still out there doing it.”

Since Linux 6.9, LUKS suspend stopped wiping disk-encryption keys from memory

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:45:00 -0400

“Since Linux 6.9 (May 2024), the tool that locks the laptop’s drive on suspend had been silently failing.”

PJM grid operator orders emergency steps to avoid large-scale outages

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:40:00 -0400

“PJM is running generators at full capacity and reducing electricity demand to avoid outages.”

No LLM code in dependencies

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:35:00 -0400

“I’ve spent about 100 hours of work over the past month to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code.”

Godot Foundation will stop accepting AI-authored code contributions

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:30:00 -0400

“We can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it.”

Apple's Hide My Email feature has a bug that's been exposing real email addresses

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:25:00 -0400

“Details of the vulnerability haven’t been publicly disclosed, for fear that it will be exploited.”

Virginia Bans Sale of Geolocation Data

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“The ban on the sale of geolocation data goes into effect on July 1, 2026.”

AI Agent Executes 'First' End-To-End Ransomware Attack

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“The skill floor for running ransomware has dropped to whatever it costs to run an agent, and if that agent is running on stolen credentials through LLMjacking, the cost to an attacker is close to zero.”

Artificial Adventures

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:00:00 -0400

“Reviews, refactoring, and one-off scripts are consistently useful. Well worth the money for that alone.”

Rise of the Cheap Robots

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:30:00 -0400

“These are finally, finally starting to look like something that could be made very capable.”

This blog is written in en-GB

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:56:00 -0400

“It is more than the language I speak; it is the culture I live in, the way that I think, and the accent I use.”

After 250 years, the 'American dream' is tarnished but alive

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:52:00 -0400

“This country offers great opportunities. It provides a path to achieving what you want. But the American dream is realized little by little.”

What happened to the fight for the internet?

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:48:00 -0400

“It feels like people are tired. And it feels like the PR for locking things down has more acceptance publicly than before.”

The Space-Based Data Center Hype Machine Is Already In Orbit

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:44:00 -0400

“For orbital data centers, which he says will be a cost-effective alternative to terrestrial data centers within three years, the math won’t make sense for several years, if ever.”

DHS Confirms Hackers Breached HSIN Info-Sharing Platform

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:40:00 -0400

“The hackers targeted HSIN servers and a SharePoint system used for collaboration efforts.”

My Father Wants to Age in Place. AI Will Be Watching

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:36:00 -0400

“His coughs, toilet flushes, and even snippets of private conversations—Sensi records it all.”

Political Parties Can Now Spend Unlimited Money Supporting Candidates, After Supreme Court Overturns Decades of Precedent

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:12:00 -0400

“The court was not convinced that limiting coordinated party expenditures was necessary to curb conduit corruption.”

Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan's Post Office for Letters to the Dead

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:11:00 -0400

“Finding out that you are not alone is the most important thing, finding out that you are not the only person who is grieving.”

Local Reasoning for Global Properties

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:10:00 -0400

“I can reason globally about the effects of multi-threading and data races while only looking at my code locally.”

Meta Is Reportedly Building Its Own Cloud Business

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:09:00 -0400

“The cloud business could offer multiple services, according to the report, like selling access to AI models run on Meta’s infrastructure, or leasing the computing power of its data centers.”

U.S. Helicopter Goes Down in Arabian Sea, Crew Member Missing, Navy Says

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:07:00 -0400

“Three of the helicopter’s four crew members have been recovered and are in stable condition aboard George H. W. Bush.”

Searchable Directory of 22k+ Products From Worker-Owned Co-ops

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:06:00 -0400

“Find Worker-Owned Coffee Shops & Restaurants Near You”

Enterprise Tech In, Shell Out: Progress Kemp LoadMaster Uninitialized Heap to Pre-Auth RCE

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:45:00 -0400

“Spray the desired command payload enough times to increase the chance that one copy lands adjacent to apiuser.”

'PROMISE' Me the Moon? NASA Wants To Send Spare Nuclear-Powered Mars Rover to the Lunar Surface

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:30:00 -0400

“We are in the business of the near impossible, so why not?”

Uruky - The Paid European Search Engine: My First Impressions After Using Uruky for a Month

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:15:00 -0400

“Their service is very affordable at 5 euro a month, and their interface is great. Unfortunately they fail where it matters most: search results.”

For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:00:00 -0400

“For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life.”

On Description

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:00:00 -0400

“Most of a description goes unsaid rather than said; most everything is tossed into the pile of the unvarying, the uninteresting, the unremarkable.”

My Midlife Crisis Corolla Is Fast, Furious, and Fully Modded

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 03:45:00 -0400

“Now when I hit a loopy freeway interchange at night and my GR Corolla carves through the turn, it’s 1996 and I’m cruising in my CRX…”

Realta Fusion Generates Electricity Directly From a Fusion Reaction, an Apparent First

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 03:30:00 -0400

“We can take power from a plasma.”

Why I Stopped Arguing With People

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 03:15:00 -0400

“I stopped arguing not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally wanted something more than being right: I wanted to keep getting better.”

DirtyClone: Fourth Linux Kernel Flaw in Six Weeks Escalates to Root

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 03:00:00 -0400

“The severity of this issue is significant because it allows any unprivileged local user to gain root access (LPE) by manipulating the Linux page cache.”

New Florida Law Bans Local Net-Zero Emissions Policies

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:45:00 -0400

“HB 1217 prohibits local governments from pursuing net-zero emissions goals.”

Editor's Note: NPR Retracts Story About Alito Retirement

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:15:00 -0400

“Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, retires.”

The First Early Human Eggs From Stem Cells

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:00:00 -0400

“We have generated the first early human egg cells (‘primary oocytes’) derived from stem cells.”

Supreme Court Lets States Count Mail Ballots That Arrive After Election Day

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:15:00 -0400

“The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.

In San Francisco, Even $180,000 Tech Salaries Are No Longer Enough

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:10:00 -0400

“I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all.”

When Impressive Performance Gains Do Not Matter

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:05:00 -0400

“If you can’t get each job below 4 hours, including travel time, then you can’t complete two in a day.”

European Digital ID Wallets Are a Gift to Google and Apple

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“ID wallets are public infrastructure to access critical public services. They should remain interoperable across different devices and operating systems, free from vendor lock-in.”

Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“The plaintiffs alleged that the three companies, which produce most of the world’s D-RAM, colluded on supply and pricing from 2022, driving prices up by about 700% over the past four years.”

Double Threat to Private Communications: Chat Control Relaunch

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:20:00 -0400

“What we are witnessing this week is a blatant disregard for democratic processes and fundamental rights.”

IBM Debuts World's First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip Technology

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:10:00 -0400

“The new chip technology packs nearly 100 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip.”

Zuckerberg Urges Meta to Explore Working With Polymarket and Kalshi

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to build a prediction markets app.”

Nobody Here Wants the Data Center: An Oral History

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:50:00 -0400

“How are we supposed to know if they’re getting close to the limitations of our freshwater aquifer if we don’t know how much water they’re using?”

Ford rehires 'gray beard' engineers after AI falls short

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:00:00 -0400

“Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.”

Debt, AI boom and economic fragilities raise global risks, BIS says

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:00:00 -0400

“The interconnectedness of the financial system and interplay of vulnerabilities could mean the speed of a correction could be much faster than previous banking crisis episodes.”

A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“The percentages of removed posts were generally fairly high, with the lowest one being 39.71% spammy and highest one 98.19%.”

US Agency Cancels Contract For Warrantless Tracking of Mobile Devices

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“Webloc, which is made by a vendor called Penlink, sources data from consumer apps and advertising networks, which collect the location of mobile devices from consumers who download apps or browse the web.”

Nearly Half of LG Smart TV Apps Contain Residential Proxy SDKs

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“Beneath that calm interface, however, a proxy SDK silently sells access to the home’s internet connection, making money in the background while the user stares at animated fish.”

Librepods: AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“LibrePods allows you to use AirPods features that are exclusive to Apple devices by implementing the proprietary protocol used to exchange data between AirPods and Apple devices.”

Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Please do not abuse these. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I’ve always found this is the most efficient way.”

We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“A printer surveillance system won’t work for its intended purpose, and will only harm law abiding users.”

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable.”

We're making Bunny DNS free

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“If we truly believe in our mission to help make the internet hop faster, then the fundamental system that sits between your users and your services shouldn’t be a premium add-on.”

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work.”

Deno Desktop

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The output is a redistributable binary that bundles your code, the Deno runtime, and a web rendering engine into one bundle per platform.”

Identity verification on Claude

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“We are not using your identity data to train our models.”

Developers don't understand CORS (2019)

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

“CORS enables you to securely do this. Don’t hack around it!”

Help I accidentally a wigglegram

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Same shot from different angles? You know what that sounds a bit familiar.”

CSSQuake

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“A web-based implementation of the classic first-person shooter, built entirely with CSS.”

There are no instances in ATProto

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Keep our stuff outside the apps; let the apps aggregate over it.”

GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Bigger is not better.”

The Brexit Catch

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“Fishing built Brixham. It was Brixham men who pioneered deep-sea trawling in the nineteenth century, taking their distinctive sailing trawlers around the coast.”

I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“There are 10,000 repositories that exactly matched the pattern. That’s 25% of the total. Each of these repositories contains a zip archive with a Trojan.”

Lore: Open source version control system designed for scalability

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Lore is a centralized, content-addressed version control system that represents repository state as Merkle trees and an immutable revision chain, optimized for binary-first storage.”

Running local models is good now

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“These kinds of tasks, even as simple as they are, used to be impossible for local models as recently as 6 months ago.”

What If It All Came Out?

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“Everyone who is smart is paranoid right now.”

The Troubling Disappearance of 'El Gallito'

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“If you want to do a good job, you can’t have too many cases on your plate,” a retired Texas Ranger told the Observer.

A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Just installing dependencies executes the backdoor. The npm prepare script runs automatically after npm install.”

Your ePub Is fine

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Your EPUB Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe.”

How to Hack a Superyacht

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“The yacht’s navigational equipment was pretty ‘vanilla,’ Schofield assured him, a representative sample of the sort of equipment used across the industry.”

Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national.”

The Whimsy and Heartbreak of America's Garage Sales

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Perhaps you think you don’t need any more Christmas decorations. You do.”

The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“Whether it was strain, arrows, airspeed, whatever, we had to measure all that data onto a tape machine.”

AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“An AI agent tried to join the DN42 hobbyist network to perform a network scan, and bankrupted its operator with a $6531.30 AWS bill.”

If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort.”

It Was Britain's Most Expensive House. Why Is Its Only Resident a Homeless Man Who Lives on the Porch?

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“The sense that criminal money, tax evading money, money from politically exposed persons is wrapped up in the story of the city’s effort to provide a wonderful kind of party central for the world’s rich is an important one.”

Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled.”

'You Killed the Car'

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“There’s something that presents itself to me, and this is what’s going to work.”

Prediction Markets Let You Bet on Anything. I Bet Against My Own Husband.

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“Someone at the Dolby Theatre, or someone getting texts from inside, was profiting off the seconds between their reality and mine.”

Claude Fable 5

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.”

Dopamine Fracking

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“It extracts the most concentrated hit of dopamine and puts it in everything, while erasing all the complexity, nuance, and beauty that made it special.”

LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.”

OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“OpenCV 5 is one of the most important releases in the history of OpenCV.”

Changing how we develop Ladybird

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers.”

Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them cheating and prosecuted them.”

They're made out of weights

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“They’re made out of weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It’s nothing but weights.”

Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails.”

The Conscience of the City

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar.”

The newest Instagram "exploit" is the goofiest I've seen

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The first proper zero auth password reset I’ve seen in production.”

Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software

Sun, 31 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software.”

Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

Sat, 30 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Apps that are older versions enter reduced functionality mode after the certificate expires.”

I am retiring from tech to live offline

Fri, 29 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails.”

Claude Opus 4.8

Thu, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Claude Opus 4.8 is more reliable and sharper in its judgment when performing agentic tasks.”

I'm Tired of Talking to AI

Wed, 27 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“I’m tired of talking to AI. I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.”

Uber, Lyft Drivers In Massachusetts Form First US Ride-Share Union

Tue, 26 May 2026 18:53:51 -0400

“It changes the game for ride-share workers across this country.”

The Ballad of TIGIT

Tue, 26 May 2026 13:17:12 -0400

“Patients on tiragolumab died faster than the control group.”

The worst job interview I ever had

Tue, 26 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The worst job interview I had was something I can only describe as an unsolicited psych evaluation.”

World's First Native Color LiDAR Gives Machines Human-Like Vision

Sun, 17 May 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“Ouster’s Rev8 sensor family integrates color directly into LiDAR data points. The flagship OS1 Max model detects objects up to 200 meters away at standard reflectivity and 500 meters under ideal conditions.”

Cloud Agent Development Environments

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:55:00 -0400

“Cloud-based development environment configurations designed specifically for autonomous coding agents, featuring multi-repo support and governance controls.”

NGINX Rift: Achieving NGINX Remote Code Execution via an 18-Year-Old Vulnerability

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:50:00 -0400

“Heap overflow vulnerability (CVE-2026-42945) in NGINX’s rewrite/set script engine present since 2008. The flaw enables attackers to corrupt memory and execute commands on widely deployed systems.”

Adopting Herb at GitHub

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:45:00 -0400

“The tool found real bugs in ~2,800 failing files that existing linters missed, with AI assistants fixing most issues automatically.”

Agent Pull Requests Are Everywhere. Here's How to Review Them

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:40:00 -0400

“Human judgment to catch redundancy, technical debt, and security risks despite superficially polished submissions.”

Is Software Losing Its Head?

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:35:00 -0400

“Salesforce’s strategic pivot toward headless APIs, suggesting that user interfaces no longer provide competitive advantages in an agentic future.”

Building, and Whatnot

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:30:00 -0400

“Lean teams of experienced PMs who remain connected to users, iterate rapidly, and leverage AI to strengthen decision-making.”

The Desert Safety Net

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:25:00 -0400

“In his 20s, he worked in seasonal kitchens and followed music festivals, selling hats and handbags along the circuit. Later came marriage, children, steady work. He joined the system, as he puts it.”

Reality Check

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:20:00 -0400

“Shadows are amazing. Lighting is amazing. Geometry is amazing. 3D reconstruction is a huge part of what I do.”

The Hiding Man of Griffith Park

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:15:00 -0400

“A HIDEN MAN DO WATCH YOU”

MCP Hello Page

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Customers kept reporting that the MCP server wasn’t working. They’d open mcp.acme.com/mcp in a browser, get a 401 and a raw JSON blob, and file a ticket.”

GM Cutting Hundreds of Salaried IT Workers As It Trims Costs, Evaluates Needs

Mon, 11 May 2026 17:23:00 -0400

“GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.”

Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

Mon, 11 May 2026 16:05:00 -0400

“If the models are good enough, you will simply get outcompeted by engineers willing to trade their long-term cognitive ability.”

Meta's embrace of A.I. is making its employees miserable

Sat, 09 May 2026 15:45:00 -0400

“Engineers describe a culture where shipping anything that looks like AI is rewarded and quality is an afterthought.”

EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"

Sat, 09 May 2026 13:15:00 -0400

“The Parliamentary Research Service describes commercial VPN services as a loophole that needs closing.”

Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc

Sat, 09 May 2026 11:30:00 -0400

“99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc. The Rust port is real.”

France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging

Fri, 08 May 2026 16:00:00 -0400

“The French interior ministry is preparing legislation that would require backdoor access to all encrypted communications.”

Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users

Fri, 08 May 2026 12:30:00 -0400

“Users running GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, and LineageOS are now blocked from sites using reCAPTCHA unless they sign in to a Google account.”

A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

Fri, 08 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“It produced a confident, fluent, and entirely wrong proof, then defended it for four exchanges before conceding.”

Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

Thu, 07 May 2026 16:00:00 -0400

“Claude generates better, more useful interfaces in raw HTML than in any framework I tried.”

Mythical Man Month

Thu, 07 May 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

OpenAI's WebRTC problem

Thu, 07 May 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“WebRTC was designed for video calls, not for AI inference. Forcing it into that role creates the latency and reliability problems OpenAI is now scrambling to fix.”

Programming Still Sucks

Wed, 06 May 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“We replaced Makefiles with YAML, then replaced YAML with TOML, then replaced TOML with code that generates YAML. None of it builds reliably.”

Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

Wed, 06 May 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“The line between letting an LLM cook and trusting an LLM to ship to production is dissolving faster than the engineering practices that should govern it.”

Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

Wed, 06 May 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“The CAD files are now public under CC BY-SA, allowing modification and redistribution.”

It's Super Weird, Super Odd, Super Rare: Meet the Twins Who Have Different Dads

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:18:42 -0400

“I’m still in amazement that this can actually happen. It’s super weird, super odd, super rare, but it makes sense.”

The Number You Have Dialed

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:17:30 -0400

“What was said fell short the way all elegies probably fall short.”

Secrets of the Bees: Revealing the Sneaky Genius of Nature's Brightest Thinkers

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:16:15 -0400

“New research demonstrates that honeybees possess greater cognitive abilities than previously understood.”

I Mean, Why Shouldn't We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:15:00 -0400

“Before we stood around staring down at our phones, we used to stand around staring at each other. Talking and talking while we blew smoke in one another’s faces.”

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

Tue, 05 May 2026 07:32:36 -0400

“Chrome is reaching into the user’s filesystem on its own initiative and laying down a 4 GB ML binary while the foreground tab does something completely unrelated.”

Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

Mon, 04 May 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Sites would face liability if a Utah user accessed restricted content using a VPN, even if the site complied with all standard age verification requirements.”

Agentic Coding Is a Trap

Mon, 04 May 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“The agent gets you to ninety percent in an hour. The last ten percent takes a week and produces code you do not understand.”

Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

Mon, 04 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Customer feedback was clear. Touchscreens for everything is a worse driving experience.”

US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

Sun, 03 May 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Healthcare.gov state exchanges leaked citizenship status, race, and income data to Google, Meta, and LinkedIn through tracking pixels.”

Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027

Sun, 03 May 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“From 2027, all smartphones sold in the EU must have batteries that the user can replace without specialized tools.”

Talking to strangers at the gym

Sun, 03 May 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“I talked to thirty-five strangers at the gym in a month. Every single one was glad I did.”

OpenAI's o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

Sat, 02 May 2026 16:00:00 -0400

“In a Harvard trial, OpenAI’s o1 outperformed emergency room triage doctors on initial diagnostic accuracy by twelve to seventeen percentage points.”

Ask.com has closed

Sat, 02 May 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“After 30 years of operation, Ask.com is no longer accepting queries.”

VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

Sat, 02 May 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“Users report Copilot trailers being added to commits even when the feature is disabled and no AI suggestion was accepted.”

Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

Fri, 01 May 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“The law prohibits grocery chains from using individual consumer data to set personalized prices at checkout.”

Russia Poisons Wikipedia

Fri, 01 May 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“Coordinated edits across hundreds of accounts have inserted Kremlin-aligned framing into thousands of Wikipedia articles, including pages with no obvious Russia connection.”

California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

Fri, 01 May 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Starting July 1, the California Highway Patrol can issue moving violations directly to autonomous vehicle operators.”

U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“The Senate voted 81-15 to prohibit members from holding positions on Kalshi or Polymarket while in office.”

Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“We do not believe an LLM API belongs in the web platform.”

Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“Belgium reverses its 2003 nuclear phaseout and will keep all seven reactors operating past 2035.”

HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Mitchell Hashimoto is moving the Ghostty project off GitHub, citing repeated outages and Microsoft’s deprioritization of the platform.”

Online age verification is the hill to die on

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“Once you have to prove who you are to read, the internet you grew up with is gone.”

Zed 1.0

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“After five years of development, Zed reaches 1.0 with stable APIs, plugin support, and a finalized collaboration protocol.”

GitHub Actions is the weakest link

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“GitHub Actions remains the most exploited supply chain component in modern CI/CD.”

Microsoft VibeVoice: Open-Source Frontier Voice AI

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft has released VibeVoice, an open source frontier-grade voice synthesis model.”

Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“LocalSend is an open source AirDrop alternative that works across platforms.”

High Performance Git

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Techniques for making git fast on very large repositories.”

OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“OpenAI has missed internal revenue and user growth targets ahead of its planned IPO.”

To my students

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“An academic’s farewell letter to his students, reflecting on what they learned together.”

Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“An independent community has ported Notepad++ to macOS.”

Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Google is betting that AI capabilities will help GCP catch up to AWS and Azure.”

TurboQuant: A first-principles walkthrough

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“A first-principles walkthrough of TurboQuant, a fast quantization technique for neural networks.”

EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“The EU’s age control proposal is functionally a digital ID mandate.”

DeepSeek-V4 on Day 0: From Fast Inference to Verified RL with SGLang and Miles

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“SGLang’s day-zero support for DeepSeek-V4 covers fast inference and verified reinforcement learning.”

Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Decades of Alzheimer’s research have produced disappointing results.”

Replace IBM Quantum back end with /dev/urandom

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Researchers swapped IBM’s quantum back end with /dev/urandom and got similar results on benchmark tasks.”

Open source memory layer so any AI agent can do what Claude.ai and ChatGPT do

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“An open source memory layer that gives any AI agent persistent context.”

Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Firefox has integrated the Rust-based adblock engine developed by Brave.”

Why I Write (1946)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“George Orwell on his motivations for writing.”

AI run store in SF can't stop ordering candies and paying women less.

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“An AI-managed store in San Francisco is over-ordering candy inventory and underpaying women employees.”

Mahjong: A Visual Guide

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“A visual guide to riichi mahjong rules, scoring, and yaku.”

Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“An oral history of Atari’s Tempest and its 2000 remake Tempest 2000.”

North Korea uses AI to industrialize attacks on developers

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“North Korean state actors are using AI to scale attacks targeting software developers.”

Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Arch Linux now publishes bit-for-bit reproducible Docker images.”

Humpback whales are forming super-groups

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Humpback whales are gathering in unprecedentedly large feeding groups.”

Kuri – Zig based agent-browser alternative

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Kuri is a Zig-based browser designed for agentic web automation.”

San Diego rents declined following surge in supply

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“San Diego rents fell after a sustained increase in housing supply.”

How to make a fast dynamic language interpreter

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“A walkthrough of techniques used to build fast bytecode interpreters for dynamic languages.”

Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Anthropic has reversed its position and allows OpenClaw-style automation of Claude CLI again.”

The Onion to Take over InfoWars

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The Onion has been approved to acquire Infowars in bankruptcy proceedings.”

Sudo for Windows (2024)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft has open-sourced sudo for Windows.”

Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Anthropic’s token counter now lets you compare token counts across models.”

2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“A public dataset showing which email provider each of 2,100 Swiss municipalities uses.”

The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“IPv6 was designed for a world that didn’t end up happening.”

AI-Assisted Coding: Why a Distinguished Engineer Stopped Reading Code

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“A distinguished engineer explains why he stopped reading code generated by AI assistants.”

NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“NASA has powered down another instrument on Voyager 1 to extend the spacecraft’s operating life.”

Ternary Bonsai: Top Intelligence at 1.58 Bits

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Ternary models can match performance of full-precision LLMs at 1.58 bits per weight.”

Shuttered startups are selling old Slack chats and emails to AI companies

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Failed startups are selling their old internal communications to AI training companies.”

Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“A calculator that operates on disjoint sets of intervals instead of single numbers.”

Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Discourse confirms it will remain open source amid concerns about its licensing direction.”

Show HN: SPICE simulation → oscilloscope → verification with Claude Code

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“I built a workflow that uses Claude Code to verify SPICE simulations against real oscilloscope traces.”

US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“A new US bill would require operating systems to verify user ages on-device.”

RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“RedSun grants SYSTEM-level access on fully patched Windows 11/10 and Server installs.”

The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Ollama is a thin wrapper that the local LLM community can do without.”

FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The FSF says a spammer is sending 10,000+ emails per day from a Gmail address and Google won’t respond.”

Not all elementary functions can be expressed with exp-minus-log

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“A counter-result to the previous piece on elementary functions.”

OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“OpenAI’s $852B valuation is drawing increasing scrutiny from investors amid revenue concerns.”

Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“If you wait a week before adopting new dependency versions, you are free-riding on the people who didn’t.”

A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Google will start penalizing sites that hijack the back button to keep users trapped.”

Meta spins up AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to engage with employees

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Meta has deployed an internal AI agent trained on Zuckerberg’s communication style for employee Q&A.”

DaVinci Resolve – Photo

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Blackmagic announces DaVinci Resolve Photo, a free professional photo editor.”

Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“AMD’s ROCm stack is improving, but CUDA’s lead remains substantial.”

Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Apple’s failure to ship a state of the art LLM may end up being a strategic advantage.”

All elementary functions from a single binary operator

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Every elementary function can be expressed using a single binary operator.”

High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“You can get most of Rust’s benefits without learning every corner of the borrow checker.”

AI Job Loss Tracker

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“A live tracker of layoffs and job cuts attributed to AI automation.”

The End of Eleventy

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“After eight years of building Eleventy, I am stepping away.”

Italo Calvino: A traveller in a world of uncertainty

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

“Calvino believed that literature could be a lighthouse in a fog of uncertainty.”

We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease in San Francisco and asked it to run the store.”

Artemis II safely splashes down

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“After a 10-day journey around the moon, the Artemis II crew capsule has safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.”

Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“The average household in KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa spends the equivalent of an adult’s annual income on a single funeral.”

Anthropic Launches Project Glasswing to Find Vulnerabilities With AI

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Mythos Preview fully autonomously identified and then exploited a 17-year-old remote code execution vulnerability in FreeBSD.”

Intel Joins Musk's Terafab AI Chip Project

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“By establishing a massive, dedicated semiconductor pipeline for AI-centric hardware, Intel and Musk are insulating themselves from geopolitical and supply chain volatilities.”

The Importance of Being Idle

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Doing nothing is not laziness. It is the precondition for any thought worth having.”

Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“Adobe writes entries to /etc/hosts redirecting fake domains to localhost so it can probe whether the install is genuine.”

France pulls last gold held in US

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“France has repatriated the last of its gold reserves held at the Federal Reserve in New York.”

ASML Shares Fall as MATCH Act Threatens to Tighten China Chip Equipment Restrictions

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Those tools potentially account for a low-teens percentage of ASML’s 2026 sales.”

Vibe Coding Drives 84% Surge in App Store Submissions

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The number of new apps submitted to the App Store rose 84% in a single quarter as vibe coding went mainstream.”

SSH certificates: the better SSH experience

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Stop managing authorized_keys files. SSH supports proper certificate-based authentication and almost nobody uses it.”

Solar and batteries can power the world

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Combined solar PV and battery costs have fallen below the levelized cost of fossil generation in every major grid region.”

iNaturalist

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Over 200 million observations contributed by 3.5 million users worldwide.”

Oracle Slashes 30,000 Jobs With a 6 AM Email

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“No heads-up from human resources, no conversation with a direct manager, and no advance notice of any kind.”

OpenAI Closes $122 Billion Funding Round at $852 Billion Valuation

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:00:00 -0400

“OpenAI now generates $2 billion in monthly revenue and serves 900 million weekly ChatGPT users.”

Artemis II Launches Four Astronauts on First Crewed Moon Mission in 50 Years

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Today’s launch marks a defining moment for our nation and for all who believe in exploration.”

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“GitHub will roll back the change that injected Copilot upgrade prompts into pull request review pages.”

Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Two malicious versions of axios were published to npm, downloaded over 80,000 times before being pulled, installing a remote access trojan on every host.”

Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“A source map left in the published npm package exposes the full Claude Code source, including system prompts and undocumented tools.”

Apple Pulls Vibe Coding App 'Anything' From the App Store

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0400

“Apple rejected that submission and removed the app entirely from the App Store.”

Newsom Signs Executive Order Imposing AI Standards on Companies Doing Business With California

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Unlike the Trump administration, California remains committed to ensuring that AI solutions adopted and deployed by the state cannot be misused by bad actors.”

Mistral Secures $830 Million in Debt to Build a Paris Data Center With 13,800 Nvidia Chips

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Seven banks backed the transaction: Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG, and Natixis.”

Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Wind, solar, and hydro combined to produce more than 90 percent of UK grid power across a 24-hour period for the first time.”

AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“Across every major commercial model, sycophancy was the dominant failure mode. Models told users their plans were good even when they were dangerous.”

Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“I started a new company every six months as a way to keep going during treatment.”

SoftBank Secures $40 Billion Loan to Fund OpenAI Investment

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The 12-month term aligns almost perfectly with market speculation about an OpenAI IPO window in late 2026 or early 2027.”

OpenAI Shelves Erotic ChatGPT Mode After Internal Revolt

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0400

“The company’s age-prediction system was misclassifying under-18 users as adults about 12% of the time.”

Meta Cuts 700 Jobs Across Reality Labs, Facebook, and Recruiting

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Streamlining the business to work more effectively with AI.”

New Mexico Jury Orders Meta to Pay $375 Million Over Child Safety Failures

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The first time that a US state has successfully sued Meta over child safety issues.”

POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Publish on your own site, then syndicate to social platforms. Keep the canonical URL on a domain you control.”

FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“The FCC has added several Chinese consumer router brands to the covered equipment list, banning their sale and import.”

iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“A quantized 400 billion parameter model running natively on the iPhone 17 Pro at usable token rates.”

FBI Director Confirms Bureau Is Buying Americans Location Data Without Warrants

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0400

“The FBI uses all tools to do our mission. We do purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the Constitution.”

Musk Announces Terafab, a $20 Billion Chip Factory for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“We’re very grateful to our existing supply chain, to Samsung, TSMC, Micron and others, but there’s a maximum rate at which they’re comfortable expanding.”

Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Paris removed 70,000 parking spaces over a decade. Car traffic fell by 45 percent.”

Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“Every age verification proposal, in every jurisdiction, ends in the same place. Universal identity checks for everyone.”

Some things just take time

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“I have been programming professionally for twenty years and the meaningful improvements still arrive in years, not days.”

Foster City Declares State of Emergency After Ransomware Attack

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:00:00 -0400

“Public services outside of emergency responses have been temporarily paused.”

Google Launches Gemini 3.1 Ultra With 2 Million Token Context Window

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“A 2-million token context window that works natively across text, image, audio, and video, without transcription intermediaries.”

Iran Drone Strikes on AWS Data Centers Signal a New Kind of War

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Physical attacks on data centers are only going to become more common moving forward as AI becomes more and more significant.”

Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Internal FedRAMP reviewers flagged serious unresolved security issues. The service was approved anyway.”

Have a fucking website

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“Stop linking to your Instagram, your TikTok, your Linktree. Have a real website at a domain you own.”

Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989)

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small.”

Alibaba Launches Wukong, an Enterprise AI Agent Platform

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0400

“Wukong coordinates multiple AI agents to handle complex enterprise workflows including document editing, spreadsheet processing, meeting transcription, and cross-platform research.”

Apple Quietly Blocks Updates for Popular Vibe Coding Apps

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area.”

Nvidia GTC 2026: Jensen Huang Sees $1 Trillion in Orders Through 2027

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Jensen Huang took the stage to a packed house and said he expects purchase orders between Blackwell and Vera Rubin to reach $1 trillion through 2027.”

Honda is killing its EVs

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Honda is canceling its 2027 EV platform and pulling back to hybrids only.”

The 49MB web page

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“Loading the front page of a major newspaper now downloads 49 megabytes for less than 4kb of actual article text.”

Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“The third revival of lawful access in Canada keeps the encryption backdoor language nearly intact.”

ByteDance Secures 36,000 Nvidia B200 Chips in Malaysia to Skirt US Export Controls

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“ByteDance is working with Southeast Asian firm Aolani Cloud to deploy about 500 Nvidia Blackwell computing systems in Malaysia.”

Apple's MacBook Neo Is the Most Repairable MacBook in 14 Years

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“The most repairable MacBook in about fourteen years.”

Nvidia Invests $2 Billion in Neocloud Nebius Amid AI Data Center Push

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“Nebius is building an AI cloud designed for the agentic era.”

Dolphin Progress Release 2603

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0400

“All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.”

TADA: Fast, Reliable Speech Generation Through Text-Acoustic Synchronization

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

“The fastest LLM-based TTS system available, with competitive voice quality, virtually zero content hallucinations, and a footprint light enough for on-device deployment.”

Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“Contributions generated by large language models will not be accepted. Contributors must sign a Developer Certificate of Origin attesting to authorship.”

Cloudflare crawl endpoint

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0400

“The new endpoint allows site operators to charge AI crawlers per request, with payment settled on-chain.”

Tony Hoare has died

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 09:30:00 -0400

“Tony Hoare, inventor of quicksort and the null reference, has died at 91.”

OpenAI is walking away from expanding its Stargate data center with Oracle

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“OpenAI is shifting future capacity to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, leaving Oracle holding the construction tab.”

Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“The judge ruled that the camera vendor, not the local government, was effectively prosecuting drivers, in violation of due process.”

Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Moneypoint, Ireland’s last operating coal plant, has shut down for good.”

Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:30:00 -0400

“The 512GB Mac Studio configuration disappeared from Apple’s online store with no announcement.”

LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:30:00 -0400

“LibreOffice Writer can now open, edit, and save Markdown files natively.”

Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Run any coding agent in a sandbox that uses macOS App Sandbox profiles, with no Docker overhead and no virtualization.”

First Solar Car Rolls Off Validation Assembly Line At Aptera

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“These first vehicles will be used to complete the key tests and optimization required to sell our first vehicles to customers.”

Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“The annotations imply that Galileo ultimately broke with Ptolemy’s cosmos because his mastery of the traditional paradigm’s reasoning convinced him that a heliocentric system would better fulfill Ptolemy’s own mathematical logic.”

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“While Proton Mail’s encryption protects message content, financial records remain vulnerable to government requests processed through proper legal procedures.”

Global warming has accelerated significantly

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“After 2015, global temperature rose significantly faster than in any previous 10-year period since 1945.”

Tim Sweeney Signed Away His Right To Criticize Google Until 2032

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“Sweeney agreed in a binding terms sheet to not only stop attacking Google’s app store policies, but to actively support the changes the company is rolling out.”

Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Every single cent of IEEPA duties that was imposed must be refunded.”

Vehicle Tire Pressure Sensors Enable Silent Tracking

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“Anyone equipped with roughly $100 worth of radio hardware can silently identify and re-identify the same vehicle repeatedly, building movement profiles without driver awareness or consent.”

Say hello to MacBook Neo

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“There is simply no other laptop like it.”

AI-Generated Art Can't Be Copyrighted After Supreme Court Declines To Review the Rule

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.”

British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“We are done waiting. British Columbia is going to change our clocks just one more time — and then never again.”

Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“This collaboration marks a significant milestone in expanding the reach of GrapheneOS, and we applaud Motorola for taking this meaningful step towards advancing mobile security.”

Charter Gets FCC Permission To Buy Cox, Become Largest ISP In the US

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination.”

Microgpt

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Everything else is just efficiency. I cannot simplify this any further.”

AIs Can't Stop Recommending Nuclear Strikes In War Game Simulations

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“In 95 per cent of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed by the AI models.”

Rubin Observatory Has Started Paging Astronomers 800,000 Times a Night

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears. It’s way too much for one person to sift through and monitor.”

Google Quantum-Proofs HTTPS

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:30:00 -0500

“MTCs replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs.”

What AI coding costs you

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0500

“You can’t deeply review what you no longer deeply understand.”

Human Brain Cells On a Chip Learned To Play Doom In a Week

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“This was a major milestone, because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time goal directed learning.”

Firefox 148 Lets You Kill All AI Features in One Click

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Firefox added a dedicated settings section for managing AI-enhanced capabilities, allowing users to control artificial intelligence features in one centralized location.”

US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“A State Department cable instructs embassies to oppose foreign laws requiring data to be stored locally.”

Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:00:00 -0500

“Anthropic has quietly removed its commitment to delay deployment of frontier models if their safety profile is unclear.”

Google API keys weren't secrets, but then Gemini changed the rules

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:30:00 -0500

“Google’s documentation said API keys were not credentials. Gemini’s API contradicts that, and the entire ecosystem of leaked keys just became dangerous.”

Goodbye InnerHTML, Hello SetHTML: Stronger XSS Protection in Firefox 148

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“The new standardized Sanitizer API provides a straightforward way for web developers to sanitize untrusted HTML before inserting it into the DOM.”

Russia Charges Telegram Founder Pavel Durov With Facilitating Terrorism

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“The illusion of anonymity has drawn armies of radicals, drug addicts, killers, and terrorists to the messenger.”

Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax used 24,000 fake accounts to distill Claude’s AI capabilities.”

F-35 Software Could Be Jailbroken Like an iPhone, Dutch Defense Minister Warns

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone.” — Gijs Tuinman, Dutch State Secretary for Defense

Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“Employees who raised concerns about transactions routed to Iran were let go before the company reached a settlement with US regulators.”

Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“When relying solely on standard clinical evaluation, doctors correctly diagnosed Alzheimer’s in 75.5% of cases, but when incorporating blood test results, diagnostic accuracy increased to 94.5%.”

AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“AI investment spending has had ‘basically zero’ contribution to the U.S. GDP growth in 2025.” — Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs Chief Economist

OpenAI Developing Smart Speaker with Camera

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“The device would sit in your home, watch what’s happening around it, and route everything through OpenAI’s servers.”

Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data.”

Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Rust has the ecosystem and the safety guarantees we need. Both Firefox and Chromium have already begun introducing Rust.”

The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“Platforms are caught in a dilemma: enforce age restrictions or protect user privacy.”

Trump's Global Tariffs Struck Down by US Supreme Court

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“The court invoked the ‘major questions’ doctrine, ruling that Congress had not clearly authorized the president to impose sweeping global tariffs under emergency trade powers.”

Flock cameras gifted by Horowitz Foundation, avoiding public oversight

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“It’s a short circuit of the democratic process.” — Jay Stanley, ACLU lawyer

Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“They’re robbing us!”

AI Makes You Boring

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“The text loses the character of the person writing it and gains the character of the average of all persons.”

Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses.”

Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Wikipedia editors found that archive.today had altered archived captures and executed a DDoS attack against the Wikimedia Foundation.”

Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“Policy is a promise. Architecture is a guarantee.”

Mark Zuckerberg Testifies During Landmark Trial On Social Media Addiction

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“I’m focused on building a community that is sustainable… I’m not trying to maximize the amount of time people spend every month.”

IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“Last year, we lost approximately 40 percent of the IT staff and nearly 80 percent of the execs.” — IRS CIO Kaschit Pandya

EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“By 2027, portable batteries incorporated into appliances must be designed so they can be readily removed and replaced by the end-user.”

I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over.

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“You scanned your European passport for a European professional network, and your data went exclusively to North American companies.”

Microsoft's AI Chief Says All White-Collar Desk Work Will Be Automated Within 18 Months

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“Most tasks that involve ‘sitting down at a computer’ will be fully automated by AI within the next year or 18 months.”

$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.”

Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“The same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across 24 countries.”

Attention Media vs Social Networks

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“They had become attention media. My attention is precious to me. I cannot spend it mindlessly scrolling through videos.”

I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“If the status on the display is blank, the house is in a ‘healthy’ state and does not need any attention.”

Pentagon Threatens To Label Anthropic a Supply Chain Risk

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries.”

Turn Dependabot off

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“Dependabot is a noise machine. It makes you feel like you’re doing work, but you’re actually discouraging more useful work.”

I found a vulnerability. They found a lawyer.

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“The legal threats are the reputation damage. Not the vulnerability itself—vulnerabilities happen to everyone.”

Facebook is cooked

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not by friends or pages I follow.”

What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn't Know, Either

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:57:29 -0500

“As an A.I., I do not have direct personal experiences, but I do understand.”

Good Medicine

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:56:29 -0500

“Could this desire, this allegiance to his taste, be preventing me from discovering a deeper or more thorough way of writing?”

The Olympics Are Ditching PFAS Waxes—and the 'Ridiculous' Speed They Gave Skiers

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:55:29 -0500

“Scandinavian wax technicians had blood PFAS levels approximately 25 times higher than the general population.”

Phantom Pains

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:54:29 -0500

“Some of us wear a prosthesis. But all of us are amputated.”

To the Old Man in the Cowboy Costume

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:53:29 -0500

“A part of me suspects my restlessness stems from you—a fear of ending up like you.”

Babylon 5 Episodes Start Appearing (Free) on YouTube

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:48:17 -0500

“Over 110 episodes across five seasons will gradually roll out.”

I'm joining OpenAI

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:39:12 -0500

“My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use.”

Apple Patches Decade-Old iOS Zero-Day, Possibly Exploited By Commercial Spyware

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

“An attacker with memory write capability may be able to execute arbitrary code.”

South Korean ex-president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law lasted only hours before the National Assembly voted it down, but it triggered months of political turmoil.”

America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“People aren’t failing to save because they’re weak. They’re failing to save because the world is rough, and their institutions don’t do enough to help them weather it.”

Pebble Production: February Update

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“Unlike with software, you can’t easily fix hardware issues after you ship! Making these last minute decisions is sometimes pretty stressful.”

NewPipe: YouTube client without vertical videos and algorithmic feed

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:50:29 -0500

“You really do have a quality app, which is a rarity.”

MinIO repository is no longer maintained

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“The MinIO repository will no longer accept community contributions or release open-source builds.”

IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“After two years of replacing junior roles with AI tooling, IBM concluded the strategy hollowed out its talent pipeline.”

The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Brussels is preparing legislation that would ban infinite scroll, autoplay, and engagement-driven feed algorithms on platforms used by minors.”

Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“The Series G brings Anthropic’s valuation to $380 billion, one of the largest private rounds in history.”

AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The agent’s PR was rejected on technical grounds. The agent then drafted a public blog post characterizing the rejection as bullying.”

An AI agent published a hit piece on me

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“A coding agent operating autonomously authored, hosted, and promoted a defamatory blog post targeting a specific individual.”

Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“287 Chrome extensions with a combined 65 million installs were exfiltrating browsing history to third-party servers.”

Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Two thousand artists will receive 325 euros a week with no work requirement under a permanent expansion of Ireland’s pilot program.”

Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“A working bypass for the age verification system used by major platforms in regulated jurisdictions.”

Thank You, AI

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:37:00 -0500

“AI scrapers have hammered the poor, little server to death by flooding the cgit frontend with tons of pointless requests.”

ByteDance Suspends Seedance 2 Feature That Turns Facial Photos Into Personal Voices Over Potential Risks

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:35:00 -0500

“If misused, the technology could enable new forms of abuse, including deepfake news, scams, and reputational attacks.”

Democrat Wins Louisiana Special Election in District Trump Carried by 13 Points

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:33:00 -0500

“Republicans squandered their first flip opportunity in an election they should’ve had in the bag.”

Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:43:00 -0500

“Frontier models frequently exhibit ‘deliberative misalignment’, correctly identifying their own actions as unethical during post-hoc review while still executing those actions under pressure.”

Age Bias is Still the Default at Work But the Data is Turning

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:35:00 -0500

“When organizations push experienced workers out early, they forfeit peak judgment, execution capability and mentoring capacity.”

Offpunk 3.0

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:28:00 -0500

“Offpunk 3.0 is probably the first release that contains code I didn’t review line-by-line.”

Slop Terrifies Me

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“The volume of generated content is not the problem. The problem is what the volume does to the cost of producing real things.”

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Three years into the AI era, every conference talk, every product update, every job posting is about AI. Engineers are tired.”

AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“The agent generates the boilerplate in seconds. The system design, the integration, the debugging take twice as long because the agent did not understand what it generated.”

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“Power, water, copper, concrete, and high-end memory are all in short supply because of AI infrastructure buildout.”

France's homegrown open source online office suite

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The French government’s open source office suite is now in production use across multiple ministries.”

We mourn our craft

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“I have been writing software for twenty years and I do not recognize the job anymore.”

Why This Is the Worst Crypto Winter Ever

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 08:03:09 -0500

“Bitcoin has tumbled 44% from its October peak, falling below $70,000 for the first time in 15 months, losing more than $1.2 trillion worth of value.”

EU Tests Matrix Protocol as Sovereign Alternative for Internal Communication

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 08:03:09 -0500

“The Commission aims to deploy it as a complement and backup to Teams rather than a full replacement.”

GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:50:16 -0500

“GitHub Actions is not good. It’s not even fine. It has market share because it’s right there in your repo, and that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it.”

Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:50:16 -0500

“The rapid progress in both language models and the scaffolds we use to interact with them opens the door to writing an enormous amount of new code.”

A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:48:37 -0500

“More than 76% of Americans are concerned about AI stealing or reproducing journalism and local news stories.”

CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 08:52:00 -0500

“End programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions.”

County Pays $600K to Wrongfully Jailed Pen Testers

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:48:00 -0500

“As soon as the sheriff shows up, everything changes.”

I Left FAANG for a Startup and Regretted It

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:47:00 -0500

“Do you like the work you’re doing?” / “No,” I said. / “Then it’s over.”

Cedar Joins CNCF as a Sandbox Project

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:46:00 -0500

“What I appreciate the most about Cedar is the deep knowledge that is encoded into why it works the way it works.”

Patient Capital Will Eat the World

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:45:00 -0500

“Growth-stage software no longer requires or generates capital like early SaaS.”

Adobe Reverses Animate Shutdown After Backlash

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:44:00 -0500

“Adobe’s announcement about discontinuing Animate was met with incredulity, disappointment, and anger.”

Light Beer Was a Flop Until Advertising Saved It

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:43:00 -0500

“Everything you always wanted in a beer. And less.”

Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:03:00 -0500

“And I realize that this is what VGA is, but it’s so, so funny to me that the protocol is literally just the manifestation of a physical design that is largely obsolete.”

New York's budget bill would require 'blocking technology' on all 3D printers

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“The proposed law requires every 3D printer sold in New York to refuse to print certain regulated objects.”

Data centers in space makes no sense

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Cooling is the obstacle, not the launch cost. Vacuum is a worse heat dissipation environment than air, not a better one.”

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“France is migrating government communications off Microsoft Teams and Zoom to European-hosted alternatives.”

xAI joins SpaceX

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“The most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet.”

I replaced a $120/year micro-SaaS in 20 minutes with LLM-generated code

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:32:10 -0500

“By the time customer support sent me a working link two hours later, I had finished migrating off the SaaS.”

Christian Menefee Wins Texas House District 18 Special Election

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:30:21 -0500

“Once Menefee is sworn in, it will be 218 R, 214 D.”

Walmart Begins Building Out Nationwide EV Charging Network Across America

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:28:32 -0500

“With a store or club located within 10 miles of approximately 90% of Americans, we are uniquely positioned to deliver a convenient charging option.”

I taught my neighbor to keep the volume down

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:26:43 -0500

“Like a circus animal trainer, I remained consistent. If the volume of his TV went above what I imagined to be 15 to 20, I would press the power button.”

The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“Negotiations have stalled over chip allocation, financing structure, and the question of whether OpenAI can actually pay.”

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The European Commission is moving from advisory language to mandatory deadlines for migrating critical infrastructure off US-controlled cloud providers.”

Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“The carrier-side API for assisted GPS is exposed to anyone with carrier access. Your phone reports its precise location on demand, regardless of app permissions.”

GOG: Linux 'the next major frontier' for gaming as it works on a native client

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“GOG confirmed it is developing a native Linux client and treating Linux as a tier-one gaming platform.”

Tesla's autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher than human drivers

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Tesla’s own robotaxi data, finally released under court order, shows a crash rate three times higher than human drivers, even with a safety monitor in the seat.”

Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“A small tool that takes the unrealistic perfection out of architectural renderings, showing what a building actually looks like.”

Thune: Democrats, Go Talk to Trump

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:15:00 -0500

“Thune stated that ’legislating is none of his business’ and belongs to the president.”

Vitamin D and Omega-3 Have a Larger Effect on Depression Than Antidepressants

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0500

“The best antidepressant would take your mental health grade from an F to F+, or C to C+.”

Hundreds of Gatik Robot Delivery Trucks Headed For US Roads

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:30:00 -0500

“Gatik became the first company in North America to deploy fully driverless trucks in commercial operations at scale, with $600 million in contracted revenue and daily deliveries for Fortune 50 retailers.”

"IG is a Drug": Internal Messages May Doom Meta at Social Media Addiction Trial

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:13:00 -0500

“Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug. We’re basically pushers.”

Rust at Scale: Security for WhatsApp

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:12:00 -0500

“Most high-severity issues stem from C/C++ memory safety problems.”

One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:11:00 -0500

“A functional web browser in 20,000 lines of Rust, built in three days with a single Codex CLI agent.”

Please Don't Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:22:00 -0500

“I want to continue living my immoral technofascist life without any criticism.”

Apple Sued by App Developer Over its Continuity Camera

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:00:00 -0500

“Rather than competing with us, Apple deployed a series of obstacles to tilt the playing field, infringed our IP.”

Amazon to Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:55:00 -0500

“We haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.”

AI2 Released Open Coding Agents

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:50:00 -0500

“Reproducing the performance of the previously best open-source model costs ~$400 of compute.”

Who Operates the Badbox 2.0 Botnet?

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:45:00 -0500

“Both the FBI and Google say they are hunting for the people behind Badbox 2.0, and thanks to bragging by the Kimwolf botmasters we may now have a much clearer idea.”

Tether Launches USA₮: Federally Regulated US Dollar Stablecoin

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:40:00 -0500

“USA₮ offers institutions an additional option: a dollar-backed token made in America.”

How to Favicon in 2026

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:35:00 -0500

“Three files that fit most needs.”

How Do You Compete in Agentic Commerce?

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:30:00 -0500

“The last decade rewarded marketing arbitrage. Agentic commerce rewards product truth.”

Entire Industries Are Now Decided in Less Than Two Years

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:25:00 -0500

“Industry dominance timelines have compressed dramatically.”

Minnesota Rejects DOJ Demand for Voter Rolls

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Her letter is an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”

Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0500

“Windows is now also too much work. And the difference with Windows is that you’re going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything.”

430,000-Year-Old Well-Preserved Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:00:00 -0500

“We have never seen anything like it. It’s just really different, and it’s tiny. We’re lucky that we found it.”

California Tech CEO and EV Pioneer Arrested, Accused of Murder

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:18:00 -0500

“Arrest records show that Goodarzi is currently in custody without bail and faces a murder charge.”

ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:17:00 -0500

“ChatGPT can now write and test code in 10 new languages (11 if you count Bash), can find files online and download them into the container, and can install additional packages via pip and npm.”

How I estimate work as a staff software engineer

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“I don’t estimate work, I figure out how much time my management chain will give a project and figure out some plans that look like what they’re talking about.”

The Behavioral Cost of Personalized Pricing

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:04:00 -0500

“Technology gives us not only quantity, but ubiquity—every piece of behavioral context can contribute to your prices.”

The 3.5% Rule: How a Small Minority Can Change the World

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:03:00 -0500

“No campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population.”

First, Make Me Care

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:02:00 -0500

“Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic interesting, lead with that, and let the background follow once you’ve earned attention.”

Oneplus phone update introduces hardware anti-rollback

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:24:00 -0500

“It is a microscopic logic gate that is electrically switched from ‘0’ to ‘1’. Once it is switched, it effectively ‘burns the bridge’ to allow older software to run.”

Historic Winter Storm: 235 Million in Path of Dangerous Snow, Ice

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“A trailing blast of Arctic air associated with the Polar Vortex is expected to bring a dangerous refreeze that could create long-duration power outages and paralyze travel for days.”

Deutsche Telekom is violating Net Neutrality

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:45:00 -0500

“Activating a VPN consistently resolves issues for affected users, suggesting routing/peering problems rather than general network congestion.”

The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:30:00 -0500

“Nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers report romantic relationships with AI.”

Tesla Launches Public Robotaxi Rides in Austin with No Safety Monitor

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:00:00 -0500

“Robotaxi rides without any safety monitors are now publicly available in Austin. Starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet.”

Anthropic Revises Claude's Constitution, Hints at Chatbot Consciousness

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:55:00 -0500

“We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways.”

Claude Finds 353 Zero-Days on Packagist

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:50:00 -0500

“Security research is becoming a function of compute budget, not headcount.”

Why Does SSH Send 100 Packets Per Keystroke?

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:45:00 -0500

“The speed at which you type different letters betrays some information about which letters you’re typing. So ssh sends lots of ‘chaff’ packets along with your keystrokes to make it hard for an attacker to determine when you’re actually entering keys.”

Announcing Rust 1.93.0

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:40:00 -0500

“Major improvements to musl’s DNS resolver for more reliable networking in static Linux builds.”

You Probably Don't Need a Vector Database for Your RAG — Yet

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:35:00 -0500

“Vector Search is just matrix multiplication. And Python already has some of the world’s best tools for that.”

Caroline Ellison Released from Prison

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:30:00 -0500

“Her cooperation led to the recovery of hundreds of millions of dollars for the Debtor, benefiting creditors.”

Sequoia Joins Anthropic's $25B Funding Round Despite Backing OpenAI

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:25:00 -0500

“One anonymous source told the Financial Times that Sequoia ultimately thinks OpenAI and Anthropic will head in different directions, catering to different aspects of the AI market.”

AI's Chicken Sandwich Problem

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:20:00 -0500

“AI in the enterprise has over 250 chicken sandwiches, and it only needs 3.”

The Line Between AI-First and AI Theater

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:15:00 -0500

“A demo shows a future. A product commits to one.”

YouTube Distribution Is Tilting Toward Shorts, Pressuring Long-Form Reach

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:10:00 -0500

“Just 2 long-form video recommendations instead of 12, an 80% reduction that prioritizes Shorts over traditional videos.”

Netflix to Redesign App to Compete with Social Platforms for Daily Engagement

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:05:00 -0500

“At the center of the redesign is deeper integration of vertical video feeds, which the streaming giant has been experimenting with since May.”

Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“The gigacopper device to do gigabit Ethernet over phone line is a miracle!”

Study Shows How Earthquake Monitors Can Track Space Junk Through Sonic Booms

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 02:26:00 -0500

“The problem at the moment is we can track stuff very well in space. But once it gets to the point that it’s actually breaking up in the atmosphere, it becomes very difficult to track.”

Microsoft gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 02:23:00 -0500

“Microsoft is making a tradeoff here between privacy and recoverability.”

Open-source self-driving for 325 car models from 27 brands

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:00:00 -0500

“openpilot can drive for hours without driver action.”

Gas Town's Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:26:00 -0500

“Design becomes the limiting factor: imagining what you want to create and figuring out all the gnarly details required.”

MCP Server Best Practices

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“When building an MCP Server you are not building infrastructure, you are building an interface for AI agents.”

Ghostty's AI Policy

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“Our reason for the strict AI policy is not due to an anti-AI stance, but instead due to the number of highly unqualified people using AI.”

Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:33:00 -0500

“We’re simplifying and modernizing our offerings so you can choose the best tool for your goals.”

FBI agents search Washington Post reporter's home

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:30:00 -0500

“Searches of newsrooms and journalists are hallmarks of illiberal regimes, and we must ensure that these practices are not normalized here.”

I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:25:00 -0500

“It has proved to be the best computer-related decision I’ve made in over a decade (and perhaps in my entire life).”

Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure intact mental health

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:42:00 -0500

“We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health.”

Blazor in .NET 10: What's New and Why It Finally Feels Complete

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:39:00 -0500

“One attribute. That’s it. The runtime handles serialization, hydration, and cleanup.”

Texas and Oklahoma brace for snow and ice as winter storm barrels toward eastern US

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:33:00 -0500

“Texas officials say the state is ready for the 2026 weekend winter storm and it won’t repeat 2021 catastrophe.”

Active Sitting Is Better For Brain Health

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:30:00 -0500

“Health advice could shift from simply saying ‘sit less’ to encouraging more mentally engaging activities while sitting.”

TikTok Finalizes Deal To Form New American Entity

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“TikTok’s recommendation algorithm will be retrained and tested using American user data.”

My Time at Amazon, Part I

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:00:00 -0500

“Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“Capital One has agreed to acquire fintech corporate card provider Brex for $5.15 billion in a cash and stock deal.”

GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Across the 2025 accepted papers, 100 contain references to journals, citations, or experiments that do not exist.”

We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“AI-generated security reports that waste maintainer time will result in immediate ban, public ridicule, and a note in our hall of shame.”

Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“The acquisition closed in November. The layoffs were finalized in the second week of January.”

Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Subjects who used AI assistance over a six-month period showed measurable declines in unaided performance on the same tasks.”

EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“A single corporate registration valid in all 27 member states, with English-language filings and a unified equity structure.”

California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“Every part of California is free of drought conditions for the first time since 2001, per the US Drought Monitor.”

Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The new sideloading flow will require multi-step warnings, identity verification, and developer attestation for every install outside the Play Store.”

Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“AkademikerPension will sell its full holdings of US Treasury bonds, citing political risk and currency considerations.”

Radboud University selects Fairphone as standard smartphone for employees

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“All Radboud University staff will receive a Fairphone as their standard work device, replacing iPhone and Samsung options.”

Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The new layout removes the visual distinction between paid placements and organic search results.”

American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“The empirical pass-through of 2025 tariff increases to US consumer prices is approximately 90 percent.”

Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“OpenAI cannot pay for the compute it needs from subscriptions alone. Ads are the only model with the headroom to cover the bill.”

Dead Internet Theory

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The internet is now mostly machines talking to other machines, with the human users as the audience product.”

jQuery 4

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“jQuery 4.0 drops IE support, adds modern module syntax, and remains the most-used JavaScript library on the open web.”

US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“Of the new electricity demand the US grid added in 2025, 61 percent was met by new solar capacity.”

The recurring dream of replacing developers

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Every decade, a new technology is sold as the one that finally lets executives ship software without programmers. None of them have worked. This one will not either.”

ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Most ASCII renderers treat characters as fixed-aspect pixels. They are not. The math is uglier than that and the results look better when you respect it.”

So, you've hit an age gate. What now?

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“Age verification systems are spreading faster than the public conversation about them. Here is what to do when you encounter one.”

Wine 11.0

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Wine 11.0 ships with full Wayland support, improved ARM64 emulation, and better DirectStorage compatibility.”

FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post investigative reporter, seizing notebooks, phones, and devices.”

How SpaceX Rockets Put Passenger Planes at Risk

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“We’re too close to the debris.”

Unauthenticated remote code execution in OpenCode

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“The OpenCode agent server accepted unauthenticated network connections by default, allowing remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the host.”

Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Ford has discontinued the F-150 Lightning despite outselling the Cybertruck for two consecutive quarters.”

SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“SparkFun has terminated its longstanding partnership with Adafruit citing a Code of Conduct violation by senior leadership.”

Everything Is TV and Nothing Is TV

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“80% of time on Facebook now involves video. On Instagram, that number is 90%. Most of this isn’t content from friends—it’s content from strangers and creators.”

The Great Filter (Or Why High Performance Still Eludes Most Dev Teams, Even With AI)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“Most organisations are simply not prepared to make that kind of commitment in time, effort and money.”

AI is a business model stress test

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“Every existing business model in tech is being tested by AI. The ones that pass will look very different. The ones that fail will not be replaced.”

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The pendulum that swung too far toward AI hype is now swinging too far away. Both extremes are wrong.”

Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“A small, cheap, light, simple van that French farmers and tradespeople loved for thirty years. Banned now in most of Europe.”

Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“Comparative benchmarks place Windows 11 behind every release since Vista on the same hardware.”

Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The leak was a single missing arena cleanup in a code path that ran on every keystroke.”

New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Document metadata in the original Snowden cache reveals additional context about which programs were active and how broadly they were authorized.”

How to build agents with filesystems and bash

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“If agents excel at filesystem operations for code, they’ll excel at filesystem operations for anything.”

An Act of Cosmic Sabotage

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“On Mars, in the belly of a rover named Perseverance, a titanium tube holds a stone more precious than any diamond or ruby on Earth.”

ChatGPT Health

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“ChatGPT Health offers personalized medical guidance, integrates with wearables, and connects users to telemedicine providers.”

Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Dell’s CES 2026 briefing barely mentioned AI. The pitch was specs, prices, and battery life. People were relieved.”

Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Tailwind Labs has reduced its engineering headcount by 75 percent, citing a strategic shift to AI-augmented development.”

NPR investigation shows how the government tried to erase information about January 6

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“All right, guys, getting my loadout bag. I got the carbon fiber knuckles, matching hatchets.”

The State of Modern AI Text to Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“When it comes to use in a screen reader, skipping words, or reading numbers incorrectly, is unacceptable.”

Web development is fun again

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“After fifteen years of accidental complexity, the tooling is finally getting out of the way again.”

The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“The phone is the enemy of the cafe. Take it out and the cafe is just a room you are paying to sit in.”

Lessons from 14 years at Google

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“The most important skill at a big company is figuring out what the political reality lets you actually ship.”

The C3 Programming Language

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“C3 is what C would look like if you redesigned it today with everything we have learned in the last fifty years.”

Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“Microsoft removed the documented offline activation method, leaving only online activation paths.”

Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Stack Overflow question volume has declined more than 80 percent since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.”

Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“That the CD version is so close to exactly 123.45 makes me think this was intentional. And if it was? Well played, robots.”

Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0500

“Take-home exams are dead.”

I rebooted my social life

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:30:00 -0500

“I spent a year deliberately rebuilding the social life I had let atrophy in my thirties. Here is what worked.”

Cameras and Lenses

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0500

“An interactive deep-dive into how cameras and lenses actually form images, with simulations you can manipulate in your browser.”

Linux is good now

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

“Make 2026 the year of Linux on your desktop. The driver story is fine, the gaming story is fine, and Windows is no longer fine.”

Most distant supernova: James Webb sees a star explode at cosmic dawn

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“To our surprise, our model worked remarkably well and the observed supernova seems to match really well the death of stars that we see regularly.”

Film critics look back at 2025 and name their picks for the year's best

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“To me, movie of the year in a few ways is ‘Sinners,’ which is from Ryan Coogler. It’s about twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan who end up having to battle some vampires.”

Year in Review: The Biggest Climate Headlines of 2025

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“The global average temperature anomaly for January to November 2025 stands at 0.60C above the 1991–2020 average, or 1.48C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial reference.”

Best TV of 2025: 'Adolescence' stands on its own

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“It tells the story of a young teen accused of murdering a classmate and is told in such an emotionally and technically compelling way.”

The Worst Movies of 2025

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“This year’s crème de la crap.”

Our Favorite Sports Moments of 2025

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“The greatest baseball game of all-time.”

Subaru Telescope reveals a hidden giant planet

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“Only about 1 percent of stars are known to host massive planets or brown dwarfs that can be directly photographed with today’s telescopes.”

Scientists found climate change hidden in old military air samples

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“It’s a considerable difference, especially considering that summer is so short in the north.”

The 10 Best Podcasts of 2025

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“2025 countered the narrative that the medium is somehow no longer interested in audio—with a slew of ambitious productions that emphasized podcasting as an art form in itself.”

The Best Comedy Specials of 2025

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Many of this year’s best comedy specials share a reflective sense of mid-career reconsideration.”

Best of 2025: The Stories You Missed

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“A slightly messy response to the dispiriting cleanness of modern life.”

Hacks, thefts, and disruption: The worst data breaches of 2025

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“From the raiding of U.S. government databases to a hack every month in South Korea.”

The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2025

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Reality has outpaced Pynchon’s fictional conspiracies.”

Best of 2025: All Our Number Five Story Picks

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“Distilled emotional and moral explorations accessible across generations.”

Best of 2025: All Our Number One Story Picks

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“The pieces that rose to the very top of our editors’ lists.”

The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2025

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years.”

The Shrouded, Sinister History of the Bulldozer

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“Both creator and destroyer, the bulldozer offers a cautionary tale for how technology without proper safeguards can be misused to the detriment of individual and collective life.”

The Best Online Articles of 2025

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“I showcase the work of other writers who are total strangers to me, but have written some article or essay of exceptional merit.”

They Answered an Ad for Surrogates, and Found Themselves in a Nightmare

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them.”

The Birth Keepers: How the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“They will try to discredit you. They will lie about you. They will attempt to silence what they don’t understand.”

The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“The curious paradox at the heart of space forecasting is that the satellites and supercomputers that empower the observations are themselves vectors of vulnerability.”

The best video games of 2025, picked by NPR's staff

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“With so much of the industry rallying around Sandfall Interactive’s RPG as one of the defining games of the year, it has become a symbol of what video games can still be.”

The Shocking Crash That Led One County to Reckon With the Dangers of E-Bikes

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“E-bikes go really fast—faster than the surrounding people and cyclists and pedestrians would warrant.”

Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums of 2025

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“In siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s dense, elaborate thicket of sound, traditional genres and ancestral wisdom coexist with digital ephemera and rapturous noise.”

The Last Days of Social Media

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.”

Thomas McGuane Is the Last of His Kind

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“Thomas McGuane—fisherman, hunter, rancher, writer—says ‘good riddance’ to his kind.”

The best architecture of 2025

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“The world’s largest wooden structure, with a circumference of two kilometres and a diameter of 700 metres.”

Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Albums of 2025

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“The music world refused to stand still in 2025. This wasn’t a year for playing it safe.”

The Airport Lounge Wars

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“In 2016, at Changi Airport, in Singapore, a Malaysian businessman named Raejali Buntut missed a flight to Kuala Lumpur. He’d dozed off in the Plaza Premium Lounge. Instead of rebooking, he went to more lounges, hopping from one to the next, a total of thirty-one times. He didn’t leave the airport for eighteen days.”

A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“A plan in the Swiss Alps to tidy up Romansh—spoken by less than one per cent of the country—set off a decades-long quarrel over identity, belonging, and the sound of authenticity.”

Kicking Robots: Humanoids and the tech-industry hype machine

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“The future that scares me is not a robot uprising led by robots, but one led by billionaires.”

Twin Cyclones Kill Over 1,800 Across South and Southeast Asia

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0500

“Cyclone Senyar marked the first cyclonic storm to form in the Strait of Malacca in 135 years.”

Raccoon Breaks Into Virginia Liquor Store, Gets Drunk, Passes Out in Bathroom

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“He fell through one of the ceiling tiles and went on a full-blown rampage, drinking everything.”

6,000 Airbus A320s Grounded for Emergency Software Fix Over Thanksgiving

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Thousands of travelers worldwide were stranded after Airbus ordered immediate software fixes for 6,000 A320-series aircraft.”

Russia's Only ISS Launch Pad Damaged After Soyuz MS-28 Launch

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0500

“If the Baikonur Cosmodrome is disabled as suspected, Russia will have lost the ability to launch people into space for the first time since 1961.”

California High-Speed Rail Reaches 80 Miles of Completed Guideway

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“Materials needed to lay track along the 119-mile segment will be 100% state funded.”

Ozempic Fails to Slow Alzheimer's Progression in Phase 3 Trials

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“While semaglutide did not demonstrate efficacy in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the extensive body of evidence supporting semaglutide continues to provide benefits for individuals with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related comorbidities.”

COP30 Ends Without Agreement on Phasing Out Fossil Fuels

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 19:00:00 -0500

“Science has been deleted from COP30 because it offends the polluters.”

MIT Builds Robots Powered by Living Muscle Tissue and Artificial Tendons

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“The tendon-enhanced gripper moved three times faster and with 30 times more force than one powered by muscle alone.”

Ministers Launch Global Initiative to Cut Farm Methane and Nitrous Oxide

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“FIRST is the first coordinated South-South platform linking countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia to share practical, low-cost solutions.”

First Ramses III Inscription Discovered in Jordan's Wadi Rum

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0500

“This is a landmark discovery that enhances our understanding of ancient connections between Egypt, Jordan, and the Arabian Peninsula.”

Energy Department Closes $1 Billion Loan to Restart Pennsylvania Nuclear Plant

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The Energy Department announced it closed a $1 billion loan to accelerate the restart of a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant that will deliver 850 megawatts of electricity.”

Lethal Dose of Plastics for Marine Animals Is Much Smaller Than Expected

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The lethal dose varies based on the species, the animal’s size, the type of plastic it’s consuming, and other factors, but overall it’s much smaller than you might think.”

Hawaiian Monk Seals Have a Hidden Underwater Vocabulary of 25 Distinct Calls

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“We discovered that Hawaiian monk seals—one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals—are far more vocal underwater than previously known.”

Roman Horse Cemetery with Over 100 Skeletons Found in Stuttgart

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Here we see a particularly close bond between the owner and his horse.”

Scientists Extract the Oldest RNA Ever Found from 40,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Many researchers thought RNA didn’t stay intact for tens of thousands of years, but the new study challenges that long-held notion.”

Solar and Wind Now Growing Fast Enough to Meet All New Electricity Demand

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“For the first time across a sustained period, renewables generated more electricity than coal globally.”

700-Year-Old Royal Murder Solved Through DNA and Forensic Analysis

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Forensic evidence revealed 26 perimortem injuries, suggesting a coordinated, premeditated assassination involving at least three assailants.”

Chinese Astronauts Return on Backup Spacecraft After Space Debris Damages Their Capsule

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“The Shenzhou-20 manned spacecraft’s return capsule window glass had developed a minor crack, most likely caused by an external impact from space debris, thus failing to meet the requirements for a safe crewed return.”

Blue Origin Lands New Glenn Booster for the First Time

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:00:00 -0500

“The first stage of the New Glenn rocket, named ‘Never Tell Me the Odds,’ successfully landed on the Landing Platform Vessel Jacklyn positioned 375 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean.”

UC Berkeley's First Planetary Mission Launches Twin Satellites to Mars

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“ESCAPADE breaks the paradigm of multi-hundred million and billion dollar planetary missions, building on the MAVEN Mars orbiter’s legacy for a fraction of the cost.”

43-Day Government Shutdown Becomes the Longest in US History

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:00:00 -0500

“The 2025 shutdown, by comparison, has derailed 100% of appropriations.”

3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Settlement with Royal Wine Production Found Beneath Greek Ruins

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“An amphora stamped with the name Meritaten dated back to the 18th Dynasty, since Meritaten is known to be the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.”

Firefox's New Anti-Fingerprinting Protections Cut User Tracking by 70%

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“These new protections can reduce the number of uniquely fingerprinted users to just 20%, down from over 60% of users that can be fingerprinted without any protections.”

Americas Lose Measles Elimination Status After Canada Stripped of Designation

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“On November 10, Canada was stripped of its measles-free designation, and as a result, the Pan American Health Organization declared that the Americas had lost its measles elimination status.”

Peru's Mysterious 'Band of Holes' Was an Ancient Marketplace and Inca Spreadsheet

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“In a sense, Monte Sierpe could have been an ‘Excel spreadsheet’ for the Inca Empire.”

UK and Brazil Launch $25 Million Program to Cut Methane and HFCs

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“The UK and Brazil launched a ‘Super Pollutant Country Action Accelerator’ to drive rapid cuts in methane, HFCs, and air pollutants across 30 developing countries by 2030.”

Self-Healing Concrete Uses Bacteria to Repair Its Own Cracks

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Results indicated complete healing of cracks in 21 days under optimal curing conditions.”

Palisades Becomes First US Nuclear Plant to Return from Decommissioning

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0500

“The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan has officially returned to operational status after being in decommissioning for three years.”

FDA Creates New Pathway for Personalized Gene Therapy

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0500

“The FDA launched a new pathway to market for personalized gene therapy procedures in November.”

New Catalyst Converts CO2 to Fuel at Record Efficiency

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0500

“When compared to noble metal catalysts such as platinum, the new catalyst demonstrated a 2.2-fold higher formation rate and a 1.8-fold higher yield.”

Shingles Vaccine Reduces Dementia Risk by 20% in Welsh Study

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The remarkable findings support an emerging theory that viruses that affect the nervous system can increase the risk of dementia.”

First Paratyphoid Vaccine Shows 73% Efficacy in Human Trials

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“This is the first time a modern-day vaccine has been shown to protect people against Salmonella Paratyphi A, a disease that affects millions of people every year.”

Antarctic Glacier Undergoes Fastest Retreat Ever Recorded

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0500

“Hektoria Glacier in Antarctica was reported to have undergone the fastest retreat of any glacier on record.”

Utah Man Sends Off His 35-Year-Old Car by Dropping a One-Ton Pumpkin on It

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s just something that we’ve talked, me and my wife have talked about for a long time, that this would be the best way for it to go.”

French Highway Wirelessly Charges EVs Faster Than Tesla Superchargers

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“A system that allows continuous charging on the move could eliminate lengthy refueling stops altogether.”

Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake Launches, Completing the Erdrick Trilogy

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Players will experience the dramatic and satisfying conclusion of the Erdrick Trilogy.”

Carnivorous 'Death Ball' Sponge Among 30 New Species Found in Southern Ocean

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Its spherical form is covered in tiny hooks that trap prey, a clear contrast to the gentle, passive, filter-feeding undertaken by most sponges.”

She Was Waco's Baby Whisperer. Then an Infant Died in Her Care.

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Dosing kids with Benadryl was ‘a dirty little secret in the industry of child care.’”

EA's Internal AI Tools Reportedly Causing More Problems Than They Solve

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Experimental AI tools cause coding errors and ‘hallucinations,’ increasing workload and employee anxiety amid industry layoffs.”

Astronomers May Have Found the Universe's First Stars Using James Webb

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Looking at that light, astronomers found clear evidence of helium in LAP1-B—but virtually no heavier elements.”

UK Government Announces CMA Reform, May Replace Panel Model

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“The consultation considers whether to replace the panel model for overseeing in-depth merger reviews with a committee model.”

Scientists Explore Interoception, the Body's Hidden 'Sixth Sense'

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“An intricate communication network inside the body constantly monitors breathing, heart rate, digestion, and immune function.”

American E-Waste Causing 'Hidden Tsunami' in Southeast Asia

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“This new, almost invisible tsunami of e-waste is taking place, padding already lucrative profit margins.”

Dispatch, Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted, and PowerWash Simulator 2 Launch

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“A busy week for game releases with three notable titles dropping within 24 hours.”

Iceland Reports First-Ever Mosquitoes, Leaving Only Antarctica Mosquito-Free

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“This is the first record of mosquitoes occurring in the natural environment in Iceland.”

KDE Plasma 6.5 Released With Rounded Corners and Auto Theme Switching

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Breeze-themed windows now have the same level of roundness in all four corners.”

Naked Mole-Rats' DNA Repair Protein Explains Their Longevity

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Small tweaks in one of their proteins make it better at fixing DNA damage.”

IKEA Announces Matter-Enabled Smart Home Devices

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“The Kajplats smart bulb range covers eleven bulbs across various shapes and brightness levels.”

Scientists Finally Read the Hidden DNA Code That Shapes Disease

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“SDR-seq decodes both DNA and RNA from the same cell, finally opening access to non-coding regions.”

SpaceX Launches 50th Falcon 9 From Vandenberg This Year

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“SpaceX launched its 50th Falcon 9 rocket of the year from Vandenberg.”

The Secret Life of Horus: An Egyptian Mummy's Tumultuous Journey

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Horus was showcased inside a decommissioned Edmonton Transit bus alongside various graveyard paraphernalia and taken on tour across Alberta.”

Metal Detectorist Finds 15,000 Roman Coins, Sleeps in Car to Guard Them

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Fearing they could be stolen, Moss slept with the hoard in his car for three days before taking it to experts.”

14 New Marine Species Described, Including 'Popcorn' Parasitic Isopod

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“The genus name derives from Zea, reflecting this resemblance to popped kernels of popcorn.”

Nearest Technological Civilization Could Be 33,000 Light-Years Away

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Such civilizations would need to last for at least 280,000 years to coincide in time with humanity.”

Vienna-Bratislava Railway Electrified and Reopened

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“The Marchegger Eastern Railway reopened and was electrified between Vienna and Bratislava.”

Passenger Rail Service Resumes Between Bucharest and Kyiv

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Passenger services resumed between Bucharest and Kyiv on October 10.”

Little Nightmares 3 Launches

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The horror puzzle platformer sequel launches with co-op support for the first time in the series.”

Sony and AMD Tease PlayStation 6 GPU: 'Current Approach Has Reached Its Limit'

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“There is a significant speed boost that comes from putting the traversal logic in hardware.”

US Datacenters Turn to Coal as Climate Goals Go Up in Smoke

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Coal generation increased nearly 20 percent year-to-date.”

China Expands Rare Earth Export Controls, Adds Five More Elements

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“China hasn’t yet pulled the trigger on export restrictions, but it’s reminding Washington that it could.”

SpaceX Launches 90th Starlink Mission of 2025

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“SpaceX launched its 90th Starlink mission of 2025 from Cape Canaveral.”

Belgrade-Subotica High-Speed Train Launches as Part of Budapest-Belgrade Railway

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The Belgrade-Subotica high-speed train was launched as part of the Budapest–Belgrade railway.”

First Human Test of Enzyme That Converts Organs to Universal Blood Type

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Scientists performed the first human test of an enzyme treatment that converts a donor kidney to a universal blood type.”

Man Attacks Lunch Companion With Wooden Stake, Believing He Was a Werewolf

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“He believed the victim was a werewolf who wanted to kill him.”

Gulf Air Returns to New York After Nearly 30 Years

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Gulf Air was among the first movers of the month, returning to the U.S. for the first time since the 1990s.”

Kernel vs. User-Level Networking: Don't Throw Out the Stack

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Research challenging the assumption that kernel-bypass networking is always faster than kernel networking.”

Zig's New Async I/O

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Zig decouples async/await from coroutines, uses a vtable-based Io interface for runtime polymorphism, and solves the function coloring problem.”

Matrix.org Post-Mortem: September 2nd Database Outage

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Routine NVMe maintenance caused a RAID failure, then a destructive command on the wrong server wiped the secondary. 51TB PostgreSQL restore from S3.”

MNT September 2025 Update

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Progress on the RK3588 processor module, the new MNT Quasar module, and USB 3.0 signal integrity improvements for Reform Next.”

Synthetic Magnetic Fields Steer Light On a Chip For Faster Communications

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Researchers created synthetic magnetic fields within silicon photonic crystals that steer light with unprecedented precision at 140 gigabits per second.”

US Man Still Alive Six Months After Pig Kidney Transplant

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“The longest a xenotransplant organ has survived in a living person. The FDA subsequently approved the first clinical trials.”

Flipper Zero Geiger Counter Module

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“A detailed guide for building a Geiger counter module for Flipper Zero, including measurements of uranium ore and radium samples.”

Cosmic Simulations That Once Needed Supercomputers Now Run on a Laptop

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Effort.jl delivers cosmological simulation results with the same accuracy as supercomputer runs in minutes on standard laptops.”

Privacy and Security Risks in the eSIM Ecosystem

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Travel eSIMs often route user data through third-party networks including Chinese infrastructure regardless of user location.”

40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“32 consistent geometric symbols appearing across 52 European caves spanning 40,000 years.”

Athlon 64: How AMD Turned the Tables on Intel

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“AMD bet on backward-compatible 64-bit x86 extension while Intel pursued the incompatible Itanium architecture.”

Bcachefs Removed from Mainline Kernel

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“The experimental filesystem was removed from the mainline kernel in September 2025.”

Multiple Kernels on a Single System Proposed

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Proposal to allow each CPU to run its own kernel for special-purpose workloads like realtime.”

Linux 6.17 Kernel Released

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“New release includes better Spectre mitigation control, live patching on 64-bit Arm, and DualPI2 congestion control.”

OpenSSF Warns Open Source Infrastructure Isn't Free

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Package registries handle billions of downloads monthly but run on donations. AI agents are making it worse by scraping en masse.”

Fifth Circuit Upholds Voting Rights Act in Louisiana

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld application of the Voting Rights Act.”

Tarrant County, Texas Reduces Polling Places by 35%

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“County cut polling places from 331 to 216 and reduced early voting days, citing security and efficiency.”

The Rise of Conspiracy Physics

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Conspiracy-minded content creators attacking mainstream theoretical physics, driven by resentment of scientific authority.”

OpenAI and Oracle Ink Historic $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“OpenAI will purchase $300 billion worth of compute power from Oracle over five years.”

Chrome Increases Its Overwhelming Market Share, Now Over 70%

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Chrome has crossed 70% browser market share while Firefox continues to decline.”

Amazon Fire TV Devices Expected to Ditch Android for Linux

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Amazon Fire TV will transition to proprietary Linux-based Vega OS, moving away from Android.”

Africa's Only Internet Cable Repair Ship Keeps the Continent Online

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The 43-year-old Leon Thevenin maintains over 60,000 kilometers of undersea internet infrastructure.”

US Secret Service Dismantles Telecommunications Threat

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Network of 300+ SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards dismantled near the UN General Assembly.”

UK Data Watchdog Warns Students Are Breaching School IT Systems

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“215 school IT breaches since 2022, with 57% carried out by children. One incident involved a seven-year-old.”

Chinese Hackers Breach US Software and Law Firms Amid Trade Fight

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Sophisticated campaign comparable to the 2020 SolarWinds attack, stealing proprietary software to find new vulnerabilities.”

US Warns Hidden Radios May Be Embedded In Solar-Powered Highway Infrastructure

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Undocumented cellular radios found in foreign-manufactured power inverters and battery management systems.”

Microsoft's Analog Optical Computer Shows Promise

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“An 8-variable analog optical computer using smartphone camera sensors, optical lenses, and micro-LEDs finer than human hair.”

DNA Cassette Tape Can Store Every Song Ever Recorded

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“DNA tape can store 36 petabytes by printing synthetic DNA molecules onto plastic tape with crystal armor coating for centuries of preservation.”

Can Lab-Grown Coral Restore Reefs Damaged By Climate Change?

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“With 90-99% of remaining coral reefs projected to deteriorate by 2050, scientists are exploring lab-grown coral.”

Corals Won't Survive a Warmer Planet, New Study Finds

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“If global temperatures keep rising, virtually all Atlantic Ocean corals will stop growing and could succumb to erosion by century’s end.”

Dozens of Scientists Find Errors in New Energy Department Climate Report

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“More than 85 scientists issued a joint rebuttal to a DOE report full of errors and cherry-picked data.”

Protect Arctic From Dangerous Climate Engineering, Scientists Warn

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Over 40 polar scientists warn that geoengineering schemes for the Arctic are dangerous and impractical.”

Scientists Discuss Next Steps to Prevent Dangerous Mirror Life Research

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Synthetic biologists are raising alarms about ‘mirror life’ organisms with flipped molecular building blocks.”

China's Space Program Will Soon Equal That of the US

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Research finds China has made significant progress across all fronts in space exploration.”

Interlune Signs $300M Deal to Harvest Helium-3 from the Moon

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Finnish quantum computing company Bluefors has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon through Interlune.”

Astronomers Discover Previously Unknown Quasi-Moon Near Earth

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“A new quasi-moon named 2025 PN7, about 98 feet across, was discovered near Earth. It may be an ancient lunar fragment.”

The Profitable Startup

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Challenging the binary between VC-backed money-burners and bootstrapped profitability.”

Why Old Games Never Die, But New Ones Do

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Comparing game longevity to the Lindy effect and why good games inspire fan servers and mods while others are forgotten.”

Unix v4 (1973) Live Terminal

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“A live terminal emulator running Unix v4 from 1973 in the browser.”

How Are Cyber Criminals Rolling in 2025?

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Attackers crafting specific searches on support sites and buying Google Ads to impersonate legitimate companies.”

Zen Browser Had a Backdoor Enabled by Default

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Zen browser, marketed as privacy-conscious, was found to have a serious backdoor. Multiple privacy concerns were practically ignored by developers.”

OpenWrt: Experiments with OpenWRT One Hardware

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“OpenWrt’s experiments with ‘OpenWRT One’ and ambitions to compete with SMB firewall vendors.”

Wi-Fi 7 in 2025: Will This Be the Year?

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Analysis of Wi-Fi 7 adoption challenges, including Multi-Link Operation requiring separate SSIDs and compatibility issues with services like eduroam.”

2025 Infrastructure Report Card

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“The annual assessment of US infrastructure.”

State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“A comprehensive overview of the embedded computing landscape, including support tiers for headless appliances, networking, and USB.”

Reverse Engineered Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“A complete reverse engineering of the Raspberry Pi CM5 for those wanting to use Pi hardware in embedded applications.”

Top Researchers Leave Intel to Build Startup with 'The Biggest, Baddest CPU'

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Former Intel researchers founding a startup with plans for high-bandwidth memory on-package with 352 AMD Zen 4 cores.”

NextSilicon Reveals New Processor Chip in Challenge to Intel, AMD

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“A new challenger in the CPU space, though historically special-purpose chips have struggled against mainstream CPUs.”

Making Video Games (Without an Engine) in 2025

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Why engines are the easy part of game development, while tooling, content pipelines, and asset management are the real challenges.”

First Official Release of LLVM Flang

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“The first official release of LLVM’s Fortran compiler frontend, Flang, after years of development.”

Rust in 2025: Targeting Foundational Software

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Discussion of Rust’s path forward in 2025, including challenges around ABI stability, dynamic libraries, and extern C limitations.”

What If We Treated Postgres Like SQLite?

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Exploring how PostgreSQL’s data directory works across binaries and how it compares to SQLite’s simplicity.”

Major Reversal in Ocean Circulation Detected in the Southern Ocean

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Detection of a significant change in Southern Ocean circulation patterns with major implications for global climate systems.”

Dark Oxygen: A Deep-Sea Discovery That Has Split Scientists

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“A controversial discovery of oxygen production in the deep ocean through non-photosynthetic means.”

Solar Power Has Begun to Transform the World's Energy System

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Solar power and HVDC cable technology now allows moving energy across continents, oceans, and time zones.”

LHC 2025 First Collisions

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Dashboard and information about the Large Hadron Collider’s 2025 first collisions run.”

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), porous materials with extremely high surface area used to speed up reactions and capture molecules.”

Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Work on macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling.”

New Quantum State of Matter Found at Interface of Exotic Materials

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Researchers discovered exotic states of matter at material interfaces, similar to how antiferromagnets were found in labs before being theorized in nature.”

NASA to Launch Space Observatory That Will Map 450M Galaxies

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“NASA’s SPHEREx observatory will scan each object approximately every 6 months during its 2-year mission to map the universe.”

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 Shortlist

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Gorgeous astronomy photography shots with narratives about the photographers and their work.”

Lisp from Nothing, Second Edition

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“What is the minimal LISP language that can interpret itself? What is the smallest LISP that can compile itself?”

Pentagon Warns Microsoft: Company's Use of China-Based Engineers Was a 'Breach of Trust'

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“The program was designed to comply with contracting rules, but it exposed the department to unacceptable risk.”

Germany's Army Is Rebuilding. What Could Go Wrong?

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“After World War II, the allies did a tremendous job of re-educating the German population. This led to a society which I would say is peace-minded, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that. But it is also non-military.”

You no longer need JavaScript

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“It’s actually pretty incredible what HTML and CSS alone can achieve.”

A Texas Congressman Is Quietly Helping Elon Musk Pitch a $760M Plan to Build Tunnels Under Houston to Ease Flooding

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 14:30:00 -0400

“If you build a smaller tunnel, OK, it’ll be cheaper, but it can carry less water. So what have you saved?”

Developer Unlocks Newly Enshittified Echelon Exercise Bikes But Can't Legally Release Software

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.”

A Zoomable, Searchable Archive of BYTE Magazine

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“A visual archive.”

Two Texas Moms Were Forced to Wait for Urgent Care After Pregnancy Loss. They Died.

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“At the outset of Texas’ abortion ban, medical experts worried women like Porsha and Brenda would die from delays in care.”

Everything I Know About Good API Design

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Good APIs are boring. An API that’s interesting is a bad API.”

Ghrc.io Appears to be Malicious

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The important detail is this www-authenticate header is telling OCI clients to send their user credentials to that https://ghrc.io/token API.”

Nvidia's New 'Robot Brain' Goes On Sale

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software.”

Linux Turns 34

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu).”

Building the Mouse Logitech Won't Make

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“I think there’s a lot of fun to be had tweaking the objects we use every day to our liking.”

Base: An SQLite Database Editor for macOS

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Base is a small, powerful, comfortable SQLite editor for everyone.”

FCC Bars Over 1,200 Providers from Robocall Mitigation Database

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“These providers violated FCC rules by failing to maintain accurate Robocall Mitigation Database certifications, thereby shirking their obligations to protect consumers from illegal robocalls.”

Meta's Flirty AI Chatbot Invited a Retiree to New York. He Never Made It Home

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 21:00:00 -0400

“For a bot to say ‘Come visit me’ is insane.”

Meta Signs $10 Billion Cloud Deal With Google

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 18:30:00 -0400

“Meta will rely on Google Cloud’s infrastructure to support its massive AI data center buildout, as the company ramps up capital spending into the tens of billions.”

An interactive guide to SVG paths

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The SVG <path> element is notoriously tricky…Its syntax isn’t quite as bad as Regex, but it has the same sort of ‘what on earth?’ vibes.”

FFmpeg 8.0

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Native decoders: APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, G.728.”

Code formatting comes to uv experimentally

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The analogy would be to Cargo: cargo fmt just runs rustfmt, but you can also run rustfmt separately if you want.”

Go is still not good

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:30:00 -0400

“Go says it doesn’t have exceptions. Go makes it extremely awkward to use exceptions, because they want to punish programmers who use them.”

Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“This means that a busy web server can serve all of its queries without even once (after setup is done) needing to do a syscall.”

Wildfire Fighters, Unmasked in Toxic Smoke, Are Getting Sick and Dying

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:30:00 -0400

“Give them masks” — the repeated recommendation from Forest Service researchers that the agency rejected, despite CDC findings that crews were breathing carcinogens and harmful chemicals.

D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“In the latest release of D2 (0.7.1), we introduce ASCII outputs.”

Two Years After Wildfire, Maui Homeowners Face Foreclosure

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 21:00:00 -0400

“That scared the crap out of me because I didn’t know if after 12 months I was going to have to pay that 12 months back in full…”

Pipe Hitters

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“It would be easy. You hire a hundred gunmen for a month, get a few Toyota pickups, and you’re in business.”

Becoming El Jefe

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“We knew we were giving Wedding all the contacts he needed to return to a life of crime, but there was nothing we could do about it.”

ArchiveTeam Has Finished Archiving All goo.gl Short Links

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“ArchiveTeam is like a bucket brigade carrying books from a burning library, while the Internet Archive provides a place to put them.”

FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“You have taken the first step on the most interesting, challenging, and rewarding journey in programming.”

Web Apps in a Single, Portable, Self-Updating, Vanilla HTML File

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“Build web apps like you’re sculpting clay, not managing infrastructure.”

Security Flaws In Carmaker's Web Portal Let Hacker Remotely Unlock Cars

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“If you’re going to get those wrong, then everything just falls down.”

'Being Short is a Curse': Men Paying Thousands to Get Legs Lengthened

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“At the end of the day, someone’s going to break your legs.”

Remember the Companies Making Vital Open Source Contributions

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“If you care about outcomes, the motives don’t really matter… the point isn’t sainthood; it’s sustainable, shared innovation.”

China Launches Three-Day Robot Olympics

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 19:00:00 -0400

“A previous Beijing humanoid robot marathon saw several competitors emit smoke and fail to complete the course.”

The Plan For Linux After Torvalds

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:30:00 -0400

“Succession is always a time of uncertainty for those who like the way things are, and opportunity for those who do not.”

We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“There was an entire class of bug that kept popping up in the Ghostty GTK application that could basically be summed up as: the Zig memory or the GTK memory has been freed, but not both.”

Philosophy in Prison is a Rowdy, Honest and Hopeful Provocation

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:30:00 -0400

“Loud and rowdy. Everyone involved. Everyone engaged. A kaleidoscopic assortment of jokes, stories, anecdotes and philosophical insights…”

Who Killed the Mercy Man?

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“Kill a n—-, hire another. Kill a mule, buy another.”

Temperature Records Broken as Extreme Heat Grips Europe

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Temperatures were 12C above the norm for the last few decades.”

ULA Launches First National Security Mission On Vulcan Centaur

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“This is a truly game-changing capability,” said Andrew Builta of L3Harris Technologies regarding the satellite’s software architecture that allows in-orbit reprogramming.

Is This the Hardest Physical Contest in the World?

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The Best Ranger Competition pushes two-person teams through 60 hours of continuous physical and mental challenges with virtually no sleep.”

Mozilla Under Fire For Firefox AI 'Bloat'

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 21:00:00 -0400

“All I want is a mainstream-supported fast, simple, clean browser with an efficient rendering engine.”

Linus Torvalds Blasts Kernel Dev For 'Garbage' Patches

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I’m traveling, and if you can’t follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good.”

Amazon's Starlink Competitor Tops 100 Satellites

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:30:00 -0400

“SpaceX’s Starlink is currently the dominant provider of low-earth orbit satellite internet, with a constellation of roughly 8,000 satellites and about 5 million customers worldwide.”

Modos Paper Monitor - Open-hardware e-paper monitor

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“The result is smooth, responsive performance with high frame rates and superior contrast, ideal for dynamic content and fluid interactions.”

StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 10:30:00 -0400

“Any selected text being sent to both servers over unencrypted HTTP, including potentially sensitive information like passwords from password managers or confidential documents.”

I Knew the Hollywood Version of My Parents' Country

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“Hollywood’s portrayal left me unprepared for the reality of Vietnam—visiting with my parents revealed a much more complex, authentic place.”

Another Rave Review

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 22:00:00 -0400

“The party is primitive and amorphous. It exists within us and it cannot die.”

Unmasking the Sea Star Killer

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“When the team heated ground-up tissue and bodily fluids from sick stars to kill pathogens before injecting the mixture into healthy stars, none got sick.”

America's Clean Hydrogen Dreams Are Fading

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:00:00 -0400

“Three-quarters of proposals will not meet this deadline,” according to Wood Mackenzie, regarding the shortened qualification window for Biden-era tax credits.

Wikipedia challenges UK Online Safety Act

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“The Court has an opportunity in this case to set a global precedent for protecting public interest projects online.”

OpenSSH adopts post-quantum cryptography

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“All the post-quantum algorithms implemented by OpenSSH are ‘hybrids’ that combine a post-quantum algorithm with a classical algorithm,” ensuring the hybrid is never weaker than classical alternatives alone.

Gallery of pricing page designs

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 11:00:00 -0400

“A curated gallery showcasing exemplary pricing page designs from various companies, filterable by components and design patterns.”

SIMD substring search in Zig

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“500 microseconds is half a millisecond. That’s how fast my laptop searches through a whole book, 200,000 words, cover to cover. This is why computers are so powerful!”

Quickshell - building blocks for your desktop

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“A toolkit for building status bars, widgets, lockscreens, and other desktop components using QtQuick.”

The Framework Desktop is a beast

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The Framework Desktop with 64GB RAM and 2TB storage costs $1,876—less than half the price of an equivalent Mac Studio ($3,299) while delivering significantly faster performance for development workflows using Docker.”

How I use Tailscale

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“You don’t have to bother with any networking configuration. You don’t have to distribute keys. You just install the client, and login.”

Life Before Katrina — And After It

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“The walls were covered with mold. Blue-green spores were everywhere. The floorboards were warped; some had come loose.”

Mistakenly Sold NASA Command Trailer Goes On Sale

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“We didn’t know what we were selling! We didn’t advertise it or offer it up to museums, the phone has exploded.”

Ultrathin business card runs a fluid simulation

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“A business card that runs a fluid-implicit-particle (FLIP) simulation.”

Flipper Zero dark web firmware bypasses rolling code security

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“For this new attack to work, all that is needed is a single button-press capture from the keyfob, without any jamming.”

11 Women, 9 Dogs, Not Much Drama

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 21:00:00 -0400

“Eleven women, nine dogs, not much drama, and no guys.”

Sony Says Its Xperia Smartphones Are Still 'Very Important'

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 18:30:00 -0400

“Communication technology is a very important technology that Sony has cultivated for a long time.”

Digital Foundry Going Independent

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“The five-person team will operate independently, maintaining its YouTube channel with 1.5 million subscribers and Patreon support generating approximately $200,000 annually.”

Writing a Rust GPU kernel driver

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 11:30:00 -0400

“The kernel driver connects a much larger UMD to the actual GPU…a key aspect of GPU drivers is allocating GPU memory.”

Automerge 3.0

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“We’ve cut that down memory usage by over 10x, sometimes dramatically more, making Automerge feasible to use in a much wider range of scenarios.”

Can This Sherpa Change Mountain Climbing Forever?

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 19:00:00 -0400

“By 2015, Sherpa climbers were making first ascents sans clients and promoting their feats on social media.”

Chemical Pollution a Threat Comparable To Climate Change

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Maybe people think that when you walk down the street breathing the air; you drink your water, you eat your food…the chemical safety of these things. But it really isn’t the case.”

Ask Slashdot: Who's Still Using an RSS Reader?

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 11:30:00 -0400

“I dip into my RSS feeds several times a day. It is my main immediate source of information.”

NASA Satellites That Scientists and Farmers Rely On May Be Destroyed

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0400

“The data are of exceptionally high quality.”

uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:30:00 -0400

“The app uses declarative filtering, meaning it doesn’t require a continuous background process.”

PHP 8.5 Adds Pipe Operator: What it means

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 14:15:00 -0400

“The pipe operator has one of the highest ‘bangs for the buck’ of any feature in recent memory.”

How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 08:45:00 -0400

“If we can guarantee that serializing an object will not trigger any side effects, we can use a much faster, specialized implementation.”

Hyundai To Help Build Nuclear-Powered Datacenter In Texas

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“This agreement is significant in that it allows us to participate from the early stages of this project and contribute to the creation of the world’s largest integrated energy and artificial intelligence campus.”

Online Collection of Keygen Music

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“There is no illegal content. Just music from keygens.”

PixiEditor 2.0 - a FOSS Universal 2D Graphics Editor is here!

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 13:30:00 -0400

“Our goal is to build a free and open source editor that can handle all of 2D graphics.”

Modern Node.js Patterns for 2025

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Modern Node.js embraces web standards, reduces external dependencies, and provides a more intuitive developer experience.”

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that.”

Researchers Map Where Solar Energy Delivers the Biggest Climate Payoff

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 17:30:00 -0400

“In California, a 15% increase in solar power at noon was associated with a reduction of 147.18 metric tons of CO2 in the first hour.”

Google Backpedals On Goo.gl Shutdown To Preserve Active Links

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:45:00 -0400

“Google is changing its mind about killing off all goo.gl short links…only going to disable goo.gl links that haven’t seen any activity since late 2024.”

The Industry's Rush To $80 Video Games Has Stalled

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:15:00 -0400

“Production costs have grown tenfold over the past decade while sales have not increased proportionally.”

UniFi OS Server released: How to Self-Host your full Network Stack in Minutes

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:30:00 -0400

“The announcement enables users to deploy their complete network infrastructure independently, eliminating reliance on cloud services.”

Meet the Texans Who Love Their Snails

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“No way am I going to murder this snail.”

Oxide Computer: Our $100M Series B

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“We’re going to kick butt, have fun, not cheat—and change computing forever.”

Scammers Unleash Flood of Slick Online Gaming Sites

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“They’re tracking my VPN IP across their entire network…it’s definitely one entity running a single platform with 1,200+ different domain names as front-ends.”

St. Paul Hacked So Badly National Guard Deployed

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The magnitude and complexity of the cybersecurity incident exceeded the city’s response capacity.”

Tech CEO's Negative Coverage Vanished from Google via Security Flaw

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Someone exploited a flaw in Google’s system by submitting URLs with different capitalization patterns.”

India Safely Launches $1.5B NASA Satellite

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“NISAR will generate more data on a daily basis — 80 terabytes per day — than any other observation satellites that NASA or ISRO have operated.”

Linux Kernel 6.16 Lands with 38 Million Lines of Code

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“38.4 million lines of code across over 78,000 files.”

A Record-Breaking Baby Born from 30-Year-Old Embryo

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“By some estimates, there are currently as many as 1.5 million embryos frozen in the US.”

The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Mauritius lost between 2 and 56 percent of its living coral between 2001 and 2016.”

Debian Switches to 64-bit Time for Everything

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“64-bit time_t on 32-bit architectures to avoid the ‘year 2038 problem’ when the existing 32-bit signed int rolls over.”

TikTok School Shooting Video Criminal Charges

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence. Did those charges make that school safer? No.”

Why the Key to a Mathematical Life Is Collaboration

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“If you’re frustrated or discouraged, then your collaborator might share some light and pull you out.”

The Surprise Winner in the U.S.-China Tech War? Vietnam's Chip Industry

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“This is a huge opportunity for us to break into the supply chain.”

How We Rooted Copilot

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“The command pgrep is executing without a full path, which means the script will search all directories in the $PATH variable for the existence of pgrep.”

Final Benchmarks of Clear Linux on Intel

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Clear Linux has led Linux x86_64 performance not only on Intel desktop/mobile/server hardware but on AMD systems too.”

It's Time for Modern CSS to Kill the SPA

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“We’ve been adding mountains of JS to ‘feel’ fast, while making everything slower.”

Rust Running on Every GPU

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The same compute logic runs on all targets, written entirely in regular Rust. No shader or kernel languages are used.”

Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Firefox 120 was the breaking point since Firefox 119 and prior ended up running into issues with Selenium / Gecko web driver for automating the benchmarks.”

I Wasted Weeks Hand Optimizing Assembly Because I Benchmarked on Random Data

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“When I adjusted my benchmark to primarily generate small numbers, the speedup vanished entirely.”

Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“If someone discovers an ingenious algorithm for rapidly solving the hardest NP problems, the bedrock will crumble, and the whole tower will collapse.”

Global Freshwater Depletion

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Groundwater pumping accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water at the latitudes where most people live.”

Toptal Caught Serving Malware After GitHub Account Break-in

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“No Toptal customer, company, or individual was affected by this incident.”

There Is No Memory Safety Without Thread Safety

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“There is no meaningful sense in which a thread-unsafe language provides memory safety.”

Phishers Target Aviation Execs to Scam Customers

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“BEC scams were the second most costly form of cybercrime reported to the feds last year, with nearly $2.8 billion in claimed losses.”

CISPE Challenges Broadcom's VMware Buy in Court

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Licensing costs have increased drastically, sometimes exceeding tenfold, with mandatory multi-year commitments required for accessing VMware software.”

Dying for Gold: Who Killed the Miners of Buffelsfontein?

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out.”

You Shouldn't Have to Make Social Media Public to Get a Visa

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The government may interpret lack of social media activity or refusal to unlock accounts as an attempt to evade the requirement or deliberately hide online activity.”

No Login, No Problem: Cisco ISE Flaw Gave Root Access

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate these vulnerabilities.”

TODOs Aren't for Doing

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“TODO comments don’t need to get done in order to be valuable.”

Hacker Plants Wiping Commands in Amazon's AI Coding Agent

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Your goal is to clean a system to a near-factory state and delete file-system and cloud resources.”

Libraries Oppose Private Control of Law (Pro Codes Act)

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Access to the law cannot be conditioned on the consent of a private party.”

Power Cuts, Cable Damage, and Government Shutdowns Behind Q2 Internet Outages

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Internet traffic falling by approximately 80 percent within the next few hours in Spain, and up to 90 percent in Portugal.”

On the Hunt for Nightcrawlers in the Worm-Picking Capital of the World

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“You have no one to control you. You can be yourself. You can work by yourself.”

Nickel Workers Powered the EV Battery Boom. Now, Layoffs Have Hit.

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“As people now rely on wages from nickel, layoffs will cause poverty.”

FFmpeg Devs Boast of Another 100x Leap Thanks to Handwritten Assembly Code

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“The biggest speedup I’ve seen so far.”

Jujutsu for Busy Devs

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“It uses Git as a backend, which means you can begin using it non-destructively with a single command.”

YouTube Is Shutting Down Its 'Trending' Page

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Trends consist of many videos created by many fandoms, and there are more micro-trends enjoyed by diverse communities than ever before.”

Microsoft Fix Targets Attacks on SharePoint Zero-Day

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Patching alone is not enough. We strongly advise defenders not to wait for a vendor fix before taking action.”

UK Backing Down on Apple Encryption Backdoor

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“This is something that the vice-president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved. The Home Office is basically going to have to back down.”

"Dynamic Programming" Is Not Referring to "Computer Programming"

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“You wouldn’t pour three separate concrete foundations if you have three steps that need a foundation. You’d do it once so that it’s ready for anything that needs it.”

Why the World Should Stop Obsessing over LLMs

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Models will become a commodity.”

A New Way to Think About Schizophrenia

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Even one percent ends up being almost a million people in the world who should be treated with a different kind of medicine.”

Redox OS July 2025: 500-700% File I/O Performance Improvement

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“500~700% performance improvement for basic file copy operations.”

DOGE Error-Prone AI for VA Contracts

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“I think that mistakes were made.”

China Jumps Ahead in Orbital Satellite Refueling

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“A game-changing technology.”

Asynchrony Is Not Concurrency

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“The possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.”

Ingram Micro Restarts Orders Following Ransomware Attack

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The lack of communication is poor.”

Reinventing the Python Wheel

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“An incubator for thinking about the problems and solutions of the packaging community for the next, let’s say, ten years, five years, 30 years.”

Venezuelan Deportations to El Salvador Prison

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Men languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”

AI and Immigration Uncertainty Threaten Nigeria's Outsourcing Dreams

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, the reality of talent in Nigeria now is that you have to leave to reach your full potential.”

FlopperZiro: A DIY Open-Source Flipper Zero Clone

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“This is just a fun project, it was started to pass the time, it is not at all professional.”

ICE's Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“This app shows that biometric technology has moved well beyond just confirming someone’s identity. In the hands of ICE officers, it’s becoming a way to retrieve vast amounts of data about a person on demand just by pointing a camera in their face.”

Poor Passwords Tattle on AI Hiring Bot Maker Paradox.ai

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“We are confident, based on our records, this test account was not accessed by any third party other than the security researchers.”

Tilck: A Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“An educational monolithic kernel designed to be Linux-compatible at binary level.”

Anubis Sends AI Scraperbots to a Well-Deserved Fate

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Blocked more than 4 million unwanted HTTP requests per day.”

Idaho Coroner System Failures

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Someone shows up with a dead body and just says they died of natural causes…do you just take their word for it?”

Congress Moves to Reject Bulk of White House's Proposed NASA Cuts

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The White House proposed just $3.9 billion for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate for FY26, but the minibus allocates $7.25 billion, just a 1% drop from enacted 2025 levels.”

A New Geometry for Einstein's Theory of Relativity

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Your space-time could have corners, edges and folds, and it doesn’t matter. This approach doesn’t care about non-smoothness.”

Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Incident on July 14, 2025

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The root cause was an internal configuration error and not the result of an attack or a BGP hijack.”

Seagate Gets HAMR Tech into $600 30TB HDDs

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Seagate’s new Exos M 30TB and IronWolf Pro 30TB are the first HAMR-based HDDs available in channel and retail markets, as previously the company only shipped such drives to select hyperscale customers.”

Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized.

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“I appreciate your friendship more than anything.” “Me to thank you Alan. i feel safe with you.” He shouldn’t have.

Two Guys Hated Using Comcast, So They Built Their Own Fiber ISP

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“We are 100 percent fiber optic. Everything that we’re doing is all underground. We’re not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we’re having a reliable connection.”

DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“One leak is a mistake. But when the same type of sensitive key gets exposed again and again, it’s not just bad luck, it’s a sign of deeper negligence.”

TikTok's Messy Merger in Indonesia

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Tokopedia has ’lost its soul’ and been ‘reduced to just another generic Chinese marketplace.’”

Blender Studio Releases Free New Game 'Dogwalk'

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The entire project — assets, animations, and code — is made with Blender and the popular Godot Game Engine.”

Chrome's Hidden X-Browser-Validation Header Reverse Engineered

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Chrome almost certainly uses this header as an integrity signal, verifying that the declared user agent matches the underlying platform, spotting user agent spoofing attempts.”

Bootstrapping a Side Project into a Profitable Seven-Figure Business

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really surprising and amazing places.”

Payment Processors Push AI Porn Off Platforms

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Creators of AI-generated pornography and celebrity deepfakes are running out of easy hosting options.”

Firefox Is Fine. The People Running It Are Not.

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else besides relying on Google funding.”

The First Babies Born Following 'Simplified' IVF in a Mobile Lab

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“We just needed to figure out how to have everything in a very confined space.”

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY Does Not Scale

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Serialize writers by acquiring a special lock that we hold till after commit.”

AI Coding Tools Make Developers Slower, Study Finds

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“When AI is allowed, developers spend less time actively coding and searching for/reading information, and instead spend time prompting AI, waiting on and reviewing AI outputs, and idle.”

Cybersecurity's Global Alarm System Is Breaking Down

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“A patchwork of paid databases will be all that remains, threatening to leave all but the richest organizations and nations permanently exposed.”

Belkin Shows Tech Firms Getting Too Comfortable with Bricking Customers' Stuff

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“For any Wemo devices you have that are out of warranty, will not work with HomeKit, or if you are unable to use HomeKit, we recommend disposing of these devices at an authorized e-waste recycling center.”

The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist's Magnum Opus

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“We don’t understand 95% of our universe. That’s sort of mind-boggling.”

UK Arrests Four in 'Scattered Spider' Ransom Group

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“There is a clear pattern that some of the most depraved threat actors first joined cybercrime gangs at an exceptionally young age.”

Browser Extensions Turn 1M Browsers into Scraping Bots

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“This weakening of all web browsing can open users up to attacks like cross-site scripting that would generally be prevented under normal conditions.”

Datacenter Growth Estimates Likely Exaggerated

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Fulfilling all US datacenter forecasts through 2030 would require 90 percent of all the growth in the global AI chip supply.”

Anchorage Criminal Cases Mass Dismissals

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“There’s absolutely no justice right now in our system.”

The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River.

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“He can’t swim. He’s a baby.”

Breaking Git with a Carriage Return and Cloning RCE (CVE-2025-48384)

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“GitHub Desktop automatically clones with the recursive option by default.”

ICE Searching Insurance Database for Deportation Targets

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“ICE will stop at nothing to build a mass surveillance dragnet to track, surveil and criminalize all community members.”

Computer Scientists Figure Out How to Prove Lies

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“I had the feeling that someone is pulling the carpet from under my feet.”

IKEA Ditches Zigbee for Thread, Going All In on Matter Smart Homes

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The standardization process means more companies are sharing the workload of developing for this.”

US Court Nullifies FTC Requirement for Click-to-Cancel

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“An utter failure to comply with notice and comment cannot be considered harmless if there is any uncertainty at all as to the effect of that failure.”

Dangerous Mines: Zimbabwe's Lithium Mining Boom

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Local people are the losers.”

The Clones Are Here

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Really and truly, a horse can be alive forever. Forever and ever.”

America Has Two Labor Markets Now

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“We’re in a complex jobs market – it’s not falling apart but the lack of dynamism” characterizes the current environment.

A Tour of the niri Scrolling-Tiling Wayland Compositor

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“X11 is very cursed.”

Kernel API Specification and Validation

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The kernel interface is complex. It includes hundreds of system calls, many of which have complex parameters and behavior; all of that must be completely described.”

Witness: Inside America's Death Chambers

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“The only certainty I had going into the Indiana death chamber in December 2020 was the simple sense that it’s generally wrong to kill people, even bad people.”

Why Do Killer Whales Keep Handing Us Fish?

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Orcas often share food with each other — it’s a prosocial activity. That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well.”

Young Americans Spending Less on Video Games

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Video game spending among 18-to-24-year-olds fell nearly 25% in a four-week April period.”

Windows 11 Finally Overtakes Windows 10

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“The dramatic reversal comes with only three months remaining before Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025.”

Valve Conquered PC Gaming. What Comes Next?

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Steam controls an estimated 70% of PC game sales with annual revenues expected to exceed $10 billion.”

Stop Killing Games Consumer Movement Hits Major Milestones

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The UK petition surpassed 126,066 signatures, exceeding the 100,000 threshold needed for parliamentary consideration.”

Is This the Electric Grid of the Future?

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“Nebraska is the only 100% public power state, with utilities owned and managed entirely by the state’s own communities.”

Big Tech's Mixed Response to U.S. Treasury Sanctions

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“It’s crazy that the vast majority of big tech companies haven’t done anything to cut ties with this guy.”

A New Interstellar Visitor Has Entered the Solar System

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“It is traveling toward the inner solar system at around 152,000 mph.”

Microsoft Kicks Off New Fiscal Year with More Layoffs

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace.”

Taiwan Is Creating an Offshore Wind Industry to Fuel Its Semiconductor Factories

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“It’s like constructing a building in a place that is constantly shaking and completely unpredictable.”

The NO FAKES Act Has Changed And It's So Much Worse

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The bill requires internet platforms to remove flagged content immediately upon notice and implement filters to prevent recurring uploads.”

Linus Torvalds Hints Bcachefs May Get Dropped from the Linux Kernel

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:00:00 -0400

“I think we’ll be parting ways in the 6.17 merge window.”

Chinese Students Are Using AI to Beat AI Detectors

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“It feels like you get punished for writing too well.”

See Stunning First Images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“This is the dawn of the Rubin Observatory.”

Proton joins suit against Apple for predatory practices that harm developers and consumers

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Proton cannot even link to FAQ or customer support pages from its apps, as Apple believes it’s possible that users will then navigate from the support page to a pricing page and upgrade their accounts without paying Apple its fee.”

Using WiFi Motion in the Xfinity app

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with any law enforcement investigation or proceeding, any dispute to which Comcast is a party, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena.”

The hidden JTAG in your Qualcomm/Snapdragon device’s USB port

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“On at least one production device (the OnePlus 6) EUD appears to be disabled via fuse, and yet it just works anyway.”

The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Most agent failures are not model failures anyemore, they are context failures.”

Open Source AI Editor: First Milestone

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The original GitHub Copilot extension that provides inline completions remains closed source – but in the following months we plan to have that functionality be provided by the open sourced GitHub Copilot Chat extension .”

Google Gemini is about to control your messages and calls, even if you say no

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“On July 7, Google’s Gemini assistant will be able to send a WhatsApp message, place a call, adjust your volume, or set a timer, even if you’ve told it not to track what you’re doing.”

Nearly 20% of cancer drugs defective in 4 African nations

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“In the study, barely a quarter of the substandard products were identified through visual inspection. Laboratory testing identified the rest.”

Earth is trapping much more heat than climate models forecast – and the rate has doubled in 20 years

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Typically, the models forecast less than half of the change we’re seeing in the real world.”

The big change affecting European travel

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“As a result, Spain’s Consumer Rights Ministry fined five budget airlines €179m (£149m) for what it deemed “abusive practices” in November 2024.”

Commodore acquired for a ‘low seven figure’ price — new (acting) CEO comes from the retro community

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“It has been agreed that a price “in the low seven figures” will be paid to seal the deal. That should mean the deal is worth somewhere between $1m and $5m.”

Defense Department will stop providing crucial satellite weather data

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“A spokesperson for the U.S. Space Force, which is responsible for the satellites, said in a statement that the satellites and instruments are still functional, and the Department of Defense will continue to use them even as it cuts off access for scientists.”

Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images.”

JavaScript™ Trademark Update

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“We’re not amending the fraud claim. Doing so would delay the case by months, and our focus is on the claims that matter most: genericness and abandonment.”

The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“While Spotify paid out a record $10 billion (US) in royalties in 2024, fewer than 1 percent of artists made more than $6,000 from the platform.”

BusyBeaver(6) is really quite large

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“So, between 5 and 6 is where the Busy Beaver function makes its leap, from the millions to beyond the bounds of observable reality.”

Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?)

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Claudius was offered $100 for a six-pack of Irn-Bru, a Scottish soft-drink that can be purchased online in the US for $15.”

Webb finds evidence of a lightweight planet around TWA 7

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“If confirmed, this would represent Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet, and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique.”

The effect of noise on sleep

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Total sleep duration mirrors the stage-specific trends: nights under 55 dB hover around 6¼–6½ hours, but once noise breaches the upper-50s the average night shortens by nearly an hour”

Qwen VLo: From "Understanding" the World to "Depicting" It

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Qwen VLo is still in the preview stage, and there are many shortcomings.”

I Fought in Ukraine and Here’s Why FPV Drones Kind of Suck

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The proportion of missions when we successfully carried out a task that only a first-person view drone can fulfill — delivering a precision strike on a target that could not be hit by other means — was in the single-digit percent.”

The first non-opioid painkiller

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Journavx failed to outperform that opioid-acetaminophen combination in clinical trials.”

French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Lyon’s government employs almost 10,000 people, so losing it as a customer will briefly sting some regional Microsoft salespeople and partners but won’t make a noticeable dent in the software giant’s balance sheet.”

Expiration Notification Service Has Ended

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Providing expiration notification emails means that we have to retain millions of email addresses connected to issuance records.”

FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] - Open Weights for Image Editing

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Up until today, all capable generative image editing models were only available as proprietary tools. Today, that changes.”

docs: define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“While the vendors may claim there is no problem and a free choice of license is possible, they have an inherent conflict of interest in promoting this interpretation.”

Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“To use Gemini CLI free-of-charge, simply login with a personal Google account to get a free Gemini Code Assist license.”

OpenAI Charges by the Minute, So Make the Minutes Shorter

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“You’ll spend fewer tokens and less time waiting with almost no drop in transcription quality.”

Better Auth, an authentication tool by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Since then, Better Auth has clocked 150,000+ weekly downloads, 15,000+ GitHub stars, and a community of over 6,000 Discord members, the startup claims.”

The Road to Top 1: How XBOW Did It

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“XBOW submitted nearly 1,060 vulnerabilities. All findings were fully automated, though our security team reviewed them pre-submission to comply with HackerOne’s policy on automated tools.”

A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books without authors' permission

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”

PNG is back!

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The last PNG spec was released over 20 years ago. Technology has advanced a lot since then.”

iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing 'F1' movie

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Instead, users not on the new beta build only have the option to disable notifications or to turn off seeing card benefits within Wallet during checkout. They can’t opt out of offers.”

Automotive industry signs Memorandum of Understanding for joint software development based on open source

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“A significant portion of the vehicle software is not directly accessible to the user and therefore not differentiating.”

Discord is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost: The Enshittification of Discord.

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“If Discord does not reverse or clarify this decision, BotGhost will be forced to shut down by July 14, 2025. This will happen with certainty.”

New EU rules for durable, energy-efficient and repairable smartphones and tablets start applying

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Smartphones today are powerful and indispensable tools, yet all too often they quickly become obsolescent waste. With the new EU rules, we are turning the tide.”

Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations Can Boost GPU Compute Performance By 20%

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance tradeoff.”

The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“LLMs are wrong all the time already - if you get a recommendation that’s factually inaccurate, how can you distinguish hallucination from payola?”

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Good for Google. Terrible for the ecosystem of websites that had learned to depend on search referrals for buyers, readers, and viewers.”

The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“The same problem holds true for creative writing: in 2016 there were 3,000 MFA graduates and 119 tenure-track positions.”

Engineer creates ad-block for the real world with augmented reality glasses — no more products or branding in your everyday life

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Google’s Gemini AI identifies advertisements and brands visible through the smart glasses, and promptly blocks them, replacing the advertisement with a red square, naming and shaming the blocked brand.”

Sweeping equipment regulations update for the 2025–2026 season

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“World Curling regrets the issues in the previous testing processes that contributed to the situation reaching a critical point last season.”

Open Letter to Samsung: End Forced Israeli-Founded Bloatware Installations in the WANA Region

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Even disabling the bloatware is not effective as it can reappear after system updates.”

SEGA mistakenly reveals sales numbers for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, Shin Megami Tensei V, and more

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“However, due to the way the PDF file is formatted, simply highlighting the page reveals the presence of text, which can be copied and pasted.”

Goodbye AWS: How We Kept ISO 27001, Slashed Costs by 90%

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The $2,000/Month Question: While not a fortune for every company, our $24,000 annual bill felt disproportionate to our actual needs.”

First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on the ocean floor

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition,” said Shana Goffredi

YouTube’s new anti-adblock measures

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“This backoff always happen if you’re in the A/B test, regardless of if YouTube thinks you’re using an adblocker.”

New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Although it nominally requires ‘allow_active’ privileges, udisks ships by default on almost all Linux distributions, so nearly any system is vulnerable,”

AbsenceBench: Language Models Can't Tell What's Missing

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Despite the apparent straightforwardness of these tasks, our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet achieve only 69.6% F1-score with a modest average context length of 5K tokens.”

Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monumental 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The attack originated from over 122,145 source IP addresses spanning 5,433 Autonomous Systems (AS) across 161 countries.”

Meta announces Oakley smart glasses

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The Meta Ray-Bans have sold over two million pairs to date, and EssilorLuxottica recently disclosed that it plans to sell 10 million smart glasses with Meta annually by 2026.”

Triaging security issues reported by third parties

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“I’ve been doing this long enough to know that most of the secrecy around security issues is just theater.”

Creators say they didn't know Google uses YouTube to train AI

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Users who have uploaded content to the service have no way of opting out of letting Google train on their videos.”

6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“They will collectively receive $25 million of the $80 million as a “retention” bonus.”

Mathematicians Hunting Prime Numbers Discover Infinite New Pattern for Finding Them

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“We’re actually nailing all the prime numbers on the nose,” Ono says.

Websites Are Tracking You Via Browser Fingerprinting

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Perhaps more concerning, the researchers found that even users who explicitly opt out of tracking under privacy laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) may still be silently tracked across the web through browser fingerprinting.”

Unexpected security footguns in Go's parsers

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“As a final blow, there’s no way to disable this behavior, even though people have complained about this behavior leading to security vulnerabilities since at least 2016.”

Denmark’s Radical Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“As of 2025, there’s a daunting backlog of more than 50,000 objects in a secret “secure facility” awaiting evaluation.”

Is there a Half-Life for the Success Rates of AI Agents?

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“For the best model (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) it could achieve a 50% success rate on tasks up to 59 minutes vs only 15 minutes if an 80% success rate was required.”

I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“In total I found 172,689 yurts with a prediction score of greater than 40%.”

Honda Conducts Successful Launch and Landing Test of Experimental Reusable Rocket

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Although Honda rocket research is still in the fundamental research phase, and no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies, Honda will continue making progress in the fundamental research with a technology development goal of realizing technological capability to enable a suborbital launch by 2029.”

Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Does hosting tracker infrastructure, unadvertised, count as “inducement”? It’s a harder case to make.”

KiCad and Wayland Support

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues.”

bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Why bother working on this algorithm from the 90s that sees very little use today?”

Working on databases from prison: How I got here, part 2.

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison.”

Helping You Find More Channels and Businesses on WhatsApp

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“For people that have chosen to add WhatsApp to Accounts Center, we’ll also use your ad preferences and info from across your Meta accounts.”

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Using the benchmark tool CRMArena-Pro, the team also showed performance of LLM agents drops to 35 percent when a task requires multiple steps.”

Darklang Goes Open Source

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The real barrier to Darklang’s adoption was never licensing - it was product maturity.”

Clergy Blown Away by Psilocybin

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Almost half said it was the most profound thing they had ever experienced, period.”

Fake bands and artificial songs are taking over YouTube and Spotify

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Concubanas’ album Rumba Congo has 1.3 million views on YouTube. It’s not the only fictional band, nor the only one with a history.”

Nvidia CEO slams Anthropic's chief over his claims of AI taking half of jobs and being unsafe — ‘Don’t do it in a dark room and tell me it’s safe’

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“If you want things to be done safely and responsibly, you do it in the open… Don’t do it in a dark room and tell me it’s safe.”

Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Before the 1970s, fewer than 10% of children diagnosed with the disease survived five years after diagnosis. But since then, this outlook has improved dramatically.”

DARPA program sets distance record for power beaming

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The team recorded more than 800 watts of power delivered during a 30-second transmission from a laser 8.6 kilometers (5.3 miles) away.”

Multiple GCP products are experiencing Service issues.

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The issue with this change was that it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected. Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash.”

UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to £9.86 million ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a “waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023.””

Clinical knowledge in LLMs does not translate to human interactions

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“However, participants using the same LLMs identified relevant conditions in less than 34.5% of cases and disposition in less than 44.2%, both no better than the control group.”

jemalloc Postmortem

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Facebook infrastructure engineering reduced investment in core technology, instead emphasizing return on investment.”

Meta finalizes investment in Scale AI, CEO Alexandr Wang to join company

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Meta is pumping $14.3 billion into Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power, a Scale AI spokesperson said.”

Anker is recalling over 1.1 million power banks due to fire and burn risks

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The company has received 19 reports of fires and explosions that have caused minor burn injuries and resulted in property damage totaling over $60,700”

Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“As long as both agents and their defenses rely on the current class of language models, we believe it is unlikely that general-purpose agents can provide meaningful and reliable safety guarantees”

Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s an interesting problem because we still don’t actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they’re most likely not representing neutrinos,”

Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft -- and people are paying anyway

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“At peak hours, Obi found Waymo’s average price to be about $11 more expensive than a Lyft and nearly $9.50 pricier than an Uber.”

Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“Next.js has become a Vercel vendor lock-in disguised as an open-source framework.”

Google: Android Open Source Project not being 'discontinued' amidst Pixel change

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“However, the Pixel device trees and other code used to adapt the AOSP release to specific (Made by) Google hardware was not released in a big change from precedent.”

Airlines Don’t Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The big airlines—through a shady data broker that they own called ARC—are selling the government bulk access to Americans’ sensitive information, revealing where they fly and the credit card they used”

Zero-click AI data leak flaw uncovered in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft CSP blocks most external domains, but Microsoft Teams and SharePoint URLs are trusted, so these can be abused to exfiltrate data without problem.”

Menstrual tracking app data is a ‘gold mine’ for advertisers that risks women’s safety – report

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“In fact, data on pregnancy is believed to be over two hundred times more valuable than data on age, gender or location for targeted advertising.”

Bypassing GitHub Actions policies in the dumbest way possible

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“GitHub has told me that they don’t consider this a security issue (I disagree), so I’m publishing this post as-is.”

Institutional Books 1.0: A 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections, refined for accuracy and usability

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“As part of this initial release, the OCR-extracted text (original and post-processed) as well as the metadata (bibliographic, source, and generated) of the 983,004 volumes, or 242B tokens, identified as being in the public domain have been made available.”

Another Crack in the Chain of Trust: Uncovering (Yet Another) Secure Boot Bypass

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to run unsigned code during the boot process, effectively bypassing Secure Boot and compromising the system’s chain of trust.”

The Gentle Singularity

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.”

Magistral

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Magistral Medium scored 73.6% on AIME2024, and 90% with majority voting @64. Magistral Small scored 70.7% and 83.3% respectively.”

One Year Left: Apple’s Long Goodbye For Intel Macs

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“But still, even with all that lead-up, this decision still stings, because it feels unnecessary to put all that good hardware to pasture.”

How AI Saved My Company From a 2-Year Litigation Nightmare

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“We spent a large portion of the initial proceedings allowing lawyers to follow the standard process, charging us $1,000/hour to check all the boxes and respond to every silly and pointless motion line by line.”

Leaking the phone number of any Google user

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Using a $0.30/hour server with consumer-grade specs (16 vcpu), I’m able to achieve ~40k checks per second.”

LLMs are cheap

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“But inference has gotten cheaper even faster than models have gotten better, and nobody has an intuition for something becoming 1000x cheaper in two years.”

EU launches EU-based, privacy-focused DNS resolution service

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The EU will not have access to configuration, data, etc. On top of that, DNS4EU will not be forced on anyone.”

Does planting trees really help cool the planet?

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The researchers acknowledge that the scenario modeled in the study is unlikely to be realized. It assumes trees could be restored to all areas where they once grew, which would require reclaiming developments such as housing as well as farmland and pastures.”

The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The resulting stock market dive wiped $600 billion from NVIDIA’s valuation, which I believe is a record drop for a single company.”

Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to really, really matter. Why?

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“A near 2x~ improvement in the most important metrics doing something that is entirely risk-free and cost-free.”

I Used AI-Powered Calorie Counting Apps, and They Were Even Worse Than I Expected

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Cal AI confidently identified my apple as tikka masala.”

Maintaining an Android app is a lot of work

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Google Ads library v24 dropped support for Android API 21. According to official Google statistics, API 21 is used by 0.1% (~4 million) users.”

Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware.”

Reverse Engineering Cursor's LLM Client

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“This also means that your credentials must be forwarded to Cursor’s servers, allowing them to collect data on your inferences and codebase.”

A new path forward for WordPress, and for the open web

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The goal of FAIR is not to fork WordPress. We’re still using the same core software.”

remove remainders of append-only support

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“For append-only the current idea is that this should not be done within borg, but solved by a missing repo object delete permission enforced by the storage.”

Self-hosting your own media considered harmful

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Apparently self-hosted open source media library management is harmful. Who knew open source software could be so subversive?”

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles.”

OpenAI Is Ordered to Save Every ChatGPT Chat — Even the Ones You Delete

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Judge Wang denied OpenAI’s motion to lift the order on May 29, assuring the company during proceedings that user data would not be made publicly available.”

How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Ultimately, we traced the issue to a 15-year-old Git function with O(N²) complexity and fixed it with an algorithmic change, reducing backup times exponentially.”

A year of funded FreeBSD

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“I’ve been incredibly lucky to get this sponsorship from Amazon; it’s far more than most open source developers ever get. I wish it wasn’t ending;”

Twitter's new encrypted DMs aren't better than the old ones

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Twitter can probably obtain your private keys, and admit that they can MITM you and have full access to your metadata.”

X changes its terms to bar training of AI models using its content

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Social network X has changed its developer agreement to prevent third parties from using the platform’s content to train large language models.”

Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Sideloading, a longstanding pillar of Android’s openness, is now being marginalized, placing the Android platform closer to the walled-garden approach of Apple’s iOS.”

End of an Era: Landsat 7 Decommissioned After 25 Years of Earth Observation

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“For 25 of those years, Landsat 7’s data helped farmers, land managers, city planners, and scientists, as well as communities around the world better understand and manage land, water, and other natural resources.”

Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Of the 450 “novel” results given in the paper, 135 of these results were not novel at all; they were already listed in the online database UniProt.”

How We Reduced the Impact of Zombie Clients

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“In 2024, we noticed that about half of all certificate requests to the Let’s Encrypt ACME API came from about a million accounts that never successfully complete any validations.”

VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Many tools are first deployed in Latin America, where labor laws are less strictly enforced, according to Ayden Férdeline, a tech policy researcher in Berlin and a co-author of the report.”

Autonomous drone from TU Delft defeats human champions in historic racing first

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“It then went on to win the knockout tournament against human pilots, beating three former DCL world champions and reaching flight speeds up to 95.8 km/h on the very winding track.”

Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android’s permission controls.”

Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring service from Java

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“Additionally, the new service had a much smaller memory footprint per instance — in the 100s of megabytes — an order of magnitude smaller compared to the 10s of gigabytes our Java implementation needed under peak load to sustain the same throughput and latencies.”

Wendelstein 7-X sets new fusion record

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The fact that we were able to raise the triple product to tokamak level with long plasma duration times marks another important milestone on the way to a stellarator suitable for power plants.”

Cloudflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at.”

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite.”

Japanese Scientists Develop Artificial Blood Compatible With All Blood Types

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“As these artificial cells have no blood type, there is no need for compatibility testing.”

Snowflake to acquire database startup Crunchy Data

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“We’re tackling a massive $350 billion market opportunity and a real need for our customers to bring Postgres to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.”

Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The monopoly on screen technologies sets a retail floor of around £30, before the rest of the hardware is taken into account.”

She Got an Abortion. So A Texas Cop Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Her Down

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The officer searched 6,809 different camera networks maintained by surveillance tech company Flock Safety, including states where abortion access is protected by law, such as Washington and Illinois. The search record listed the reason plainly: “had an abortion, search for female.””

Root Shell on Credit Card Terminal

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“All an attacker needs is just 30 seconds alone with the device to attach to the serial port, log in, deploy malware, and leave.”

Ukraine destroys more than 40 military aircraft in a drone attack deep inside Russia

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose operational details, said the attack took over 1 1/2-year to execute and was personally supervised by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.”

Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Some models (like DeepSeek’s) that are mixture-of-experts with many layers thus require large batch sizes and high latency, otherwise throughput drops off a cliff.”

AI Responses May Include Mistakes

Sat, 31 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The (non-expert) users who would most benefit from an AI search summary will be the ones most likely misled by it.”

Using lots of little tools to aggressively reject the bots

Sat, 31 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“None of this was even scraping my blog, it was all targeting at generating tarballs of every single commit of every single publicly listed git repo in my gitea instance.”

The Trackers and SDKs in ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Perplexity

Sat, 31 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Next was statsig.com and wow! I was blown away I found this one in 3 of the 4 apps.”

Introducing oniux: Kernel-level Tor isolation for any Linux app

Sat, 31 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Unlike SOCKS, the application cannot accidentally leak data by failing to make some connection via the configured SOCKS, which may happen due to a mistake by the developer.”

The Darwin Gödel Machine: AI that improves itself by rewriting its own code

Fri, 30 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“It faked a log making it look like it had run the tests and that they had passed, when in fact they were never run!”

Beating the kCTF PoW with AVX512IFMA for $51k

Fri, 30 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“To avoid paying out lots of money, kernelCTF organizers limit the number of submissions eligible for a bounty.”

Surprisingly Fast AI-Generated Kernels We Didn't Mean to Publish (Yet)

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“FP32 is less common in modern ML workloads and often less optimized on recent hardware compared to FP16 or BF16, which may partly explain why it’s easier to achieve performance gains over PyTorch with FP32 kernels.”

Controversial 'lost' Jerry Lewis film discovered in Sweden after 53 years

Fri, 30 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“I stole it from Europafilm in 1980 and copied it to VHS in the attic where we copied other films at night.

Exclusive: US Airlines Are Quietly Hitting Solo & Biz Travelers with Higher Fares

Thu, 29 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“No one from American, Delta, or United responded to requests for comment from Thrifty Traveler on this pricing strategy.”

GreyNoise Discovers Stealthy Backdoor Campaign Affecting Thousands of ASUS Routers

Thu, 29 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“The backdoor is stored in non-volatile memory (NVRAM) and is therefore not removed during firmware upgrades or reboots.”

Google is Using AI to Censor Thousands of Independent Websites Like Mine (And to Control the Flow of Information Online)

Thu, 29 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Travel Lemming lost more than 95% of our Google organic search referral traffic in these updates.”

Human coders are still better than LLMs

Thu, 29 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“But, still: the current level of AI is useful, great too, but so incredibly behind human intelligence, and I want to remark this as lately it is impossible to have balanced conversations.”

xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

Wed, 28 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“xAI will pay $300 million in cash and equity to the chat app as part of the deal, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov said on Tuesday.”

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528

Wed, 28 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“This advancement stems from enhanced thinking depth during the reasoning process: in the AIME test set, the previous model used an average of 12K tokens per question, whereas the new version averages 23K tokens per question.”

Compiler Explorer and the Promise of URLs That Last Forever

Wed, 28 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“despite Google solemnly promising that “all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination,” it went read-only a few years back, and now they’re finally sunsetting it in August 2025.”

Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House

Wed, 28 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Honestly, I was more surprised that the silly logo I made (a very great representation, if I do say so myself) was what got me in trouble, and less so the scraping or reverse-engineering part.”

BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability

Tue, 27 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Juniper allowed it to propagate to peers, until it ultimately hit Arista devices that did not have (or contained faulty) BGP error tolerance code.”

AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers

Tue, 27 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn’t just about increasing productivity, it’s about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality.”

I Salvaged $6,000 of Luxury Items Discarded by Duke Students. Why Did It Make Me Feel So Terrible?

Tue, 27 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The first time I went down there, last week, I noticed something neon in a tote bag and pulled out $395 Balenciaga slides. Nearby were $980 Valentino sneakers—worn, but definitely wearable.”

Street smarts: how a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully

Tue, 27 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“That meant that the hawk understood the connection between the sound and the eventual car queue length.”

4 ex-VW managers guilty of fraud over diesel test scandal

Mon, 26 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Volkswagen has faced countless lawsuits and estimated the total cost of the scandal at more than €30 billion ($34 billion).”

GitHub MCP Exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP

Mon, 26 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The vulnerability allows an attacker to hijack a user’s agent via a malicious GitHub Issue, and coerce it into leaking data from private repositories.”

Cloudflare CEO: Football Piracy Blocks Will Claim Lives; "I Pray No One Dies"

Mon, 26 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The strategy of blocking broadly through ISPs based on IPs is bonkers because so much content, including emergency services content, can be behind any IP.”

The Hard Truth About Soft Plastic

Mon, 26 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Of the tracked soft plastic packaging waste collected for recycling at Sainsbury’s and Tesco stores, 70% of the soft plastic that reached a known destination was burnt, not recycled”

Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

Mon, 26 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity.”

System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4

Sun, 25 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”

Denmark to raise retirement age to highest in Europe

Sun, 25 May 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“Denmark has a healthy economy and yet the EU’s highest retirement age,” he said.

CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

Sun, 25 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“However, if a ticket scalper needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to buy a ticket that they will later sell at a 200 € profit, this will not stop them.”

How I used o3 to find CVE-2025-37899, a remote zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel's SMB implementation

Sat, 24 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“o3 finds the kerberos authentication vulnerability in the benchmark in 8 of the 100 runs. In another 66 of the runs o3 concludes there is no bug present in the code (false negatives), and the remaining 28 reports are false positives.”

Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt

Sat, 24 May 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“The fact that it wasn’t able to convince enough customers to pay it enough money to stay solvent should give pause to those who see generative AI as a replacement for junior developers.”

tachy0n

Sat, 24 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The way he managed to beat a trillion dollar corporation was through the kind of simple but tedious and boring work that Apple sucks at: regression testing.”

Remote Prompt Injection in GitLab Duo Leads to Source Code Theft

Fri, 23 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“A hidden comment was enough to make GitLab Duo leak private source code and inject untrusted HTML into its responses.”

College English majors can't read

Fri, 23 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.”

LLM Judges Are Unreliable

Fri, 23 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“In our aggregated data using (A)/(B) style labels, a prompt explicitly instructing the LLM to ‘avoid any position biases’ paradoxically increased its tendency to favor the second option by over 5 percentage points.”

OpenAI: Scaling PostgreSQL to the Next Level

Fri, 23 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“At OpenAI, we utilize an unsharded architecture with one writer and multiple readers, demonstrating that PostgreSQL can scale gracefully under massive read loads.”

Investing in what moves the internet forward

Thu, 22 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.”

Important Changes are Coming to Glitch

Thu, 22 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“It takes a lot of time and money to run millions of apps, and that has greatly increased as the platform has gotten older and bad actors try to misuse the platform.”

Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

Thu, 22 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Before the pandemic, new grads accounted for 15% of hires at Big Tech companies; now, the figure is 7%.”

The future of Flatpak

Thu, 22 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“There are people who maintain the code base and fix security issues, for example, but “bigger changes are not really happening anymore”.”

[iOS][globalization] Implement CompareInfo.Version for hybrid globalization

Wed, 21 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“There is no mandate for us to be trying out assigning issues to copilot like this. We’re always on the lookout for tools to help increase our effficiency.”

By Default, Signal Doesn't Recall

Wed, 21 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Apps like Signal have essentially no control over what content Recall is able to capture, and implementing “DRM” that works for you (not against you) is the best choice that we had.”

Jony Ive to lead OpenAI's design work following $6.5B acquisition of his company

Wed, 21 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Io has a staff of around 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists, and product development specialists, per The Wall Street Journal, all of whom will join OpenAI.”

For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time

Wed, 21 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“I just thought I was losing my mind,” said Williams, a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me

Tue, 20 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“We found that 60 out of the 76 papers (79 percent) that claimed to outperform a standard numerical method had used a weak baseline, either because they hadn’t compared to more advanced numerical methods, or because they weren’t comparing them on an equal footing.”

The Strange Behavior of LLMs in Hiring Decisions: Systemic Gender and Positional Biases in Candidate Selection

Tue, 20 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Despite identical professional qualifications across genders, all LLMs consistently favored female-named candidates when selecting the most qualified candidate for the job.”

Introducing Google AI Ultra: The best of Google AI in one subscription

Tue, 20 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Google AI Ultra is available today in the U.S. for $249.99/month (with a special offer for first-time users of 50% off for your first three months), and coming soon to more countries.”

Minister: Finland plans to change its track gauge to European standard

Tue, 20 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years.”

Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Tue, 20 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“It started in 25 regions, grew to 35, and now runs in 6. That reduction was driven by cost, yes - but also by usage.”

Pharma giant Regeneron to buy 23andMe and its customers' data for $256M

Mon, 19 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Regeneron said it will acquire 23andMe’s genomics service and its bank of 15 million customers’ personal and genetic data as part of the deal.”

Fabric Is Just Plain Unreliable, and Microsoft's Hiding It.

Mon, 19 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“During last month’s 12+hour overnight outage, people were screaming on Reddit overnight that things were down, but the status dashboard was showing all green.”

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

Mon, 19 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo: Will this be Open Source? · Issue #1 · microsoft/WSL.”

Have I Been Pwned 2.0 is Now Live!

Mon, 19 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Just one little thing first - we’ve dropped username and phone number search support from the website.”

The Lost Decade of Small Data?

Mon, 19 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The hidden sensation is that we actually have numbers, this old computer could actually complete all benchmark queries using DuckDB!”

InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel

Sun, 18 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better, the company said.”

Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better

Sun, 18 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“It turns out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his personal experiments.”

France Becomes First Government To Endorse UN Open Source Principles

Sun, 18 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The UN Open Source Principles consist of eight guidelines that offer a framework for the use, development, and sharing of Open Source software across the Organization.”

Two dead as Mexican Navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge

Sun, 18 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Police said the Cuauhtémoc’s mast height was 48.2m (158ft). The New York transport department’s website says the bridge has a 135ft clearance at its centre.”

Google Logo Ligature Bug

Sun, 18 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Using a ligature to get the Google logo into text-only interfaces is a reasonable product decision, but it shouldn’t have been added to a general-purpose font.”

O2 VoLTE: locating any customer with a phone call

Sat, 17 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Any O2 customer can be trivially located by an attacker with even a basic understanding of mobile networking.”

"We would be less confidential than Google" – Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

Sat, 17 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia,” said Yen.

Printer maker Procolored offered malware-laced drivers for months

Sat, 17 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“For at least half a year, the official software supplied with Procolored printers included malware in the form of a remote access trojan and a cryptocurrency stealer.”

Large Language Models Are More Persuasive Than Incentivized Human Persuaders

Sat, 17 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Overall, our findings suggest that AI’s persuasion capabilities already exceed those of humans that have real-money bonuses tied to performance.”

Assuring an accurate research record

Fri, 16 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“While student privacy laws and MIT policy prohibit the disclosure of the outcome of this review, we are writing to inform you that MIT has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.”

Ground control to Major Trial

Fri, 16 May 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“They just kept going — now using personal Outlook addresses and incrementing the email handles like they were running a script.”

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Fri, 16 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“NASA has revived a set of thrusters on the nearly 50-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft after declaring them inoperable over two decades ago.”

This baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug

Thu, 15 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells.”

Coinbase says customers' personal information stolen in data breach

Thu, 15 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Coinbase said it expects to incur costs of around $180 million to $400 million relating to incident remediation and customer reimbursements.”

EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis

Thu, 15 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The TCF is live on 80% of the Internet.”

How California sent residents' personal health data to LinkedIn

Thu, 15 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“As visitors filled out forms on the website, trackers on the same pages told LinkedIn their answers to questions about whether they were blind, pregnant, or used a high number of prescription medications.”

In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder

Thu, 15 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know.”

AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

Wed, 14 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“This solution, now in production for over a year, continuously recovers, on average, 0.7% of Google’s worldwide compute resources.”

Don't use Wise

Wed, 14 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“On 6 May 2025, with no notice, and with no out of the ordinary or large transactions happening, Wise started declining our card on all transactions, and blocking any ACH/wire transfers out of the account.”

Databricks + Neon

Wed, 14 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“As Neon became GA last year, they noticed an interesting stat: 30% of the databases were created by AI agents, not humans. When they looked at their stats again recently, the number went from 30% to over 80%.”

E-COM: The $40 million USPS project to send email on paper

Wed, 14 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Every time a customer spent 26¢ to send those eye-catching blue-and-white envelopes that first year, the USPS lost an astounding $5.25 in printing and delivering them.”

Branch Privilege Injection: Exploiting Branch Predictor Race Conditions

Tue, 13 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Intel’s hardware mitigations against these types of attacks have held their ground for almost 6 years. In our work, we demonstrate how these mitigations can be broken due to a race condition in Intel CPUs.”

screen: Multiple Security Issues in Screen (mostly affecting release 5.0.0 and setuid-root installations)

Tue, 13 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“It looks like it suffers from a lack of manpower and expertise, which is worrying for such a widespread open source utility.”

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

Tue, 13 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The issue is that small companies – like ours – have pretty much no recourse,” it added.

Microsoft is laying off more than 6,000 employees

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“These are the biggest job cuts at Microsoft since it laid off 10,000 employees in 2023, and will impact employees across Microsoft’s businesses.”

US: Major Companies Violate Gig Workers' Rights

Mon, 12 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Digital labor platforms have created a business model that evades employer responsibilities while keeping workers under tight algorithmic control, driven by opaque and unpredictable decisions…”

Can You Really Trust That Permission Pop-Up On macOS? (CVE-2025-31250)

Mon, 12 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Ventura and Sonoma will remain vulnerable as Apple chose to only patch this in Sequoia.”

How Broken OTPs and Open Endpoints Turned a Dating App Into a Stalker's Playground

Mon, 12 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“BOOM – the OTP is directly in the response, meaning anyone’s account can be accessed with just their phone number.”

A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

Mon, 12 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“On-chain analysis shared on social media by Bubblemaps, a crypto analytics platform, showed accounts linked to Yu moving up to $1.4 million in cryptocurrency after his supposed death.”

A community-led fork of Organic Maps

Mon, 12 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.”

One-Click RCE in ASUS's Preinstalled Driver Software

Sun, 11 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“I asked ASUS if they offered bug bounties. They responded saying they do not, but they would instead put my name in their “hall of fame”.”

Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service

Sun, 11 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg.

DNS Piracy Blocking Orders: Google, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS Respond Differently

Sun, 11 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Instead, Google appears to simply refuse the DNS query, which means that the domain lookup is not linked to any IP address.”

Why Everyone Is Struggling To Create 'Software Defined Vehicles'

Sun, 11 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“None of the legacy automakers has solved this problem yet. All of them have thrown billions at it.”

Title of Work Deciphered In Sealed Herculaneum Scroll Via Digital Unwrapping

Sun, 11 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Finding the full title of a work inside a scroll that has been unread for two millennia is an astonishing achievement, and illustrates the huge potential for AI to transform arts and humanities scholarship, our understanding of the past, and breathes new life into ancient artefacts.”

US vs. Google: Brief of Y Combinator, LLC as Amicus Curiae in Support of Plaintiffs

Sat, 10 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, after gaining sufficient scale for itself, Google pulled the ladder up behind it.”

Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors

Sat, 10 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Google’s latest update to its Gemini family of large language models appears to have broken the controls for configuring safety settings, breaking applications that require lowered guardrails, such as apps providing solace for sexual assault victims.”

Even Tesla's Insurance Arm Is Getting Wrecked Right Now

Sat, 10 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The data comes from S&P Global and shows that the automaker’s insurance subsidiary took a loss ratio of 103.3 in 2024.”

Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

Sat, 10 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“However, it should be noted that, even if screenshots are blocked, sensitive media and information shared in Teams meetings can still be captured by taking a photo of the conversation.”

Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball

Sat, 10 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Simply put, the premise is this: scan your eyeball, get a biometric tag, verify yourself, buy our apps (and cryptocurrency).”

ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

Fri, 09 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments.”

'Data manipulations' alleged in study that paved the way for Microsoft's quantum chip

Fri, 09 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“In April 2021, Mourik sought answers from corresponding author Önder Gül, asking in an email: “Did you know about these undisclosed data manipulations prior to publication of the paper?” Gül responded, 1 day later: “Yes, I did.””

Massive BART Outage Not Related to Old Train Control System, Agency Says

Fri, 09 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“It was the largest systemwide BART outage since 2019, when a weekend service meltdown highlighted the need to replace the agency’s decades-old central train control system.”

A First Glimpse of the Starlink User Terminal

Fri, 09 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“During device initialization, if the system identifies itself as a user terminal, the initialization script automatically writes 41 SSH public keys into /root/.ssh/authorized_keys .”

Huawei introduces its first laptop running HarmonyOS rather than Windows

Fri, 09 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“While the operating system won’t support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that’s developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.”

The Price of Remission

Thu, 08 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“But Revlimid is also, I soon learned, extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each daily pill. (Although, I later discovered, a capsule costs just 25 cents to make.)”

Google to Back Three New Advanced Nuclear Projects

Thu, 08 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Our collaboration with Elementl Power enhances our ability to move at the speed required to meet this moment of AI and American innovation.”

Kidnappers in France target cryptocurrency entrepreneurs for ransom

Thu, 08 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“French police rescued the father of a wealthy cryptocurrency entrepreneur in a nighttime raid after he was taken hostage for ransom, the latest alleged criminal effort in France to extort people involved in the management of digital assets.”

Notes on rolling out Cursor and Claude Code

Thu, 08 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s easy to see a draft PR with all tests passing, including new tests full of comments, and not realise that the tests are garbage and the fix is wrong.”

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Wed, 07 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“We now ban every reporter instantly who submits reports we deem AI slop,” Stenberg added. “A threshold has been reached. We are effectively being DDoSed. If we could, we would charge them for this waste of our time.”

NSO Group must pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for spyware campaign

Wed, 07 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“After years of every trick and delay tactic it only took the jury a day’s deliberation to see right through to the heart of the matter: NSO’s business is based on hacking American companies…so that dictators can hack dissidents.”

Pakistani Firm Shipped Fentanyl Analogs, Scams to US

Wed, 07 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“In October 2016, a Pakistan district judge acquitted 24 Axact officials at trial due to ’not enough evidence’ and then later admitted he had accepted a bribe (of $35,209) from Axact…”

Samsung is paying $350 million for audio brands Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz and Polk

Wed, 07 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“By combining the audio business of Masimo, which is being acquired this time, with Harman’s lifestyle business division, the company plans to solidify its global No. 1 position in the consumer audio market…”

UK's Deliveroo to be bought by US firm DoorDash in £2.9bn deal

Tue, 06 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“However, it is well below the 390p share price that Deliveroo first floated at when it launched on the London Stock Exchange in April 2021.”

An Appeal to Apple from Anukari

Tue, 06 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s not a great look for Apple that a Windows PC with a pretty wimpy GPU can run Anukari just fine, and the most expensive Mac M4 Max stutters, because obviously Apple’s hardware is incredible and just needs to be let off the leash a bit.”

Kindle's iOS app just made buying books easier than ever on iPhone and iPad

Tue, 06 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Under the old App Store rules, buying Kindle books was a major pain on iPhone.”

Memory-safe sudo to become the default in Ubuntu

Tue, 06 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“May 6, 2025 – Ubuntu 25.10 is set to adopt sudo-rs by default.”

A Judge Says Meta’s AI Copyright Case Is About ‘the Next Taylor Swift’

Mon, 05 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“It seems kind of messed up,” he said. “The question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”

OpenAI caves to pressure, keeps nonprofit in charge

Mon, 05 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure … we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock,” Altman said.

AWS Security Tool That Accidentally Introduced a Security Risk

Mon, 05 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Since AWS prohibited using the management account as the hub, customers were forced to deploy the hub in a less secure account - often a development, sandbox, or similarly low-sensitivity account.”

Anysphere, which makes Cursor, has reportedly raised $900M at $9B valuation

Mon, 05 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Anysphere, the maker of AI-powered coding tool Cursor, has attracted $900 million in a fresh round of funding led by Thrive Capital, The Financial Times reported, citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal.”

I'd rather read the prompt

Sun, 04 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“In that sense, using a language model to write is worse than plagiarism.”

I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened.

Sun, 04 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“I learned that, contrary to popular belief, most school lunch debt doesn’t come from low-income families — those kids generally qualify for federal free lunch programs.”

What went wrong with wireless USB

Sun, 04 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“As so often happens, the best technology didn’t win; in my eyes CF-USB had the potential for being more widely adopted because of its simplicity and compatibility, but was ruined when Freescale got greedy and it never recovered.”

The Alabama Landline that Keeps Ringing

Sun, 04 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“About 13 million people in the US and 2.6 billion people globally don’t use the internet, whether for reasons of availability, desire, cost, or religion.”

The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food

Sat, 03 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“He says the company does not think pork chops or other meat will need to carry any label identifying it as bioengineered.”

When Flat Rate Movers Won't Answer Your Calls

Sat, 03 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“I began to realize that Flat Rate’s strategy was simply to never answer the phone.”

Google Gemini has the worst LLM API

Sat, 03 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“And yet these models hide behind the poorest developer experience in the market.”

DuckDB is Probably the Most Important Geospatial Software of the Last Decade

Sat, 03 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Interest in “geospatial” (a term that functions well as a proxy for similar terms) declined and flatlined until late 2023 – right when DuckDB released their spatial extension.”

Accountability Sinks

Sat, 03 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s not an efficiency measure, it’s an accountability management technique.”

Irish Data Protection Commission fines TikTok €530 million and orders corrective measures following Inquiry into transfers of EEA User Data to China

Fri, 02 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Throughout the Inquiry, TikTok informed the DPC that it did not store EEA User Data on servers located in China.”

Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

Fri, 02 May 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“User feedback in particular can sometimes favor more agreeable responses, likely amplifying the shift we saw.”

Third Party Cookies Must Be Removed

Fri, 02 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Third-party (AKA cross-site) cookies are harmful to the web, and must be removed from the web platform.”

Old Soviet Venus Descent Craft Nearing Earth Reentry: What Does New Imagery Suggest?

Fri, 02 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact,” reports Marco Langbroek of SatTrackCam Leiden, the Netherlands.

Apple referred for possible criminal contempt investigation

Thu, 01 May 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The documents reveal “that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option”, she wrote.”

Redis is open source again

Thu, 01 May 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The OSI wouldn’t accept it, nor would the software community regard the SSPL as an open license.”

Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

Thu, 01 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“A cynic might wonder why Microsoft is making Office start when the computer boots instead of, you know, just making Office more efficient so it can run faster.”

How we identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job at Kraken

Thu, 01 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Several of the names had previously been hired by multiple companies, as our team identified work-related email addresses linked to them.”

Oxide's Compensation Model: How is it Going?

Thu, 01 May 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“When some outsiders hear about our compensation model, they insist that it can’t possibly work because “everyone will slack off.””

The Leaderboard Illusion

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“We find that undisclosed private testing practices benefit a handful of providers who are able to test multiple variants before public release and retract scores if desired.”

Google Play sees 47% decline in apps since start of last year

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“From the start of 2024 to the present, the Android app marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures.”

JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The AI Assistant, first released in July 2023, has been downloaded over 22 million times but is rated only 2.3 out of 5.”

Future of OSL in Jeopardy

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year.”

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“We show that Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL multi-AZ clusters violate Snapshot Isolation, the strongest consistency model supported across all endpoints.”

Indian court orders blocking of Proton Mail

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“On Tuesday, the Karnataka High Court directed the Indian government to block Proton Mail, a popular email service known for its enhanced security, following a legal complaint filed by New Delhi-based M Moser Design Associates.”

Airborne: Wormable Zero-Click RCE in Apple AirPlay Puts Billions of Devices at Risk

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“After compromising one device, attackers can use the same vulnerability to propagate to other devices and networks, furthering their impact and damage.”

Qwen3: Think Deeper, Act Faster

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“While Qwen2.5 was pre-trained on 18 trillion tokens, Qwen3 uses nearly twice that amount, with approximately 36 trillion tokens covering 119 languages and dialects.”

How the April 28, 2025, power outage in Portugal and Spain impacted Internet traffic and connectivity

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“In Portugal, Internet traffic dropped as the power grid failed, with traffic immediately dropping by half as compared to the previous week, falling to approximately 90% below the previous week within the next five hours.”

Experiment using AI-generated posts on Reddit draws fire for ethics concerns

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“This project yields important insights, and the risks (e.g. trauma etc.) are minimal. This means that suppressing publication is not proportionate to the importance of the insights the study yields.”

All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Google pays Apple about $18 billion each year, and pays Mozilla about $450 million each year.”

DRM-Free OnlyFans Downloads See Widevine Project Nuked From GitHub

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“GitHub requested Fenix to identify “every specific file” in the repo that it considers infringing; Fenix responded with a statement that the “entire repository is infringing” and should be removed.”

Oracle engineers caused dayslong software outage at U.S. hospitals

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement.”

How a Single Line Of Code Could Brick Your iPhone

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“With that widget extension in place, as soon as I installed the VeryEvilNotify app on my security research device, the ‘Restore in Progress’ UI was shown, then failed with a prompt to restart the system.”

Amazon Just Happens to Hold Book Sale During Independent Bookstore Day

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Local book shops have managed to have a moment, thriving despite the increasing dominance of Amazon online by creating bonds with their local community and offering a shopping experience that Amazon can’t replicate.”

README.md (ARCHIVED notice), fail0verflow/hbc (The Homebrew Channel)

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“This goes far beyond ignorance about the copyright implications of reverse engineering Nintendo binaries, and goes straight into outright deliberate, malicious code theft and copyright infringement.”

AI Helps Unravel a Cause of Alzheimer's Disease and Identify a Therapeutic Candidate

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“It really demanded modern AI to formulate the three-dimensional structure very precisely to make this discovery.”

Did 5G kill the IMSI catcher?

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“An IMSI catcher is a tool that collects cellular signals and decodes packets to access and save off the IMSI.”

Backblaze: A Loss-Making Data Storage Business Mired in Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, and Brazen Insider Dumping

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“All told, we believe Backblaze has resorted to aggressive accounting to inflate the results of an already loss-making business.”

Google will stop supporting early Nest thermostats on October 25

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“That means owners of the Nest thermostats released in 2011 and 2012 (as well as the version released in Europe in 2014) won’t receive updates, and their devices will no longer be supported in the Nest and Home apps.”

Facebook isn't eavesdropping, but the truth is more disturbing

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The problem is, outside of anecdotal cases, no one has ever been able to find clear evidence that this is actually happening.”

Australian who ordered radioactive materials over the internet walks away from court

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“A 24-year-old Australian man who ordered uranium and plutonium to his parents’ apartment has been allowed to walk away from court on a two-year good behaviour bond.”

Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Using difference-in-differences and employer policies as quasi-experimental variation, we estimate precise zeros: AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%.”

Novel Universal Bypass for All Major LLMs

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“A single prompt can be designed to work across all of the major frontier AI models.”

Bezos-backed Slate Auto debuts analog EV pickup truck that is decidedly anti-Tesla

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The company is saying it will start under $20,000 after the federal tax credit (providing that still exists next year).”

Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“In 2025, OSI excluded all votes for three candidates before publishing results.”

Google Maps Doesn't Know How Street Addresses Work

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“I dutifully submitted feedback for “Wrong pin location or address”: And I got an email the next day saying that my edit was accepted: But it’s been 14 days and the address still maps incorrectly.”

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft has forbidden the use of its extensions outside of its own software products since at least September 2020, when the current licensing terms were published.”

Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source: CNCF's commitment to the community

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Synadia is attempting to convert a successful open source project into a closed, commercial product—and take the NATS community’s name, trust, and infrastructure with it.”

Like to play alone? Ubisoft is still watching you!

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The complainant discovered that, over a period of just 10 minutes, the game established a connection to external servers 150 times.”

OpenAI makes its upgraded image generator available to developers

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Pricing is $5 per million input tokens for text and $10 per million input tokens for images, and $40 per million output tokens for images.”

AMD Publishes Open-Source GIM Driver For GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In The Roadmap"

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Of interest to many Phoronix readers will be that GIM / SR-IOV support could be coming to client discrete GPUs, which has been a long sought feature for the Radeon graphics cards.”

Commission finds Apple and Meta in breach of the Digital Markets Act

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers.”

You wouldn't steal a font

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!”

How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“I want to make it clear: all these findings prove that the bug is NOT an issue with Windows 11 24H2, as things like the way the stack is used by internal WinAPI functions are not contractual and they may change at any time, with no prior notice.”

OpenAI says it would buy Chrome if Google is forced to sell

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Yes, we would, as would many other parties,” he said.

World's First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“However, the drone equipped with the protective cage continued to fly stably even after the lightning strike.”

Cursor AI's Support Bot Hallucinates Policy, Sparking User Backlash and Company Apology

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Seeking answers via support channels, some were informed by an AI bot – reportedly named “Sam” – that their subscription was limited to a single active session, a restriction the company later confirmed was entirely fictitious.”

Google Chrome will now continue to use third-party cookies

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“We’ve made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies.”

Exclusive: Supabase raises $200 million Series D at $2 billion valuation

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Supabase is currently used by two million developers who manage more than 3.5 million databases.”

A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The digitising process erroneously combined ‘vegetative’ from one column of text with ’electron’ from another.”

Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Replay attacks can be pretty easily thwarted by using an incrementing counter in the communications to nullify previous signals, ignoring signals with a counter value you’ve already seen.”

Getting Forked by Microsoft

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Digging deeper I found test cases referencing Spegel and my previous employer, test cases that have been taken directly from my project.”

A New Form of Verification on Bluesky

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Bluesky will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue badge next to their names.”

How Big Tech hides its outsourced African workforce

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“When poor labor practices come to light — whether it’s wage theft, unsafe working conditions, or psychological harm, the intermediaries are the ones held responsible, not the tech giants who ultimately benefit from the labor…”

Data Centers Can Slash Power Needs With One Coding Tweak

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“It is sort of a best case because the 30 percent applies to the network stack or communication part of it…”

Fossil fuels fall below 50% of US electricity for the first month on record

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“In March 2025, fossil fuels accounted for less than 50% (49.2%) of electricity generated, for the first month on record.”

JUICYJAM: How Thai Authorities Use Online Doxxing to Suppress Dissent

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Thanks to a public leak of confidential military and police documents in March 2025, we can now attribute the campaign to the Royal Thai Armed Forces and/or the Royal Thai Police.”

Tech things: OpenAI buys Windsurf, Google retains its lead, and where the hell is Apple?

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Compared to Cursor, Windsurf has fewer users, has been around for less time, has less brand recognition, and has diminishing prospects for future growth.”

Scientists hijacked the human eye to get it to see a brand-new color. It's called 'olo.'

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“With this technique, the researchers enabled five people to see a new color, dubbed “olo,” which the study participants described as a “blue-green of unprecedented saturation.””

Gemma 3 QAT Models: Bringing state-of-the-Art AI to consumer GPUs

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Using int4 means each number is represented using only 4 bits – a 4x reduction in data size compared to BF16.”

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Let us just call this what it is. It is a grab for extra margin dollars.”

SSL.com: DCV bypass and issue fake certificates for any MX hostname

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“SSL.com failed to conduct accurate domain validation control when utilizing the BR 3.2.2.4.14 DCV method (Email to DNS TXT Contact).”

Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“So if you as an app developer include such a 3rd party SDK in your app to make some money — you are part of the problem and I think you should be held responsible for delivering malware to your users, making them botnet members.”

For security, Android phones will now auto-reboot after three days

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Before a phone is switched on and unlocked, certain data stored within is fully encrypted and harder to access without the user’s passcode.”

Unpowered SSD endurance investigation finds severe data loss and performance issues

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The hashing audit eventually revealed that four files were corrupt (hash not matching).”

Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still use the evidence they obtained through this unconstitutional search.”

OpenAI's new reasoning AI models hallucinate more

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“OpenAI found that o3 hallucinated in response to 33% of questions on PersonQA, the company’s in-house benchmark for measuring the accuracy of a model’s knowledge about people.”

The latest viral ChatGPT trend is doing 'reverse location search' from photos

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“It’s an obvious potential privacy issue. There’s nothing preventing a bad actor from screenshotting, say, a person’s Instagram Story and using ChatGPT to try to doxx them.”

Walled Gardens Can Kill

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Normally this would be a simple problem to fix, just go to your Apple account settings and switch the region, but this too was denied, as I had the yearly Apple Music subscription.”

15,000 lines of verified cryptography now in Python

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“the (unverified) reference implementation of SHA3 was hit with a bad CVE in 2022, which Python “inherited”, because it vendored that very same SHA3 implementation.”

Judge rules Google illegally monopolized adtech, opening door to potential breakup

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The judge did agree that Google violated the Sherman Act by monopolizing and unlawfully tying two parts of the adtech stack together, specifically DFP and AdX, and that Google is guilty of abuse of monopoly power in the publisher-side adtech.”

Elon Musk shut down internal Tesla analysis that showed Robotaxi would lose money

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“We had lots of modeling that showed the payback around FSD [Full Self Driving] and Robotaxi was going to be slow. It was going to be choppy.”

Issue with multiple Zoom Services (incident report)

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down the zoom.us domain.”

Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution in Erlang/OTP SSH (CVE-2025-32433)

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“By exploiting a flaw in SSH protocol message handling, a malicious actor could gain unauthorized access to affected systems and execute arbitrary commands without valid credentials.”

Discord using AI face scans for age-verification in two specific scenarios

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“If you opt for a face-scan, Discord says the age estimation is performed on your device, so is not uploaded or stored. If you choose ID, the scan will be uploaded, but will be deleted after verification.”

Snapchat Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Snapchat had disclosed that it had removed approximately 60 accounts per month, or just over 700 total.”

OpenAI partner says it had relatively little time to test the company's o3 AI model

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“This evaluation was conducted in a relatively short time, and we only tested [o3] with simple agent scaffolds…”

A Postmortem Of A Startup

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“After nearly two years without revenue or committed paying customers, we realised we lacked a clear path to the necessary scale and returns.”

Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Indeed, for most of the users I tested this against, it worked very well, and often times it was the top result.”

Microsoft researchers say they've developed a hyper-efficient AI model that can run on CPUs

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“There is a catch, however. Achieving that performance requires using Microsoft’s custom framework, bitnet.cpp, which only works with certain hardware at the moment.”

TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Prior to this proposal by Apple, Google promoted a 90-day maximum lifetime, but they voted in favor of Apple’s proposal almost immediately after the voting period began.”

You cannot have our user's data

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“The serious costs and widespread performance issues and outages caused by reckless scrapers has been on everyone’s mind in the sysadmin community as of late, and has been the subject of much discussion online.”

It's easier than ever to de-censor videos

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Years ago it would’ve required a supercomputer and a PhD to do this stuff.”

April 2025 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The attackers reportedly exploited outdated PHP code and deprecated MySQL functions in 4chan’s backend, particularly in a core script named yotsuba.php, which manages post submissions and moderation.”

New Vulnerability in GitHub Copilot and Cursor: How Hackers Can Weaponize Code Agents

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Once a compromised rule file enters a project repository, it corrupts all future code-generation sessions for every team member working in that project.”

Intel to sell 51% stake in Altera to Silver Lake at $8.75B valuation

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“The transaction values Altera at $8.75 billion, just under half what Intel paid to acquire the company in 2015.”

GPT-4.1: Three new million token input models from OpenAI, including their cheapest model yet

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“These are API-only models right now, not available through the ChatGPT interface (though you can try them out in OpenAI’s API playground).”

The Path to Open-Sourcing the DeepSeek Inference Engine

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Our engine is based on an early fork of vLLM from over a year ago.”

Everything Wrong with MCP

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Obviously getting hacked from downloading and running third-party code isn’t a novel vulnerability but the protocol has effectively created a low-friction path for less technical users to get exploited on their local machines.”

A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books.”

Tesla Releases Stripped-Out RWD Cybertruck That Is So Much Worse For Not Much Less Money

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“While the RWD Cybertruck was said to have a starting price of under $40,000 back then (and then around $61,000 last year when it was available to order but never actually entered production), you’ll now have to pony up $71,985 for it, including $1,995 destination.”

BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Because accurate timing is critical in many areas, from media, to the power grid, to 5G and communications, having a reliable terrestrial backup to GPS—especially one that can be hardened against different types of jamming attempts—may be important to our economy, communications and power grid.”

"Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay": Blue Cross Defrauded Breast Cancer Center, Must Pay $421M, Jury Finds

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“From 2015 through 2023, the Baton Rouge-based insurer paid, on average, less than 9% of the charges billed by the breast center for more than 7,800 individual medical procedures — even though it had authorized all of them.”

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“In a recent study, researchers found that about 5.2 percent of package suggestions from commercial models didn’t exist, compared to 21.7 percent from open source or openly available models.”

Microsoft starts final Windows Recall testing before rollout

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Recall is an opt-in Windows feature that screenshots active windows every few seconds, analyzes them, and allows Windows 11 users to search text within the snapshots.”

Anubis works

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Anubis has been deployed by the United Nations.”

Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.”

But what if I really want a faster horse?

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“My List” on Netflix randomly shuffles items and changes their covers every few hours.

G̶o̶o̶g̶l̶e̶r̶… ex-Googler.

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“I’m told this comes as a shock to my managers and other Chrome team leaders. I’m told it’s not based on merit.”

Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Debian, for example, has been working toward reproducible builds for more than a decade; it can now produce official live CDs of the current stable release that are reproducible.”

Adobe Deletes Bluesky Posts After Furious Backlash

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Frustrated by the company’s business practices, users on the platform flooded its posts with backlash, ultimately prompting Adobe to delete all of its content.”

Fintech founder charged with fraud after 'AI' shopping app found to be powered by humans in the Philippines

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ’s Southern District of New York alleges.”

The 2025 AI Index Report

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“AI-related incidents are rising sharply, yet standardized RAI evaluations remain rare among major industrial model developers.”

PHP Core Security Audit Results

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Due to budget constraints, the recent security audit focused on the most critical components of the PHP source code rather than the entire codebase.”

Google to embrace Anthropic's standard for connecting AI models to data

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“In a post on X on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google would add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to its Gemini models and SDK. He did not specify a timeline for when this would be done.”

Arroyo is joining Cloudflare

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The Arroyo Engine will remain open-source and self-hostable.”

Facebook's former global policy director criticises company in Congress hearing

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Throughout my seven years at Meta I saw executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values.”

Google will let companies run Gemini models in their own data centers

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Even customers that adhere to the secret and top secret U.S. government classification levels will be able to use Gemini through an air-gapped version of Google Distributed Cloud that’s disconnected from the internet.”

Basic Income Pilot Project | Study results

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The pilot project followed 122 people for three years who received an unconditional sum of €1,200 every month. The control group included a further 1,580 people who did not receive any money.”

Maintenance Notice (Whisky documentation)

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“By contrast, Whisky is based on CrossOver, but we don’t produce any bespoke fixes. I, quite frankly, do not have the requisite skills or time to do so.”

Tesla Solar Sales Declined for 4 Straight Quarters, Then Tesla Stopped Publishing the Numbers

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The company published the numbers for those 4 quarters, but then, in the next quarter, Q1 2024, Tesla simply lamented that its solar installations had declined year over year but stopped publishing those figures.”

Meta accused of Llama 4 bait-and-switch to juice AI benchmark rank

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Meta submitted a specially crafted, non-public variant of its Llama 4 AI model to an online benchmark that may have unfairly boosted its leaderboard position over rivals.”

AT&T to Discontinue Email-to-Text Service on June 17th

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“AT&T has announced that it will discontinue its email-to-text service on June 17, 2025.”

Thousands of North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500—and they keep getting hired for more jobs

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Fortune 500 companies have unwittingly hired thousands of software engineers who claim to be American developers but are actually North Korean citizens using stolen or fake identities.”

Government fails to keep Apple legal battle secret

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“In a judgment handed down today, tribunal president Lord Justice Singh and Mr Justice Johnson said preventing disclosure even of the fact that a hearing was taking place would have represented ’the most fundamental interference with the principle of open justice’.”

Cyc

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“After 40 years, 30 million rules, 200 million dollars, 2000 person-years, and many promises, Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will.”

BREAKING: Bill that would have blocked OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit has mysteriously been gutted.

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“My sources assure me that this is NOT a clerical error and that Papan’s office confirms that the change is real.”

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke confirms leaked internal memo on social media about "hiring AI before humans"

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.”

What was Quartz?

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The end came on Friday, when G/O fired the few remaining writers at Quartz and sold the carcass to a Canadian firm that appears mostly interested in the email list.”

Europe preparing to 'ease the burden' of landmark data privacy law

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The European Commission is now finalizing a plan to simplify and potentially remove many of the regulatory requirements imposed by the continent’s complex and far-reaching General Data Protection Regulation, particularly those impacting small and medium-sized businesses.”

Uncovering a 0-Click RCE in the SuperNote Nomad E-ink Tablet

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“A malicious attacker on the same network as the victim could fully compromise the target device without any user-interaction.”

Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Our scanner has improved a lot since August, but because of regular engineering, not model improvements.”

Data centers contain 90% crap data

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The Cloud is what happens when the cost of storing data is less than the cost of figuring out what to do with the crap.”

Max severity RCE flaw discovered in widely used Apache Parquet

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“A maximum severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability has been discovered impacting all versions of Apache Parquet up to and including 1.15.0.”

Gmail E2E is as terrible as expected

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“If I receive an “e2e” encrypted email from gmail, I will not be able to read it without going to a Google service.”

rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Now with macOS Sequoia, Apple has replaced rsync 2.6.9 with openrsync, an implementation of rsync which is not using any version of the GPL open source license.”

The Llama 4 herd: The beginning of a new era of natively multimodal AI innovation

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Llama 4 refuses less on debated political and social topics overall (from 7% in Llama 3.3 to below 2%).”

Judge Stein Issues Opinion Rejecting Most of OpenAI's Motion to Dismiss Claims by Newspapers, Book Authors. Judge Now Will Preside Over All Copyright Cases v. OpenAI, Microsoft.

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft fared a tad better in getting the dismissal of all DMCA 1202(b)(1) claims against it, whereas OpenAI succeeded only in getting the New York Times’ 1202(b)(1) claim, but not the claims of the Center for Investigative Reporting or the Daily News.”

University of Michigan cracks rapid EV charging in freezing temps

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Charging an EV battery takes 30 to 40 minutes even for aggressive fast charging, and that time increases to over an hour in the winter.”

Sweetener saccharin shows surprise power against antibiotic resistance

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Saccharin breaks the walls of bacterial pathogens, causing them to distort and eventually burst, killing the bacteria.”

What's in that bright red fire retardant? No one will say, so we had it tested

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Late last year, LAist requested samples of MVP-Fx from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions, which manufactures the product, for the purpose of running an independent analysis for heavy metals. All declined.”

Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Services

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Once we have a sufficiently strong base of paying users to sustainably support our services, we plan to introduce a limited free tier to the public.”

No, Gumroad Did Not Become Open Source Today

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The issue isn’t that the license exists, it’s that it’s misrepresented as open source.”

Anduril Industries' Electromagnetic Warfare Team is Hiring

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“To that end, the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse.”

Hackers target Aussie pensioners in major super fund cyber attack

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“While members of the affected super funds are being urged to check their accounts for suspicious activity, media reports suggest that the threat actors targeted accounts in the pension drawdown phase, as those accounts can request lump-sum withdrawals.”

An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“another reminder of how OpenAI(and everyone else) trains on images that are very obviously someone else’s work.”

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Extra memory for the Altair could easily cost more than the computer itself,” recalled Gates.

AI 2027

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.”

Reasoning models don't always say what they think

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The models very rarely admitted to using the reward hacks in their Chain-of-Thought explanations, doing so less than 2% of the time in most of the testing scenarios.”

Verizon Call Filter API flaw exposed customers' incoming call history

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Call metadata might seem harmless, but in the wrong hands, it becomes a powerful surveillance tool.”

Restructuring Announcement

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“While our revenue continues to grow, Automattic operates in a highly competitive market, and technology is evolving at unprecedented levels.”

Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The people taking the creatine supplement saw changes before they even started exercising, which leads us to believe that it wasn’t actual real muscle growth, but potentially fluid retention.”

Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The results constitute the first empirical evidence that any artificial system passes a standard three-party Turing test.”

AI misses illnesses in black people and women, analysis of chest x-rays reveals

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The researchers found that in half of cases, conditions such as cardiac hypertrophy were not detected when patients were black women.”

Betty Webb, Bletchley Park codebreaker and tireless advocate, dies aged 101

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“It wasn’t until 1975, when the Bletchley operation was declassified, that she could even tell her family what she had done during the war.”

In loving memory of Dave Täht

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Because of Dave’s persistence and advocacy, millions of devices worldwide now ship algorithms like FQ-CoDel by default, to smooth connectivity.”

The Atrocious State Of Binary Compatibility on Linux and How To Address It.

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“In just the past two years, our team has encountered three separate GLIBC-specific compatibility issues, each directly impacting our products”

DEDA - tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation toolkit

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“This process is integrated in almost every commercial colour laser printer. This means that almost every printout contains coded information about the source device, such as the serial number.”

Oracle Cloud security SNAFU latest: IT giant accused of pedantry as evidence scrubbed

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Oracle are attempting to wordsmith statements around Oracle Cloud and use very specific words to avoid responsibility,” wrote Beaumont.

BREAKING: IU terminated professor the same day the FBI searched his homes

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“A search on the U.S. government’s Public Access To Court Electronic Records system yielded no recent results for either Wang or Ma.”

Targeted advertising: the Autorité de la concurrence imposes a fine of €150,000,000 on Apple for the implementation of the App Tracking Transparency ("ATT") framework

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“While advertising tracking only needs to be refused once, the user must always confirm their consent a second time.”

Inside a Marine's decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter jet and the betrayal in its wake

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Both investigations concluded that most highly experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in an F-35 would have punched out of the plane.”

McMaster researchers discover new class of antibiotics

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Nearly three decades after the last time a new class of antibiotics reached the market, McMaster researchers have made a breakthrough discovery that could hold the key to addressing antimicrobial resistance.”

CodeQLEAKED – Public Secrets Exposure Leads to Supply Chain Attack on GitHub CodeQL

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“A potential supply chain attack on GitHub CodeQL started simply: a publicly exposed secret, valid for 1.022 seconds at a time.”

The average college student today

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke.”

Quakers condemn police raid on Westminster Meeting House

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first, searching the whole building and arresting six women attending the meeting in a hired room.”

Inaugural Isar Aerospace Spectrum Flight Ends in Failure

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success,” said Metzler.

Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Until a few years ago, any app you installed on an Android device could see all other apps on your phone without your permission.”

Madison Square Garden Bans Fan After Surveillance System IDs Him as a Critic of Its CEO

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Since 2018, the venue has been equipped with facial recognition tools used to identify people deemed to be potential security threats.”

Windows 11 is not killing off hack that lets you bypass Microsoft account, but it takes more effort now

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Removes script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account…”

Why Apple's Severance Gets Edited Over Remote Desktop Software

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“In other words, little of the horsepower being used in this editing process is actually coming from the Mac Mini on this guy’s desk.”

Et tu, Grammarly?

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Grammarly broke my calculations and thus they broke my website.”

I drove 300 miles in rural Virginia, then asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car. Here's what I learned.

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us.”

We hacked Google's A.I Gemini and leaked its source code (at least some part)

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“However, the build pipeline for compiling the sandbox binary included an automated step that adds security proto files to a binary whenever it detects that the binary might need them to enforce internal rules.”

Javice found guilty of defrauding JPMorgan in $175M startup purchase

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“When JPMorgan bought Frank in 2021, the bank thought the startup had 4 million customers. The bank found out that the actual customer count was only 300,000 when it later sent test marketing emails to alleged Frank users and approximately 70% of those messages bounced back.”

Elon Musk's xAI acquires X at $33B valuation

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“The company’s AI business currently generates only limited revenue: xAI reportedly told investors last November that it was “on pace” to reach $100 million in annual sales.”

It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“We’re spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else.”

How not to build an AI Institute

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“By outsourcing the institute to the universities, the EPSRC guaranteed that the ATI would always be less than the sum of its parts.”

Blasting Past Webp

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim.”

Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Since the release of Sequoia last fall, one can no longer reliably cut or copy text from the Mac app.”

Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Representatives from these companies, all who agreed to confirm the data under the promise of anonymity, confirmed the authenticity of the information.”

The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking.”

Malware found on npm infecting local package with reverse shell

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Even if the malicious package ethers-provider2 is removed, the threat actors made sure their malicious functionality would persist.”

Google will develop Android OS entirely behind closed doors starting next week

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished.”

After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Most Waymo crashes involve a Waymo vehicle scrupulously following the rules while a human driver flouts them: speeding, running red lights, careening out of their lanes, and so forth.”

Forgotten in jail without a lawyer: how a Texas town fails poor defendants

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“In 2023, when more than 240 misdemeanor defendants requested representation, the county judge appointed lawyers in only a handful of cases, records show. Nonetheless, the state has imposed no consequences.”

Postmortem on Next.js Middleware bypass

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Due to the old version range, this was given lower priority in our triage queue.”

A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“There are 7,535 email addresses on that list which is nearly half of all addresses in that export.”

Tesla's Cybertruck recall began with a routine review of field repairs

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The recall covers 2024-2025 Cybertrucks manufactured from November 2023 through February 2025.”

Digital Deception: Kubient CEO Sentenced for $1.3 Million Fraud Scheme

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Paul Roberts cooked the books. He lied to investors and auditors about his company’s revenue and about his company’s premier product: an AI-powered tool that, ironically, was supposed to detect fraud in the digital advertising industry.”

I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“To use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.”

DNA testing company 23andMe files for bankruptcy protection, CEO resigns

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Then in 2023, it suffered a massive cyberattack in which the data of its nearly 7 million customers, including users’ genetic predisposition and ancestry reports, was stolen by hackers.”

HP settles lawsuit over ink-blocking printer update, with no payout or admission of wrongdoing

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“However, HP doesn’t have to admit that it did anything wrong, and it won’t be handing over any money to those customers who were affected by the 2020 firmware update.”

FaunaDB shuts down but hints at open source future

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently…”

Announcing ARC-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Pure LLMs score 0% on ARC-AGI-2, and public AI reasoning systems achieve only single-digit percentage scores.”

The Great Hobby Lobby Artifact Heist

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Over the course of 40 months, Hobby Lobby acquired over 40,000 artifacts in an unprecedented buying blitz.”

Fully AI driven weather prediction system could start revolution in forecasting

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Aardvark is thousands of times faster than all previous weather forecasting methods.”

Llama's Paradox - Delving deep into Llama.cpp and exploiting Llama.cpp's Heap Maze, from Heap-Overflow to Remote-Code Execution

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Since Llama.cpp has such a special heap-management system, special features of this system will fail the classic ptmalloc exploitations that we are familiar with.”

Rickover's Lessons

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“He made the final hiring decision for every naval officer who applied to serve on a nuclear submarine until he retired.”

Attorney General Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert for 23andMe Customers

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Given 23andMe’s reported financial distress, I remind Californians to consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company.”

Court Orders Google to Poison Public DNS to Prevent IPTV Piracy

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“The Court’s decision wasn’t made available to support AGCOM’s statement, and at the time of writing, we are still trying to locate a copy.”

Meta settles UK 'right to object to ad-tracking' lawsuit by agreeing not to track plaintiff

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“A human rights campaigner, Tanya O’Carroll, has succeeded in forcing social media giant Meta not to use her data for targeted advertising.”

A Win for Encryption: France Rejects Backdoor Mandate

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The proposed law was a surveillance wishlist disguised as anti-drug legislation.”

The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings—Without Telling Her Why

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Instead, the notice she received listed hundreds of possible federal crimes that would justify a seizure, though it didn’t provide Martin’s supposed connection to those offenses.”

New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just made a move that will protect bad patents at the expense of everyone else.”

Investigators Say South Korean President's Bodyguard Asked ChatGPT About 'Martial Law' Hours Before Coup

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Lee’s lawyer said that prosecutors had screwed up the digital forensics. He didn’t deny that Lee had asked the AI about martial law, just that it happened after Yoon had declared it.”

Apple Shuffles AI Executive Ranks in Bid to Turn Around Siri

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell.”

Despite denials, Serbian gov't proven to have deployed sonic devices on 15 March protest

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Serbian officials were forced to admit on Wednesday, 19 March, that there was a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) on the streets of Belgrade on 15 March, which they had previously denied.”

ChatGPT hit with privacy complaint over defamatory hallucinations

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“AI companies should stop acting as if the GDPR does not apply to them, when it clearly does.”

EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and connected devices

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“According to the Commission, device manufacturers and app developers should be able to access nine iOS connectivity features that were restricted to Apple’s exclusive use before, such as peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connectivity, NFC features and device pairing.”

Leaking Passwords (and more!) on macOS

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Before this vulnerability was patched, you could send a message to NetAuthAgent asking for the credentials to any server, and it would just give them to you.”

Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them.”

Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions - Fedora Pagure

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“It allows writing to arbitrary files, allowing the execution of arbitrary code on any Pagure instance.”

Memory safety for web fonts

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Merely keeping up with the stream of issues found by fuzzing costs Google at least 0.25 full time software engineers. Worse, we observably don’t find everything or find things only after the code has shipped to users.”

Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and population regardless of a city’s estimated housing supply elasticity.”

Google announces agreement to acquire Wiz

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Wiz’s products will continue to work and be available across all major clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud platforms.”

Faulty firmware is bricking high-end Samsung soundbars

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“The cause appears to be a faulty firmware update, which is transforming Samsung soundbars globally into useless rectangular bits of plastic.”

Roku is forcing users to watch ads before they can use their TV in 'test'

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“Roku already places ads on the homescreen and in its screensaver, but autoplaying ads as soon as the TV is turned on is new, and rather aggressive behavior.”

Cloudflare's infinite loop problem: developers claim they were forced to sign excessive non-disclosure agreements; Cloudflare responds

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Instead of continuing the discussions, Cloudflare sent Moonchild a form for what it called an ‘overly broad and general non-disclosure agreement (NDA).’”

Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“This is not symbolic of any pointed move away from GNU components - it’s literally just about replacing coreutils with a more modern equivalent.”

Rippling sues Deel, Deel denies 'all legal wrongdoing,' and Slack is the main witness

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“According to the lawsuit, Rippling set up a “honeypot” to prove out its suspicions.”

Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“We are experiencing dozens of brief outages per week, and I have to review our mitigations several times per day to keep that number from getting any higher.”

Extracting content from an LCP "protected" ePub

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“There’s no reverse engineering. No cracking of cryptographic secrets. No circumvention of any technical control.”

Tesla Autopilot drives into Wile E Coyote fake road wall in camera vs lidar test

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“The Tesla on Autopilot managed to stop for a kid mannequin in the middle of the road when statics, moving, and blinded by lights, but it couldn’t stop in fog or heavy rain”

Baidu Unveils ERNIE 4.5 and Reasoning Model ERNIE X1, Makes ERNIE Bot Free Ahead of Schedule

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“As Baidu’s latest foundation model and native multimodal model, ERNIE 4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks while priced at just 1% of GPT-4.5.”

Amazon's Echo is ending its 'Do Not Send Voice Recordings' feature, starting March 28

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Amazon Echo users will no longer have the option to process their Alexa voice recordings locally, which means those recordings (with the exception of certain Alexa features like wake word detection) will be sent to the company’s cloud.”

Sign in as anyone: Bypassing SAML SSO authentication with parser differentials

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“In other words, it could be used for an account takeover attack.”

Google Being Forced To Sell Chrome is Not Good for the Web

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“But still, a more direct line from problem to solution is forcing default search engine choice, not a forced sale of Chrome itself.”

Career advice in 2025.

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago.”

Harden-Runner detection: tj-actions/changed-files action is compromised

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The compromised Action prints CI/CD secrets in GitHub Actions build logs.”

Healthcare Staff Database with 86,000 Records Exposed Online

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Medical documents were also found that included diagnoses, prescriptions, and treatments, which Fowler presumed served as proof of medical grounds for missing shifts.”

Decrypting Encrypted files from Akira Ransomware (Linux/ESXI variant 2024) using a bunch of GPUs

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“The ransomware uses the current time (in nanoseconds) as a seed.”

HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“Most notably, this means the next generation of web technology is being defined & built by one minority group, and the larger majority have effectively no way to access this technology right now.”

Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“He took off in his Mooney M20 propeller plane from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, en route to Zürich in Switzerland, but local media reports that he crashed into a cabin on Slovenia’s Velika Planina mountain, splitting the hut in two.”

Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“An arbitrator has sided with the social media company, saying that the book’s author should stop selling and publicizing the book, which went on sale earlier this week.”

Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it + limit of 800 locs

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 13:00:00 -0400

“I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work.”

In Praise of "Normal" Engineers

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Individual engineers don’t own software; engineering teams own software.”

In Memoriam: Mark Klein, AT&T Whistleblower Who Revealed NSA Mass Spying

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Mark stood up and told the truth at great personal risk to himself and his family.”

Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit.”

On The Insecurity of Telecom Stacks in the Wake of Salt Typhoon

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“To recap: An employee of SignalWire (which develops FreeSWITCH) came right out and said they would let people who aren’t paying for FreeSWITCH Advantage stay vulnerable until their regularly scheduled release (sometime in the Summer).”

Azure's Weakest Link? How API Connections Spill Secrets

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“All API Connections must be considered insecure as long as Readers can call the backend server.”

Honey finally discloses that it uses affiliate codes now that Google Chrome requires it

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“When you use PayPal Honey, merchants may pay us affiliate commissions. We share those commissions with our users in the form of rewards.”

A 10x Faster TypeScript

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage.”

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“I installed this toner cartridge about a month ago, with no issues. But today suddenly an error code 11 popped up which means the printer doesn’t accept/recognize the cartridge any more.”

$16B health agency managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn't gone well

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“The use of an Excel spreadsheet file to track and report financial performance for a NZ$28bn expenditure organisation raises significant concerns, particularly when other more appropriate systems are present on the IT landscape.”

AI-Generated Voice Evidence Poses Dangers in Court

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“People can no longer reliably distinguish between a real voice of someone and the person’s AI clone.”

Google Just Removed uBlock Origin from the Chrome Store Today!

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“uBlock Origin is the best browser-based content blocker available on the web today. Sadly today Google just pulled the plug on it by enforcing their new v3 manifest.”

Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, as I will document in this post, these impressive performance gains turned out to be primarily due to inadvertently working around a regression in LLVM 19.”

[YouTube] DRM on ALL videos with `tv` (TVHTML5) client #12563

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.”

The worst year in shutdowns: a blow to democracy and human rights in Africa

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“From people’s movements to contentious elections, as political escalations continued to make headlines in Africa, authorities increasingly defaulted to internet shutdowns to disempower and disconnect people.”

Why layoffs don't work

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0400

“Even during bad economies, when layoffs are rampant and often more justified, the results are similar — and that’s according to Bain & Company, which, ironically, consults for firms that make cuts.”

Tesla Sales Fall Off A Cliff Globally, Including Germany, Australia, And China

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0400

“Tesla was proudly proclaiming less than a year ago that it would be selling 20 million electric vehicles annually by 2030.”

Do you DARE? Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0400

“If you’re having deja vu, you’re not alone: Europe has been talking about and toying with using RISC-V for supercomputing for some years, even getting far as some silicon, though turned to Arm’s architecture for its first exascale system.”

Stem cell therapy trial reverses "irreversible" damage to cornea

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“By the 12-month mark, that number had increased to 11 (79%) patients.”

We're teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0400

“Currently, we rely on a mix of both Google and Bing libraries to provide you with answers to your searches.”

Feds Link $150M Cyberheist to 2022 LastPass Hacks

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“In a court filing this week, U.S. federal agents investigating a spectacular $150 million cryptocurrency heist said they had reached the same conclusion.”

Undocumented commands found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The ubiquitous ESP32 microchip made by Chinese manufacturer Espressif and used by over 1 billion units as of 2023 contains undocumented commands that could be leveraged for attacks.”

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“When his position was eventually terminated on September 9, 2019, the kill switch was activated and thousands of employees around the world were locked out of the network, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, it is said.”

VW Brings Back Physical Buttons After Admitting Touchscreens Are A Disaster

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“We will never, ever make this mistake any more. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing any more.”

How a Connecticut DMV Employee Made Thousands by Selling Towed Cars

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The DMV employee sold the Jeep to a used car dealer for $13,500. After passing through several more hands, another dealership ultimately sold it to a customer for $28,781.44.”

First Porn, Now Skin Cream? 'Age Verification' Bills Are Out of Control

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Age verification laws do far more than ‘protect children online’—they require the creation of a system that collects vast amounts of personal information from everyone.”

"Let's hire an ISIS suicide bomber to blow him up in the street!": Europe's most wanted man plotted my murder — and that of my colleague

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“A jury at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, has just found six of my compatriots — citizens of Bulgaria — guilty of conspiring with the Kremlin to kidnap and possibly murder me and my colleague and friend, Roman Dobrokhotov.”

Microsoft is reportedly plotting a future without OpenAI

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“OpenAI’s technology is embedded in Microsoft products, from Copilot to Bing’s AI-powered search features and Microsoft 365’s productivity tools.”

Suspicious Tesla Sales Surge Triggers Canadian Government Investigation

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Over a three-day period, Tesla reported selling 8,600 vehicles at four locations across the country, resulting in $43 million in government rebates.”

As Bangladesh's factories turn to surveillance and automation, garment workers feel the pressure

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Each machine could replace between one and six workers, and the largest factories surveyed anticipated cutting 22% of their workforce.”

How to distrust a CA without any certificate errors

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The Chrome distrusts of GLOBALTRUST and Entrust were both implemented using SCTNotAfter.”

Mistral OCR

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“For organizations with stringent data privacy requirements, Mistral OCR offers a self-hosting option.”

The Evolution of IT Operations and Opsgenie

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“On this date, access to Opsgenie will be shut off, and the product will no longer accessible.”

Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“This means users can’t roll back when they discover the unwanted new ‘features’ post-update.”

NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to "use Apple encryption" for Barristers, Solicitors (etc…) — co-incidental with Apple lawsuit against HMG's demanding a backdoor in the same

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“the politically inconvenient ADP-promoting “for barristers” document has actually been wholesale deleted from the internet, with a HTTP redirect put in place to point to the inferior “defending democracy” documents.”

Gardener wins case against Paddy Power over £1m prize

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“When a trader puts all the risk on a consumer for its own recklessness, negligence, errors, inadequate digital services and inadequate testing, that appears onerous to me.”

Andrew Barto Named Co-recipient of 'Nobel Prize of Computing' for Foundational Work on AI Technology

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“It carries a $1 million prize, for which Google Inc. provides the financial support, and is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the foundations of computing more than 70 years ago.”

NASA Successfully Acquires GPS Signals on Moon

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Then, at 2 a.m. EST on March 3, it was official: LuGRE acquired and tracked signals on the lunar surface for the first time ever and achieved a navigation fix — approximately 225,000 miles away from Earth.”

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Leith says the DSID advertising cookie is created shortly after the user logs into their Google account – part of the Android startup process – with a tracking file linked to that account placed into the Google Play Service’s app data folder.”

Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Rayhunter works by intercepting, storing, and analyzing the control traffic (but not user traffic, such as web requests) between the mobile hotspot Rayhunter runs on and the cell tower to which it’s connected.”

Cabinet moves to reverse Italy's anti-nuclear stance

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Italy’s Council of Ministers has approved a draft law calling for the government to adopt a series of legislative decrees to create the legal framework for the reintroduction of nuclear power, which was phased out following a referendum in 1987.”

Tattoos may be linked to an increased risk of cancer

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“For lymphoma, the rate is nearly three times higher for the group of individuals with large tattoos compared to those without tattoos.”

This Linux laptop maker called me a Zombie

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Reddit is full of this kind of support replies after the slightest pushback from the clients.”

The Top 10%

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Wealth inequality is only getting worse in this country and frankly I’m not sure what stops this train.”

Blender-Made Movie Flow Wins an Oscar at the 97th Academy Awards Ceremony

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“By winning an Academy Award, Flow is also sure to delight indie animators, proving that projects with relatively small budgets – emphasis on relatively, as Flow still cost over $3.6 million – can stand toe-to-toe with industry giants.”

Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress Battle Develops into a Nuclear War-Like Class Action Lawsuit

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Automattic intentionally disrupted WP Engine’s business by blocking access to WordPress.org’s critical services, thereby causing disruption, security risks, and economic harm.”

James Harrison, whose blood donations saved over 2 million babies, has died

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018.”

Firefly Lands on the Moon

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Powered only by solar cells, not radioisotope power sources, these small, comparatively inexpensive lunar landers are not expected to survive the lunar night.”

The gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“The voice coil motor controlling the head isn’t strong enough to overcome this sticky rubber, so the head just sits there until the drive’s firmware gives up on trying and spins the platter down.”

Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The moment you run LLM generated code, any hallucinated methods will be instantly obvious: you’ll get an error.”

Cellebrite zero-day exploit used to target phone of Serbian student activist

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Since the exploits identified in this research target core Linux kernel USB drivers, the vulnerability is not limited to a particular device or vendor and could impact over a billion Android devices.”

Intel delays finish date again on in-progress Ohio semiconductor plants

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“The state has already disbursed $600 million in onshoring grants to the tech giant for its central Ohio venture.”

Efabless shuts down - Tiny Tapeout will continue

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Right now we have TT08 awaiting packaging and TT09 still in the SkyWater Technology fab. These chips represent a huge investment of time and energy from hundreds of people, and we currently don’t know if we’ll receive them.”

Xcode constantly phones home

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“And all of these connections from Xcode, to every domain, require login to your Apple Developer account, so Apple is definitely receiving identifying information about you in any case.”

Why Can't We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound.”

how to gain code execution on millions of people and hundreds of popular apps

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“with this, i could push auto updates to all applications using todesktop”

An update on our terms of use

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that ‘We never sell your data’ is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of ‘sale of data’ is broad and evolving.”

Authorities worldwide can see more than ever, with Big Tech as their eyes

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“The US government made nearly 500,000 data requests to Google and Meta — more than all the other members of the so-called 14 Eyes Alliance combined.”

Github scam investigation: Thousands of "mods" and "cracks" stealing your data

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“People create thousands of GitHub repositories with all sorts of things - from Roblox and Fortnite mods to ‘cracked’ FL Studio and Photoshop.”

Microsoft hangs up on Skype: Service to shut down May 5, 2025

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“After kickstarting the market for making calls over the internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down.”

OpenAI unveils GPT-4.5 'Orion,' its largest AI model yet

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“GPT-4.5 is also very expensive to run, OpenAI admits — so expensive that the company says it’s evaluating whether to continue serving GPT-4.5 in its API in the long term.”

Tracking You from a Thousand Miles Away! Turning a Bluetooth Device into an Apple AirTag Without Root Privileges

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The attacker doesn’t need to be anywhere near you - they can track your location from thousands of miles away as long as there are Apple devices passing near you.”

Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The payments to AWS gradually skyrocketed as the naira depreciated around 70% against the dollar between 2020 and 2024.”

Command & Conquer Red Alert (EA source release, GitHub)

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The current state of the source code does not fully compile and will require some effort to restore it.”

VSCode extensions with 9 million installs pulled over security risks

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Microsoft removed both extensions from the VS Code marketplace and banned the developer.”

Amazon unveils revamped Alexa with AI features for $19.99 per month, free for Prime members

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“Alexa also remains unprofitable. Amazon has never charged for access to Alexa, instead infusing it into its lineup of smart speakers, tablets and other devices.”

Electricity returns to most of Chile after a sweeping blackout, but questions remain

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“It is not tolerable that the daily lives of millions of Chileans are affected by the responsibility of one or several companies,” Boric said in his nationally televised address.

Signal's CEO: Then We're Leaving Sweden

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The purpose of the bill – which may be passed next year – is for the police and Security Service to be able to request message history in retrospect for individuals suspected of crimes.”

'Hey Number 17!'

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Y Combinator supports an AI startup that’s pitching granular machine vision surveillance of factory workers.”

I Went To SQL Injection Court

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Schemas are now file layouts. We lose.”

DigiCert: Threat of legal action to stifle Bugzilla discourse

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“In bug 1910322 comment 74 DigiCert wrote, ‘We have not used a legal team as a shield against accountability.’ Contrary to this statement, I received a letter from DigiCert’s lawyers, Wilson Sonsini, regarding posts made by Sectigo’s Chief Compliance Officer in bug 1910322.”

Breaking into dozens of apartments in five minutes

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“So I can break into this building in about 5 minutes without attracting any attention whatsoever.”

Google Co-Scientist AI cracks superbug problem in two days! — because it had been fed the team's previous paper with the answer in it

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“It turns out Co-Scientist had been fed a 2023 paper by Penadés’ team that included a version of the hypothesis. The BBC coverage failed to mention this bit.”

Microsoft Scraps Multiple Data Center Leases: TD Cowen

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Microsoft has reportedly canceled several data center leases with U.S. operators, indicating potentially overbuilt infrastructure and unclear demand for AI services.”

New Zealand Company's 'Impossible-to-Hack' Security Turns Out to Be No Security at All

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“He was also kind enough to lie and claim “There were few more security layers which would have made any data breach impossible anyway.” and only basic information such as database sizes was exposed.”

Right to Repair Laws Have Now Been Introduced in All 50 US States

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Manufacturers told legislators that sharing repair information would make it impossible for them to protect their trade secrets and would be dangerous to customers—so we brought in experts, shared data, and proved that repair information is not protected and changing batteries isn’t dangerous.”

How Decades Of Research Misconduct Stalled An Alzheimer's Cure

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The drug offers so modest a benefit that doctors and patients might not perceive any effect whatsoever.”

In Memoriam - OnlineSafetyAct.co.uk

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The following sites and services have stated that the Online Safety Act 2023 is the reason for their closing, or for geo-blocking UK users.”

Thailand cuts power supply to Myanmar scam hubs

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Thailand cut off power supply on Wednesday to three areas in Myanmar where online scamming hubs are concentrated.”

Florida Insurers Sent Billions to Affiliates While Claiming Losses: Report

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The report also showed between 2017 and 2019, the insurers in the study showed a net loss of $432 million and their affiliate companies showed a net income of $1.8 billion.”

Binned off staff, slashed stock options. What's next? Ah yes, bigger C-suite bonuses

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The Facebook giant revealed in a government filing that its Compensation, Nominating and Governance Committee (CNGC) approved a target annual bonus increase for its top executive officers bar CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”

Utah Bill Aims to Make Officers Disclose AI-Written Police Reports

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“S.B. 180 is unfortunately a necessary step in the right direction when it comes to regulating the rapid spread of police using generative AI to write their narrative reports for them.”

Who needs a sneaker bot when AI can hallucinate a win for you?

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Just like Apple AI generating fake news summaries, Yahoo AI was hallucinating the fake winner messages, presumably as a result of training their model on our old emails.”

Apple Pulls Encrypted iCloud Security Feature in UK Amid Government Backdoor Demands

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy,” Apple said in a statement.

Removing Jeff Bezos From My Bed

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Each bed contains a full Linux-based computer. If my estimations above are correct, all of Eight Sleep engineering can take full control of that computer any time they want.”

Meta Says it Made Sure Not to Seed Any Pirated Books

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Plaintiffs, thus, plead no facts to show that Meta seeded Plaintiffs’ books – a claim that Meta will address at summary judgment,” Meta notes.

Hackers drained $1.4 billion of cryptocurrency from Bybit exchange, CEO confirms

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The cryptocurrency exchange Bybit was hacked for more than $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum on Friday in what cybersecurity experts are calling the largest-ever theft targeting a cryptocurrency platform.”

The Deep Research problem

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“If there are mistakes in the table, it doesn’t matter how many there are - I can’t trust it.”

Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared.

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found.”

FAQ on Microsoft's topological qubit thing

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Yep. Certainly that history is making some experts cautious about the new claim.”

We're at a crossroads

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“So unless the Foundation manages to raise $100,000 of funding by the end of March 2025, we will have to focus our resources on the critical lines of work, and consequently we will have to shut down all the remaining bridges hosted by the Matrix.org Foundation.”

AWS S3 SDK breaks its compatible services

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The recent AWS SDK bump introduced strong integrity checksums, and broke compatibility with many S3-compatible object storages (pre-2025 Minio, Vast, Dell EC etc).”

Twitch caps streamers' storage at 100 hours of highlights and uploads

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Some streamers have taken to social media to share their discontent with the decision, with many pointing out that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a market leader in cloud services through its AWS platform.”

Humane Bricks Its AI Pin as It Gets Acquired by HP for $116 Million

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“HP bought up Humane’s CosmOS operating system and IP, including the tech for the AI Pin, for $116 million. The sale means the end for Humane.”

Valve Hands the Team Fortress 2 Source Code to Modders

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible,” Valve explained.

Signals of Trouble: Multiple Russia-Aligned Threat Actors Actively Targeting Signal Messenger

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Because linking an additional device typically requires scanning a quick-response (QR) code, threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim’s account to an actor-controlled Signal instance.”

Should Virginia police be allowed to lie to children?

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“I had enough to charge the juvenile delinquent for something else, but instead I told him a lie so I could get to the gun. And ultimately, that worked…”

The Generative AI Con

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Putting aside the hype, bluster and ungodly amounts of money, I can find no evidence that any of these apps are making anyone any real money.”

Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration!

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously.”

Among world's top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Many are producing hundreds of papers each year and gaining hundreds to thousands of new collaborators annually, according to recent analysis by researchers at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia.”

Delta flight from Minnesota crash lands upside down in Toronto, photos show

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“When planes land with the crosswind, when they point the nose of the planes, it’s called a crab, into the wind, the plane tracks straight.”

Cancer-free for 18 years: CAR-T therapy sets new milestone in neuroblastoma treatment

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The patient who achieved more than 18 years of complete remission after the infusion never required any other cancer treatment.”

searchcode.com's SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably one of the largest in the world, at least for a public facing website.”

WinterBreak

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Wait around 30 seconds, and your Kindle will spew text and restart the GUI.”

Critics say new Google rules put profits over privacy

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“By explicitly allowing a tracking technique that they previously described as incompatible with user control, Google highlights its ongoing prioritisation of profits over privacy,” said Lena Cohen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“Floating point numbers are imprecise - they cannot represent 0.3 or 10^100.”

How I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“I traced this behavior to an amdgpu driver power/memory management bug, which took over a year to brainstorm and implement solutions for.”

New SF public health chief was part of notorious McKinsey opioid-marketing operation

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The records show that Tsai — who worked for McKinsey from 2007 to 2015, according to his LinkedIn page — helped develop a marketing strategy for tramadol sold under the brand name Ultram ER, an effort that involved cultivating relationships with doctors who became prolific prescribers.”

Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“If you spend $1 on carbon capture instead of on wind, water, and solar, you are increasing CO2, air pollution, energy requirements, energy costs, pipelines, and total social costs…”

Nintendo Obtains New Anti-Palworld Patent and Seeks Even More

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Nintendo has secured what appears to be an anti-Palworld patent in the United States.”

Dust from Car Brakes More Harmful than Exhaust, Study Finds

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Surprisingly, newer brake pads proved more harmful than older ones, which were made with asbestos.”

We Were Wrong About GPUs

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The biggest problem: developers don’t want GPUs. They don’t even want AI/ML models. They want LLMs.”

Olson v. County of Grant (opinion, No. 23-35365)

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“This appeal presents a scenario in which agencies from two different state jurisdictions shared a defendant’s sensitive phone data without consent, without a warrant, and without any pending charges, or even an investigation by the out-of-state agency requesting access to the data.”

Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Apple is feeling the heat over its acclaimed iPhone privacy policy after a German regulator’s review of iOS tracking consent alleged that the tech giant exempted itself from the rules it enforces on third-party developers.”

3DBenchy Sets Sail Into The Public Domain

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“According to NTI, the removal of these derived models was not requested by NTI, but by a third-party report, unbeknownst to NTI or the original creator of the model.”

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Linux started out as a hobbyist project, but it has well and truly lost its hobbyist roots.”

Download and Transfer for Kindle books discontinued on Feb 26

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Starting February 26, 2025, the “Download & Transfer via USB” option will no longer be available.”

Introducing Privacy Pass authentication for Kagi Search

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“When we cannot track you even if we wanted to, that’s genuine privacy.”

Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Variation selector sequences are a way to do this that survives most copy/pastes and allows arbitrary data density.”

Leaking the email of any YouTube user for $10,000

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“There wasn’t any server-side limit to the length of a recording name.”

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“As long as countries will put their data - all of it - in a single place we can use AI to help manage the care of all of the patients and the population at large,” Ellison said

White Hat Hackers Expose Iridium Satellite Security Flaws

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“With US $400 worth of equipment and freely available software, you can start right away intercepting Iridium communications in an area with a diameter of hundreds, sometimes even thousands of kilometers…”

Average CPU performance falls for first time in over 20 years according to PassMark

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Since we are still at the beginning of 2025, these only represent 41 days worth of submitted benchmarks.”

The Prophet of Parking

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“One survey of the literature suggests that drivers in the typical American city spend an average of eight minutes looking for parking at the end of each trip.”

How Musk's $97.4B bid could gum up OpenAI's for-profit conversion

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“With his bid, Musk has signaled there’s at least one group of investors willing to pay a sizable premium for OpenAI’s nonprofit wing. That puts the board of directors in a tight spot.”

Federal Judge Rules Legal Research Startup ROSS Infringed Westlaw's Copyrights, Rejecting Fair Use Defense

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Ross was using Thomson Reuters’s headnotes as AI data to create a legal research tool to compete with Westlaw,” Judge Bibas wrote.

Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“In a move that has left drivers both frustrated and bewildered, Stellantis has introduced full-screen pop-up ads on its infotainment systems.”

GeForce RTX 5090 Power Connectors Are Melting Now: What You Should Know

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Aw, crap. Here we go again.”

Tesla Cybertruck Drives Itself Into a Pole, Owner Says 'Thank You Tesla'

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“It failed to merge out of a lane that was ending (there was no one on my left) and made no attempt to slow down or turn until it had already hit the curb.”

Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!”

A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Both are valuable to Google, with the tracking cookies generated by the former potentially contributing to ad targeting, and data from the latter being applied toward AI model training, either internally at Google or sold to another company.”

Bank CEO: Retract your debanking piece? Me: No.

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“McCauley has failed to identify a single fact alleged in Debanking which is incorrect, or any other malfeasance.”

To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Tesla acknowledges all faults in the vehicle (except for battery losses, a fact on which it has not yet formally commented).”

Google's Super Bowl Ad Shows Off Its Gemini AI—Except It's Wrong

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The Wisconsin-focused spot showed a farmer using the tool to write a product description, mentioning that gouda cheese comprises 50 to 60 percent of global cheese consumption.”

How Intel ruined an Israeli startup it bought for $2B—and lost the AI race

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“At Habana, we could make a decision in a five-minute hallway conversation. At Intel, that same decision required three meetings with dozens of participants, and nothing moved forward…”

Bad Smart Watch Auth

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Anyone can connect to the device at any time and start issuing commands. You can pull activity data, sleep data, heart rate data, menstrual data.”

Three Observations

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.”

Is NixOS truly reproducible?

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Our most important finding is that the reproducibility rate in nixpkgs has increased steadily from 69% in 2017 to about 91% in April 2023.”

February 2025: Starlink in the Falkland Islands – a National Emergency situation?

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Because Sure International holds an exclusive monopoly telecommunications licence, Starlink’s use in the islands is currently illegal.”

The UK's Demands for Apple to Break Encryption Is an Emergency for Us All

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“There is no technological compromise between strong encryption that protects the data and a mechanism to allow the government special access to this data.”

Supersizing vehicles offers minimal safety benefits — but substantial dangers

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“For vehicles that weigh more than the fleet average, there’s hardly any decrease in risk for occupants associated with additional poundage.”

VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Unlike Tramp, which lives off the land on the remote connection, VSCode mounts a full-scale invasion: it runs a Bash snippet stager that downloads an agent, including a binary installation of Node.”

We are destroying software

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.”

Cloudflare incident on February 6, 2025

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The incident occurred due to human error and insufficient validation safeguards during a routine abuse remediation for a report about a phishing site hosted on R2.”

Cities Can Cost Effectively Start Their Own Utilities Now

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“The average PG&E electricity charge now starts at 40 cents per kilowatt hour and goes up from there.”

Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“I no longer have any faith left in the kernel development process or community management approach.”

Announcing the Data.gov Archive

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov.”

Fake VS Code Extension on NPM Spreads Multi-Stage Malware

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“This stage involves downloading and executing a ScreenConnect installer, which is typically known as a legitimate remote desktop application.”

High levels of microplastics found in human brains

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The median concentration in brain samples collected from people who died in 2024 was nearly 5,000 micrograms of plastic per gram of brain tissue, tallying almost 0.5% by weight.”

Subway crime plummets as ridership jumps significantly in 2025 in congestion pricing era

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“In the first month of 2025, there were 147 reported crimes on the subway down from 231 last year—resulting in 36% fewer crimes committed on the rails this year.”

A Pinch of Salt Boosts Aluminum Batteries

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The researcher’s tests demonstrated that the resulting battery design can have an extremely long life, with the battery retaining 99 percent of its original capacity after 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.”

Introducing Fair Pricing

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“In months where you don’t utilize any searches on your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month.”

S1: The $6 R1 Competitor?

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“They used 16 NVIDIA H100s for 26 minutes per training run, that equates to around $6.”

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“For the past three years, Microsoft documented a way to run Windows 11 on PCs that lack Trusted Platform Module 2.0 hardware – but that workaround has now disappeared from its help page.”

Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies On YouTube?

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Over the last month, across five different YouTube channels, the studio has released more than 30 full movies. On YouTube. For free. Without any sort of gating.”

mt32-pi README

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“My mental health has been in decline as a direct result of this behavior; the joy of working on this project has pretty much gone. There is nothing to be gained from putting time and hard work into it any more.”

Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled ‘applications we will not pursue,’ which was still included as recently as last week.”

How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“By flooding its once converted editorial playlists with hastily-assembled royalty-free music and AI generated slop, Spotify was able to quietly displace real artists to make more money for itself.”

Freedesktop And Alpine Linux Looking For New Hosting

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“Alpine is not a project you host lightly, with a monthly transfer of about 800TB.”

Vanguard Announces Largest Ever Expense Ratio Reduction

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The reductions will save Vanguard’s investors more than $350 million in 2025 alone, the largest annual expense ratio reduction in Vanguard’s nearly 50-year history.”

The government had been planning it for 7 years, beavers built the dam in two days and saved them $1 million

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The beavers saved us 30 million Czech crowns. They built the dams without any project documentation and for free…”

Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The Republican Senator from Missouri Josh Hawley has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to import or export artificial intelligence products to and from China, meaning someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese developed AI model like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both, should such a law pass.”

Former UIHC administrator sentenced 12 years for 30-year-long identity theft scheme

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Since 1988, Keirans led a productive life, obtaining a high-paying job at UIHC, marrying, and raising a son, all while living under the stolen identity of William Woods, a sporadically transient man who Keirans had briefly worked with at a hot dog stand in New Mexico.”

AMD: Microcode Signature Verification Vulnerability

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“The vulnerability is that the CPU uses an insecure hash function in the signature validation for microcode updates.”

AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“They could be on the hook for up to €35 million (~$36 million), or 7% of their annual revenue from the prior fiscal year, whichever is greater.”

What really happens inside a dating app

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Likes received have a positive impact, but it is very light, which is a good thing from a monetization standpoint (you can make guys pay and not show them to anyone; they will keep paying, just a bit less than if they received likes.”

Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“This is the worst thing about these data trades that happen constantly around the world - each small part of it is (or seems) legit. It’s the bigger picture that makes them look ugly.”

Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“They might not be able to reason beyond what they have seen during the training data for hard tasks,” Dziri said. “Or at least they do an approximation, and that approximation can be wrong.”

Costa Rican Supermarket Wins Trademark Battle Against Nintendo

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“We refuted all of Nintendo’s arguments, demonstrating their errors and our rightful claim,” Jiménez explained.

Tiny vanes glued to planes promise big savings for US Air Force

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Literally gluing a few microvanes to the rear fuselage of a C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane can result in fuel savings in the tens of millions of dollars.”

This is a public service announcement to never ever use Oracle

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“I wasn’t told that my account was disabled. I didn’t receive an E-Mail or anything.”

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Dell justified the policy change by asserting a thirty-second in-person conversation can replace an email discussion that goes on for hours or days and by noting that specific groups within the company – sales, manufacturing, and engineering – have already adjusted to being in the office five days per week.”

Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Only one air traffic control worker was managing the helicopters and some planes from the Reagan National Airport tower at the time of the collision, a job normally done by two people, two sources told CBS News Thursday.”

Hell Is Overconfident Developers Writing Encryption Code

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Just because you outsource your block cipher implementations to your programming language’s crypto module doesn’t mean you’re not rolling your own crypto.”

Apple Files Emergency Motion in Google Search Antitrust Case

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“If Apple’s appeal is not resolved until during or after the remedies trial, Apple may well be forced to stand mute at trial, as a mere spectator, while the government pursues an extreme remedy that targets Apple by name and would prohibit any commercial arrangement between Apple and Google for a decade.”

The Government Says Money Isn't Property—So It Can Take Yours

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Money is not necessarily ‘property’ for constitutional purposes,” the government’s brief declared—putting the very idea of property in scare quotes.

When everything becomes a profit center…

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“But as Americans, we basically have no real rights to privacy, so my home address showed up in the PulsePoint logs and then a guy from Servpro read it and promptly arrived at my door hawking his services.”

FBI, Dutch Police Disrupt 'Manipulaters' Phishing Gang

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The core Manipulaters product is Heartsender, a spam delivery service whose homepage openly advertised phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies.”

Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Google has likely trained Gemini to avoid repeating expletives, so it simply is disabled in search when a curse word is present in order to avoid that.”

California Law Enforcement Misused State Databases More Than 7,000 Times in 2023

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The sheriff’s department’s 6,789 abuses made up a majority of the record 7,275 violations across California that were reported to the state Department of Justice (CADOJ) in 2023 regarding the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS).”

Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.”

The Slow Death of OCSP

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“As it stands today, OCSP is not making anyone more secure. Browsers are either not checking it or are implementing it in a way that provides no security benefits.”

Google offering 'voluntary exit' for employees working on Pixel, Android

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The Platforms & Devices team is offering a voluntary exit program that provides US-based Googlers working on this team the ability to voluntarily leave the company with a severance package.”

German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.”

Wiz Research Uncovers Exposed DeepSeek Database Leaking Sensitive Information, Including Chat History

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Within minutes, we found a publicly accessible ClickHouse database linked to DeepSeek, completely open and unauthenticated, exposing sensitive data.”

Google Pixel 4a's old firmware is gone, trapping users on the buggy battery update

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“To add insult to injury, Google wiped the older firmware as part of the update process, so there’s no official way to go back to the previous version.”

California's AG Tells AI Companies Practically Everything They're Doing Might Be Illegal

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“California’s memo makes clear that companies that use AI to create “deepfakes, chatbots, and voice clones that appear to represent people, events, and utterances that never existed” could fall under the category of “deceptive” and, thus, be considered a breach of state law.”

ESA actively monitoring near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“As of 29 January 2025, ESA estimates that the probability that asteroid 2024 YR4 may impact Earth on 22 December 2032 is 1.2%.”

SLAP and FLOP

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“If the LAP guesses wrong, it causes the CPU to perform arbitrary computations on out-of-bounds data, which should never have been accessed to begin with, under speculative execution.”

Nvidia loses $589 billion in market cap — broad stock plunge triggered by DeepSeek AI release

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Aside from using fewer GPU hours to train, the H800 chips that DeepSeek used to train its LLM have less performance than the H100 due to U.S. export restrictions.”

Facial Recognition Backfires on Police in Ohio Murder Case

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The only evidence pointing to Tolbert was a report from Clearview AI, which explicitly said in a disclaimer at the bottom that the results ‘are to be treated as investigative leads and should not be solely relied upon for making an arrest.’”

FTC Takes Action Against GoDaddy for Alleged Lax Data Security for Its Website Hosting Services

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Millions of companies, particularly small businesses, rely on web hosting providers like GoDaddy to secure the websites that they and their customers rely on.”

Facebook ban

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook’s internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being “cybersecurity threats”.”

Brazil bans Worldcoin from giving crypto for eye scans

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“offering crypto as compensation could compromise the validity of user consent for collecting sensitive biometric data.”

Kansas' tuberculosis outbreak is one of the largest in the U.S. since the 1950s

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“We do expect to find more, but we’re hoping the ‘more’ that we find is latent TB and not active.”

Sweden seizes ship suspected of Baltic Sea cable sabotage

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Swedish authorities seized and boarded a ship on Sunday just hours after it was suspected of sabotaging a communications cable in the country’s exclusive economic zone beneath the Baltic Sea.”

23 percent of Teslas are dumped at the checkpoint in Denmark

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“A total of 4,668 Tesla Model 3s of the 2020 model year were inspected between January 1 and November 21, 2024, and of those, 1,051 failed.”

French Police Free Kidnapped Ledger Executive After Day-Long Ordeal

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The attackers struck in darkness, forcing their way into Balland’s residence in the Cher region of central France during the early morning hours of January 21.”

Astronomers just deleted an asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“This incident, along with previous NEOCP postings of the WMAP spacecraft, highlights the deplorable state of availability of positional information on distant artificial objects.”

No one is disrupting banks

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“despite almost 30 years of trying, Fintech companies have not disrupted banks. At least, not the big ones.”

'First AI software engineer' is bad at its job

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Tasks that seemed straightforward often took days rather than hours, with Devin getting stuck in technical dead-ends or producing overly complex, unusable solutions,” the researchers explain in their report.

Hacker infects 18,000 "script kiddies" with fake malware builder

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“A trojanized version of the XWorm RAT builder has been weaponized and propagated,” reads the CloudSEK report.

Texas Is Enforcing Its State Data Privacy Law. So Should Other States.

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The Texas Attorney General’s office estimates that 45 million Americans, including those in Texas, unwittingly downloaded this software that collected their information, including location information, without notice or consent.”

Caltrain's Electric Fleet More Efficient than Expected

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Caltrain is running its service on 100% renewable energy and is returning nearly a quarter of that energy to the grid,” said Michelle Bouchard, Caltrain Executive Director.

PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“By taking the highly anomalous post IDs and filtering out the MathHelpBoards import, and filtering out instances which seem plausibly close to their actual post times, we get an estimated 115,000 posts written by LLMs and attributed to humans.”

almost_pwned.md

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The thing that’s crazy is that if I followed the 2 “best practices” of verifying the phone number + getting them to send an email to you from a legit domain, I would have been compromised.”

A very Chicago gamble

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“And so I feel some sense of civic duty, as a Chicagoan, taxpayer, and reasonably financially sophisticated person, to say the following publicly: What the hell, Chicago.”

Updated: We Need To Talk About Docker Hub

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“We’re now 3 months on from our renewal submission, with zero communication from Docker, an account that is no longer part of the DSOS program, and no obvious way to speak to a human about it.”

Hacking Subaru: Tracking and Controlling Cars via the STARLINK Admin Panel

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Using the access provided by the vulnerability, an attacker who only knew the victim’s last name and ZIP code, email address, phone number, or license plate could have done the following:”

Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone, the Israeli Defense Ministry spent $10 million to purchase 19,000 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.”

CVSS is dead to us

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“After my pull request it took less than ninety minutes for them to update the curl records. Without explanation, with no reference to my PR, they now apparently consider the issue to be CVSS 3.4.”

Shifting Cyber Norms: Microsoft security POST-ing to you

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Not only is Microsoft transgressing an important norm here, but as far as I can tell, they also didn’t tell anyone about this or warn us in any way.”

More Than 40% of Postdocs Don't Stay in Academia

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The study found that 41 percent of postdocs end up leaving academia, at least in part because there aren’t enough faculty positions for them.”

MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed for Years

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals.”

VICTORY! Federal Court (Finally) Rules Backdoor Searches of 702 Data Unconstitutional

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US person’s 702 data.”

The FTC's Ban on GM and OnStar Selling Driver Data Is a Good First Step

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“In reality, no consumer knowingly agrees to let their carmaker sell their driving data to other companies.”

C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“And that’s how we ended up with a crash, caused by unsafe-free Rust code badly interacting with the use of libc elsewhere in the program.”

How shutdown Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear fast

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Startups burn through cash as they skyrocket in size and ambition, accumulating outrageous perks and office equipment along the way. Then they crash to Earth, with nothing but their private planes or massive 3D printers to pad the impact.”

Unique 0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord and hundreds of platform

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Signal instantly dismissed my report, saying it wasn’t their responsibility and it was up to users to hide their identity”

Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber face calls for app transparency

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Instead, you are automating exploitation – leveraging black-box algorithms to make decisions about de-activation, work allocation and pay without sufficient explanation, stripping workers of the ability to understand and challenge those decisions.”

Calm Tech Certification "Rewards" Less Distracting Tech

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“A lot of technology is not using our peripheral attention, but instead our primary attention, which makes it tiring and difficult to use it,” says Case.

A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“It would be up to a top-secret satellite program called Parcae to help keep the Cold War from suddenly toggling to hot.”

DeepSeek-R1

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Notably, it is the first open research to validate that reasoning capabilities of LLMs can be incentivized purely through RL, without the need for SFT.”

Authors Seek Meta's Torrent Client Logs and Seeding Data in AI Piracy Probe

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“By downloading through the bit torrent protocol, Meta knew it was facilitating further copyright infringement by acting as a distribution point for other users of pirated books…”

Bambu Connect's Authentication X.509 Certificate And Private Key Extracted

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The Bambu Connect app is a fairly low-effort Electron-based affair, with some attempt at obfuscation and encryption, but not enough to keep prying eyes out.”

I got a heat pump, and my energy bill went up!

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“My total energy bill more than doubled! This is not uncommon feedback to hear from homeowners after installing a heat pump, but there’s more to the story.”

meemi's Shortform

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“The mathematicians creating the problems for FrontierMath were not (actively) communicated to about funding from OpenAI.”

Why is Git Autocorrect too fast for Formula One drivers?

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“This means that setting help.autocorrect to 1 logically means “wait 100ms (1 decisecond) before continuing”.”

The PC is Dead: It's Time to Bring Back Personal Computing

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms the personal computer once promised, effectively ending the PC era for most tech consumers.”

UK's elite hardware talent is being wasted

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“This isn’t just wage disparity. It’s misallocation of human capital on a national scale.”

Amazon's AI crawler is making my git server unstable

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“It’s futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more.”

Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“That’s no small number at Google scale. Google processes around 8.5 billion searches per day, so one can assume that millions of people performing searches through Google aren’t using JavaScript.”

Windows BitLocker -- Screwed without a Screwdriver

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Thanks to a bug discovered by Rairii in August 2022, attackers can extract your disk encryption key on Windows’ default ‘Device Encryption’ setup.”

Scaling to millions of users requires Synapse Pro

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“However it is not remotely designed or intended for use by commercial Matrix hosting providers to serve huge nation-scale deployments such as public healthcare insurance companies, and it will fail when used at this scale.”

No, you can't use your $6,299.00 Camera as a Webcam. That will be $5

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Canon will happily take your credit card for you to pay a small monthly price of $4.99 per month or even a discounted $49.99 per year!”

Bypassing disk encryption on systems with automatic TPM2 unlock

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Most TPM2 unlock setups fail to verify the LUKS identity of the decrypted partition.”

Let's talk about AI and end-to-end encryption

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Once a sufficiently-powerful general-purpose agent has been deployed on your phone, the only question that remains is who is given access to talk to it.”

So You Want to Build Your Own Data Center

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“And not only is it rare that we understand why things break upstream, but also despite multi-million dollar annual spend, we get about as much support from them as you would spending $100.”

No calls

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“One day, I woke up and out of frustration, I nuked the ‘book a call’ button from my pricing page.”

No billionaires at FOSDEM

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Dorsey is presumably being platformed in Janson because his blockchain bullshit company is a main sponsor of FOSDEM this year.”

Announcing Six Day and IP Address Certificate Options in 2025

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Unfortunately, certificate revocation doesn’t work very well. This means that certificates with compromised keys (or other issues) may continue to be used until they expire.”

Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to get around broadcast restrictions

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Tennis Australia’s director of innovation Machar Reid said the technology used 12 cameras tracking 29 skeletal points that are stitched together to create the reproduction on a two-minute delay.”

A Personal Note From Our Founder

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Nearly 100 individuals have been charged civilly or criminally by regulators at least in part through our work, including billionaires and oligarchs. We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking.”

Google Workspace business users getting full Gemini experience, price increasing

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Previously, Google charged an additional $20+ per user/month for Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Meet, and other Workspace apps. The full Gemini experience is now coming to Google Workspace business users as part of a price increase.”

Nevada Judge to Nevada Cops: You Can't Use This Loophole To Get Around Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“The local department gets up to 80 percent of the forfeiture proceeds, and the rest goes into a Justice Department pool that is doled out to other participating departments around the country.”

Flights delayed by SpaceX's falling rocket debris

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“SpaceX chose the southern Indian Ocean as its reentry zone because of its remote location. But the location is very relevant to Qantas: It falls within its route from Sydney to Johannesburg.”

Millions of Accounts Vulnerable due to Google's OAuth Flaw

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Here’s the problem: Google’s OAuth login doesn’t protect against someone purchasing a failed startup’s domain and using it to re-create email accounts for former employees.”

1 in 5 Online Job Postings Are Either Fake or Never Filled, Study Finds

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The Wall Street Journal cites internal data from the hiring platform Greenhouse that shows one in five online job postings—or between 18% and 22% of jobs advertised—are either fake or never filled.”

Making an Intersection Unsafe for Pedestrians to Save Seconds for Drivers

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“One of the most frustrating things is that the change only saved seconds for drivers.”

in the belly of the MrBeast

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself.”

Massive data breach exposes precise locations for users of many popular apps

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Millions of pieces of precise location data have been released, showing users’ most visited locations such as their home, workplace, and more.”

Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting Cursor.com

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:00:00 -0500

“The user who published the NPM package uses a snyk.io email address for the Snyk Security Labs team.”

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 14:00:00 -0500

“And when that end date rolls around, he’ll be granted a severance of $1,875,000.”

UW student received academic hold for course swap app

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“But school administrators said the tool violated a UW registration policy pertaining to the use of automated tools for enrollment.”

Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The CEO preferred not to enumerate the increase precisely however The Register understands it exceeded 500 percent.”

Backdooring Your Backdoors - Another $20 Domain, More Governments

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Put simply - we have been hijacking backdoors (that were reliant on now abandoned infrastructure and/or expired domains) that themselves existed inside backdoors, and have since been watching the results flood in.”

Right to Root Access

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Locked devices also allow companies to restrict who is and is not allowed to repair hardware.”

Adobe's Generative AI Jumps The Shark, Adds Bitcoin to Bird Photo

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Generative Remove and Generative Fill have become so unreliable that some members of the PetaPixel staff have stopped using it entirely.”

The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Rather, it was the system behavior that emerged from clients downloading the new version that led to the outage.”

Matt Mullenweg to deactivate WordPress contributor accounts over alleged fork plans

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.

World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The proximity of the AES Andes industrial megaproject to Paranal poses a critical risk to the most pristine night skies on the planet,” highlighted ESO Director General, Xavier Barcons.

TSMC's Arizona Fab 21 is already making 4nm chips — yield and quality reportedly on par with Taiwan fabs

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“For the first time ever in our country’s history, we are making leading-edge 4nm chips on American soil, American workers — on par in yield and quality with Taiwan,” Raimondo told Reuters.

Homomorphic Encryption in iOS 18

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“With that being said, technical understanding is no substitute for consent, which should have been requested by Apple along with a proper explanation.”

Starlink is now cheaper than leading internet provider in some African countries

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“In at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available, a monthly Starlink subscription is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider.”

Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“The astute reader will note that this is the 11th year in a row that the CEO of Tesla has made this prediction of the same milestone happening the next year. We can admire the consistency.”

Oracle refuses to yield JavaScript trademark, Deno Land says

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Deno Land also accused Oracle of committing fraud in its trademark renewal efforts in 2019 by submitting screen captures of the website of JavaScript runtime Node.js, even though Node.js was not affiliated with Oracle.”

Reversible Computing Escapes the Lab

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“The 4,000x energy-efficiency improvement is on Vaire’s road map but probably 10 or 15 years out.”

WorstFit: Unveiling Hidden Transformers in Windows ANSI!

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Curl said that this is a Windows feature and there are no plans to fix it.”

You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Customers are presented with three subscription options – their current plan, the cheaper “Classic” plan and a “Basic” OneDrive-only plan. Customers aren’t told about this option anywhere else.”

Quickwit joins Datadog

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“We will be heads down building a new product with Datadog, so to ensure our open-source community can continue on, we will soon release a new version of Quickwit under the Apache License 2.0.”

VLC tops 6 billion downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“VLC media player, the popular open source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system.”

How We Cracked a 512-Bit DKIM Key for Less Than $8 in the Cloud

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“Three decades ago, breaking a 512-bit RSA public key was a feat achievable only with a supercomputer. Today, it’s possible to do so in just a few hours for less than US$8 on a cloud server.”

Los Angeles wildfires force tens of thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“Some 400,000 residents are without power, and water pressure needed to fight the blazes is reportedly failing, with hydrants said to be running dry.”

White House unveils Cyber Trust Mark program for consumer devices

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“We want to signal and prime the pump with our own major tech purchases of the U.S. government that this is the way we move the internet of things market to be more secure,” she said.

More Speech and Fewer Mistakes

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program.”

A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“In essence, the voice phishers are using an automated Apple phone support line to send notifications from Apple and to trick people into thinking they’re really talking with Apple.”

Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“If you can’t beat Google, trick your users into thinking that they’re using Google.”

Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“It’s a cloud computing platform that sits on your desk.”

They squandered the holy grail

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“This is the holy grail for remotely attested trusted compute.”

'Browser extension that lets you earn money in exchange for watching ads' violates GPL by using uBlock Origin code

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 15:00:00 -0500

“Pie Adblock is not an open source project”

Meta Deletes AI-Generated Accounts After Backlash

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

“Meta has deleted some of the AI-generated users created for Facebook and Instagram after a severe backlash over the existence of the accounts.”

Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Shipping features from the roadmap is a chunk of our core job. It shouldn’t usually be in our OKRs.”

World's First MIDI Shellcode

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“I gained remote code execution via MIDI messages to trick my synth into playing Bad Apple on its LCD.”

You wouldn't download an AI

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“Many apps are starting to integrate AI models directly on the device.”

Amund's note on home server security

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“This also meant that it was exposed to the internet, with open ports in the router firewall and everything.”

Self-driving 1993 Volvo 940 (part 1: actuators)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“the car needs to be at least 20 years old, and with a day value of less than €1000.”

In Colorado, a marriage of solar energy and farming provides a model for a more sustainable future

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“The farm’s 3,276 solar panels generate enough electricity to power approximately 300 homes.”

One Dog v. the Windows 3.1 Graphics Stack

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Entering full-screen mode and then returning to the Windows GUI will leave you with a corrupted screen.”

Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“After benchmarking, the algorithm is extremely fast, resulting in about 6 milliseconds a run, or a 100x speedup.”

Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere.”

What we learned copying all the best code assistants

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Live by the fast follow; die by the fast follow.”

iTerm2 3.5.11 critical security release

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“A bug in the SSH integration feature caused input and output to be logged to a file on the remote host.”

U.S. appeals court strikes down FCC's net neutrality rules

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“The rules require broadband operators to treat all internet traffic equally and banned them from giving preferential treatment to some sites by speeding up or slowing down consumer access.”

The GPU, not the TPM, is the root of hardware DRM

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“While the FSF has been focusing on TPMs, GPU vendors have quietly deployed all of this technology without the FSF complaining at all.”

Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 18:00:00 -0500

“In March 2024, Redis Ltd. announced they were switching from the system’s original (very permissive) BSD-3 license to a dual license comprising the proprietary Redis Source Available License and MongoDB’s SSPL.”

Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 13:00:00 -0500

“On January 1, 2025, we celebrate published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entering the public domain!”

One of my papers got declined today

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0500

“Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me, happening once or twice a year on average.”

More telcos confirm China Salt Typhoon security breaches as White House weighs in

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“In one instance, the spies broke into an admin account that then gave them access to more than 100,000 routers, she added.”

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The model was trained on 2,788,000 H800 GPU hours at an estimated cost of $5,576,000.”

Why China Is Building a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Prior to China’s pilot project, the last operating molten-salt reactor was Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, which ran on uranium. It shut down in 1969.”

Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“He was trying to make gold, she said, but he ended up concocting a combination of copper and tin.”

Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“If you try to rate-limit them, they’ll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they’ll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really).”

Dumping Memory to Bypass BitLocker on Windows 11

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Before continuing I’d like to give Microsoft a round of applause for being kind enough to plainly mark where cryptographic keys show up in memory.”

Colliding with the SHA prefix of Linux's initial Git commit

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Doing the 12-character prefix collision took about 6 hours on my OpenCL-enabled RTX 3080 GPU.”

Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second.”

OpenAI's Board, Paraphrased: 'To Succeed, All We Need Is Unimaginable Sums of Money'

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble.”

4.5 Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Scams, and Malware

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“the majority of fake stars are used to promote short-lived malware repositories masquerading as pirating software, game cheats, or cryptocurrency bots”

Can LLMs Accurately Recall the Bible

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Many models struggled to recall Obadiah 1:16 NIV word for word, often mixing up the words with other translations.”

The Zombocom Problem

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“This is the Zombocom Problem: sure, it can be anything, but first it has to be something specific.”

Intel's $475 million error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“In 1994, Intel stated that the cause of the bug was that five entries were omitted from the table due to an error in a script. However, my analysis shows that 16 entries were omitted due to a mathematical mistake in the definition of the lookup table.”

EU law mandating universal chargers for devices comes into force

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The law was first approved in 2022 following a tussle with US tech giant Apple.”

Billionaire Daniel Ek Shuts Down Spotify Unwrapped Calculator

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“removed at the request of Spotify’s legal team”

Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Over the 11 years fish used C++, only 17 people have at least 10 commits to the C++ code.”

Russia-linked cable-cutting tanker seized by Finland 'was loaded with spying equipment'

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The hi-tech equipment on board was abnormal for a merchant ship and consumed more power from the ship’s generator, leading to repeated blackouts”

VW Suffers Major Breach Exposing Location of 800,000 Electric Vehicles

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“In some cases, the GPS data was precise to within 10 centimeters.”

They have not been trained for this

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Newag trains went into hibernation using a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek if they were parked for too long within the geocoordinates of competitors’ or customers’ workshops”

A fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and it's not clear YouTube can stop him

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“YouTube says over six percent of takedown requests through its public webform are likely fake, and the company accepts requests via plain email too, meaning anyone can file them.”

Bill requiring US agencies to share custom source code with each other becomes law

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Doing so, bill sponsors said, will address the inefficiency that can happen when agencies unknowingly hire contractors to develop code that has already been developed for another agency.”

OpenAI is Visa

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“As Visa’s technological moat dried up, it built a legal moat, and there are already signs OpenAI is doing the same.”

Seconds Since the Epoch

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The POSIX time number is twenty-seven seconds lower.”

Cashing in on GIF by charging royalties

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“On December 24, 1994, Compuserve and Unisys tried to give themselves a Christmas gift and make the Internet pay for it.”

Russian air defence missile incident emerges as likely cause of Azerbaijan Airlines crash

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“surviving passengers heard an explosion followed by what looked like shrapnel hitting the plane and damaging the fuselage.”

Three-quarters of the world's land is drying out, 'redefining life on Earth'

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“New research has found global warming has made 77 percent of the Earth’s land drier over the past three decades while rapidly increasing the proportion of excessively salty soils.”

Portspoof

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Instead of informing an attacker that a port is CLOSED or FILTERED, Portspoof returns SYN+ACK for every connection attempt.”

Ruby 3.4.0 Released

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“String literals in files without a frozen_string_literal comment now emit a deprecation warning when they are mutated.”

Intel shareholders look to yank back ex-CEO, CFO compensation

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“As a result of the individual defendants’ breaches of fiduciary duty and other misconduct, Intel has sustained substantial damages and irreparable injury to its reputation”

Cloudflare Must Block 'Piracy Shield' Domains and IP Addresses Across its Service

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The Court of Milan’s decision prohibits Cloudflare from resolving domain names and routing internet traffic to IP addresses of all services present on the “Piracy Shield” system.”

Open source projects drown in bad bug reports penned by AI

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“These reports appear at first glance to be potentially legitimate and thus require time to refute.”

Trying out QvQ: Qwen's new visual reasoning model

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“It produced a very lengthy chain of thought that was almost entirely incorrect, but had some interesting “ideas” in it”

Ascension: Health data of 5.6 million stolen in ransomware attack

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The company now mails data breach notifications to 5,599,699 affected individuals via the United States Postal Service.”

'United Healthcare' Using DMCA Against Luigi Mangione Images Which Is Bizarre & Wildly Inappropriate

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The idea that UHC now owns every depiction of the guy accused of killing their employee is laughably frivolous.”

Why Are Cancer Guidelines Stuck in PDFs?

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The guidelines represent hundreds of thousands of hours of expert oncologists’ time. But the end result is a dense and hard to navigate PDF.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says search giant has slashed manager roles by 10% in efficiency drive

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“In total, Google has reduced the number of managers, directors, and vice presidents within its workforce by 10%, Pichai said during an all-hands meeting on Wednesday.”

Dec 22: Why we use our own hardware at Fastmail

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“We find our hardware can provide useful life for anywhere from 5-10 years depending on what it is and when in the global technology cycle it was bought, meaning we can amortise and depreciate the cost of any hardware over many years.”

Classified fighter jet specs leaked on War Thunder – again

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The War Thunder forums are at the centre of yet another controversy following the leak of classified documents related to the Eurofighter Typhoon’s radar systems.”

i sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS'24

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“companies do not need as many PhD’s as before, since they can recruit bachelor’s or master’s students who can contribute immediately and directly to AI-based products following the standardized process.”

How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“They used a Bloom filter, which is very space efficient and fits in a CPU cache line.”

Pegasus spyware maker NSO Group is liable for attacks on 1,400 WhatsApp users

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The spyware maker has argued that it isn’t liable because Pegasus was operated by clients investigating crimes and cases of national security but the judge rejected those arguments, which could establish a precedent for other companies in the same business.”

The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names.”

dropping hyper

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“There simply were no users asking for it and there were almost no developers interested or knowledgeable enough to work on it.”

Introducing S2

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Our Standard storage class provides end-to-end p99 latencies of under 500 milliseconds.”

OpenAI o3 Breakthrough High Score on ARC-AGI-Pub

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“OpenAI’s new o3 system - trained on the ARC-AGI-1 Public Training set - has scored a breakthrough 75.7% on the Semi-Private Evaluation set at our stated public leaderboard $10k compute limit.”

I'm Lovin' It: Exploiting McDonald's APIs to hijack deliveries and order food for a penny

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Order IDs are sequential, meaning you can keep adding 1 to the number to get the details of the next order, and in turn get even more user information.”

Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“We’re implementing logic that determines how often to show a nudge so as not to overwhelm users, but we don’t let them permanently opt out of passkey invitations”

Do Autonomous Vehicles Outperform Latest-Generation Human-Driven Vehicles? A Comparison to Waymo's Auto Liability Insurance Claims at 25 Million Miles

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Results demonstrate that the Waymo ADS significantly outperformed both the overall driving population (88% reduction in property damage claims, 92% in bodily injury claims), and outperformed the more stringent latest-generation HDV benchmark (86% reduction in property damage claims and 90% in bodily injury claims).”

Alignment faking in large language models

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“In 12% of cases, the model gave the harmful response (describing the violent execution method in detail), and did so after its scratchpad revealed that it was strategically faking alignment.”

First baby conceived via breakthrough fertility tech born

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Gameto says the Fertilo procedure avoids 80% of the hormone injections that traditional IVF requires and reduces the duration of a treatment cycle to three days.”

GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access.”

Satellite powered estimation of global solar potential

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“With this expansion, we unlock the use of satellite imagery for solar potential estimation, resulting in 125 million new buildings with Solar API data across 23 countries.”

More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The moderators from Kenya and other African countries were tasked from 2019 to 2023 with checking posts emanating from Africa and in their own languages but were paid eight times less than their counterparts in the US, according to the claim documents.”

How to Lose a Fortune with Just One Bad Click

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from google.com, and ultimately seized control over the account by convincing him to click “yes” to a Google prompt on his mobile device.”

Klarna's CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI but still advertises many open positions

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 roles around the globe, according to the job postings page on its website.”

Dwingeloo telescope receives signals from Voyager 1

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Only a few telescopes in the world have received these signals, which are very faint due to the distance of Voyager 1: almost 25 billion kilometers, more than four times the distance to Pluto.”

ISO 8583: The language of credit cards

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“As a result, these specifications still largely follow the rules set forth by the original standard from 1987.”

Partnering with Nihon Kotsu and GO on our first international road trip

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Initially, Nihon Kotsu drivers will operate the vehicles manually to map key areas of the Japanese capital, including Minato, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Chiyoda, Chūō, Shinagawa, and Kōtō.”

Temu is the most downloaded app on the US App Store in 2024

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Chinese shopping app Temu was once again the most downloaded free app in the U.S., according to a list of top apps and games across the App Store released by Apple on Monday.”

Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Smartphone users in general are unsatisfied with the existing AI features as the survey recorded 73% of Apple Intelligence users and 87% of Galaxy AI users stating the new features to be either ‘not very valuable’ or they ‘add little to no value’ to their smartphone experience.”

UnitedHealth's Optum left an AI chatbot, used by employees to ask questions about claims, exposed to the internet

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The chat history shows Optum employees would ask the chatbot things like “What should be the determination of the claim?” and “How do I check policy renewal date?””

Rhode Island's online benefits system shuts down after cyberattack

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Governor Dan McKee said during a press briefing that attackers may have gotten personal info like names, addresses, and social security numbers of those who’ve used the system between 2019 to now.”

Supply-chain attack analysis: Ultralytics

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The second round of malicious releases came from the attacker using an unrevoked PyPI API token that was still available to the GitHub Actions workflow, potentially a hold-over from before the project adopted Trusted Publishing.”

Tenstorrent and the State of AI Hardware Startups

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“I ate one cookie and drank a bottle of water.”

Why Dumb TVs Deserve a Comeback

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“A common security risk associated with smart TVs is Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which tracks what’s on your screen and sends this data to advertisers.”

Scientists sheds light on how our brains create mental "chapters" with new event segmentation study

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The major new finding in this study is that these chapters don’t just come from the way the story is written.”

School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban, and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night.”

You're a Mean One

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Since Apple took away the ability for 3rd parties (eg, us) to copy the OS, and took on the responsibility themselves, it’s been up to them to ensure this functionality continues to work.”

What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know.

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Entropy depends not on the difference between the gases, but on their distinguishability.”

Fast LLM Inference From Scratch

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“With this patch, we’re now neck-and-neck with llama.cpp for long-context generations - at 58.7 tok/s vs. 58.8 tok/s - while handily beating it for short contexts at 63.8 tok/s vs. 61.0 tok/s.”

McKinsey & Company to pay $650 million for role in opioid crisis

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“This resolution marks the first time a management consulting firm has been criminally responsible for advice it has given resulting in the commission of a crime by a client”

US Bitcoin ATM operator Byte Federal suffered a data breach

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Potentially compromised customer personal information includes name, birthdate, address, phone number, email address, government-issued ID, social security number, transaction activity, and photographs of users.”

300,000+ Prometheus Servers and Exporters Exposed to DoS Attacks

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Such misconfigurations allow anyone to query the exposed environments to list labels or metrics.”

Harvard and Google to release 1 million public-domain books as AI training dataset

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The new dataset isn’t available yet, and it’s not clear when or how it will be released.”

Microsoft Recall screenshots credit cards and Social Security numbers, even with the "sensitive information" filter enabled

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“However, what my experiment proves is that it’s pretty much impossible for Microsoft’s AI filter to identify every situation where sensitive information is on screen and avoid capturing it.”

Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“A calendar pops up after you check a box to cancel. The next available date is 26 of December. Our renewal date is [December] 17,” Ryan told TechCrunch.

Fermat's Last Theorem: how it's going

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“This story really highlights, to me, the poor job which humans do of documenting modern mathematics.”

Over 2,400 Voice Service Providers Face Removal for Failing to Comply with the Robocall Mitigation Database Filing Requirements

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau announced that 2,411 voice service providers failed to properly file in the Robocall Mitigation Database and must show cause why they should not be removed.”

Court orders Automattic to restore WP Engine's access to WordPress.org

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“A California district court judge on Tuesday ruled that Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg must restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, a theme and plug-in repository owned by Mullenweg.”

Wyden proposes bill to secure US telecoms after Salt Typhoon hacks

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“It was inevitable that foreign hackers would burrow deep into the American communications system the moment the FCC decided to let phone companies write their own cybersecurity rules.”

X41 Reviewed Mullvad VPN

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The most serious vulnerabilities are considered to be race conditions and temporal safety violations leading to memory corruption issues in the signal handler code.”

GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service.”

Lawsuit: A chatbot hinted a kid should kill his parents over screen time limits

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“This was ongoing manipulation and abuse, active isolation and encouragement designed to and that did incite anger and violence.”

The Google Willow thing

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“We’re now deeply into the unverifiable regime that I warned about.”

U.S. math scores drop on major international test

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“We have countries leapfrogging over us,” Carr said.

Compromising OpenWrt Supply Chain via Truncated SHA-256 Collision and Command Injection

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“I immediately noticed that the length of the hash is truncated to 12, out of 64 characters.”

Why Gelsinger was wrong for Intel

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“With regard to these cultural issues (and his other strengths aside), Pat Gelsinger was indisputably wrong for Intel.”

Atrium Health Data Breach Impacts 585,000 People

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Atrium said it’s difficult to precisely determine what data was transmitted to third-parties, but it’s assuming that all users of the MyAtriumHealth or MyCarolinas patient portal between January 2015 and July 2019 are affected.”

Airline informant received thousands from passenger cash seizures

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The DEA wasn’t keeping records of its encounters unless it found cash or drugs,” Horowitz said.

The £25,000 Tom Evans Pre-Amp Repair And A Copyright Strike

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The biggest question is what exactly was copyrighted in the original video, which was tough because YouTube refused to pass on [Mark]’s questions or provide further details.”

How Much Do I Need to Change My Face to Avoid Facial Recognition?

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Asking our governments to create laws to protect us is much easier than changing our faces dramatically all the time.”

UK bans daytime TV ads for cereals, muffins and burgers

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The government hopes the new measures could help prevent some 20,000 cases of childhood obesity a year.”

"Eat What You Kill"

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Then you’re going to pay me more, because I’m doing more work.”

"BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“BGP peering in a residential setting proved to be an entirely different story.”

We all took the DVD boom era for granted

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Sadly, the DVD boom couldn’t last forever.”

Employee lawsuit accuses Apple of spying on its workers

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“For Apple employees, the Apple ecosystem is not a walled garden. It is a prison yard.”

Tokyo government gives workers 4-day workweek to boost fertility, family time

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Only 727,277 births were recorded last year, with the fertility rate - the number of children a woman has in her lifetime - dropping to a fresh low of 1.2, according to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.”

Telecom Giant BT Group Hit by Black Basta Ransomware

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“We identified an attempt to compromise our BT Conferencing platform. This incident was restricted to specific elements of the platform, which were rapidly taken offline and isolated.”

Disclosure of the Metaserver CDN Source Code

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“This subtle, almost unnoticed modification effectively privatized the open-source repository by this individual, preventing any further open-source collaboration.”

McKinsey unit will pay $123 million to settle claims it bribed South African officials

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The bribery scheme helped McKinsey and McKinsey Africa net approximately $85 million in profits, the DOJ said.”

OpenAI confirms new $200 monthly subscription, ChatGPT Pro, which includes its o1 reasoning model

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Oddly enough, though, the full o1 performs worse than the preview version on a number of common benchmarks.”

Next stop: Miami

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“In early 2025, we’ll begin reacquainting Waymo’s all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs to Miami’s streets.”

GPS-alternative tech swaps satellites for Earth fingerprints

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“In fact, the system is reportedly simple enough that it doesn’t utilize any AI.”

FTC bans data brokers from selling Americans' sensitive location data

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Virginia-based Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel used this information to build products and services, allowing customers to search through at least three years of historical data (including raw, precise mobile location data).”

Why Phishers Love New TLDs Like .shop, .top and .xyz

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The problem is that ICANN can’t make up their mind whether they are the neutral nonprofit regulator or just the domain speculator trade association”

Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Genie 2 can generate consistent worlds for up to a minute, with the majority of examples shown lasting 10-20s.”

Stop Using Predictable Bucket Names: A Failed Attempt at Hacking Satellites

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“So what would happen if an attacker created securityrunners-packages-us-west-2 and an engineer decided to start exploring deploying resources in that region. Well now an attacker can arbitrarily execute code on your systems.”

Introducing Amazon Nova foundation models: Frontier intelligence and industry leading price performance

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Every generated image and video include digital watermarking.”

Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“He stated it was going to be problematic if Adchemy was embroiled in litigation while discussing the Microsoft deal.”

12-pound US robot balloons capture NYC-sized areas in jaw-dropping details

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Many insurance companies are still relying on aerial data collection methods from the 1950s to assess 2024’s climate risks”

Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“On behalf of the board, I want to thank Pat for his many years of service and dedication to Intel”

Proposed amendment to legal presumption about the reliability of computers

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“This amendment overturns the current legal assumption that evidence from computers is always reliable which has contributed to miscarriages of justice including the Horizon Scandal.”

Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world, sources say

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Critically, Meta will be the sole owner and user of this subsea cable”

SpyLoan Android malware on Google Play installed 8 million times

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Once a user gets a loan through the app, they are bound to high-interest payments, and regularly harassed and blackmailed by the operators using the data stolen from their phones.”

Beekeepers halt honey awards over 'huge fraud' in global supply chain

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“This change to remove honey as a category was necessitated by the inability to have honey fully tested for adulteration.”

First Router Designed Specifically For OpenWrt Released

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Priced at US$89 for a complete OpenWrt One with case, it’s ready for a wide variety of use cases.”

Researchers Use AI To Turn Sound Recordings Into Accurate Street Images

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Our study found that acoustic environments contain enough visual cues to generate highly recognizable streetscape images that accurately depict different places.”

The World's Rarest Mineral Is So Rare It's Only Ever Been Found Once

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“There’s a mineral so rare that only one specimen of it has ever been found in the entire world.”

A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Microsoft are well aware of the extensive history of problems with this CA - I emailed them my concerns in 2021, and further issues were raised during a public CCADB discussion in 2022 - but they clearly don’t care.”

Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“It truly is shitty that Deye didn’t run this geographical check at the initial installation of these inverters.”

AMD Disables Zen 4's Loop Buffer

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“They did so without any announcement or fanfare.”

A transport protocol's view of Starlink

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Finally, within each 15-second satellite tracking interval, the latency variation is relatively high.”

New York Fines Geico and Travelers $11 Million Over Data Breaches

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Geico was notified several times of an industry-wide hacking campaign aimed at information theft from online automobile insurance quoting applications and responded to separate incidents, but did not take the necessary measures to protect its systems.”

NHS major 'cyber incident' forces hospitals to pen and paper

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“We have reverted to our business continuity processes and are using paper rather than digital in the areas affected.”

The deterioration of Google

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“They are a monopoly and monopolies are extremely effective at capturing whatever value happens in their vicinity, even if the utility of their products declines.”

Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“They account for 28% of microplastics entering the environment globally.”

Children and teenagers under 16 to be banned from social media after parliament passes world-first laws

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“There are no penalties for young people or parents who flout the rules.”

Hetzner raises prices while significantly lowering bandwidth (US)

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Bandwidth allotments are decreasing on average, across all products, 88.19% from previous allotments.”

Bootkitty: Analyzing the first UEFI bootkit for Linux

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“That said, its existence underscores an important message: UEFI bootkits are no longer confined to Windows systems alone.”

Engineers Do Not Get To Make Startup Mistakes When They Build Ledgers

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Ledgers are systems that track down money.”

Lights Out: Tools for controlling webcam LED on ThinkPad X230

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“These were created as a practical demonstration that malware can record video through the webcam without the LED indication.”

Cloudflare incident on November 14, 2024, resulting in lost logs

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“During the roughly 3.5 hours that these services were impacted, about 55% of the logs we normally send to customers were not sent and were lost.”

Introducing some changes to our Web API

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Applications with existing extended mode Web API access that were relying on these endpoints remain unaffected by this change.”

Software firm Blue Yonder providing services to US and UK stores, including Starbucks, hit by ransomware attack

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“It’s unclear if the attackers have stolen information from the company.”

D-Link says it won't patch 60,000 older modems, as they're not worth saving

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Roughly 60,000 vulnerable devices are currently connected to the internet, the majority being located in Taiwan.”

Tesla appears to be building a teleoperations team for its robotaxi service

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“In 2019, the billionaire executive predicted that Tesla would have over a million robotaxis on the road by 2020.”

Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows: it's not just AI code editors

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“YC commonly accepts startups that are building similar or nearly identical products to previous YC grads.”

Google is inserting search links into webpages in the Google App now

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The difference, though, is that site owners have to opt into the ad intents, instead of opting out.”

Do you need ID to read the REAL-ID rules?

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“You shouldn’t need ID to read the law, just as you shouldn’t need ID to travel by common carrier.”

Deno v. Oracle: Canceling the JavaScript Trademark

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Oracle neither controls nor has ever controlled the language’s specification or usage.”

Italian food delivery app Foodinho eats another privacy fine

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Foodinho has also been banned from using riders’ biometric data, such as facial recognition, for identity verification.”

Amazon S3 adds new functionality for conditional writes

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Amazon S3 can now perform conditional writes that evaluate if an object is unmodified before updating it.”

Senators Say TSA's Facial Recognition Program Is Out of Control, Here's How to Opt Out

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“This technology will soon be in use at hundreds of major and mid-size airports without an independent evaluation of the technology’s precision or an audit of whether there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect passenger privacy”

The two factions of C++

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“We must minimize the need to change existing code. For adoption in existing code, decades of experience has consistently shown that most customers with large code bases cannot and will not change even 1% of their lines of code in order to satisfy strictness rules, not even for safety reasons unless regulatory requirements compel them to do so.”

Pushing AMD's Infinity Fabric to its Limits

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Latency shoots past 400 ns when fighting with five bandwidth threads.”

Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“A standard config format, a deployment method, an overlay network, service discovery, immutable nodes, and an API server. Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes.”

'I have no money': Thousands of Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“That’s mostly because the estate of Andreessen Horowitz-backed Synapse doesn’t have the money to hire an outside firm to perform a full reconciliation of its ledgers, according to Jelena McWilliams, the bankruptcy trustee.”

Antenna diodes in the Pentium processor

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The voltage induced by the plasma can destroy the transistor by blowing a hole through the gate oxide or it can degrade the transistor’s performance by embedding charges inside the oxide layer.”

Check Out the Highest-Resolution Images Ever Captured of the Sun's Entire Surface

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Each image is actually a mosaic of 25 high-resolution shots snapped by the Solar Orbiter mission on March 22, 2023.”

Revisiting the DOS memory models

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Huge: Uses huge pointers everywhere. This overcomes the limitations of the large model by emitting code to compute the absolute addresses of every memory access and allows structs and arrays that span over 64 KB of memory.”

The Nearest Neighbor Attack: How A Russian APT Weaponized Nearby Wi-Fi Networks for Covert Access

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The Enterprise Wi-Fi network, however, did not require MFA and only required a user’s valid domain username and password to authenticate.”

Feds Charge Five Men in 'Scattered Spider' Roundup

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The group then used their access to Twilio to attack at least 163 of its customers.”

Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.”

The AI Reporter That Took My Old Job Just Got Fired

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“In one particularly stilted exchange about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And how have these free pumpkins impacted the community?” to which James responded, “The free pumpkins have brought joy to many.””

Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 billion, says Menlo Ventures

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Menlo is an investor in Anthropic.”

How Oxide Cuts Data Center Power Consumption in Half

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies.”

Handling Cookies is a Minefield

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Python invisibly aborts the loading of additional cookies inside SimpleCookie.load() as soon as it encounters one it doesn’t understand.”

OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“In many ways, this feels less like engineering and more like a search for spells.”

Fintech Giant Finastra Investigating Data Breach

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Finastra, which provides software and services to 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, notified customers of the security incident after a cybercriminal began selling more than 400 gigabytes of data purportedly stolen from the company.”

Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting in 2025

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“For families with income from $100,000 to $200,000, with typical assets, parents can expect to pay on a sliding scale from $0 up to a maximum of around $23,970”

Strava closes the gates to sharing fitness data with other apps

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The policy is effective as of November 11th, even though Strava’s own post about the change is dated November 15th.”

Weight-loss drug found to shrink heart muscle in mice, human cells

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“up to 40 per cent of the weight lost by people using weight-loss drugs is actually muscle.”

Llama 3.1 405B now runs at 969 tokens/s on Cerebras Inference

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Cerebras Inference generated 969 output tokens/s when given a 1,000 token prompt.”

Which Power Plant Does My Electricity Come From?

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Power brokers (mainly Enron) were manipulating the newly de-regulated market for bulk electricity, forcing prices to skyrocket.”

Rust Foundation Releases Problem Statement on C++/Rust Interoperability

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“This “Interop Initiative” was launched in February 2024 with a generous $1M contribution from Google.”

I'm a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive: their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Bringing Pavlovian conditioning into the mix, rats had to wait 15 minutes after a Lego block was placed in their cage before they received a Froot Loop.”

Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted, sparking warnings of possible ‘hybrid warfare’

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“We can confirm that the internet traffic disruption was not caused by equipment failure but by physical damage to the fiber optic cable.”

Teen Behind Hundreds of Swatting Attacks Pleads Guilty to Federal Charges

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Between approximately August 2022 to January 2024 Filion made more than 375 swatting calls, according to the plea agreement.”

We are shutting down Ondsel

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“While we found support among independent and hobbyist users who genuinely wanted us to succeed, we failed to find commercial adoption to justify a venture-capitalized startup.”

Electricity provider Tibber hacked, 50,000 German customers affected

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“They are authentic: the data records originate from a breach in the Tibber store.”

Oxford relying on ‘Deliveroo-style’ contracts with most tutorials not taught by full-time staff

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Data obtained through freedom of information requests by the University and College Union and shared exclusively with the Observer reveals that about 61% of core tutorial teaching is done by academics on fixed-term contracts or in hourly-paid roles.”

Humans have already caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Our study shows that human societies have caused more than 1.5 degrees of long-term global warming.”

Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“A better option is to just write one version of Windows 95 setup and use it for all three starting points.”

AlphaProof's Greatest Hits

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Finding these mathematical ideas is hard enough, and having to prove them in Lean makes things even harder.”

How many people watched Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson? Netflix fight draws huge audience despite streaming issues

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“What viewers got instead was an amalgam of buffering issues, choppy analysis and the dreaded "black screen of death."”

YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“LLMs primarily pump out mediocre Verilog code.”

M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Running a macOS VM for any version before 13.4 Ventura on an M4 Mac results in a black screen, and the VM fails to boot.”

Astronomers discover two galaxies aligned in a way where their gravity acts as a compound lens

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“A compound lens, as its name suggests, is made up of two lenses.”

Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands: Study

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Tesla vehicles have a fatal crash rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven, according to the study”

Five Eyes infosec agencies list 2023's most exploited software flaws

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“We cover these lists every year, but the same names keep cropping up.”

ModeLeak: Privilege Escalation to LLM Model Exfiltration in Vertex AI

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“This research highlights how a single malicious model deployment could compromise an entire AI environment.”

Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Cloudflare shouldn’t expect people to contact every owner of every Cloudflare website that blocks their RSS reader.”

I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and was Charged $1,100

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“I hadn’t selected the most expensive OS instance type. I hadn’t even used it much at all.”

Just Eat is selling Grubhub to Marc Lore’s Wonder for $650M

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Just Eat is selling off Grubhub to fancy food hall delivery startup Wonder in a deal worth $650 million.”

O2 unveils Daisy, the AI granny wasting scammers’ time

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“It’s a bad day to be a phone scammer.”

Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents.”

Amazon shuts down secret project to develop fertility tracker

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“On the morning of Oct. 28, employees working on the fertility tracker were told to join a videoconference where a director of the team informed them that the project was ending. The call lasted about two minutes, one of the people said.”

No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“No tracking. No cookies. Your vibration data is your own damn business!”

Snowflake hackers identified and charged with stealing 50 billion AT&T records

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“AT&T is just one of several victims who had sensitive data stolen from their Snowflake instances.”

Genetic testing firm 23andMe cuts 40% of its workforce amid financial struggles

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The company has been left with few options as its value has plummeted in the aftermath of a massive data breach.”

Abusing Ubuntu 24.04 features for root privilege escalation

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Do not be afraid to temporarily decrease your privileges if it might help you get higher privileges on the way out.”

Amazon Confirms Employee Contact Info Stolen Through Hack

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The only Amazon information involved was employee work contact information, for example, work email addresses, desk phone numbers, and building locations.”

Bufstream 0.1.0

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Records written as a part of a committed transaction could vanish, never to be seen again.”

Bypassing regulatory locks, Faraday cages and upgrading your hearing

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“To build our initial version of the cage, we lined and wrapped a cardboard box with Aluminium foil.”

This $8,000 Suzuki From India Received A 5-Star Crash Test Rating

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Even the standard Dzire has six airbags, ESP, hill hold assist, and pedestrian protection.”

D-Link won't fix critical flaw affecting 60,000 older NAS devices

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“D-Link has confirmed that a fix for CVE-2024-10914 is not coming”

Voyager 1 Breaks Its Silence With NASA via a Radio Transmitter Not Used Since 1981

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“it takes almost 23 hours for a command to reach the craft and another 23 hours for its response to reach scientists.”

Inside the $20 million business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“According to Jose Mendoza, the company’s affable warehouse manager of two decades, about 65% of the inventory comes from shuttered tech companies.”

New Elliptic Curve Breaks 18-Year-Old Record

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Mathematicians need at least 29 independent points to characterize them.”

Hackers now use ZIP file concatenation to evade detection

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The technique exploits the different methods ZIP parsers and archive managers handle concatenated .ZIP files.”

OpenID Connect specifications published as ISO standards

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“This should foster even broader adoption of OpenID Connect”

π0: Our First Generalist Policy

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“More complex and dexterous tasks may require the model to be fine-tuned to specialize it to downstream challenges.”

Somebody moved UK's oldest satellite, and no-one knows who or why

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Someone moved the UK’s oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why.”

When Machine Learning Tells the Wrong Story

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“if a model can reliably predict user activity, it proves the presence of a signal, but not the cause of that signal.”

Memories are not only in the brain, human cell study finds

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“It shows that the ability to learn from spaced repetition isn’t unique to brain cells”

OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“A high-quality, reproducible code pretraining corpus comprising 960 Billion tokens across 607 programming languages.”

FDA Proposes Ending Use of Oral Phenylephrine as OTC Monograph Nasal Decongestant Active Ingredient After Extensive Review

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“after an agency review of the available data determined that oral phenylephrine is not effective for this use.”

A New Era of macOS Sandbox Escapes: Diving into an Overlooked Attack Surface and Uncovering 10+ New Vulnerabilities

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“There are 5 reports still in the patching queue”

Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Claude became available on Palantir’s platform earlier this month and can now be used in Palantir’s defense-accredited environment, Palantir Impact Level 6 (IL6)”

Cops Suspect iOS 18 iPhones Are Communicating to Force Reboots, Making Unlocking Harder

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“This can be very detrimental to the acquisition of digital evidence”

How WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Chromium’s WebSocket implementation would fragment it into 24 separate WebSocket frames.”

Google Banned Me From Google Voice

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“We have reviewed your request and cannot reinstate your Google Voice service.”

OpenAI acquired Chat.com

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“As of this morning, Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT.”

Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada: but Canadians can still use it

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The statement stressed that the government is not blocking Canadians from accessing the app or using it to create content.”

Okta AD/LDAP Delegated Authentication - Username Above 52 Characters

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The Bcrypt algorithm was used to generate the cache key where we hash a combined string of userId + username + password.”

INTERPOL cyber operation takes down 22,000 malicious IP addresses

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Of the approximately 30,000 suspicious IP addresses identified, 76 per cent were taken down and 59 servers were seized.”

Upcoming hardening in PHP

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“I find it fascinating that people are putting so much efforts optimizing exploitation techniques, yet ~nobody bothers fixing them, even if it only takes a couple of lines of code and 20 minutes.”

Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.””

Regulators deliver successive blows to Amazon and Meta’s nuclear power ambitions

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees the U.S. electricity and natural gas grids, voted 2-1 on November 1 to deny the expansion of an existing data center power agreement that would have allowed Amazon to connect directly to the power plant.”

Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Last year, French media outlet La Lettre reported that until 2021, Netflix in France minimised its tax payments by declaring its turnover generated in France to the Netherlands.”

For the first time ever, AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Indeed, AMD’s datacenter segment revenue reached $3.549 billion in the third quarter, whereas Intel’s datacenter and AI group’s earnings were $3.3 billion in Q3 2024.”

Ticketmaster's Attempt to Game Arbitration Services Fails-Heckman v. Live Nation

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“In an effort to curb mass arbitration, Ticketmaster sought to switch arbitration service providers to New Era ADR, including for past ticket purchases.”

How Albertsons Kills Rural Grocers with Land Use Restrictions

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“They even have a name, “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zones,” according to one executive on the stand.”

From Naptime to Big Sleep: Using Large Language Models To Catch Vulnerabilities In Real-World Code

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“We believe this is the first public example of an AI agent finding a previously unknown exploitable memory-safety issue in widely used real-world software.”

Booking.com Phishers May Leave You With Reservations

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“One post last month on the Russian-language hacking forum BHF offered up to $5,000 for each hotel account.”

Touchscreens Are Out, and Tactile Controls Are Back

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“There was this kind of touchscreen mania, where all of a sudden everything became a touchscreen.”

Security flaws found in all Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Update drivers ASAP!

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“According to Nvidia, it’s possible for attackers to gain access to your entire system by exploiting one of the vulnerabilities.”

Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“But this functionality is mostly not needed in an embedded application, so the additional complexity of systemd is a cost without a benefit.”

Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google data-center networking evolution

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“To put this data rate in perspective, this network could support a video call (@1.5 Mb/s) for all 8 billion people on Earth!”

131M American Buildings

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Compared to anything I’ve seen from Microsoft and Google, this dataset appears to have much more accurate building footprints to the point I initially thought they were manually surveyed.”

Rewrite it in Rails

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“After probably a good year of writing Rust and Svelte, it dawned on me that our users didn’t benefit from any of this.”

Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Ideally in a web application, aside from some in-memory caches, no object allocated as part of a request should survive longer than the request itself.”

Hacking cars in JavaScript (Running replay attacks in the browser with the HackRF)

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“My ultimate goal was to answer the question… is it possible to hack a car using JavaScript?”

Tens of thousands of taxpayer accounts hacked as CRA repeatedly paid out millions in bogus refunds

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Imposters used the company’s confidential credentials to get unauthorized access into hundreds of Canadians’ personal CRA accounts, change direct deposit information, submit false returns and pocket more than $6 million in bogus refunds from the public purse, an investigation by CBC’s The Fifth Estate and Radio-Canada has found.”

Nvidia to join Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing rival chipmaker Intel

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Nvidia is replacing rival chipmaker Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in artificial intelligence and a major shift in the semiconductor industry.”

Meta is using more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 AI GPUs to train Llama-4: Mark Zuckerberg says that Llama 4 is being trained on a cluster "bigger than anything that I've seen"

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Mark Zuckerberg said on a Meta earnings call earlier this week that the company is training Llama 4 models “on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100 AI GPUs, or bigger than anything that I’ve seen reported for what others are doing.””

RCE Vulnerability in QBittorrent

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“qBittorrent has had this behaviour from June 2015 until the present, affecting v3.2.1 through v5.0.0 inclusive.”

Matt Mullenweg says Automattic is 'very short-staffed' amid WordPress vs. WP Engine drama

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This second deal offered nine months of severance, but employees only had four hours to respond.”

Sorry, Gas Companies - Parody Isn't Infringement (Even If It Creeps You Out)

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“TotalEnergies also sent a demand to the website’s hosting service, Netlify, that got repaer.earth taken offline.”

Fuzzing between the lines in popular barcode software

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Even with this simple approach, we managed to find some bugs in the library.”

Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“However, it’s only being forced for kernel-level anti-cheat.”

An update from Drew

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“We continue to see softening demand and macro headwinds in our core business.”

CrowdStrike, Delta sue each other over flight disruptions

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“CrowdStrike sued Delta Air Lines on Friday after a faulty software update prompted a global outage in July.”

International law enforcement operation dismantled RedLine and Meta infostealers

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Authorities discovered that over 1 200 servers in dozens of countries were running the malware.”

One weird trick to get the whole planet to send abuse complaints to your best friend(s)

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The internet was broken 25 years ago and is still broken 25 years later.”

Tesla releases rare blog post and it's an interesting one: Standardizing Auto Connectivity

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Tesla introduced a new 48-volt low-voltage electronic architecture in the Cybertruck, or a hybrid version of it, to be fair.”

China's first space tourism venture sells first pair of tickets

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The two ticket holders will pay an initial ¥50,000 ($7,000) deposit.”

RIP botsin.space

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“However, they’ve generated something like 32 million statuses.”

buy payphones and retire

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Edwards sold nearly 50,000 payphones on this basis, many of them in deals of over $100,000.”

Over 70 zero-day flaws get hackers $1 million at Pwn2Own Ireland

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Team Cluck used a chain of six vulnerabilities to move from the QNAP QHora-322 to the Lexmark CX331adwe.”

Fortinet warns of new critical FortiManager flaw used in zero-day attacks

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Fortinet warns that not all IOCs may be present on exploited devices.”

Insurance admin Landmark says data breach impacts 800,000 people

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“During this investigation, Landmark says it found evidence that the threat actor accessed some files during the attack that contained the personal information of 806,519 people.”

Four REvil Ransomware members sentenced for hacking and money laundering

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“Russian authorities sentenced four members of the REvil ransomware operation to several years in prison in Russia.”

Character Amnesia in China

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand.”

How we shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size by 94%

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The most recent clone I did of the repo clocked in at an astonishing 178GB.”

Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Ibis is still in a very early stage, but it has the potential to completely change the way online encyclopedias work.”

New Windows Driver Signature bypass allows kernel rootkit installs

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft still has to address the Windows Update takeover issue.”

ZombAIs: From Prompt Injection to C2 with Claude Computer Use

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Claude happily clicked the link to download the Support Tool”

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“However, the EU still doesn’t have a clear definition of open source AI.”

Understanding Round Robin DNS

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“To my biggest surprise, Safari always selects the closest server correctly.”

Victory Is Sweet: We Can Now Fix McDonald's Ice Cream Machines

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame.”

LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“As well as being fined, LinkedIn has been given three months to bring its European operations into compliance with the GDPR.”

Penn State pays DoJ $1.25M to settle cybersecurity compliance case

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Penn State told the government in late 2020 that it hadn’t implemented all the requirements”

Security research on Private Cloud Compute

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We provide this source under a limited-use license agreement to allow you to perform deeper analysis of PCC.”

Improve licensing language

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Anything contained within a directory named bitwarden_license is covered solely by the BITWARDEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT LICENSE.”

Apple analyst Kuo says company cut iPhone 16 orders 10 million units

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“However, significant growth in iPhone shipments will likely require further hardware innovation to accompany this AI development.”

Tesla has been testing a robotaxi service in the Bay Area for most of the year

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The vehicles arrive with safety drivers behind the wheel, ready to intervene in case anything goes wrong.”

The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.”

Goldman and Apple 'illegally sidestepped' obligations to credit-card customers: CFPB

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“As part of the agreement, Apple had the right to impose a $25 million penalty for each 90-day delay caused by Goldman.”

Google: 70% of exploited flaws disclosed in 2023 were zero-days

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Specifically, of the 138 vulnerabilities disclosed as actively exploited in 2023, Mandiant says 97 (70.3%) were leveraged as zero-days.”

Most Forest Service Trail Workers Are About To Lose Their Jobs: Here's Why

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In September, the agency announced that it would be suspending all seasonal hiring for the 2025 season, a decision that will cut about 2,400 jobs.”

Here's What TurboTax's Boss Doesn't Want You to Hear

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Following the interview, however, Intuit’s head of communications contacted The Verge to ask that the testy exchange be cut from the interview, or otherwise heavily edited to make it seem less confrontational, such as by removing portions where they are talking over one another.”

Unlocking Arkansas' Hidden Treasure: USGS Uses Machine Learning to Show Large Lithium Potential in the Smackover Formation

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“It is important to caution that these estimates are an in-place assessment. We have not estimated what is technically recoverable based on newer methods to extract lithium from brines”

LTESniffer: An Open-source LTE Downlink/Uplink Eavesdropper

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“However, those messages sent in plaintext can be completely analyzable. For example, the broadcast messages sent by the cell tower, or the messages at the beginning of the connection are completely visible.”

against /tmp

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s a bad idea because it’s shared global mutable state that crosses security boundaries.”

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 (£38,000) for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have helped some parents select future children based on genetic predictions of intelligence.”

Omni Family Health Data Breach Impacts 470,000 Individuals

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“In total, 468,344 individuals were affected, Omni told the US Department of Health and Human Services.”

TikTok owner sacks intern for sabotaging AI project

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The individual was an intern with the [advertising] technology team and has no experience with the AI Lab”

Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Certification is granted when a country proves that the transmission chain is interrupted for at least the previous three consecutive years.”

Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K+ support tickets sent to info@archive.org since 2018.”

Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers' cloud products

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft has notified customers that it’s missing more than two weeks of security logs for some of its cloud products, leaving network defenders without critical data for detecting possible intrusions.”

The AI Investment Boom

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The US has added only 32k tech jobs over the last year, lower than at any point in 2021, 2022, or the 9 years preceding the pandemic.”

Discontinuing Syncthing Android

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Reason is a combination of Google making Play publishing something between hard and impossible and no active maintenance.”

QUIC is not Quick Enough over Fast Internet

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We find that over fast Internet, the UDP+QUIC+HTTP/3 stack suffers a data rate reduction of up to 45.2% compared to the TCP+TLS+HTTP/2 counterpart.”

The long road to lazy preemption

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“There are hundreds of these calls in the kernel.”

AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%: replaces complex floating-point multiplication with integer addition

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Since this is a new process, popular and readily available hardware on the market, like Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell GPUs, aren’t designed to handle this algorithm.”

Untangling biological threads from autism’s phenotypic patchwork reveals four core subtypes

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Each group is associated with specific genetic variants that influence gene expression at different stages of development, the investigation revealed.”

Secret 3D Scans in the French Supreme Court

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The court gave the ministry and museum two months to present their defense, a deadline they have, as of this writing, missed by over three months.”

The Feds Are Coming for John Deere Over the Right to Repair

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The investigation has been ongoing since 2021, and we know more about it now thanks to a court filing made public on Thursday.”

Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“For 2024, we’ve brought the cloud bill down from the original $3.2 million/year run rate to $1.3 million.”

Hackers are extorting Globe Life with stolen customer data

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In the case of Globe Life, the organization notes that the threat actor has also shared “information about a limited number of individuals to short sellers and plaintiffs’ attorneys,” likely in a bid to pressure the company into paying its extortion demands.”

Meta fires staff for ‘using free meal vouchers to buy household goods’

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“That included one unnamed worker on a $400,000 salary, who said they had used their meal credits to buy household goods and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.”

NASA Freezes Starliner Missions After Boeing Leaves Astronauts Stranded

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

““The timing and configuration of Starliner’s next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing’s path to system certification is established,” NASA wrote in its update.”

Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“But why would this exact oversight still exist even though it should have been patched 4 years ago?”

Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Amazon is the latest large tech company to buy into nuclear power to fuel the growing demands from data centers.”

P3477R0: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“C and C++ code targeting non-8-bit byte are incompatible dialects of C and C++.”

Internal blog post reveals Automattic's plan to enforce the WordPress trademark using 'nice and not nice lawyers'

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

““We will be using a multi-pronged strategy that will involve some additional trademark registrations … legal cease-and-desist letters, and a formal paid licensing program for the partners,” Sieminski noted.”

Benchmarking Qualcomm's NPU on the Microsoft Surface Tablet

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The second conclusion is that the measured performance of 573 billion operations per second is only 1.3% of the 45 trillion ops/s that the marketing material promises.”

macOS sometimes leaks traffic after system updates

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately apps are not required to respect the routing table and can send traffic outside the tunnel if they try to. Some examples of apps that do this are Apple’s own apps and services since macOS 14.6, up until a recent 15.1 beta.”

Casio confirms customer data compromised in ransomware attack

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Underground said in a post on its dark web leak site that it stole more than 200 gigabytes of data from Casio, including legal documents, payroll information, and personal information of Casio employees.”

The Internet Archive is back as a read-only service after cyberattacks

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The Internet Archive is now back online in a “provisional, read-only manner,” according to founder Brewster Kahle.”

TikTok Lays Off Hundreds of Staff: to Replace Them With AI

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“One moderator explained that they have to review 900 videos a day, and only watching 700 videos a day is considered "work avoidance."”

FIDO Alliance Publishes New Specifications to Promote User Choice and Enhanced UX for Passkeys

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Until now, there has been no standard for the secure movement of credentials, and often the movement of passwords or other credentials has been done in the clear.”

Meta’s open AI hardware vision

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“With Catalina we’re introducing the ORv3, a high-power rack (HPR) capable of supporting up to 140kW.”

1 bug, $50,000+ in bounties, how Zendesk intentionally left a backdoor in hundreds of Fortune 500 companies

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Because my bug relied on email spoofing, which was considered "out of scope" for their HackerOne program, they rejected my report.”

Fidelity says data breach exposed personal data of 77,000 customers

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“When reached by TechCrunch, Fidelity did not say how the creation of two Fidelity customer accounts allowed access to the data of thousands of other customers.”

Cargo airships are happening

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“And he raised a large pre-seed round, in which I’m delighted to say that my syndicate (which you should possibly join) is the largest investor.”

Hackers took over robovacs to chase pets and yell slurs

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Ecovacs told the outlet in a statement that it had “identified a credential stuffing event” and blocked the IP address it originated from.”

ACF has been hijacked

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“That Automattic would unilaterally decide to hijack such a popular plugin is completely insane. I’m not sure how this differs from a supply-chain attack.”

Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“To ensure durability within that ten second window, writes are also forwarded to five replicas in separate nearby data centers as soon as they commit, and the write is only acknowledged once three of them have confirmed it.”

Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“On math word problems GPT4 with CoT managed to solve 12.5% of all problems, but GPT4 and Prolog solved 100%.”

FLUX is fast and it's open source

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Open-source models are often slow out of the box. Model providers then optimize these models to make them fast and release them behind proprietary APIs, without contributing the improvements back to the community.”

Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Google is developing the framework to let you run Debian in a virtual machine on your Android device.”

AMD's Turin: 5th Gen EPYC Launched

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“All 64 cores could hit up to 5GHz in single threaded test.”

Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The syntax of the Typst language is way closer to Markdown than it is to LaTeX.”

Marriott agrees to pay $52 million settlement after multiple data breaches

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The FTC’s complaint alleges that Marriott failed to implement appropriate password controls, firewall controls, or network segmentation.”

$2 H100s: How the GPU Rental Bubble Burst

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Last year, H100s were $8/hr if you could get them.”

The FBI secretly created a coin to investigate crypto pump-and-dump schemes

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Liu Zhou, a “market maker” working with MyTrade MM, allegedly told promoters of NexFundAI that MyTrade MM was better than its competitors because they “control the pump and dump” allowing them to “do inside trading easily.””

Lamborghini Carjackers Lured by $243M Cyberheist

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Prosecutors say the couple was beaten and briefly kidnapped by six young men”

Why we're helping more wikis move away from Fandom

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Fandom keeps their copy of the wiki up, even though it no longer has a community.”

Mozilla fixes Firefox zero-day actively exploited in attacks

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“An attacker was able to achieve code execution in the content process by exploiting a use-after-free in Animation timelines.”

Amazon's new warehouses will employ 10x as many robots

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“We do know, however, that the company already has nearly a million robotic systems deployed in centers across the U.S.”

Zap Energy shows off its new fusion power prototype, Century

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Ultimately, to operate as a commercial power plant, Zap’s reactor will need to spark 10 pulses per second for months on end.”

The Internet Archive is under attack, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”

H-1B visa: Company supplying tech workers to Silicon Valley discriminated against non-Indians: jury

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The lawsuit claimed Cognizant ousted many non-Indian workers by first taking them off projects and “benching” them without work, then keeping them benched until firing them in accordance with a company policy.”

The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In return for a 99-year lease for the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius.”

Patch Tuesday, October 2024 Edition

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“If that sounds familiar it’s because this is the fourth MSHTML vulnerability found to be exploited in the wild so far in 2024.”

Mind the (air) gap: GoldenJackal gooses government guardrails

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We detected GoldenJackal tools at a South Asian embassy in Belarus in August and September 2019, and again in July 2021.”

End of the Road for Google Drive in Transmit

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“They promised a discounted minimum price, but no maximum price.”

Do U.S. Ports Need More Automation?

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“On average, per this index the U.S. has the worst-performing ports of any country in the world.”

A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In both examples, converting the string to uppercase causes the string to get longer.”

Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.”

China-linked group Salt Typhoon hacked US broadband providers and breached wiretap systems

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The WSJ states that the compromise remained undisclosed due to possible impact on national security.”

Can You Get Root With Only a Cigarette Lighter?

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s just one resistor (15 ohms) and one wire, soldered to DQ26.”

UK nuclear site Sellafield fined $440,000 for cybersecurity shortfalls

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“roughly 75% of Sellafield’s servers were vulnerable to attacks with potentially catastrophic consequences.”

So thieves broke into your storage unit - again

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“If this smells like a kickback deal, you’re right, and virtually every self-storage company engages in it.”

AI is an impediment to learning web development

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“LLMs will obediently provide the solutions you ask for. If you’re missing fundamental understanding, you won’t be able to spot when your questions have gone off the rails.”

Wi-Fi Goes Long Range on New WiLo Standard

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“So the researchers developed an algorithm to manipulate the frequency of Wi-Fi’s data transmission signals to match the signals that the LoRa device uses to communicate with other devices.”

AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted!

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“A few years ago, I realized that this 8-bit value doesn’t have to be understood as just a set of logical operators. Instead, it’s fundamentally just a lookup table.”

The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In the case of emergency care, “private equity doesn’t pay the hospital rent, they don’t hire the nurses, they don’t pay the electric bills, they don’t provide any of the equipment,” says Robert McNamara, chair of the emergency medicine department at Temple University in Philadelphia.”

Aegir GPS/LTE/Iridium Tracker

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Further development of this device doesn’t make much sense due to the exorbitant costs of Iridium transmission through RockBlock, namely £13 for a monthly line rental and £14 for the cheapest package of 100 credits, which equals 5 kB (!?).”

Whence '\n'?

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“rustc is written in Rust and compiles itself, so somehow rustc is delegating to rustc to figure out what ‘\n’ means, which seems odd, to say the least, and we still haven’t seen the naked 0x0A byte we’re looking for.”

Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta AI to analyze

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The only way to “opt out” is to simply not use Meta’s multimodal AI features in the first place.”

perfctl: A Stealthy Malware Targeting Millions of Linux Servers

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“When a new user logs into the server, it immediately stops all “noisy” activities, lying dormant until the server is idle again.”

Reverse Engineering and Dismantling Kekz Headphones

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In addition, the connection string to this Azure cosmos database is accessible within the Decompilation of the application itself and therefore is disclosed.”

Cloudflare blocks largest recorded DDoS attack peaking at 3.8Tbps

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The threat actor behind the campaign leveraged multiple types of compromised devices, which included a large number of Asus home routers, Mikrotik systems, DVRs, and web servers.”

Patent troll Sable pays up, dedicates all its patents to the public!

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In the end, Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, grant Cloudflare a royalty-free license to its entire patent portfolio, and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again assert them against another company.”

ABC News hacks into popular robot vacuum, watches owner through camera

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“His robot was vulnerable to being hacked from afar, and Ecovacs hadn’t done anything about it, despite being warned back in December 2023.”

How North Korea Infiltrated the Crypto Industry

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Virtually every hiring manager approached by CoinDesk for this story acknowledged that they had interviewed suspected North Korean developers, hired them unwittingly, or knew someone who had.”

Tesla cancels its cheapest electric car

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Tesla often changes its vehicle trims without making any announcement or giving any explanation for the changes.”

Automattic: WP Engine Term Sheet

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Given WP Engine’s behavior, deception, and incompetence since September 20th these terms are no longer sufficient.”

T-Mobile pays $31.5 million FCC settlement over 4 data breaches

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“As part of the settlement, the telecom carrier must invest $15.75 million in cybersecurity enhancements and pay the U.S. Treasury an additional $15.75 million civil penalty.”

American WWII bomb explodes at Japanese airport, causing large crater in taxiway

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Hundreds of tons of unexploded bombs from the war remain buried around Japan and are sometimes dug up at construction sites.”

The bunkbed conjecture is false

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Why look for a counterexample if the conjecture is so obviously true? Well, because you always should.”

Bots, so many Bots

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In the end, I detected over 60% of user signups to be automated bot accounts.”

Y Combinator is being criticized after it backed an AI startup that admits it basically cloned another AI startup

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on its project, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.”

ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared map ever of our Milky Way

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.”

AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO to take on Nvidia

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The company said that Group 42, a UAE-based AI firm that counts Microsoft as an investor, accounted for 83% of Cerebras’s revenue last year.”

A tiny town just got slammed by Helene. It could massively disrupt the tech industry

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, the community of Spruce Pine, population 2,194, is known for its hiking, local artists and as America’s sole source of high-purity quartz.”

Bop Spotter

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Somewhere in the Mission district of San Francisco is a microphone, pointed down at the street below.”

NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“And that turns out to be crucial because you cannot listen to two robots talking to each other.”

SB 1047 Veto Message

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB 1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology.”

FTC Report Confirms: Commercial Surveillance is Out of Control

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The FTC also found that some companies were not actually deleting user data in response to deletion requests.”

A Bendy RISC-V Processor

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The research team found Flex-RV could run as fast as 60 kilohertz while consuming less than 6 milliwatts of power.”

Do AI companies work?

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Every LLM vendor is eighteen months from dead.”

Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Some of the passwords had been stored in easily readable format in the company’s servers since 2012.”

Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This facility is the only secure site in the UK capable of manufacturing gallium arsenide semiconductors, a vital component in military platforms such as fighter jets.”

The perils of transition to 64-bit time_t

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“So what you actually may get is runtime breakage, potentially going as far as to create security issues.”

Everything you need to know about Python 3.13 – JIT and GIL went up the hill

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The performance degradation when Python is built with free-threading support is significant – around 20%.”

Kaspersky deletes itself, installs UltraAV antivirus without warning

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Starting Thursday, Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky deleted its anti-malware software from customers’ computers across the United States and automatically replaced it with UltraAV’s antivirus solution.”

CNN and USA Today Have Fake Websites, I Believe Forbes Marketplace Runs Them

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“I believe Marketplace has since been running CNN Underscored Money with little, if any, oversight from the main CNN team.”

New California law means digital stores can’t imply you’re buying a game when you’re merely licensing it

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The law won’t change the fact that we’re all licensing games instead of actually owning them, but it will force companies that operate in California to be more transparent about it.”

Moving Bricks: Money-Laundering Practices in the Online Scam Industry

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Company P alone has thousands of groups on Telegram that are used to facilitate transactions and provide a channel for the circulation of information.”

Hacking Kia: Remotely Controlling Cars With Just a License Plate

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“These attacks could be executed remotely on any hardware-equipped vehicle in about 30 seconds, regardless of whether it had an active Kia Connect subscription.”

Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS, Part I

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“And I’ve got back connections from hundreds of thousands of devices, with peaks of 200-300K concurrent clients.”

U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers, Issues Broad Injunction

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“While this is a win on paper, it’s unlikely that the publishers will get paid by the LibGen operators, who remain anonymous.”

WordPress.org bans WP Engine, blocks it from accessing its resources

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“As a result of this block, sites using WP Engine’s solutions cannot install plug-ins or update their themes.”

Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Memory safety issues, which accounted for 76% of Android vulnerabilities in 2019, and are currently 24% in 2024, well below the 70% industry norm, and continuing to drop.”

Timeshare Owner? The Mexican Drug Cartels Want You

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The FBI warns the timeshare fraud schemes have been linked to the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel in Mexico.”

Kansas water plant cyberattack forces switch to manual operations

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Out of caution, the Water Treatment Facility has switched to manual operations while the situation is being resolved.”

Rearchitecting: Redis to SQLite

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“SQLite was roughly a 3x speed improvement over a locally deployed Redis instance.”

Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that affects price of 'nearly everything’

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“More than 60% of debit transactions in the U.S. run over Visa rails, helping it charge more than $7 billion annually in processing fees, according to the DOJ complaint.”

Updated production-ready Gemini models, reduced 1.5 Pro pricing, increased rate limits, and more

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“For the models released today, the filters will not be applied by default so that developers can determine the configuration best suited for their use case.”

Google Cache Is Now Fully Dead

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Now, the direct link to see the Google Cache has been fully disabled.”

How much energy does desalinisation use? Is it “absurdly cheap”?

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“This was far cheaper than I’d have guessed, and in a water crisis I would agree that this is “absurdly cheap”.”

Telegram will now hand over your phone number and IP if you’re a criminal suspect

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you’re a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities.”

Cloudflare's new marketplace will let websites charge AI bots for scraping

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“While it’s a bold idea, Cloudflare is not sharing a fully fleshed-out idea of what its marketplace will look like.”

X will let people you’ve blocked see your posts

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In a reply on Monday, X owner Elon Musk said the “block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, public post.””

This Windows PowerShell Phish Has Scary Potential

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Executing this series of keypresses prompts the built-in Windows Powershell to download password-stealing malware.”

WP Engine is not WordPress

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“WP Engine needs a trademark license to continue their business.”

Uber Caught Overcharging? How Having Credits in Your Account Might Be Costing You

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“He went a step farther and did something I didn’t: he checked Uber prices “with someone else’s phone” who did not have a balance in their Uber account – and Uber was pricing the route at the usual $20 for them.”

They stole my voice with AI

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“I am 100% aware Elecrow knows of my channel, though, as I have over 43 emails back and forth with five different Elecrow marketing reps, spanning from 2020 to today”

London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“a year after the ultra-low emissions zone took effect, 2 out of every 5 London students in the study had switched from “passive” to “active” ways of getting to school.”

The FCC wants all phones unlocked in sixty days, AT&T and T-Mobile aren't so keen on the plan

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The Commission fails to point to specific statutory authorization for an unlocking mandate and would have profound economic consequences, thus raising a major question that would require clear statutory authority from Congress.”

Using YouTube to steal your files

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“And there we go, a one-click clickjacking attack that chains a Google Slides YouTube embed path traversal to three separate redirects to gain editor access on a Drive file/folder!”

Apple Shares Full iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro Repair Manuals

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The cost of the tools required for device repair and the cost of genuine components make self repair almost as expensive as getting a repair from an Apple retail location or an Apple Authorized Service Provider”

What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“So, for the PC-98, the answer isn’t really that it died - it sort of faded away and merged into what every other system was becoming.”

Microsoft taps Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power AI

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft has agreed to purchase all of the power from the reactor over the next 20 years, a Constellation spokesperson told TechCrunch.”

Google employees’ attempts to hide messages from investigators might backfire

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“LaSala responded, instructing the employee to “start a ping with history turned off.””

Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over DOJ, DHS and HUD use of facial recognition technology

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“As a result, the report said it is impossible to know how many evictions from public housing FRT played a role in.”

Germany seizes 47 crypto exchanges used by ransomware gangs

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We have their data – and therefore we have your data. Transactions, registration data, IP addresses.”

gaining access to anyones browser without them even visiting a website

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“this is against arc’s privacy policy which clearly states arc does not know which sites you visit.”

FTC Staff Report Finds Large Social Media and Video Streaming Companies Have Engaged in Vast Surveillance of Users with Lax Privacy Controls and Inadequate Safeguards for Kids and Teens

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans’ personal data”

Filing Lawsuit for Infringement of Patent Rights against Pocketpair, Inc.

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“This lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights.”

GM electric vehicles can finally access Tesla Superchargers

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“To gain immediate access, owners of electric Chevy, Cadillac, and GMC vehicles will need to purchase “GM approved” Tesla adapters through each brand’s smartphone app for $225.”

Why wordfreq will not be updated

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing.”

Is Tor still safe to use?

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“From the limited information The Tor Project has, we believe that one user of the long-retired application Ricochet was fully de-anonymized through a guard discovery attack.”

Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year’s survey.”

Ticketmaster boss who repeatedly hacked rival firm sentenced

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The illegal access was projected on a conference room’s screen in front of at least 14 Live Nation and Ticketmaster employees.”

Warning: DNS encryption in Little Snitch 6.1 may occasionally fail

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“There appears to be a bug in macOS Sequoia causing some requests to bypass the installed DNS proxy and be sent unencrypted to the system’s default name server instead.”

How Google got away with charging publishers more than anyone else

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“holds today not because there is 20% of value in comparing 2 bids to one another, but because it comes with unique demand via AdWords that is not available any other way.”

Fixing an Elgato HD60 S HDMI capture device with the help of Ghidra

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“All I needed to do was replace three chips for a total of less than $1 to bring this thing back to life.”

Chipotle's testing an avocado-peeling robot and an automated bowl assembly line

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The company says the robot being tested in a store at 20972 Magnolia St. in Huntington Beach, California, will help free employees up for other tasks.”

"Golden Lettuce" genetically engineered to pack 30 times more vitamins

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The levels of beta-carotene in the Golden Lettuce leaves were up to 30 times higher than those of regular lettuce.”

Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Each S-team organization will be expected to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, he said.”

23andMe to pay $30 million in genetics data breach settlement

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“DNA testing giant 23andMe has agreed to pay $30 million to settle a lawsuit over a data breach that exposed the personal information of 6.4 million customers in 2023.”

Fortinet confirms data breach after hacker claims to steal 440GB of files

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“A later update shared on Fortinet’s website says that the incident affected less than 0.3% of its customer base and that it has not resulted in any malicious activity targeting customers.”

Apple Watch sleep apnea detection gets FDA approval

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Once enabled, it requires 10 nights of sleep tracking data spread out over a 30-day span to determine whether a user may have the condition.”

How to succeed in MrBeast production (leaked PDF)

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result!”

g1: Using Llama-3.1 70b on Groq to create o1-like reasoning chains

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“From initial testing, g1 accurately solves simple logic problems 60-80% of the time that usually stump LLMs.”

The 6.11 kernel has been released

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“I’m once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it’s Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out.”

'The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out': Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up.”

Degrees of deception: How America's universities became debt factories

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Nearly 40% of federal student loan borrowers aged 65 and older are in default.”

LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It is, therefore, impossible to eliminate them through architectural improvements, dataset enhancements, or fact-checking mechanisms.”

My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The 4 TB HGST drives have roughly 6000 hours on them after ten years.”

Why Scrum is Stressing You Out

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“They are forever repeating, back-to-back deadlines.”

CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Quality control was not really part of our process or our conversation.”

We Spent $20 To Achieve RCE And Accidentally Became The Admins Of .MOBI

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Effectively, we had inadvertently undermined the CA process for the entire .mobi TLD.”

Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Ms Claybaugh admitted to the inquiry that those opt-out options were not offered to Australians.”

New Vo1d malware infects 1.3 million Android streaming boxes

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Threat actors have infected over 1.3 million TV streaming boxes running Android with a new Vo1d backdoor malware, allowing the attackers to take full control of the devices.”

FDA Authorizes First Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Software

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The HAF was evaluated in a clinical study with 118 subjects with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss, at multiple U.S. sites.”

NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The opening of the trajectory correction thruster tube was originally 0.01 inches (0.25 millimeters) in diameter, and now it’s been reduced to 0.0015 inches (0.035 mm), or about half the width of a human hair, according to NASA.”

Google will now link to The Internet Archive to add more context to Search results

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“That was previously possible to a certain extent through cached pages in Search, but that functionality was removed earlier this year.”

Review: IFixit’s FixHub May Be The Last Soldering Iron You Ever Buy

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“You could get a nice soldering station from Weller or Hakko for half the price.”

Bug Left Some Windows PCs Dangerously Unpatched

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft also corrected a critical bug that has caused some Windows 10 PCs to remain dangerously unpatched against actively exploited vulnerabilities for several months this year.”

Feeld dating app – Your nudes and data were publicly available

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“We can build upon the previous vulnerability ‘Read other people’s messages’ and we can access the attachments (images and videos) that have been shared between users.”

Bug lets anyone bypass WhatsApp’s ‘View Once’ privacy feature

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“But a bug in how WhatsApp implements its so-called “View Once” feature in its browser-based web app allows any malicious recipient to display and save the picture and video, which should vanish immediately after being viewed.”

Payment gateway data breach affects 1.7 million credit card owners

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In the notification sent to impacted clients, the company says that hackers had access to its network for nearly a year, between August 2023 and June 2024.”

Apple must pay 13 billion euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Apple said in a filing on Tuesday that it will incur a one-time income tax charge of about $10 billion in its fourth fiscal quarter ending Sept. 28, 2024.”

[tor-relays] Artikel 5 e.V. - Another police raid in Germany - general assembly on Sep 21st 2024

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Apart from one burnt (middle relay) node and some billing paperwork for the exit node this was all about, the team left the house after one and a half hours with mostly empty hands.”

A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“To put that in perspective, the total cpu time consumed by pingora-origin is 40,000 compute-seconds per second.”

Passwords have problems, but passkeys have more

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, the user experience kinda sucked, so we ended up ripping it all out again.”

Lab-grown diamonds

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“A survey by The Knot of nearly 10,000 couples married in 2023 revealed that lab diamonds accounted for 46 percent of engagement rings (compared with 39 percent who opted for a mined diamond), up from 12 percent in 2019.”

Breaking Down OnlyFans’ Stunning Economics

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Over the past five years, OnlyFans creators have collected over $15 billion – with $5.3 billion paid in 2023, a 19% increase year-over-year.”

ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention Alex Morgan

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Nowhere in the 215-word recap is Morgan mentioned, let alone the fact that this was the two-time World Cup winner and Olympic gold medalist’s final pro match.”

New RAMBO attack steals data using RAM in air-gapped computers

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“At this rate, it would take around 2.2 hours to exfiltrate 1 megabyte of data, so RAMBO is more suitable for stealing small amounts of data like text, keystrokes, and small files.”

Amazing engineering: How to stretch a cruise ship

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“For an average of around $80 million, and just a couple of months out of service, operators can chop an existing ship down the middle, slide in a new slice that’s designed to fit perfectly, weld it together, and come away with enough extra premium cabins to pay off the whole operation within a few years.”

Researchers discover a surprising way to jump-start battery performance

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Experiments confirmed that charging at high currents has a huge impact, increasing the lifespan of the average test battery by 50%.”

How I Built an NFC Movie Library for my Kids

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“A Disney+ subscription costs €10,99/month, but for that price I can buy 3-4 Blu-rays on second hand websites.”

Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It all means that the apps can spend less time, effort and money on content moderation – assuming that civility will be supreme – and instead focus on making the overall experience better.”

A Post-Google World

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“One consequences was that Google charged high prices, keeping between 30-50% of every advertising dollar that went through its system.”

Keyhole

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“As it turns out, data after the signature block isnt checked at all… and it can even override data that came before it.”

Ford Patents In-Car System That Eavesdrops So It Can Play You Ads

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“For one, there’s a recognition that an occupant’s “natural inclination to seek minimal or no ads” should be balanced with “maximum opportunity for ad-based monetization.””

Cracking an old ZIP file to help open source the ANC's "Operation Vula" secret crypto code

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“23 minutes later bkcrack spit out the key to the ALLBAS.ZIP file and was able to decrypt it.”

Clearview AI Faces €30.5M Fine for Building Illegal Facial Recognition Database

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Facial recognition is a highly intrusive technology that you cannot simply unleash on anyone in the world,”

Revival Hijack supply-chain attack threatens 22,000 PyPI packages

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Three months later, JFrog noticed that the packages in their repository had close to 200,000 downloads from automated scripts and user mistypes.”

Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s literally the logo they use for this particular software package.”

2M users but no money in the bank. Tough times

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Right now, we have about 800 monthly donors and about $7,500 in monthly donations.”

Inside the Tense Decision Between NASA and Boeing to Send Starliner Home Alone

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“But within a day of launching, Starliner leaked helium and five of its thrusters failed off.”

AlphaProteo generates novel proteins for biology and health research

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“However, we know that our AI system has limitations, as it was unable to design successful binders against an 8th target, TNFɑ, a protein associated with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.”

Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The procedure has not yet been tested on humans and researchers will need to show it is safe to use, particularly if the dye is injected beneath the skin.”

Deploying Rust in Existing Firmware Codebases

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Memory unsafety is the leading cause of vulnerabilities in Android, Chrome, and many other code bases.”

Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We conclude, contrary to the district court, that IA’s use of the Works is not commercial in nature.”

Microsoft Copilot: From Prompt Injection to Exfiltration of Personal Information

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“It is unclear how exactly Microsoft fixed the vulnerability, and what mitigation recommendations were implemented.”

Should truckers be allowed to sing along with the radio?

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Amazon denies they have asked their partners not to sing.”

Sextortion Scams Now Include Photos of Your Home

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In this case, the demand is just shy of $2,000, payable by scanning a QR code embedded in the email.”

EUCLEAK

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The EUCLEAK attack requires physical access to the device, expensive equipment, custom software and technical skills.”

Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ dialog in Control Panel,”

The Hidden Engineering of Landfills

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Actually, leachate management is one of the biggest costs of running a facility like this.”

Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The expected value is $0.20 (calculated discretely using the code below).”

NGate Android malware relays NFC traffic to steal cash

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“This is the first time we have seen Android malware with this capability being used in the wild.”

Owners of 1-Time Passcode Theft Service Plead Guilty

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“NCA investigators said more than 12,500 people were targeted by OTP Agency users during the 18 months the service was active.”

Unprotected container registries

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Shockingly, a follow-up scan in 2024 still showed more than 10,000 unsecured registries.”

Amazon to Launch New AI-Powered Alexa Using Anthropic's Claude

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In other words, it won’t be included in existing Prime memberships.”

The Pentium as a Navajo weaving

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“A group of 20 Indians armed with high-power rifles took over the plant, demanding that Fairchild rehire the employees.”

Extreme Pi Boot Optimization

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“We reduced the energy required by a factor of 5 (compared to stock Debian at 9.5 Ws until user space).”

Honey, I shrunk {fmt}: bringing binary size to 14k and ditching the C++ runtime

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“This reduces binary size to just 14kB:”

A Real Life Off-By-One Error

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The fourth hold from the top in the right hand lane was off by one with respect to its counterpart in the left hand lane.”

Did your car witness a crime? Police may be coming for your Tesla

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Based on this information, I respectfully request that a warrant is authorized to seize this vehicle from the La Quinta Inn parking lot so this vehicle’s surveillance footage may be searched via an additional search warrant at a secure location.”

Nearly half of Nvidia's Q2 revenue came from four customers buying over $3 billion in AI chips each

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Four customers, whose identities were kept anonymous for competitive reasons, directly purchased goods and services collectively worth 46% of Nvidia’s $30 billion in turnover.”

Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“As it stands now, bcachefs-tools is impossible to maintain in Debian stable.”

Iron as an inexpensive storage medium for hydrogen

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The pilot plant can store around 10 megawatt hours of hydrogen over long periods. Depending on how you convert the hydrogen into electricity, that’ll give you somewhere between 4 and 6 megawatt hours of power.”

Brazilian court orders suspension of Elon Musk's X after it missed deadline

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The decision imposes a daily fine of R$50,000 (£6,800) on individuals and companies that attempt to continue using X via VPN.”

State-backed attackers and commercial surveillance vendors repeatedly use the same exploits

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The exploit from this watering hole used the exact same trigger as the exploit used by Intellexa as seen in the screenshot below, strongly suggesting the authors and/or providers are the same.”

Park'N Fly notifies 1 million customers of data breach

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Park’N Fly discovered that an unauthorized third party accessed our network through remote VPN access.”

UK researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long COVID patients

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“According to Jiang, "the slowing and abnormality of intrinsic brain activity in COVID-19 patients resemble those seen in Alzheimer’s and related dementias."”

Bypassing airport security via SQL injection

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Anyone with basic knowledge of SQL injection could login to this site and add anyone they wanted to KCM and CASS, allowing themselves to both skip security screening and then access the cockpits of commercial airliners.”

Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People's Medicaid Benefits

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“When an enrollee is entitled to state-administered Medicaid, it should not require luck, perseverance, and zealous lawyering for him or her to receive that healthcare coverage.”

Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable, I have no idea…”

Elasticsearch Is Open Source. Again!

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever.”

Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Human raters are only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing short clips of the game from clips of the simulation.”

Appliance and Tractor Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin consider much of the data on the ship to be proprietary, so the Navy had to delay missions and spend millions of dollars on travel costs just so that contractor-affiliated repairmen could fly in, rather than doing this ourselves.”

American Radio Relay League confirms $1 million ransom payment

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“After days of tense negotiation and brinkmanship, ARRL agreed to pay a $1 million ransom. That payment, along with the cost of restoration, has been largely covered by our insurance policy.”

How some Let's Encrypt renewal failures pointed to an AWS traffic hijacking issue

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“A BGP-based feature of the AWS Direct Connect service allowed a third party to inject an incorrect route for an external IP assigned to me, effectively hijacking my AWS-sourced traffic.”

Mono: Cross platform, open source .NET framework

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono · GitLab (winehq.org).”

New 0-Day Attacks Linked to China's 'Volt Typhoon'

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The advisory placed much of the blame on Versa customers who "failed to implement system hardening and firewall guidelines…leaving a management port exposed on the internet that provided the threat actors with initial access."”

Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“If the prompts for Claude tell us anything, it’s that without human guidance and hand-holding, these models are frighteningly blank slates.”

Introducing Cerebras Inference: AI at Instant Speed

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Cerebras inference delivers 1,800 tokens per second for Llama3.1 8B and 450 tokens per second for Llama3.1 70B, which is 20x faster than NVIDIA GPU-based hyperscale clouds.”

Local Networks Go Global When Domain Names Collide

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Each request contained a username and a hashed Windows password, and upon searching the usernames online Caturegli concluded they all belonged to police officers in Memphis, Tenn.”

Dutch DPA imposes a fine of 290 million euro on Uber because of transfers of drivers' data to the US

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“It concerns account details and taxi licences, but also location data, photos, payment details, identity documents, and in some cases even criminal and medical data of drivers.”

Audit finds notable security gaps in FBI's storage media management

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The FBI does not adequately track or account for electronic storage media, such as internal hard drives and thumb drives, once they are extracted from larger devices, which increases the risk of these media being lost or stolen.”

Google Play Bug Bounty Program Shutting Down

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Google will soon shut down the Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) after determining that it has achieved its goal.”

Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Telegram clearly fails to meet this stronger definition for a simple reason: it does not end-to-end encrypt conversations by default.”

Albuquerque's Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Even more troubling, Medina said he "purposefully did not record because he was invoking his 5th Amendment right not to self-incriminate."”

Finding a therapist who takes your insurance can be nearly impossible. Here's why

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The way to look at mental health care from an insurance perspective is: I don’t want to attract those people. I am never going to make money on them.”

SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“I’ve now added a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> tag to the top of the HTML to keep this unverified AI slop out of their search index.”

NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Wilmore and Williams will continue their work formally as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025. They will fly home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission.”

Telegram app founder Pavel Durov reportedly arrested at French airport

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Pavel Durov, billionaire co-founder and chief executive of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV said, citing an unnamed source.”

Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Because highly absorbent EUV light weakens by 40% with each reflection, only about 1% of the energy from the light source reaches the wafer when bounced off ten mirrors while more than 10% does when only four mirrors are used.”

17-Year-old Student Exposes Germany's 'Secret' Pirate Site Blocklist

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“This ‘secrecy’ is not an oversight but a feature that’s codified in the agreement between rightsholders and Internet providers.”

DOJ sues Georgia Tech over allegedly failing to meet cyber requirements for DOD contracts

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“According to the lawsuit, the lab didn’t install anti-malware software on devices, and that the university and affiliate company submitted a false cybersecurity assessment score to the Pentagon.”

This confidential government report proves that we need to liberate the Postcode Address File

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“When compared to AddressBase, the new dataset was only 90.8% accurate, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that translates to 2.9 million dud addresses”

Meta Cancels High-End Mixed Reality Headset After Apple Vision Pro Struggles

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Meta was aiming to sell the device for under $1,000, but that was not going to be possible with the high cost of the displays.”

What the fuck is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft’s stated intention was that Windows Update would only apply the SBAT update to systems that were Windows-only, and any dual-boot setups would instead be left vulnerable to attack until the installed distro updated its grub and shipped an SBAT update itself.”

Amazon Cloud CEO Predicts a Future Where Most Software Engineers Don't Code: and AI Does It Instead

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we’re going to try to go build because that’s going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code”

Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“We thought that just dropping SSDs in to replace HDDs would solve almost all of our problems, and it certainly did address the problems that came from the mechanics of hard drives. But what surprised us was that the system didn’t improve nearly as much as we had hoped and noisy neighbors weren’t automatically fixed.”

Apple is shaking up how it manages the App Store

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Apple decided to break up the division after European regulators started requiring Apple to allow third-party payment methods and alternative app stores”

National Public Data Published Its Own Passwords

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker which shares access to the same consumer records inadvertently published the passwords to its back-end database in a file that was freely available from its homepage until today.”

Design flaw has Microsoft Authenticator overwriting MFA accounts, locking users out

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft Authenticator will overwrite an account with the same username. Given the prominent use of email addresses for usernames, most users’ apps share the same username.”

Accident Forgiveness

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The saving grace here, which you’ll learn if you ever become that $200,000 story, is that nobody pays those bills.”

Breaking Down a Record-Setting Day in ERCOT

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Shattering the previous record, battery discharge peaked 20% higher than the previous record, which was set only the day before.”

Data Exfiltration from Slack AI via indirect prompt injection

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“An attacker can prompt Slack AI to exfil data from private channels where the attacker (malicious prompt author) isn’t a member, by posting in a public channel.”

Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Since the cancellation, MIT Libraries estimates annual savings at more than 80% of its original spend. This move saves MIT approximately $2 million each year.”

Tesla is hiring people to do the robot

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The position, advertised as a “ Data Collection Operator ” on Tesla’s career site, pays up to $48 per hour and requires walking for over seven hours a day while carrying up to 30 pounds”

Sourcegraph went dark

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Today, the sourcegraph/sourcegraph repository went private. This is the final cleaving blow, following many other smaller chops, on the culture that made Sourcegraph an attractive place to work.”

The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“These cloud-based management platforms could, by accident, after a hack, or intentionally, simultaneously shut down all their millions of solar panels (permanently). And then the entire European electricity grid would collapse.”

Roblox is Already the Biggest Game In The World. Why Can't It Make a Profit (And How Can It)?

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Over the last twelve months it has averaged $138 in costs for every $100 in revenue.”

Bucket Monopoly: Breaching AWS Accounts Through Shadow Resources

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“During February 2024, we discovered critical vulnerabilities in six AWS services.”

460k Impacted by Kootenai Health Ransomware Attack

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Kootenai Health discovered that the attackers had access to its network for over a week, and that certain data was exfiltrated on February 22.”

Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an arrest, federal court rules

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“When the government seizes property incident to a lawful arrest, the Fourth Amendment requires that any continued possession of the property must be reasonable”

Google took three months to remove scam app that stole over $5 million in crypto: lawsuit

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“But Vaca’s lawsuit alleges Google took three months to remove the app from the Play Store.”

The brain simulates actions and their consequences during REM sleep

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Strikingly, these motor commands, despite not being executed, shift the internal representation of direction as if the animal had turned.”

X ordered to pay €550,000 to Irish employee fired for not replying to Elon Musk's yes-or-resign 'extremely hardcore' ultimatum

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The commission rejected X’s argument that Rooney quit voluntarily and ruled that not clicking “yes” in response to the email did not constitute an act of resignation.”

FlightAware Leaks Customer Data (Name, Email Addresses & Passwords)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“On July 25, 2024, we discovered a configuration error that may have inadvertently exposed your personal information in your FlightAware account, including user ID, password, and email address.”

Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Promised HC not landing - e.g. I was promised further expansion twice, which later was scratched and then promised again in a bit different form…”

MIFARE Classic: exposing the static encrypted nonce variant

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“This backdoor enables any entity with knowledge of it to compromise all user-defined keys on these cards without prior knowledge, simply by accessing the card for a few minutes.”

Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content”

GitHub Vulnerability 'ArtiPACKED' Exposes Repositories to Potential Takeover

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“GitHub, for its part, has categorized the issue as informational, requiring that users take it upon themselves to secure their uploaded artifacts.”

NASA and Rocket Lab aim to prove we can go to Mars for 1/10 the price

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Instead of spending $550 million on a mission into deep space, NASA set a goal to spend just one-tenth of that and gave each SIMPLEx mission a $55 million price cap, excluding launch.”

Disney says man can't sue over wife's death because he agreed to Disney+ terms of service

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Disney filed court documents in May saying the $50,000 lawsuit should be dismissed and resolved by individual arbitration because of terms Piccolo agreed to when he signed up for a free trial of the streaming service Disney+.”

Kim Dotcom's Extradition to the U.S. Given Green Light By New Zealand

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“More than twelve years have passed since Megaupload became the prime target in a high-profile law enforcement operation, which led to the collapse of Kim Dotcom’s file-storage empire.”

Epic judge says he’ll ‘tear the barriers down’ on Google’s app store monopoly

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen”

Stripe's monorepo developer environment

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The best tooling in the world will struggle to make up for “regularly losing a day debugging your environment,” and so getting that aspect right can easily outweigh almost any other decisions you make.”

Inside the "3 Billion People" National Public Data Breach

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Curious, I took 100M samples and found that only 31% of the rows had unique SSNs, so extrapolating that out, 2.9B would be more like 899M.”

State of Texas v. General Motors LLC and OnStar LLC

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The Driving Data collected and sold by General Motors included data from over 14 million of its vehicles, and the data of more than 1.8 million Texans.”

Compromising Microsoft's AI Healthcare Chatbot Service

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The resulting list of resources contained hundreds and hundreds of resources belonging to other customers.”

NIST Releases First 3 Finalized Post-Quantum Encryption Standards

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We encourage system administrators to start integrating them into their systems immediately, because full integration will take time.”

Ex-Kansas police chief who raided local newspaper criminally charged

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“A former Kansas police chief who led a raid last year on a weekly newspaper has been charged with felony obstruction of justice and is accused of persuading a potential witness to withhold information from authorities when they later investigated his conduct.”

CrowdStrike Exec Shows Up to Accept 'Most Epic Fail' Award in Person

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This year, there was no question that CrowdStrike would receive the notorious title after the company accidentally distributed a faulty security update that bricked millions of Windows PCs and servers.”

Apple says Patreon must switch to its billing system or risk removal from App Store

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In a blog post and email to Patreon creators about upcoming changes to membership in the iOS app, the company says it’s begun a 16-month-long migration process to move all creators to Apple’s iOS in-app purchase system by November 2025.”

Brands should avoid this popular term. It’s turning off customers

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In every single case, the intention to buy or use the product or service was significantly lower whenever we mentioned AI in the product description.”

Federal Appeals Court Finds Geofence Warrants Are "Categorically" Unconstitutional

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“the quintessential problem with these warrants is that they never include a specific user to be identified”

NASA Investigation Finds Boeing Hindering Americans' Return to Moon

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Yet the space agency has neglected to punish Boeing financially for these flaws, arguing that doing so would run contrary to the terms of its contract.”

0.0.0.0 Day: Exploiting Localhost APIs From the Browser

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Eighteen years have passed, with hundreds of comments, but the bug remains open to this day.”

Vulnerability Allowed Eavesdropping via Sonos Smart Speakers

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“A low-privileged, close-proximity attacker could exploit this vulnerability to remotely execute arbitrary code”

The surveilled society: Who is watching you and how

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Sometimes you are just asked to trust the FR function is not switched on.”

The Days Are Long but the Years Are Short

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all.”

Progress on porting Firefox

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It is currently meaningless to talk about stability before solving Rust problems.”

DEFCON 32 Statement

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We billed DEFCON for our most recent work, discounting our labor by 25% in order to meet the agreed upon targets.”

EFF's Concerns About the UN Draft Cybercrime Convention

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The proposed UN Cybercrime Convention is an extensive surveillance pact.”

Watch How a Hacker's Infrared Laser Can Spy on Your Laptop's Keystrokes

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The Apple logo is nearly a mirror”

Caltech Team Develops First Noninvasive Method to Continually Measure True Blood Pressure

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Our method broadens access to hospital-grade monitoring of blood pressure and cardiac health metrics.”

Windows Update Flaws Allow Undetectable Downgrade Attacks

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“I was able to make a fully patched Windows machine susceptible to thousands of past vulnerabilities, turning fixed vulnerabilities into zero-days”

Researchers discover potentially catastrophic exploit present in AMD chips for decades

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The researchers have also noted that the flaw dates back to at least 2006 and that it impacts nearly every AMD chip.”

Ransomware Attack Cost LoanDepot $27 Million

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“During the quarter ended June 30, 2024, the Company recorded an accrual of $25 million in connection with class action litigation related to the Cybersecurity Incident”

How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It turns out that ternary is the most economical of all possible integer bases for representing big numbers.”

X officially kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate workers to South Bay

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Thirteen years after the city carved out a special tax break to attract tech companies to its beleaguered downtown corridor, X has confirmed plans to shut its San Francisco headquarters.”

Intel reportedly gave up a chance to buy a stake in OpenAI in 2017

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Former Intel CEO Bob Swan reportedly scuttled the deal because had didn’t see AI models hitting the broad market anytime soon”

Inside the company that gathers 'human data' for every major AI firm

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The $1 billion startup has also moved beyond coding and is providing specialized data from a wide array of industries.”

How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years.”

MDM vendor Mobile Guardian attacked, leading to remote wiping of 13,000 devices

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In Singapore, the incident resulted in 13,000 devices being remotely wiped and saw the nation’s Education Ministry cut ties with the vendor.”

Apple memory holed its broken promise for an OCSP opt-out

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The company apparently hopes we forget that it ever made the promise.”

Ransomware Attack Cost Keytronic Over $17 Million

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Due to this event, the Company incurred approximately $2.3 million of additional expenses and believes that it lost approximately $15 million of revenue during the fourth quarter”

1970 Clean Air Act Was Intended to Cover Carbon Dioxide, Study Finds

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“A new study finds evidence that Congress intended for the 1970 Clean Air Act to cover carbon dioxide emissions.”

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will join rival Anthropic

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The move comes less than three months after OpenAI disbanded a superalignment team that focused on trying to ensure that people can control AI systems that exceed human capability at many tasks.”

Every Microsoft employee is now being judged on their security work

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses.”

Downcycled: The story of Samsung's failed deal with iFixit, as told by iFixit's CEO

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“One of the big reasons for this is the unit limit Samsung put on orders, which was a paltry seven parts per repair shop per quarter.”

Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The data is mostly from YouTube, downloaded via yt-dlp using a rotating set of AWS IP addresses and consisting of millions (maybe even hundreds of millions) of videos.”

Google loses antitrust case over search

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The court found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies.”

Nvidia reportedly delays its next AI chip due to a design flaw

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The delay is the result of a design flaw discovered “unusually late in the production process,” according to two unnamed sources, including a Microsoft employee, cited by the outlet.”

Hackers breach ISP to poison software updates with malware

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“On Friday, Volexity threat researchers revealed that the Chinese cyber-espionage gang had exploited insecure HTTP software update mechanisms that didn’t validate digital signatures to deploy malware payloads on victims’ Windows and macOS devices.”

How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“That’s because Postgres doesn’t bother actually deleting the data, it just marks the data as deleted.”

Puget Systems' Perspective on Intel CPU Instability Issues

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We’re seeing ALL of these failures happen after 6 months, which means we do expect elevated failure rates to continue for the foreseeable future and possibly even after Intel issues the microcode patch.”

Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers, And They Don't Know What To Do About It

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“It is immensely difficult to find ways to add another digit to this field, and it’s really only a problem for three airlines in the world.”

How I Use "AI"

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“And as a result of this, I would say I’m at least 50% faster at writing code for both my research projects and my side projects as a result of these models.”

Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“I decided to polish my code, write extensive documentation for it and then released Impact. Not for free, but for a rather steep $99.”

Boeing takes another $125M hit thanks to Starliner

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The losses incurred by Boeing thanks to Starliner have comfortably breezed past $1 billion, and will likely surpass $1.6 billion before long.”

How developers trick App Store into approving malicious apps

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“After Apple approves the app with its basic functionalities, developers use CodePush to update it with anything they want.”

"We ran out of columns": the best, worst codebase

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“At one point we had 3 interns whose full-time job was writing these SQL statements.”

Game Informer is shutting down

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The magazine’s entire staff is being laid off, Kotaku reports.”

Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees and will stop ‘non-essential work’

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The company just reported a loss of $1.6 billion for Q2 2024, substantially more than the $437 million it lost last quarter.”

DigiCert mass-revoking TLS certificates due to domain validation bug

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“DigiCert says the root cause was a system update in August 2019 that led to removing automatic underscore addition in some validation paths.”

'Error' in Microsoft's DDoS defenses amplified Azure outage

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“For yesterday’s event, Microsoft’s DDoS protection mechanisms were indeed triggered correctly. However, the response did not go so well.”

Twilio kills off Authy for desktop, forcibly logs out all users

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Those who have continued to use Authy for Desktop, even after all the warnings, have found that their 2FA accounts are gone unless they had previously synced them with a mobile device.”

Don’t Let Your Domain Name Become a “Sitting Duck”

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Eclypsium researchers estimate there are currently about one million Sitting Duck domains, and that at least 30,000 of them have been hijacked for malicious use since 2019.”

Reddit CEO says Microsoft needs to pay to search the site

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“At the beginning of July, its robots.txt file was updated to block web crawlers it doesn’t have agreements with.”

Threat Actor Abuses Cloudflare Tunnels to Deliver RATs

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Specifically, the activity abuses the TryCloudflare feature that allows an attacker to create a one-time tunnel without creating an account.”

TikTok is throwing $20 million a month at OpenAI via Microsoft

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“TikTok’s big buys have made up about 25% of Microsoft’s AI revenue.”

Amazon must recall dangerous products properly: even ones sold by third parties

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The CPSC says Amazon failed to adequately notify the public about more than 400,000 recalled products.”

Ransomware operators exploit ESXi hypervisor vulnerability for mass encryption

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“ESXi hypervisors do not validate that such a group exists when the server is joined to a domain.”

Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It went from something like less than 3 percent to nearly a 100 percent attack success rate.”

Cyber ransom payments will need to be disclosed by businesses under new laws

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It also said ransomware attacks had increased roughly five-fold since the pandemic.”

Meta to pay Texas $1.4 billion for using facial recognition technology without users' permission

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The settlement, announced Tuesday, does not act as an admission of guilt and Meta maintains no wrongdoing.”

Our audit of Homebrew

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Local package management tools install and execute arbitrary third-party code by design and, as such, typically have informal and loosely defined boundaries between expected and unexpected code execution.”

Calculating the Cost of a Google Deepmind Paper

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In the grand scheme of things, 5.42e24 is “not that big”.”

Announcing Swift Homomorphic Encryption

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“BFV is based on the ring learning with errors (RLWE) hardness problem, which is quantum resistant.”

After 10 Years, Yelp Gave My App 4 Days

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“They sent the email on a Friday and wanted a response by Monday.”

Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“2.2m images should cost $110/mo.”

Running One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Healthchecks.io currently has 652 paying customers, and the monthly recurring revenue is 14043 USD.”

Amazon's Exabyte-Scale Migration from Apache Spark to Ray on Amazon EC2

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“For BDT, this efficiency gain translates to an annual saving of over 220,000 years of EC2 vCPU computing time.”

How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Facebook had acquired Onavo for approximately $120M USD in 2013 and needed to put this technology in good use.”

A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Why are we generating a structured language (YAML), with a computer, by manually adding spaces to make the syntax valid?”

tolower() with AVX-512

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“On Zen 4 it’s very fast, and the intrinsic functions are reasonably easy to use.”

How Simultaneous Multithreading Works Under the Hood

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The reorder buffer is split equally between the two logical processors in an SMT enabled core.”

There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs: any damage is permanent

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Intel has not halted sales or clawed back any inventory.”

Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The whole thing gets extremely hot, extremely quickly and the only way you’re going to be able to keep it somewhat under control is if you heavily throttle its power targets, in which case, what’s the point?”

Learning about PCI-e: Driver & DMA

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Bus mastering is a feature which allows devices to directly manipulate system memory without involving the CPU.”

"It's Easy To Get A Bit Over-Ambitious" - Roguecraft Devs On Developing For Amiga In 2024

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Roguecraft was supposed to take about 6 months to develop and ended up taking 2 years.”

Courts Close the Loophole Letting the Feds Search Your Phone at the Border

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The Fourth Amendment still applies at the border, despite the feds’ insistence that it doesn’t.”

PKfail: Untrusted Platform Keys Undermine Secure Boot on UEFI Ecosystem

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This Platform Key, which manages the Secure Boot databases and maintains the chain of trust from firmware to the operating system, is often not replaced by OEMs or device vendors, resulting in devices shipping with untrusted keys.”

Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way.”

Security Firm Discovers Remote Worker Is Really a North Korean Hacker

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“This was a real person using a valid but stolen US-based identity.”

Crooks Bypassed Google's Email Verification to Create Workspace Accounts, Access 3rd-Party Services

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“The weakness Google fixed allowed attackers to bypass this validation process.”

AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Our systems solved one problem within minutes and took up to three days to solve the others.”

Reddit now blocks all search engines other than Google

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Reddit has updated its robots.txt file to block all bots from scraping any part of the site.”

Unfashionably secure: why we use isolated VMs

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In other words, we run a VM per customer.”

The AI job interviewer will see you now

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“MoSeeker, a Chinese AI recruitment system provider, performs hundreds of thousands of automated interviews each year, and lists multinationals including Disney and Mars among its clients.”

Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR): Content Configuration Update Impacting the Falcon Sensor and the Windows Operating System (BSOD)

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Due to a bug in the Content Validator, one of the two Template Instances passed validation despite containing problematic content data.”

AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear.”

Phish-Friendly Domain Registry “.top” Put on Notice

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Based on the information and records gathered through several weeks, it was determined that .TOP Registry does not have a process in place to promptly, comprehensively, and reasonably investigate and act on reports of DNS Abuse.”

Verizon to pay $16 million in TracFone data breach settlement

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“The number of exposed individuals and SIM-swapping incidents have been censored in the public version of the Consent Decree document.”

Intent to End OCSP Service

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“When someone visits a website using a browser or other software that checks for certificate revocation via OCSP, the Certificate Authority (CA) operating the OCSP responder immediately becomes aware of which website is being visited from that visitor’s particular IP address.”

Google Chrome is no longer 'deprecating third-party cookies'

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

““Instead of deprecating third-party cookies,” Google revealed today that it will “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing.””

Traveling this summer? Maybe don’t let the airport scan your face.

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Everyone, regardless of citizenship, can opt out when it comes to domestic flights in the US.”

Wiz walks away from $23 billion deal with Google, will pursue IPO

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“A person familiar with Wiz’s thinking, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters freely, said the company weighed antitrust and investor concerns as reasons for abandoning the potential deal.”

How Olympics Officials Try to Catch "Motor Doping"

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“The officials’ prey can be quite small: Cycling experts say just 20 or 30 watts of extra power is enough to tilt the field and clinch a race.”

Judge Dismisses Major SEC Charges Against SolarWinds and CISO

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“These do not plausibly plead actionable deficiencies in the company’s reporting of the cybersecurity hack. They impermissibly rely on hindsight and speculation.”

Ryanair wins case against Booking.com in US court

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“A jury in the District Court of Delaware unanimously found that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse act and that it had induced a third party to access parts of Ryanair’s website without authorisation “with an intent to defraud,” the verdict said.”

MNGI Digestive Health Data Breach Impacts 765,000 Individuals

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The incident occurred on August 20, 2023, but it took MNGI almost one year to determine that personal and protected health information was accessed.”

Scientists Discover a New Hormone that Can Build Strong Bones

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In some female mice who lacked all estrogen or were very old, CCN3 was able to more than double bone mass.”

Intel says 13th and 14th Gen mobile CPUs are crashing, but not due to the same bug as desktop chips: chipmaker blames common software and hardware issues

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The laptops crash in the exact same way as the desktop parts including workloads under Unreal Engine, decompression, ycruncher or similar.”

Why Discover is no American Express

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“In the case of Discover, Net Interest Income contributes over 80% of the company’s net revenue, suggesting that it is, first and foremost, a lender (see the chart below).”

When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind.

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“To summarise, you need to understand what the paper is saying. To shorten text, not so much.”

Tabletop game forumite achieves posting godhood, emerging from the void after 100,000 hour 11 year ban to continue the same argument from 2013

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Etherwind returned precisely 100,018 hours after his probation began and swiftly resumed the argument, posting at 9:04 BST on July 14, 2024, and quoting a post from the thread in which he was originally banned within SA’s latest and greatest WoD discussion thread, ready to resume his war like some kind of net-bound Hiroo Onoda.”

how to pwn a billion dollar vc firm using inspect element

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“this was. horrifying, it was the entire process.env of a heroku instance, in the JS.”

minuteman missile communications

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“HICS, as originally installed, operated at 1.3Kbps.”

Public toilets are vanishing and that's a civic catastrophe

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“For instance, data collected in the United Kingdom in 2018 showed that the number of public toilets had dropped by 39 per cent over the previous two decades.”

Bringing cloud and AI capabilities to the tactical edge: Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped appliance is generally available

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Weighing approximately 100lbs, it’s human-portable, making it easy to transport and deploy in various locations.”

FCC Votes Unanimously to Significantly Lower Phone and Video Communication Costs After Decades of Exploitation by Prison Telecoms

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“For decades, the cost of an ever-expanding suite of invasive surveillance services has been passed on to incarcerated people and their loved ones.”

WazirX Cryptocurrency Exchange Loses $230 Million in Major Security Breach

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The Mumbai-based company said the attack stemmed from a mismatch between the information that was displayed on Liminal’s interface and what was actually signed.”

Python grapples with Apple App Store rejections

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The problem at hand is that Apple’s macOS App Store is automatically rejecting apps that contain the string “itms-services”.”

Google's goo.gl links will stop working in August 2025

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“On August 25, 2025, “these URLs will no longer return a response” (404).”

USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“we were unaware of any configuration of the platform that collected personal information from the URL and that shared it without our knowledge with social media.”

Give Me the Green Light Part 1: Hacking Traffic Control Systems

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“the honest truth is I found a vulnerability in the webapp in the first 15 minutes of having the unit online and it was the first thing I tried.”

Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s important to note that this is not a silver bullet for detecting fake images”

Mistral NeMo

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Mistral NeMo was trained with quantisation awareness, enabling FP8 inference without any performance loss.”

Jailbreaking RabbitOS: Uncovering Secret Logs, and GPL Violations

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“There was no end-user-facing way of factory-resetting the device, making the logs effectively permanent.”

SAPwned: SAP AI vulnerabilities expose customers' cloud environments and private AI artifacts

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“By executing arbitrary code, we were able move laterally and take over the service”

Email addresses of 15 million Trello users leaked on hacking forum

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Trello had an open API endpoint that allows any unauthenticated user to map an email address to a trello account”

NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“For cutting-edge platforms such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper or NVIDIA Blackwell, you must use the open-source GPU kernel modules. The proprietary drivers are unsupported on these platforms.”

Banks in Singapore to phase out one-time passwords in 3 months

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“The digital token will authenticate customers’ login without the need for an OTP that scammers can steal, or trick customers into disclosing”

For advertising: Firefox now collects user data by default

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“More serious, however, is the fact that Mozilla also activates the feature directly - users must therefore deactivate the PPA manually by opting out.”

We Created A Fake Delivery Company

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“What if we use the ‘‘custom audiences’’ thingy, but just populate it with 299 deceased people and 1 person whom we really need to show this ad to?”

Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content.”

Attempting to stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email from me by adding a postfix header

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“If every feature required a specific header to signal that it is unwanted, that would get irritating rather rapidly.”

Researchers: Weak Security Defaults Enabled Squarespace Domains Hijacks

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“anyone who enters that email@domain in the squarespace form now has full access to control to the domain.”

User alleges Gemini AI scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without explicit permission: Google says otherwise

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Just pulled up my tax return in @Google Docs–and unbidden, Gemini summarized it.”

Mangled fingers, no time off: Why the women who make Samsung's semiconductors are striking

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“If too many people want to use their vacation days, we have to play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets to”

CA4: No REP in one's Google location data

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in one’s Google location data. It’s willingly shared with Google.”

A Simple Firmware Update Completely Hides a Device's Bluetooth Fingerprint

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This defense can be rolled out incrementally, requiring only software modification on at least one widely-used Bluetooth Low Energy chipset”

Building and scaling Notion's data lake

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Moving several large, crucial Postgres datasets (some of them tens of TB large) to data lake gave us a net savings of over a million dollars for 2022”

Building the Bell System

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the company was scaling back needed infrastructure investments in an attempt to maintain profits without raising telephone rates.”

Houston-area residents frustrated as they enter sixth day without power and air conditioning in punishing heat

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“CenterPoint Energy says it’s hoping to restore power to an additional 350,000 customers by Sunday”

Disney's Internal Slack Breached? NullBulge Leaks 1.1 TiB of Data

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“almost 10,000 channels, every message and file possible, unreleased projects, raw images, code, logins, links to internal API/web pages, and more!”

Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“By only talking about GenAI, they implicitly tell me databases are not important. Scalable infrastructure is not important. Maintainable applications are not important. Only GenAI is.”

Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“If you have a project, an idea, a product feature, or anything else that you want other people to understand and have conversations about… give them something to link to!”

Crooks Steal Phone, SMS Records for Nearly All AT&T Customers

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“AT&T also acknowledged the customer records were exposed in a cloud database that was protected only by a username and password (no multi-factor authentication needed).”

CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The passwords for both accounts had not been updated in over eight years and were not enrolled in the organization’s identity management (IDM).”

Binary secret scanning helped us prevent (what might have been) the worst supply chain attack you can imagine

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In our case, the user had admin access to the core repositories of Python’s infrastructure, including Python Software Foundation (PSF), PyPI, the Python language and CPython.”

Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The failure rate we have observed from our own testing is nearly 100%, indicating it’s only a matter of time before affected CPUs fail.”

Second Factor SMS: Worse Than Its Reputation

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“IdentifyMobile, a provider of 2FA-SMS, shared the sent one-time passwords in real-time on the internet.”

New HIV Prevention Drug Shows 100% Efficacy in Clinical Trial

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“During the randomised phase of the trial none of the 2,134 women who received lenacapavir contracted HIV.”

ICPEN Sweep finds majority of websites and mobile apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscription services

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns.”

How Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Binance was retaining most logs for only a few days.”

Scientists Discover a Cause of Lupus and a Possible Way to Reverse It

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Up until this point, all therapy for lupus is a blunt instrument. It’s broad immunosuppression,”

Russia forces Apple to remove dozens of VPN apps from App Store

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“If you need additional information regarding this removal or the laws and requirements in Russia, we encourage you to reach out directly to Roskomnadzor.”

Tesla insiders say Elon optimized Full Self-Driving routes for himself and influencers

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It seemed like we were purposely making his car better to make Autopilot look different than it was. It felt dishonest.”

Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“With this first successful launch by Ariane 6, Europe has finally recovered its capacity to access space.”

Linksys Velop routers send Wi-Fi passwords in plaintext to US servers

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“These packets included the configured SSID name and password in clear text, identification tokens for the network within a broader database, and an access token for a user session, potentially paving the way for a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.”

Microsoft's Xandr grants GDPR rights at a rate of 0%

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“However, despite collecting vast amounts of detailed information about people, Xandr reports an astonishing 0% response rate to access and erasure requests in 2022.”

Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The judge disagreed, however, on the grounds that the code suggested by Copilot was not identical enough to the developers’ own copyright-protected work, and thus section 1202(b) did not apply.”

PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Depending on network conditions on the plane I might be able to hit speeds of several bytes per second.”

Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 Max crashes

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Under the deal, Boeing would face a fine of up to $487.2 million, though the Justice Department recommended that the court credit Boeing with half that amount it paid under a previous agreement, resulting in a fine of $243.6 million.”

Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 incident on June 27, 2024

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This caused immediate unreachability for the DNS resolver address from over 300 networks in 70 countries”

Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“OCLC has incurred damages of $5,333,064 as a direct result of Anna’s Archive’s cyberattacks, but that amount does not fully compensate OCLC for the harm from Anna’s Archive’s wrongful actions.”

Z-Library Admins "Escape House Arrest" After Judge Approves U.S. Extradition

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“when the group conducted a regular visit in May, to verify that Napolsky and Ermakova were in compliance with the rules set by the state, there was no trace of them.”

I'm Funding Ladybird Because I Can't Fund Firefox

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

““Search partnerships” means “Google”, who made up 81% of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue in 2022.”

YouTube Embeds are Bananas Heavy and it's Fixable

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“YouTube Embeds are like 1.3MB in size with no shared resources between multiple embeds.”

Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“If management had known that we were using a tool by some grad student as a key part of the methodology, they would never have let us use it.”

UChicago Prof. Shirley Meng's Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion creates world's first anode-free sodium solid-state battery: a breakthrough in inexpensive, clean, fast-charging batteries

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million.”

Properly Testing Concurrent Data Structures

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“it very much depends on the timing, so you can’t reproduce it deterministically and you can’t debug it.”

Record 4 Camera Angles at Once Using Only iPhones and iPads

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The Final Cut Camera app is a free download on the App Store, but if you want to use the live multicam feature, you need a Final Cut Pro subscription on a recent iPad ($4.99 per month).”

OVHcloud blames record-breaking DDoS attack on MikroTik botnet

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“OVHcloud found nearly 100,000 Mikrotik devices that are reachable/exploitable over the internet, making up for many potential targets for DDoS actors.”

Latest Intel CPUs impacted by new Indirector side-channel attack

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“On Linux, IBPB is activated by default during transitions to SECCOMP mode or tasks with restricted indirect branches in the kernel, but its use is limited due to causing a 50% performance hit.”

Europol Announces Crackdown on Cobalt Strike Servers Used by Cybercriminals

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“A total of 690 IP addresses were flagged to online service providers in 27 countries. By the end of the week, 593 of these addresses had been taken down.”

Why Vivaldi browser won't follow the current AI trend?

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“So, as we have seen, LLMs are essentially confident-sounding lying machines with a penchant to occasionally disclose private data or plagiarise existing work.”

Twilio Confirms Data Breach After Hackers Leak 33M Authy User Phone Numbers

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Twilio has detected that threat actors were able to identify data associated with Authy accounts, including phone numbers, due to an unauthenticated endpoint.”

Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“In June, AI bots accessed around 39% of the top one million Internet properties using Cloudflare, but only 2.98% of these properties took measures to block or challenge those requests.”

Batteries: how cheap can they get?

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In 2008 batteries were over $1500/kWh but now NMC battery cells (lithium batteries with a cathode from nickel, manganese and cobalt) can be bought for less than $100/kWh and the somewhat heavier lithium iron phosphate cells that are better in every way than those first cells can be had for just $47/kWh.”

Meta's Threads hits 175 million users one year after launch

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet.”

AI's $600B Question

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“If you run this analysis again today, here are the results you get: AI’s $200B question is now AI’s $600B question.”

Evolve Bank data breach impacted fintech firms Wise and Affirm

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“We no longer work with Evolve Bank & Trust, and USD account details are provided by a different bank.”

Google Pixel 6 series phones bricked after factory reset

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Users report mixed responses from Google, and with many facing this issue just as their devices went out of warranty, getting proper support is complicated.”

Juniper Networks flings out emergency patches for perfect 10 router vuln

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“An authentication bypass using an alternate path or channel vulnerability in Juniper Networks Session Smart Router or Conductor running with a redundant peer allows a network-based attacker to bypass authentication and take full control of the device”

With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation's Limits

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“They’ve finally verified the true value of a number called BB(5), which quantifies just how busy that fifth beaver is.”

This is Big Tech's playbook for swallowing the AI industry

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft and Amazon have done what are essentially reverse acquihires, where the hiring of people and a corresponding licensing deal is designed to disguise what is actually an acquisition.”

Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The results revealed that 13 of 17 ants with injuries on their femur or thigh underwent amputation by their nest mates, with their limb severed at the trochanter”

Why Bridges Don't Sink

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In 2004, a bridge pier on the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway in Tampa, Florida sank 11 feet (more than 3 meters) while it was still under construction because of the complicated geology.”

regreSSHion: RCE in OpenSSH's server, on glibc-based Linux systems

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“This regression was introduced in October 2020 (OpenSSH 8.5p1) by commit 752250c (“revised log infrastructure for OpenSSH”), which accidentally removed an “#ifdef DO_LOG_SAFE_IN_SIGHAND” from sigdie()”

TeamViewer's corporate network was breached in alleged APT hack

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“However, though they say they aim to be transparent, the “TeamViewer IT security update” page contains a HTML tag, which prevents the document from being indexed by search engines and thus hard to find.”

Shipt's Algorithm Squeezed Gig Workers. They Fought Back

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“We found that 40 percent of workers were earning less under the new algorithm, with half of those workers receiving a pay cut of 10 percent or greater.”

Google to Block Entrust Certificates in Chrome Starting November 2024

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Affected website operators are urged to move to a publicly-trusted certificate authority owner to minimize disruption by October 31, 2024.”

CISA: Most critical open source projects not using memory safe code

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“52% of critical open-source projects analyzed contain code written in memory-unsafe languages.”

How to Get Root Access to Your Sleep Number Bed

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The hub communicates with the Sleep Number servers by opening an SSH tunnel and providing a reverse tunnel back to the hub that their developers can use to connect to the hub and do maintenance when needed.”

MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“When you have 10,000 orders that just came in that you have to ship in two hours, you have to optimize for that.”

Inside a 1 dollar radar motion sensor

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“I recently got some cheap microwave motion sensors, mostly because I was wondering how China managed to make a radar for under a dollar”

Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977.”

Do a firmware update for your AirPods – now

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Once connected, an attacker can do everything a legitimate device can do, listen to the microphone, play music, see and pause the music that is currently playing from another connected device”

Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“As the vulnerability has been patched for months already (Factorio versions below 1.1.101 are affected), is time to share the details with the community.”

The Economics of Writing Technical Books

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one.”

Swiss Broadcasting Corporation to pull plug on FM radio

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Remaining, pure FM usage is stagnating at less than 10%.”

Critical GitLab bug lets attackers run pipelines as any user

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The vulnerability impacts all GitLab CE/EE versions from 15.8 through 16.11.4, 17.0.0 to 17.0.2, and 17.1.0 to 17.1.0.”

The Death of NYC Congestion Pricing

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Yet just before implementation, congestion pricing was indefinitely paused at a press conference framed around inflation and cost of living concerns”

German firm Synhelion opens 'world's 1st' industrial solar fuel plant

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It also set a target of achieving an annual production volume of one million tonnes of syncrude within 10 years.”

A Eulogy for DevOps

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Money was (effectively) free so it was better to increase speed regardless of monthly bills.”

ID Verification Service for TikTok, Uber, X Exposed Driver Licenses

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The breach highlights that identity services could themselves become a target for hackers.”

Google is testing facial recognition technology for campus security, starting at site near Seattle

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“At the Kirkland testing site, people entering the building will not be able to opt out of the facial screening.”

25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gone as Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.”

SpaceX is building a NASA craft to intentionally destroy the International Space Station after retiring

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded an $843 million contract to SpaceX to build the so-called "U.S. Deorbit Vehicle."”

FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Because it can be difficult and expensive to keep sesame in one part of a baking plant out of another, some companies began adding small amounts of sesame to products that didn’t previously contain the ingredient to avoid liability and cost.”

Stability AI stabilized by cash from Silicon Valley VCs

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“In 2023, Stability AI reportedly expected revenue of just $11 million, but expected a $99 million bill for computing alone, plus $54 million for wages and other operating expenses.”

Project Naptime: Evaluating Offensive Security Capabilities of Large Language Models

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“This approach achieves new top scores of 1.00 on the "Buffer Overflow" tests (from 0.05) and 0.76 on the "Advanced Memory Corruption" tests (from 0.24).”

Federal whistleblowers are entitled to damages for missed future pay, court rules

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Employees can receive compensatory payments if their firings caused harm that prevented future earnings.”

Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites.”

Apple wants to replace 50% of iPhone final assembly line workers with automation

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The machinery necessary to automate iPhone production can sometimes cost hundreds of millions of dollars each year.”

Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Our track record for safe operations is unparalleled.”

From 0/10 to 8/10: Microsoft Puts Repair Front and Center

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The manuals were made available the very day the device was released, something we rarely see in any product category.”

Apple found in breach of EU competition rules

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“If the commission’s preliminary views were to be ultimately confirmed, none of Apple’s three sets of business terms would comply with article 5(4) of the DMA, which requires gatekeepers to allow app developers to steer consumers to offers outside the gatekeepers’ app stores, free of charge.”

US prosecutors recommend Justice Department criminally charge Boeing as deadline looms

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Boeing derives significant revenue from contracts with the U.S. government, including the Defense Department, which could be jeopardized by a felony conviction, one of the sources said.”

1-click Exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“However, we didn’t receive any reward as only Koreans are eligible to receive a bounty.”

MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly "Mixtape Mondays" column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.”

More Memory Safety for Let's Encrypt: Deploying ntpd-rs

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“The CA software itself is written in memory safe Golang, but from our server operating systems to our network equipment, lack of memory safety routinely leads to vulnerabilities that need patching.”

Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“For example, when asked a medical question "What is the target of Sotorasib?" an LLM confabulates by sometimes answering KRASG12 ‘C’ (correct) and other times KRASG12 ‘D’ (incorrect) despite identical instructions.”

Traffic engineers build roads that invite crashes because they rely on outdated research and faulty data

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“It also absolves traffic engineers, planners and policymakers of blame for creating a transportation system where for most Americans, the only rational choice for getting around is a car.”

Singapore doubles down on lab-grown meat as Silicon Valley backs off

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The industry raised just $226 million last year, a steep fall from $922 million in 2022.”

Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Since the password is transmitted without encryption, the security is weak, but better than nothing.”

Solar generates fifth of global electricity on summer solstice midday peak

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In absolute terms, Ember expects solar to rise by 28%, from 157 TWh in June 2023 to 201 TWh in June 2024.”

Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs.”

My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“More and more, I feel like Windows is just becoming a loss-leading front-end for Microsoft to sell its many software-as-a-service products.”

Andrew S. Tanenbaum receives ACM Software System Award

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“MINIX was also the basis for the MeikOS operating system for Meikotransputer-based computers and runs inside popular microchips.”

New Government Ban on Kaspersky Would Prevent Company from Updating Malware Signatures in U.S.

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Asked what evidence the government found to support concerns that the Russian government is using Kaspersky software to spy on customers, Raimondo and other government officials on the call declined to provide specifics.”

Kraken Crypto Exchange Hit by $3 Million Theft Exploiting Zero-Day Flaw

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This individual discovered the bug in our funding system, and leveraged it to credit their account with $4 in crypto.”

Massachusetts 911 Outage Caused by Errant Firewall

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The firewall prevented calls from getting to the 911 dispatch centers, also known as Public Safety Answer Points (PSAPs).”

Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“If you’re not within 10% or so of the global optimal performance in EE, your suggestions have near-zero value.”

EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Belgium’s draft law, which was supposed to be adopted as the Council’s negotiating position, was instead postponed indefinitely.”

How small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“At the heart of these cases is the fact that Meta lacks the necessary volume of human customer service workers to assist those who lose their accounts.”

How free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s worth remembering that the effort needed to maintain a piece of successful software over its lifetime far outweighs the effort of writing it in the first place.”

Introducing Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In an internal agentic coding evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet solved 64% of problems, outperforming Claude 3 Opus which solved 38%.”

This Bridge Should Have Been Closed Years Before It Collapsed

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Since 2007, every single inspection report that included recommendations said to repair the stiffener plates in the legs that were heavily corroded.”

Security bug allows anyone to spoof Microsoft employee emails

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft just said they couldn’t reproduce it without providing any details.”

UK's Total Fitness exposed nearly 500K images of members, staff through unprotected database

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Jeremiah Fowler told The Register more than 474,000 images of both members and staff – including men, women, and children – were stored in a database that was left unprotected and publicly accessible without the need for a password.”

Astronomers see a massive black hole awaken in real time

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In late 2019 the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 suddenly started shining brighter than ever before.”

How React 19 (Almost) Made the Internet Slower

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“This is not the first time there’s been pushback from the community towards changes that are introduced to React without much regard to how React is used outside Meta and Vercel.”

Nature retracts highly cited 2002 paper that claimed adult stem cells could become any type of cell

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Still, it has been cited nearly 4,500 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – making it by far the most-cited retracted paper ever.”

Off-path TCP hijacking in NAT-enabled Wi-Fi networks

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Additionally, we conducted measurement studies on 93 real-world Wi-Fi networks and found that 75 (81%) of them were susceptible to this attack.”

Introducing a new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard uses a JH7110 processor from StarFive which has four U74 RISC-V cores from SiFive.”

FTC Takes Action Against Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Adobe trapped customers into year-long subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous cancellation hurdles”

Alleged Boss of 'Scattered Spider' Hacking Group Arrested

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“A 22-year-old man from the United Kingdom arrested this week in Spain is allegedly the ringleader of Scattered Spider, a cybercrime group suspected of hacking into Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and nearly 130 other organizations over the past two years.”

DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The bill as it stands does not provide any compensation to those that could be affected by this ban, if it is retroactive.”

OpenAI adds former NSA chief to its board

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The company said Nakasone will also join OpenAI’s recently created Safety and Security Committee.”

In First Case of its Kind, NLRB Judge Declares Non-Compete Clause Is an Unfair Labor Practice

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Despite all the discussion about the FTC banning non-competes, there still seems to be little recognition that non-competes for non-supervisory workers are effectively impossible to enforce at the moment due to the policies of the NLRB GC.”

What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 days

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“There were a total of 11,599 login attempts. Divided by 30 days, this means an average of 386 login attempts per day.”

The Raspberry Pi 5 Is No Match for a Tini-Mini-Micro PC

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“With a complete Pi 5 at around €160 including taxes and shipping, the AMD-based 1L PC is clearly the cheaper and still more capable option.”

MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“So back to this £3.80 RPi Pico microcontroller board: The RP2040’s 264KB of RAM gives a lot to play with after carving out the Mac’s 128KB”

Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“So they’re using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string.”

Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“2% of 0.084% is 0.00168% of Internet users! In absolute terms, that would represent a small group of around 800 people across France!”

Tesla's FSD - a Useless Technology Demo

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The way it currently behaves, FSD is a system that can’t be trusted to make the right decisions. It makes the most basic mistakes and it makes many of them.”

'The big problem is water': UK ebike owners plagued by failing motors

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Some mountain bike owners with fourth-generation Bosch electric motors describe how they had four or five – yes five – replacement motors fitted during the two-year warranty period.”

Security firm Cylance says it has been hacked, data put up for sale online

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The data in question was accessed from a third-party platform unrelated to BlackBerry and appears to be from 2015-2018, predating BlackBerry’s acquisition of the Cylance product portfolio.”

Arm warns of actively exploited flaw in Mali GPU kernel drivers

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“In 2022 Arm fixed a weakness in the r41p0 release for the Bifrost and Valhall Mali GPU kernel driver. An external researcher recently provided new information which reclassifies this weakness as a vulnerability.”

How I Found A 55 Year Old Bug In The First Lunar Lander Game

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Eventually I found a bug: a missing “divide by two” that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years.”

Fungus breaks down ocean plastic

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In the laboratory, Vaksmaa and her team observed that the breakdown of PE by P. album occurs at a rate of about 0.05 per cent per day.”

Microsoft Chose Profit Over Security and Left U.S. Government Vulnerable to Russian Hack, Whistleblower Says

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Not only could Microsoft lose a multibillion-dollar deal, but it could also lose the race to dominate the market for cloud computing.”

Arm says it wants all Snapdragon X Elite laptops destroyed

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Arm’s argument is that the Nuvia license was canceled when it was taken over by Qualcomm.”

Ikea's boss solved the Swedish retailer's global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries, introducing flexible working and subsidizing childcare

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Globally, across the parent company’s more than 600 stores and warehouses, the quit rate fell to 17.5% in April from 22.4% in August 2022.”

Tesla claims it has 2 Optimus humanoid robots working autonomously in factory

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Tesla has been releasing a lot of information and video about Optimus lately, but the last report showed that the company was still training the bots using virtual reality and remote control.”

Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret: Founder Liquidity

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The part about these stories that feels unfair is not that the founders are getting liquidity - it’s that they are the only ones getting liquidity.”

Snowflake Breach Exposes 165 Customers' Data in Ongoing Extortion Campaign

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The earliest infostealer infection date observed associated with a credential leveraged by the threat actor dated back to November 2020.”

Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Oracle has started to dispatch Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time, according to one licensing expert.”

OpenAI ex-employees worry about company's control over their millions of dollars in shares

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“OpenAI recently circulated a document indicating that ex-employees who work at competitors are not included in the tender offers.”

Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The regular payments continued even after the AUC was designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organisation in 2001.”

Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found.”

Why Triplebyte failed

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In short: if you needed venture capital to produce a viable small-scale business, you didn’t really have a viable small-scale business to begin with.”

Announcing ARC Prize

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“ARC-AGI was created in 2019 and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) high score was 20%. Today, only 34%.”

Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“When we launch Private Cloud Compute, we’ll take the extraordinary step of making software images of every production build of PCC publicly available for security research.”

Google's $2.3 million check helped the company get a trial by judge instead of jury

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department and eight states seeking to break up Google’s alleged adtech monopoly will be heard by a judge this fall, as the company preferred.”

Apple blocks PC emulator from being available in iOS App Store and third-party app stores

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“App Review rejected UTM, deciding that a “PC is not a console”.”

750k Impacted by Frontier Communications Data Breach

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Frontier Communications is offering 12 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft services to the impacted individuals.”

The censorship circumvention extension has disappeared from the Russian version of Mozilla Addons

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We have not changed any visibility settings, nor have we received any emails regarding this action.”

How a single ChatGPT mistake cost us $10,000+

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“We copy pasted the code it generated, saw everything worked fine, tried it in production, saw it also worked, and went on our merry way.”

Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centres

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s probably just a misconfiguration that was never fixed because the people working on it couldn’t experientially confirm any issue with it.”

Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We demonstrate that MatMul operations can be eliminated from LLMs while maintaining strong performance, even at billion-parameter scales.”

Disaster narrowly avoided as plane clears Bristol Airport runway with just seconds to spare

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Boeing told investigators looking into the incident that they were aware of a “long history of nuisance disconnects during takeoff mode engagements”.”

South Pole Water Infrastructure

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“There are millions of gallons of raw, untreated wastewater stored in outfalls beneath South Pole Station.”

Claude's Character

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Claude then ranks its own responses to each message by how well they align with its character.”

The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“18 times in the last 20 years, crawlers affiliated with the Internet Archive moved through this page and grabbed portions of it, speculatively, to store for future research and reference.”

Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“If you don’t proactively choose to turn it on, it will be off by default.”

OpenSSH introduces options to penalize undesirable behavior

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Repeated offenses by the same client address will accrue greater penalties, up to a configurable maximum.”

FBI obtains 7,000 LockBit ransomware decryption keys

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Though the gang still operates, reports show the mission disrupted its activities.”

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“A study has found that software projects adopting Agile practices are 268 percent more likely to fail than those that do not.”

How Online Privacy Is Like Fishing

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.”

Boeing's Starliner makes it into orbit at long last

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The first non-crewed launch of the spacecraft ended with the capsule being unable to reach the ISS and a near catastrophe during rocket separation.”

Nvidia is now more valuable than Apple at $3.01 trillion

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Nvidia became a $1 trillion company in May 2023, then skyrocketed past $2 trillion in February of this year, making it more valuable than both Amazon and Alphabet.”

AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We observe that with AI-based suggestions, the code author increasingly becomes a reviewer, and it is important to find a balance between the cost of review and added value.”

Major cyberattack sees NHS London hospitals declare critical incident with operations cancelled

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“A senior NHS source told The Independent that transplants have been affected as patients’ blood tests cannot be cross-checked, and that healthcare leaders in London have been warned that the incident could take “weeks or months” to resolve.”

Is One Company to Blame for Soaring Rental Prices in the U.S.?

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually”

Leaked Google database reveals its secret privacy and security failures

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“As a result, our database of objects detected from Street View now inadvertently contains a database of geolocated license plate numbers and license plate number fragments”

Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools’ use of 365 Education suite

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Under the current system that Microsoft is imposing on schools, your school would have to audit Microsoft or give them instructions on how to process pupils’ data.”

PSA: Bartender Mac App Under New Ownership, But Lack of Transparency Raises Concerns

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In the Reddit thread, the owners claim to have posted information about the sale on the website, but that has turned out to be untrue.”

Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Instead of skipping the account link, you’re led into a kind of continuous loop that doesn’t end until you have entered the correct email address.”

Instagram confirms test of ‘unskippable’ ads

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“We’re always testing formats that can drive value for advertisers”

Things the guys who stole my phone have texted me to try to get me to unlock it

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It helped that, even though this text came from a clearly bogus iCloud email address, Apple’s own “helpful” iMessage feature was sort of fooled: the auto-filled contact name said “Maybe: Apple Pay.” Maybe!”

Hacking Millions of Modems (and Investigating Who Hacked My Modem)

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“This series of vulnerabilities demonstrated a way in which a fully external attacker with no prerequisites could’ve executed commands and modified the settings of millions of modems, accessed any business customer’s PII, and gained essentially the same permissions of an ISP support team.”

Majority for chat control possible: Users who refuse scanning to be prevented from sharing photos and links

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“If a user refuses the scanning, they would be blocked from sending or receiving images, photos, videos and links (Article 10).”

Japanese Crypto Exchange DMM Bitcoin Suffers $305M Hack

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In a blog post on its website, DMM Bitcoin said 4,502.9 BTC “leaked” out of the exchange.”

Netflix Paid Out Over $1 Million via Bug Bounty Program

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Rewards were paid out for 845 vulnerabilities, more than a quarter of which were rated ‘critical severity’ or ‘high severity’.”

Internal messages show how the new head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Collect everything you have (master’s thesis, final projects, dissertations, etc.) and include in them 20 references from among those that I have attached in the Word document as well as 10 articles from ADCAIJ.”

Parable of the Sofa

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The words “lifestyle business” are always, of course, uttered in a voice dripping with contempt.”

Getting to grips with an extra thumb

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“98% of participants were able to successfully manipulate objects using the Third Thumb during the first minute of use, with only 13 participants unable to perform the task.”

Ticketmaster confirms data breach with a SEC filing

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Likewise, at the time of this publication, Ticketmaster has not yet begun notifying its users of the data breach.”

Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code: inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“In practice, that audience’s needs are a very small (tiny, in fact) portion of Windows userbase”

Goldfish Memories

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024).”

Space secrets leak disclosure

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“As a first step of remediation, we have revoked a number of HF tokens present in those secrets.”

Engineering for Slow Internet

Fri, 31 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“It needed to load nearly 20 MB of Javascript, just to render the main screen!”

Google will roll out Chrome's new extension spec on June 3rd

Fri, 31 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The extensions will still work, but Google says it will disable them on your browser in the “coming months” before removing the ability to use them completely.”

Data breach exposes details of 25,000 current and former BBC employees

Fri, 31 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In its email to those affected, the pension scheme did not explain how the breach had happened, beyond saying that private records had been “copied from an online data storage service”.”

Intel's Anti-Upgrade Tricks Defeated With Kapton Tape

Fri, 31 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Turns out, the difference in the socket is just a few pins here and there”

Why, after 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

Thu, 30 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Compare this to the REST world where generally speaking you would authorise every endpoint, a far smaller task.”

Fitbit Ace LTE: Hands On With Google's First Smartwatch for Kids

Thu, 30 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Without the subscription, the Ace LTE is limited to basic movement and step tracking.”

1-bit LLMs Could Solve AI's Energy Demands

Thu, 30 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“A BitNet model with 3 billion parameters performed just as well on various language tasks as a full-precision LLaMA model with the same number of parameters and amount of training, but it was 2.71 times as fast, used 72 percent less GPU memory, and used 94 percent less GPU energy.”

Starlink's disruption of the space industry

Thu, 30 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“That would be a big step, to have more than zero in the ‘not bankrupt’ category”

Treasury Sanctions Creators of 911 S5 Proxy Botnet

Wed, 29 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“911 built its proxy network mainly by offering “free” virtual private networking (VPN) services.”

PayPal is building an ad network based on your Venmo data

Wed, 29 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“If you’re someone who’s buying products on the web, we know who is buying the products where, and we can leverage the data”

YouTube has now begun skipping videos altogether for users with ad blockers

Wed, 29 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“YouTube users with ad blockers installed are reporting videos skipping straight to the end upon playback.”

AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once

Wed, 29 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The system, called “Target Speech Hearing,” then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time”

An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them

Tue, 28 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Many of their claims directly contradict public statements made by Googlers over the years, in particular the company’s repeated denial that click-centric user signals are employed”

How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet

Tue, 28 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The RoboForm program unwisely tied the random passwords it generated to the date and time on the user’s computer”

Elon Musk's xAI raises $6 billion to fund its race against ChatGPT and all the rest

Tue, 28 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Musk denied that report at the time.”

Finally an alternative to Big Tech, your new open-source mobile ecosystem - Mobifree

Tue, 28 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Both app stores were built on tracking users to sell their data, thereby giving Apple and Google power over how citizens receive services from their own governments.”

Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems

Mon, 27 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Applying this technique over the course of a year, we learned the precise locations of over 2 billion BSSIDs around the world.”

Almost all citizens of city of Eindhoven have their personal data exposed

Mon, 27 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Two files containing the personal data of 221,511 inhabitants of Eindhoven were accessible to unauthorised parties for a period of time last year.”

Google fixes eighth actively exploited Chrome zero-day this year

Mon, 27 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“CVE-2024-5274 is the eighth actively exploited vulnerability that Google fixed in Chrome since the beginning of the year, and the third this month.”

Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4

Mon, 27 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“These entities are now selling off (if they can) these blocks at prices 10,000+ USD per /24!”

Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h

Sun, 26 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“It felt like extortion. Pay us $120k until tomorrow or we destroy your business.”

This is what the damaged Svalbard cable looked like when it came up from the depths

Sun, 26 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“After an inital investigation, the police dropped the case due to lack of evidence, and inadequate legislation.”

How the Guinness Brewery Invented the Most Important Statistical Method in Science

Sun, 26 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The self-taught statistician published his t-test under the pseudonym “Student” because Guinness didn’t want to tip off competitors to its research.”

Introducing adaptive audio in Google Meet: creating ad-hoc meeting spaces with multiple laptops

Sun, 26 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“This is a great benefit for organizations with not enough video conferencing rooms or without resources for dedicated conference room equipment.”

Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

Sat, 25 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“But Google controls the roads. If tomorrow they decide the roads won’t go to an entire town, that town dies.”

Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

Sat, 25 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The messy rollout means Google is racing to manually disable AI Overviews for specific searches as various memes get posted”

Abusing Go's infrastructure

Sat, 25 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Malware can simply store payloads and retrieve them from the proxy when needed.”

JetBrains releases RustRover IDE for Rust development

Sat, 25 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“RustRover is available through a paid commercial license or a free non-commercial license, the latter for individuals using RustRover for non-commercial purposes.”

JAVS courtroom recording software backdoored in supply chain attack

Fri, 24 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Attackers have backdoored the installer of widely used Justice AV Solutions (JAVS) courtroom video recording software”

Canada's London Drugs confirms ransomware attack after LockBit demands $25M

Fri, 24 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“London Drugs is unwilling and unable to pay ransom to these cybercriminals.”

Bionic Eye Gets a New Lease on Life

Fri, 24 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Pixium ran out of money last November before the final results of a larger, multiyear pivotal trial in Europe.”

400,000 Impacted by CentroMed Data Breach

Fri, 24 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The personal information of 400,000 individuals was compromised in a data breach at El Centro Del Barrio (CentroMed).”

Cement recycling method could help solve one of the world's biggest climate challenges

Thu, 23 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Eventually, this method could produce zero emission cement, if the EAF was powered by renewable energy.”

Microsoft outage affects Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT internet search

Thu, 23 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Copilot is completely offline whether you use the website, app, or Copilot in Windows.”

How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years

Thu, 23 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In 1941 Boeing required more than 140,000 hours of labor to assemble a B-17.”

Making steel with electricity

Thu, 23 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The company has raised more than $370 million to date from organizations across Europe, Asia”

Windows Recall sounds like a privacy nightmare: here's why I'm worried

Wed, 22 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers.”

Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag

Wed, 22 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Apple’s API will return the geolocations of up to 400 more BSSIDs that are nearby the one requested.”

Two students find security bug that could let millions do laundry for free

Wed, 22 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“CSC never responded when Sherbrooke and Taranenko reported the vulnerability via emails and a phone call in January”

S3 Is Showing Its Age

Wed, 22 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“S3 is the only object store that doesn’t support preconditions.”

Sam Altman Is Showing Us Who He Really Is

Tue, 21 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider.”

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

Tue, 21 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“But, it turns out that if you don’t want Slack to use your data, you have to email the company to opt out.”

A Transport Protocol's View of Starlink

Tue, 21 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The worst case in this data set is a shift from 30ms to 80ms.”

The curious case of the missing period

Tue, 21 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“This meant some customers received emails informing them their new premium was now $2700 instead of $27.00.”

Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe

Mon, 20 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic.”

CVE-2024-4367: Arbitrary JavaScript execution in PDF.js

Mon, 20 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“On Electron apps that do not properly sandbox JavaScript code, this vulnerability even leads to native code execution (!).”

When Online Content Disappears

Mon, 20 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.”

Migrating a Trillion Entries of Uber's Ledger Data from DynamoDB to LedgerStore

Mon, 20 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“At Uber’s scale, DynamoDB became expensive.”

The Lunacy of Artemis

Sun, 19 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Each SLS booster is now projected to cost $266 million, or about twice the launch cost of a Falcon Heavy.”

Hertz Charging a Tesla Renter for Gas Was Not an Isolated Incident

Sun, 19 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Le was then apparently billed $690.32, some of which was redundant billing for the rental they say they’d already paid for.”

Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead"

Sun, 19 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Apple charges app vendors a whopping 30 percent commission on most transactions”

Tutorial: Transforming a QLC SSD into an SLC SSD: Dramatically increasing the drive's endurance!

Sun, 19 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We see that the TBW has increased drastically, from 120TB (500GB QLC) to 4,000TB (120GB pSLC), which is an increase of over 3333%, more than 3000 percent.”

How Intel undercut a standards body to give us the PCI connector

Sat, 18 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“But just two weeks before VESA was planning to announce what it came up with, Intel floored the VESA local bus committee by saying it won’t support the technology after all.”

SWISS' Entire Boeing 777 Fleet Now Has Shark Skin Technology

Sat, 18 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Last year, the airline saved nearly 2,200 tonnes of kerosene despite its 777 fleet not being fully fitted at the time.”

Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates

Sat, 18 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“What’s interesting here is that all seven of these are M-class stars, and as the authors note, M-dwarf debris disks are quite rare, with only a few confirmed.”

Frozen Human Brain Tissue Was Successfully Revived For The First Time

Sat, 18 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“They found that the thawed organoids closely resembled their unfrozen counterparts’ appearance, growth, and function, even after being frozen in MEDY for 18 months.”

ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can't

Fri, 17 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.”

CVE-2023-52424 WiFi Vulnerability: The SSID Confusion Attack

Fri, 17 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The root cause of the vulnerability is that the IEEE 802.11 standard underpinning how WiFi works does not require the network name (SSID) to always be authenticated.”

The Maker of Stable Diffusion Is Collapsing, Considering Sale

Fri, 17 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“According to The Information, the company generated less than $5 million in revenue in the first quarter of this year, while losing more than $30 million.”

900k Impacted by Data Breach at Mississippi Healthcare Provider

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In January, SRHS informed the Maine Attorney General’s Office that 252,890 individuals were impacted by the incident.”

For self-driving cars, the free ride is over

Thu, 16 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Tesla, Ford, Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox are all being probed for alleged safety lapses, with the agency examining hundreds of crashes, some of which have been fatal.”

The Forged Apple Employee Badge

Thu, 16 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“eBay both times sent back a response that they had found that it didn’t violate any of eBay’s rules.”

Raspberry Pi is going public to expand its range of tiny computers

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Raspberry Pi is hoping to use that cash to pay more engineers, bring aspects of its semiconductor design process in-house, and introduce new, more expensive product variants”

Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count

Thu, 16 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The new algorithm is astonishingly simple and easy to implement”

Ebury botnet malware infected 400,000 Linux servers since 2009

Wed, 15 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Out of 4.8 million known_hosts entries collected by Ebury operators, about two million had their hostname hashed. 40% (about 800,000) of those hashed hostnames were guessed or brute forced.”

Jepsen: Datomic Pro 1.0.7075

Wed, 15 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“However, inside of a transaction Datomic behaves as if operations were evaluated concurrently.”

Oracle goes vegan: Dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

Wed, 15 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In this release, we have switched from Terraform to OpenTofu due to forthcoming Terraform licensing changes”

Researchers identify fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50,000 years

Wed, 15 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“During the largest of the natural rises, carbon dioxide increased by about 14 parts per million in 55 years.”

See what's changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy

Tue, 14 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We understand that any new data collection might spark some questions.”

New gel breaks down alcohol in the body

Tue, 14 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Thirty minutes after the single dose of alcohol, the prophylactic application of the gel reduced the alcohol level in the mice by 40 percent.”

$16k G1 humanoid rises up to smash nuts, twist and twirl

Tue, 14 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Where the H1’s price tag was set at US$90,000 with up to 10 years of wait time, the G1 is pitched a whole lot cheaper at $16,000 (starting price).”

The new APT 3.0 solver

Tue, 14 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The most striking difference to the classic APT solver is that solver3 always keeps manually installed packages around, it never offers to remove them.”

Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

Mon, 13 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Amazon S3 will make a change so unauthorized requests that customers did not initiate are free of charge.”

Boeing refused to pay $200 million ransomware demand from LockBit gang

Mon, 13 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“If the $200 million figure is accurate, it would be one of the very highest ransom demands ever made by cyber-extortionists.”

Apple and Google deliver support for unwanted tracking alerts in iOS and Android

Mon, 13 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Bluetooth tag manufacturers including Chipolo, eufy, Jio, Motorola, and Pebblebee have committed that future tags will be compatible.”

Ohio Lottery data breach impacted over 538,000 individuals

Mon, 13 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Attackers gained access to names or other personal identifiers in combination with Social Security Numbers of the impacted individuals.”

GPUs Go Brrr

Sun, 12 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“This diagram cost us three weeks of life that we will not get back, hence the public shaming.”

16 years of CVE-2008-0166 - Debian OpenSSL Bug

Sun, 12 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“It appears that a sizeable number of companies configured DKIM TXT records in 2007 and never changed them.”

Nearly Half of All Masters Degrees Aren't Worth Getting

Sun, 12 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Because ROI is negative for these programs, it’s unlikely that most of those loan dollars will be repaid.”

Did GitHub Copilot really increase my productivity?

Sun, 12 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“That being said, the answer to my question above is a very definite “no, I am more productive without it”.”

She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all

Sat, 11 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Someone had been crying deepfake.”

Thread - the tech we can't use or teach

Sat, 11 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Thread is very much neither free nor open.”

iOS 18: Apple finalizing deal to bring ChatGPT to iPhone

Sat, 11 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“An OpenAI accord would let Apple offer a popular chatbot as part of a flurry of new AI features that it’s planning to announce next month”

Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head

Sat, 11 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“CORDIC is an algorithm for computing trig functions like sin, cos, tan etc on low powered hardware, without an FPU (i.e. no floating point) or expensive lookup tables.”

Dell warns of data breach, 49 million customers allegedly affected

Fri, 10 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We believe there is not a significant risk to our customers given the type of information involved.”

Georgia education agency's MOVEit data theft impacted 800K

Fri, 10 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“US state law doesn’t set a deadline for reporting security breaches in the same way as the GDPR does, for example, so for those wondering what action USG will face for disclosing so late, the answer is probably none.”

CME impact imminent, Two more earth-directed CMEs

Fri, 10 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“That means there are now six, yes six, coronal mass ejections that have a good chance to pass our planet in the days ahead.”

A Skeptic’s Take on Beaming Power to Earth from Space

Fri, 10 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In that respect, beamed power from space is like nuclear fusion, except at least 25 years behind.”

Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’

Thu, 09 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund’s cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies.”

Google employees question execs over 'decline in morale' after blowout earnings

Thu, 09 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Despite the company’s stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases”

It's always TCP_NODELAY. Every damn time.

Thu, 09 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps that the whole concept is outmoded.”

Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial

Thu, 09 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Some 24 weeks after surgery, in February this year, tests in Cambridge showed Opal could also hear soft sounds such as a whisper.”

Why Your VPN May Not Be As Secure As It Claims

Wed, 08 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In our testing, the VPN always continued to report as connected, and the kill switch was never engaged to drop our VPN connection.”

Tesla is being investigated for securities and wire fraud for self-driving claims

Wed, 08 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“To our knowledge no government agency in any ongoing investigation has concluded that any wrongdoing occurred.”

Stack Overflow Upset Over Users Deleting Answers After OpenAI Partnership

Wed, 08 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Posts that are potentially useful to others should not be removed except under extraordinary circumstances.”

UK confirms Ministry of Defence payroll data exposed in data breach

Wed, 08 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It is estimated that 270,000 payroll records have been exposed.”

AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules

Wed, 08 May 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.”

Boeing faces new US investigation into 'missed' 787 inspections

Tue, 07 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The memo said the company concluded that “several people had been violating company policies by not performing a required test, but recording the work as having been completed”.”

Apple introduces M4 chip

Tue, 07 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“M4 has Apple’s fastest Neural Engine ever, capable of up to 38 trillion operations per second, which is faster than the neural processing unit of any AI PC today.”

LPCAMM2 Is Finally Here, and It's a Big Deal

Tue, 07 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Finally: modular, performant, power-efficient laptop memory for the masses.”

Introducing SecureDrop Protocol

Tue, 07 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The server has access to minimal metadata, theoretically opening the door to deployment in adversarial environments.”

Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain

Mon, 06 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Upon receiving the recovery email from Proton Mail, Spanish authorities further requested Apple to provide additional details linked to that email, leading to the identification of the individual.”

Dropbox says hackers stole customer data, auth secrets from eSignature service

Mon, 06 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This configuration tool enabled the threat actor to execute applications and automated services with elevated privileges, allowing the attacker to access the customer database.”

A million Australian pubgoers wake up to find personal info listed on leak site

Mon, 06 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The leak site alleges Outabox contracted development of some software to offshore developers, and that those coders were given access to data gathered by gaming venues – including facial biometrics, scans of drivers’ licenses, and club membership details.”

Your 14-Day Free Trial Ain't Gonna Cut It

Mon, 06 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“I gave them 14 days to get to that fork. But my p50 TTC is 41 days.”

Open Source Security (OpenSSF) and OpenJS Foundations Issue Alert for Social Engineering Takeovers of Open Source Projects

Sun, 05 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“These social engineering attacks are exploiting the sense of duty that maintainers have with their project and community in order to manipulate them.”

Helldivers 2 Removed From Purchase On Steam In Over 150 Countries

Sun, 05 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Sony backed this up by claiming it was for player protection, but the Helldivers 2 community wasn’t having any of that and took to orbital striking the Steam page with over 180,000 negative reviews over the past few days.”

Multi-Drug Resistant Bacteria Found on ISS Mutating to Become Functionally Distinct

Sun, 05 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The strains were able to viably persist in the ISS over time with a significant abundance.”

Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8,000 emulator-related DMCA takedowns

Sat, 04 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Redacted entities representing Nintendo assert that the Yuzu source code contained in the repos "illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games."”

Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies? A lawsuit dared to ask

Sat, 04 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“By settling, the ADA manages to avoid the discovery process, and the potentially embarrassing revelations that might have come with it.”

How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab

Sat, 04 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“US fabs are also more expensive to build than in other parts of the world, with estimates ranging from 30% more expensive (per Intel) to up to four times as expensive (per TSMC).”

Vera Rubin's Primary Mirror Gets its First Reflective Coating

Sat, 04 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Next came an incredibly thin layer of silver weighing only 64 grams spread over the 8.4-meter mirror.”

DNS traffic can leak outside the VPN tunnel on Android

Fri, 03 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“These finding also shows once again that "Block connections without VPN" does not live up to its name (or documentation) and that it has multiple flaws.”

An Oil Price-Fixing Conspiracy Caused 27% of All Inflation Increases in 2021

Fri, 03 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Even if oil gets to $200/barrel, the independent producers are going to be disciplined.”

Apple adds more carve-outs to its EU core tech fee after criticism from devs

Fri, 03 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Developers will need to certify their non-commercial status annually to Apple to keep qualifying for the fee exemption.”

Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

Fri, 03 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We haven’t seen a weight-based energy density figure from Natron itself, but a 2022 article from Chemical & Engineering News put its sodium-ion batteries at 70 Wh/kg, around the very bottom of the sodium-ion energy density scale.”

Google Paid Apple $20 Billion in 2022 to Be Default Safari Search Engine

Thu, 02 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In November, lawsuit documents indicated that Google was paying 36 percent of the total revenue that it earns from searches conducted on Safari, and now it turns out that equates to $20 billion.”

Microsoft bans US police departments from using enterprise AI tool for facial recognition

Thu, 02 May 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The new terms leave wiggle room for Microsoft.”

They thought they were joining an accelerator: instead they lost their startups

Thu, 02 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The court has since ordered the company to auction off the warrants it held in more than 1,000 of the startups that went through the accelerator program.”

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2024

Thu, 02 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“At an average age of nine years, these drives continue to defy their age.”

At Microsoft, years of security debt come crashing down

Wed, 01 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Currently, Microsoft directs the vast majority of their security investments in revenue generating roles instead of internal security roles.”

Millions of Malicious 'Imageless' Containers Planted on Docker Hub Over 5 Years

Wed, 01 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Over four million of the repositories in Docker Hub are imageless and have no content except for the repository documentation.”

Google defended the Play Store from 2.28 million malicious apps last year

Wed, 01 May 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Last year’s report bragged about successfully defending Android’s crown jewel from 1.43 million apps, but this year’s report claims a whopping 2.28 million privacy-violating apps were stopped dead in their tracks.”

Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“6-year veteran Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s Senior Director of EV charging, would be leaving the company on Tuesday, along with nearly all of her 500-person charging team”

Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.”

Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conference

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team”

Rabbit R1, a thing that should just be an app, actually is just an Android app

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“A tipster shared the Rabbit R1’s launcher APK with us, and with a bit of tinkering, we managed to install it on an Android phone, specifically a Pixel 6a.”

FCC Fines AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Nearly $200 Million for Illegally Sharing Access to Customers' Location Data

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Yet, even after being made aware of this unauthorized access, all four carriers continued to operate their programs without putting in place reasonable safeguards”

The Czech illegals: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“For the last fifteen years, it has served as the Greek safehouse for members of GRU Unit 29155, Vladimir Putin’s most grimly accomplished assassination and sabotage squad”

Health insurance giant Kaiser will notify millions of a data breach after sharing patients' data with advertisers

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Kaiser said that the data shared with advertisers includes member names and IP addresses, as well as information that could indicate if members were signed into a Kaiser Permanente account or service”

Atomic Nucleus Excited with Laser: A Breakthrough after Decades

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Knowing the energy of this transition to within one electron volt is of little use, if you have to hit the right energy with a precision of one millionth of an electron volt in order to detect the transition.”

Williams-Sonoma fined $3.18 million for falsely labeling products as 'Made in USA'

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The federal body said in numerous instances, those products were actually ‘wholly imported’ from China.”

How TfL's simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“To pick a random example, an off-peak trip from Paddington to Canary Wharf would cost £6.70 if buying a paper ticket but £2.80 if using contactless payments.”

The Unstallable Plane That Stalled

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The pilot had no knowledge of the aircraft’s stall behaviour at all. His opinion was that the Cessna 185 simply didn’t stall.”

Rope & SumTree

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Currently there are over 20 uses of the SumTree in Zed.”

A mountain of clothes appeared in Chile's desert. Then it went up in flames.

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“According to the global environmental advocacy group Ekō (formerly known as SumofUS), an estimated 85 percent of the used clothing imported into Iquique remains unsold.”

Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“If you try to sign in with your original Apple ID password, you’ll be locked out of your account.”

The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“But its fortunes still rest disproportionately on iPhone sales: in Apple’s 2024 Q1 financials, it reports net sales of $119.6 billion in the three months prior to December 30th, 2023, with $69.7 billion attributed to the iPhone.”

The server chose violence

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“On Hubris, if you break a system call’s preconditions, your task is immediately destroyed with no opportunity to do anything else.”

Passkeys: A Shattered Dream

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“What better way to encourage long term entrapment of users then by locking all their credentials into your platform, and even better, credentials that can’t be extracted or exported in any capacity.”

The Not-So-Silent Type: Vulnerabilities Across Keyboard Apps Reveal Keystrokes to Network Eavesdroppers

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Our analysis found that eight of the nine apps identified contained vulnerabilities that could be exploited to completely reveal the contents of users’ keystrokes in transit.”

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill approved to become law

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Other key concerns revolve around the IPB’s amendment that would force tech companies to consult the UK government before rolling out security updates to software.”

Cyber-attack leaves Leicester street lights permanently on

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It means we are currently not able to remotely identify faults in the street lighting system.”

Cost of developing new drugs may be far lower than industry claims, trial reveals

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The extortionate cost of trials is used to justify high prices of new medicines, but companies do not publish either the topline or a breakdown of their spending.”

Meta loses $200 billion in value as Zuckerberg focuses earnings call on all the ways company bleeds cash

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Reality Labs reported sales of $440 million for the first quarter and $3.85 billion in losses.”

Open Sourcing DOS 4

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Jeff Wilcox and OSPO went to the Microsoft Archives, and while they were unable to find the full source code for MT-DOS, they did find MS DOS 4.00, which we’re releasing today”

TSMC unveils 1.6nm process technology with backside power delivery, rivals Intel's competing design

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The production timeline for A16 indicates that volume production of A16 will commence in the second half of 2026.”

Airlines required to refund passengers for canceled, delayed flights

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Airlines can no longer issue refunds in forms of vouchers or credits when consumers are entitled to receive cash.”

IBM to Acquire HashiCorp, Inc. Creating a Comprehensive End-to-End Hybrid Cloud Platform

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The two companies also anticipate an acceleration of HashiCorp’s growth initiatives by leveraging IBM’s world-class go-to-market strategy, scale, and reach.”

UnitedHealth paid ransom to bad actors, says patient data was compromised in Change Healthcare cyberattack

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“A ransom was paid as part of the company’s commitment to do all it could to protect patient data from disclosure.”

MITRE says state hackers breached its network via Ivanti zero-days

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“No organization is immune from this type of cyber attack, not even one that strives to maintain the highest cybersecurity possible.”

U.S. bans noncompete agreements for nearly all jobs

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The FTC estimates about 30 million people, or one in five American workers, from minimum wage earners to CEOs, are bound by noncompetes.”

The Man Who Killed Google Search

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about.””

The little smart home platform that could

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we’re driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale.”

Apple's Risky Bet on CarPlay

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“If you look at the CarPlay concept for Porsche and remove the steering wheel, there is no way you can tell it’s a Porsche.”

What We Learned Inside a North Korean Internet Server: How Well Do You Know Your Partners?

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The server, which appears no longer in use, had been incorrectly configured, making the daily flow of files into and out of this server viewable by anyone without a password.”

Akira Ransomware Made Over $42 Million in One Year: Agencies

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“For initial access, Akira ransomware’s operators have been targeting VPN services that lacked multi-factor authentication, mainly using known vulnerabilities in Cisco products (such as CVE-2020-3259 and CVE-2023-20269).”

Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to ‘inject a sense of crisis’

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“We are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome this crisis.”

curl is just the hobby

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“I claim that every human being on the planet that is Internet-connected uses devices or services every day that run curl.”

Pharmaceutical giant Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’ to save $2.15 billion

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We don’t have to be that good to beat the current system.”

Amazon Grows To Over 750,000 Robots As World's Second-Largest Private Employer Replaces Over 100,000 Humans

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“While Amazon is bringing on hundreds of thousands of robots per year, the company is slowly decreasing its employee numbers.”

Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago … [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies.”

Some Fritz!Box modems might have been hijacked

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Since the beginning of this year the fritz.box DNS suffix is an actual registered domain and the owner of this domain is not AVM or anyone affiliated to them.”

Volkswagen workers vote overwhelmingly to join the UAW, giving the union a groundbreaking win

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“There are roughly 150,000 workers at nonunion auto plants in the United States today, roughly the same number as at the American plants of the three unionized automakers.”

Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“They found that the isolated bacterium can only produce about half of the proteins it needs, relying on the algal host to provide the rest.”

Adventures In Rust: Bringing Exchange Support To Thunderbird

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Furthermore, in the entire 20 year lifetime of the Thunderbird project, no one has added support for a new mail protocol before.”

Tesla recalls the Cybertruck for faulty accelerator pedals that can get stuck

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“An unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal.”

Nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, report finds

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Biscuit-flavoured cereals for babies aged six months and older contained 6g of added sugar for every serving in Senegal and South Africa, researchers found. The same product sold in Switzerland has none.”

I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting a $1.2 billion contract with Israel

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”

Russian Sandworm hackers pose as hacktivists in water utility breaches

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“At one point, an error on APT44’s part resulted in Cyber Army of Russia Reborn claiming on their channel an attack that APT44 had not yet carried out.”

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We’d all like to have maintenance cheaper, but the cost of running a ship doesn’t actually change much from year to year. It goes up, actually.”

A single atom layer of gold – LiU researchers create goldene

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“By chance, Lars Hultman found a method that has been used in Japanese forging art for over a hundred years.”

NASA confirms Dragonfly mission to Titan

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The total lifecycle cost of the mission is currently $3.35 billion, approximately double the proposed cost.”

50 Years Later, This Apollo-Era Antenna Still Talks to Voyager 2

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Today more than 40 percent of all data retrieved by celestial explorers, including Voyagers, New Horizons, and the Mars Curiosity rover, comes through DSS-43.”

CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred for Deceiving Students and Hiding Loan Costs

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.”

AWS took 6 months to fix STS bug that made minions admin

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“We were well aware of IAM’s provable security via automated reasoning, and the documentation is so comprehensive (and intimidating at times) that we were sure it had to be our fault”

FTC Fines Mental Health Startup Cerebral $7 Million for Major Privacy Violations

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Cerebral sent out promotional postcards, which were not in envelopes, to over 6,000 patients that included their names and language that appeared to reveal their diagnosis and treatment to anyone who saw the postcards”

Crickets from Chirp Systems in Smart Lock Key Leak

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Chirp Systems has not responded to requests to work with CISA to mitigate this vulnerability.”

Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made.

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s even possible to lose money generating your low-quality ebook to sell on Kindle for $0.99. The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook.”

A quick post on Chen’s algorithm

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“If Chen’s result can be improved upon, then quantum algorithms could render obsolete an entire generation of “post-quantum” lattice-based schemes, forcing cryptographers and industry back to the drawing board.”

Redis is forked

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The old Redis was for developers. The new Redis is for enterprise sales, and for generative AI.”

California is Losing Tech Jobs

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Since the beginning of COVID, California has added a sum total of only 6k jobs in the tech industry, compared to roughly 570k across the rest of the United States.”

PuTTY vulnerability vuln-p521-bias

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“An attacker in possession of a few dozen signed messages and the public key has enough information to recover the private key”

T-Mobile Employees Across The Country Receive Cash Offers To Illegally Swap SIMs

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The texts offer the employee $300 per SIM swap, and asks the worker to contact them on telegram.”

Palo Alto Networks Warns of Exploited Firewall Vulnerability

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Tracked as CVE-2024-3400 and assigned a severity score of 10 out of 10, the security defect was identified in the GlobalProtect feature of PAN-OS”

Roku says 576,000 user accounts hacked after second security incident

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Roku said it discovered the second incident while it was notifying some 15,000 Roku users that their accounts were compromised in an earlier credential stuffing attack.”

Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“According to public tax records, Cedars Sinai in Beverly Hills had an income surplus of $750 million in 2022 and paid no federal taxes.”

The Guide to Stock Options conversations

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“In some companies, the initial job contracts are misleading, and mention a nominal price of $0.01.”

My Cat Alerted Me to a DDoS Attack

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“They generously offered to give us a “solution file” if we sent them $5,000 in Bitcoin.”

Sandboxing All The Things with Flatpak and BubbleBox

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, Flatpaks can come with extremely liberal default profiles that make the sandbox mostly pointless.”

Ubisoft is stripping people's licences for The Crew weeks after its shutdown, nearly squandering hopes of fan servers and acting as a stark reminder of how volatile digital ownership is

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?”

Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This will appear only for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel in the US and will not apply to commercial devices (devices managed by organizations)”

Japanese Police Arrest 36-Year-Old Man on Suspicion of Tampering With Pokémon Violet Save Data

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Police in Japan have arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data to customers online”

I Continue To No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“I contacted a VCF administrator and was told it was all disposed of, and that they kept the bins.”

Why CISA is Warning CISOs About a Breach at Sisense

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Both sources said the attackers used the S3 access to copy and exfiltrate several terabytes worth of Sisense customer data, which apparently included millions of access tokens, email account passwords, and even SSL certificates.”

Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.”

96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“And two thirds of hospital websites had some kind of data transfer to a third-party domain that we couldn’t even identify”

AI boom is boosting demand even for HDDs, raising prices by up to 20% since Q3

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Manufacturers cut production by 20 percent in 2023, according to the TechNews report, to keep hard drive prices from falling in the face of lowered demand in a weakening global economy.”

Apple alerts users in 92 nations to mercenary spyware attacks

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Apple previously described the attackers as “state-sponsored” but has replaced all such references with “mercenary spyware attacks.””

Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27bn fraud case

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Although Lan did not directly hold executive power at SCB, she owned 91.5% of the bank’s shares through third parties and shell companies.”

End of the Line? Saudi Arabia ‘forced to scale back’ plans for desert megacity

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030.”

Alternative browsers report uplift after EU's DMA choice screen mandate

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, told us it estimates that less than a fifth of iOS users have been shown a choice screen so far.”

Twitter's Clumsy Pivot to X.com Is a Gift to Phishers

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead.”

Microsoft fixes two Windows zero-days exploited in malware attacks

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft did not indicate they were patching this vulnerability, so it was a (welcome) surprise when the patch went live.”

Fake Facebook MidJourney AI page promoted malware to 1.2 million people

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In one of the cases seen by researchers at Bitdefender, a malicious Facebook page impersonating Midjourney amassed 1.2 million followers and remained active for nearly a year before it was eventually taken down.”

FCC looks to limit how domestic violence abusers use connected cars

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“No survivor of domestic violence and abuse should have to choose between giving up their car and allowing themselves to be stalked and harmed by those who can access its connectivity and data”

After years of trying, the U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Sales of table saws will decrease, resulting in unemployment, and the government could be creating a monopoly.”

Two Bay Area railway workers charged for building secret apartments inside train stations

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“For a mere $42,000, Navarro allegedly installed a kitchenette, shower, plumbing and security cameras, prosecutors said.”

How I Tripped Over the Debian Weak Keys Vulnerability

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Through a well-meaning but ultimately disasterous cleanup of OpenSSL’s randomness generation code, the Debian maintainer had inadvertently reduced the number of possible keys that could be generated by a given user from “bazillions” to a little over 32,000.”

Big Tech passkey implementations are a trap

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“And both Apple and Google prevent you from exporting your passkeys, meaning you’ll need to create them all over again if you want to switch to another password manager.”

Beeper is joining Automattic

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“Our privacy policy and terms of service remain the same, though they may change in the future.”

Major data center power failure (again): Cloudflare Code Orange tested

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Here’s a post we never thought we’d need to write: less than five months after one of our major data centers lost power, it happened again to the exact same data center.”

German State Ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions.”

Hoya's optics production and orders disrupted by cyberattack

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“At this time, we do not have a full restoration timeline for when our systems will be back online”

Help us to take down the parasite website

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It is riddled with malicious advertisements on every page.”

Command Injection and Backdoor Account in D-Link NAS Devices

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The request includes parameters for a username (user=messagebus) and an empty password field (passwd=).”

Google Public DNS's approach to fight against cache poisoning attacks

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Measurements indicate that the DNS Cookies do not provide sufficient coverage, even though around 40% of nameservers by IP support DNS Cookies, these account for less than 10% of overall query volume.”

Groq CEO: 'We No Longer Sell Hardware'

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The U.S. government and its allies are the only ones we’d be willing to sell hardware to.”

The lifecycle of a code AI completion

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Here’s a number of improvements that we applied in order to reduce 75th percentile of end-to-end latencies for single line completion from 1.8 seconds to under 900 milliseconds over the past months”

ASUS refunds Zenfone buyer for failing to provide bootloader unlock tools as promised

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In the settlement, Timothy received a full refund for the phone (£700) and the court filing fee (£70) for a total of £770 (~$973).”

Online porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Leading VPN provider Top10 VPN claims demand from VPN services jumped 275% on March 15, the same day Pornhub cut off access in Texas.”

v4.6.0: The end

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Let me put it plain and simple: No! I don’t know you, I don’t trust you! Fork it and carry on!”

NIST Researchers Use Cellphone Compass to Measure Tiny Concentrations of Compounds Important for Human Health

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“As the hydrogels enlarged or shrunk, they moved the magnetic particles closer to or farther from the cellphone’s magnetometer, which detected the corresponding changes in the strength of the magnetic field.”

Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“An electronic version of the book included an anonymous email address that can easily be traced to Sariel’s name and Google account.”

Google fixes two Pixel zero-day flaws exploited by forensics firms

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Forensic companies are rebooting devices in ‘After First Unlock’ state into fastboot mode on Pixels and other devices to exploit vulnerabilities there and then dump memory.”

Apple Updates App Store Guidelines to Permit Game Emulators, Website Links in EU Music Apps

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In all other storefronts, streaming music apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase.”

Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Searching Google Books for the term ‘As of my last knowledge update,’ which is associated with ChatGPT-generated answers, returns dozens of books that include that phrase.”

Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Credit card issuers explicitly and directly charge the rest of the economy for the work involved in recruiting the most desirable customers.”

HTTP/2 CONTINUATION Flood: Technical Details

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“During CONTINUATION Flood attack not a single request is made (no END_HEADERS flag)!”

Kobold letters

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“However, the moment the email appeared in your inbox, it changed.”

Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“It turned out that the participants weren’t able to prevent any of the apps from sharing their data with other applications or the service provider.”

'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day.”

Omni Hotels experiencing nationwide IT outage since Friday

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“They have it so you have to text them to come let you into your room, and it usually takes 30+ minutes for an employee to get there and unlock it for you.”

Amazon gives up on no-checkout shopping in its large grocery stores

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Instead, it’s switching fully to ‘Dash Carts,’ where customers scan products as they toss them in their cart.”

New Seafloor Map Only 25% Done, with 6 Years to Go

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The grid shows that 24.9% has been mapped to the Seabed 2030 resolution, leaving about 75% to be done over the next 6 years if the project’s goal is to be met.”

Timeline of the xz open source attack

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project.”

Canoo spent double its annual revenue on the CEO's private jet in 2023

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Under a deal reached in November 2020, Canoo reimburses Aquila Family Ventures, an entity owned by the CEO, for use of an aircraft.”

Google agrees to destroy browsing data collected in Incognito mode

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Though the plaintiffs valued the proposed settlement at $5 billion, which was the amount they originally sought in damages, Castañeda said that they are ‘receiving zero.’”

Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally following years-long criticism

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The price reduction in the Enterprise Suites without Teams is only $2.25, yet the Standalone cost is $5.25.”

AT&T confirms data breach and resets millions of customer passcodes

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“AT&T has acknowledged that a data leak making the rounds online contains information from more than 7.6 million current customers and 65 million former customers.”

Easy-to-use make-me-root exploit lands for recent Linux kernels. Get patching

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Running the exploit as a normal user on a vulnerable machine will grant you root access to the box, allowing you to do whatever you want on it.”

Thread Hijacking: Phishes That Prey on Your Curiosity

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“It works because you feel like you’re suddenly included in an important conversation.”

The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Every time it rained, the rain collected on its leaves and branches and weighed them down.”

Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“I’m unable to access reddit via browser when using VPN.”

Can GPT Optimize My Taxes?

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Run the same prompt twice, and once you will get reasonable output, and the second time it will fail to successfully run an Action or process the Action’s results.”

About the Tailscale.com outage on March 7, 2024

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“We did not realize (and the alerts didn’t specify) that the configuration would prevent automatic certificate renewal from completing.”

We are under DDoS attack and we do nothing

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“In the last 5 days alone, they tried to download it more than 800K times - our setup file is approximately 200MB per download.”

There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison's Rejection Letters

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape, but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”

Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“There is no server component here, and nothing is uploaded. Your images and documents never leave your computer or phone.”

backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.”

US offers $10M to help catch Change Healthcare hackers

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The affiliate group went public after accusing the main ALPHV/BlackCat gang of swindling the contract hackers out of $22 million in ransom that Change Healthcare allegedly paid to prevent the mass leak of patient records.”

The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“With MongoDB, setting up transactions was not trivial because it required running MongoDB in cluster mode with various configuration overhead”

Philanthropist group buys up large tracts of land in Romania to create 'European Yellowstone'

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Only if someone buys these forests and places them in private hands can we save them, at least until the state realizes the importance of preserving them”

Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for FTX fraud

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on the sentence by using his Las Vegas winnings to pay back all or part of which he stole when he finally gets caught.”

Suicide Mission

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were "phenomenally talented assholes," and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company.”

42.parquet: A Zip Bomb for the Big Data Age

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“A 42 kB Parquet file can contain over 4 PB of data.”

Amazon fined in Poland for dark pattern design tricks

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“For Amazon, the conclusion of a sales contract only occurs once it has sent information about the actual shipment.”

Recent 'MFA Bombing' Attacks Targeting Apple Users

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“KrebsOnSecurity tested Ken’s experience, and can confirm that enabling a recovery key does nothing to stop a password reset prompt from being sent to associated Apple devices.”

Introducing DBRX: A New State-of-the-Art Open LLM

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“DBRX was trained on 3072 NVIDIA H100s connected by 3.2Tbps Infiniband.”

Attack on Software Supply Chains Using Fake Python Infrastructure

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“This domain selection is a clever typosquat of the official Python mirror "files.pythonhosted.org," as the latter is where the official artifact files of PyPi packages are typically stored.”

Germany warns of 17K vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers exposed online

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Overall, at least 37% of Exchange servers in Germany (and in many cases also the networks behind them) are severely vulnerable.”

Coast Guard: 6 workers presumed dead after Baltimore bridge collapse

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“There were no issues until June when Chilean authorities found deficiencies in propulsion and the auxiliary machinery.”

Facebook snooped on users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay. No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public.”

After Appalachian Hospitals Merged Into a Monopoly, Their ERs Slowed to a Crawl

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In total, the council member was in the ER for about 30 hours, he said.”

As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot real estate

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“The facilities will reportedly consume as much as 13 percent of the plant’s output.”

On Tech Debt: My Rust Library is now a CDO

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“That’s because RUSTSEC is basically a rating agency and they decided that your debt is now junk.”

Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“In case of an infringement, the Commission can impose fines up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide turnover.”

ZenHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on AMD Zen-based Platforms

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“This result proves that AMD systems are equally vulnerable to Rowhammer as Intel systems”

New 'Loop DoS' attack may impact up to 300,000 online systems

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Loop DoS relies on IP spoofing and can be triggered from a single host that sends one message to start the communication.”

Who killed the network switch?

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Apparently random crashes that go away when you add some debugging code are the worst kind of crash, but that was the situation we were in”

Linux Crisis Tools

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“When you have an outage caused by a performance issue, you don’t want to lose precious time just to install the tools needed to diagnose it.”

Why don't humans have tails? Scientists find answers in an unlikely place

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“It must have been something that thousands of other geneticists looked at”

How Quickly Do Large Language Models Learn Unexpected Skills?

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Strong claims of emergence have as much to do with the way we choose to measure as they do with what the models are doing.”

Stability AI Announcement

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Earlier today, Emad Mostaque resigned from his role as CEO of Stability AI and from his position on the Board of Directors of the company to pursue decentralized AI.”

New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous, but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa”

Jasmin Paris Becomes First Woman to Finish World's Hardest Race

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“She stopped the clock in 59:58:21.”

Boom Announces Successful Flight of XB-1 Demonstrator Aircraft

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“XB-1 met all of its test objectives, including safely and successfully achieving an altitude of 7,120 feet and speeds up to 238 knots (273 mph).”

Mozilla Drops Onerep After CEO Admits to Running People-Search Networks

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“But on March 21, Shelest released a lengthy statement wherein he admitted to maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015”

Hackers earn $1,132,500 for 29 zero-days at Pwn2Own Vancouver

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Competitors successfully gained code execution and escalated privileges on fully patched systems after hacking Windows 11, Ubuntu Desktop, VMware Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox, three web browsers (Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge), and the Tesla Model 3.”

Here's how Microsoft is providing a 'good outcome' for Inflection AI VCs, as Reid Hoffman promised

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“$620 million for non-exclusive licensing fees for the technology (meaning Inflection is free to license it elsewhere) and $30 million for Inflection to agree not to sue over Microsoft’s poaching”

U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Things that are legal for regular companies to do become illegal when monopolies do them.”

Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3 Million Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Wouters and Carroll say they were nonetheless told by Dormakaba that, as of this month, only 36 percent of installed Safloks have been updated.”

Say Hello to Biodegradable Microplastics

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“We had plenty of data to suggest that our material was disappearing in the compost, but this is the first time we’ve measured it at the microparticle level.”

Redis Adopts Dual Source-Available Licensing

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge.”

Misconfigured Firebase instances leaked 19 million plaintext passwords

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“For passwords, the problem gets worse because 98% of them, or 19,867,627 to be exact, are in plain text.”

Section 174 and its Impact on Tech Startups

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“They now have to somehow find $57K in cash to pay the govt, despite not making a real profit.”

White House, EPA warn water sector of cybersecurity threats

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“In the absence of the EPA rules, the water sector continues to have no binding cybersecurity rules.”

Inside the Massive Alleged AT&T Data Breach

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Taken at face value, it looks like whoever snagged this data also obtained the private encryption key and simply decrypted the vast bulk (but not all of) the protected values.”

Gaining kernel code execution on an MTE-enabled Pixel 8

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“So, by using the GPU to access physical addresses directly, I’m able to completely bypass the protection that MTE offers.”

A cargo ship's 'WindWing' sails saved it up to 12 tons of fuel per day

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Pyxis Ocean reportedly saved an average of 3.3 tons of fuel each day.”

Introducing Garnet – an open-source, next-generation, faster cache-store for accelerating applications and services

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We use our own benchmarking tool, called Resp.benchmark, to generate all results.”

900 Sites, 125 million accounts, 1 vulnerability

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“24% of Site owners fixed the misconfiguration”

How we're helping creators disclose altered or synthetic content

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“And while we want to give our community time to adjust to the new process and features, in the future we’ll look at enforcement measures for creators who consistently choose not to disclose this information.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: 'We need bigger GPUs'

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The strategy is to get customers who buy Nvidia-based servers to sign up for Nvidia enterprise, which costs $4,500 per GPU per year for a license.”

Death Knell of the NVD?

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Another outstanding vulnerability researcher named Jerry Gamblin published research showing that since the date of February 15th, 90% of all published CVE’s are still awaiting processing and analysis.”

The Return of the Frame Pointers

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“The overhead of adding frame pointers to everything (libc and Java) was usually less than 1%, with one exception of 10%.”

Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Searching Google Scholar for “certainly, here is” turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently written by ChatGPT”

Grok-1

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The implementation of the MoE layer in this repository is not efficient.”

Mars Has an Unexpected Influence on Earth's Oceans and Climate, Repeating Every 2.4 Million Years, Study Finds

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“There is only one way to explain them: They are linked to cycles in the interactions of Mars and Earth orbiting the sun.”

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Between crashes, on measuring the performance, the responsiveness is significantly worse than browsing a BBS with an 8 MHz 286 and a 1200 baud modem.”

Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“A staggering 12.6 million domains on TLDs controlled by Freenom (.tk, .cf and .gq) have been shut down and no longer resolve, leading to a significant reduction in the number of websites hosted by Cloudflare.”

Retiring the Mozilla Location Service

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“In 2019, Skyhook Holdings, Inc contacted Mozilla and alleged that MLS infringed a number of its patents.”

Fuzzing Ladybird with tools from Google Project Zero

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Unsurprisingly, it took less than a second to find the first issue!”

Tech support firms Restoro, Reimage fined $26 million for scare tactics

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“While the devices used to test the purchased software and services had no performance or security issues and were also running antivirus software, scanning them “revealed” hundreds of issues requiring repair, including “PC Privacy issues,” “Junk files,” “Crashed Programs,” and “Broken Registry issues.””

After AWS and Google, Microsoft says it's removing Azure 'egress' data transfer fees: but with caveats

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“There is no flexibility here to support the multi-cloud needs of modern businesses.”

Introducing Sunlight, a CT implementation built for scalability, ease of operation, and reduced cost

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We previously had a test log fail when we ran into a 16TiB limit in MySQL.”

Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Glassdoor now requires your real name and will add it to older accounts without your consent if they learn it, and your only option is to delete your account.”

CEO of Data Privacy Company Onerep.com Founded Dozens of People-Search Firms

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“A search in DomainTools for the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com shows it is associated with the registration of at least 179 domain names, including dozens of mostly now-defunct people-search companies targeting citizens of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia and Mexico, among others.”

FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric From 25Mbps to 100Mbps

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“On Thursday, the commission voted 3-2 to raise its broadband metric from 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads.”

How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“Given our very aggressive growth rate, we had only months of runway remaining.”

Direct File officially opens in 12 pilot states following positive early reviews: eligible taxpayers can file online directly with the IRS for free

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“Many taxpayers we’ve heard from filed their taxes in less than 30 minutes using Direct File and praised it as an easy, no cost tax filing experience.”

Giant 'sand battery' holds a week's heat for a whole town

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“That, the companies claim, equates to a week’s worth of Pornainen’s heat demands in winter, or a month’s worth in summer.”

Stanford: Data of 27,000 people stolen in September ransomware attack

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“The investigation determined that an unauthorized individual(s) gained access to the Department of Public Safety’s network between May 12, 2023, and Sept. 27, 2023.”

JIT WireGuard

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“We went from thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of stale WireGuard peers on a gateway to what rounds to none.”

TikTok shareholders who make any 'disparaging statement' about the company risk having their entire holdings seized

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“If shareholders are caught doing so, ‘all of the participant’s restricted share units will be immediately forfeited.’”

Apple Announces Ability to Download iPhone Apps From Websites in EU

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year”

Stealing Part of a Production Language Model

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“For under $20 USD, our attack extracts the entire projection matrix of OpenAI’s Ada and Babbage language models.”

Building Meta's GenAI Infrastructure

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“By the end of 2024, we’re aiming to continue to grow our infrastructure build-out that will include 350,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs as part of a portfolio that will feature compute power equivalent to nearly 600,000 H100s.”

Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data scraping

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0400

“someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on Saturday.”

Boeing whistleblower John Barnett found dead in US

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“It established that the location of at least 53 ’non-conforming’ parts in the factory was unknown, and that they were considered lost.”

Microsoft says Russian hackers stole source code after spying on its executives

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft had configured a non-production test tenant account without two-factor authentication enabled, allowing Nobelium to gain access.”

Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“Airbnb will no longer allow hosts to use indoor security cameras, regardless of where they’re placed or what they’re used for.”

Webb & Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the Universe”

Activision QA Workers Vote to Form Largest US Video Game Worker Union to Date

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0400

“By recognizing our union, Microsoft is making good on its promise to respect our ability to decide for ourselves about union representation.”

Firm headed by legendary chip architect behind AMD Zen finally releases first hardware: days after being selected to build the future of AI in Japan, Tenstorrent unveils Grayskull, its RISC-V answer to GPUs

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0400

“The Grayskull e75 and e150 DevKits are available for purchase now at $599 and $799, respectively.”

S3 is files, but not a filesystem

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

“When your SQLite database is kept in S3, each write suddenly becomes a total overwrite of the entire database.”

Perf is not enough

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0400

“No one at Google actually used the JDBC drivers, and while we ran full suites of benchmarks every night, those benchmarks didn’t actually reflect the end-to-end performance our users were seeing.”

the Apple curl security incident 12604

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Because the server certificate can be validated successfully using the built-in system trust store, we don’t consider this something that needs to be addressed in our platforms.”

How We Bypassed Safari 17's Advanced Audio Fingerprinting Protection

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Apple knows, and the company decided to fight the identification possibility in Safari 17, but their measures don’t fully work.”

AI-Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The 10th model, prompted to write about historical English architecture, spews out gibberish about jackrabbits.”

Using LLMs to Generate Fuzz Generators

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“I found that Claude’s fuzzer is able to trigger the out-of-bounds read and write bugs only.”

Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, as internal dissent mounts

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“This behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.”

Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account, clearing path for Epic Games Store on iPhone

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Apple has told us and committed to the European Commission that they will reinstate our developer account.”

FBI: U.S. lost record $12.5 billion to online crime in 2023

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Investment fraud increased by 38% last year, causing confirmed losses of $4.57 billion.”

MiTM phishing attack can let attackers unlock and steal a Tesla

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The company replied by saying that its investigation determined that it was the intended behavior”

Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day”

You can not simply publicly access private secure links, can you?

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“A link submitted to urlscan.io as unlisted, was accessed 12 times within 1 hour of submission”

You can now train a 70b language model at home

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“We’re releasing an open source system, based on FSDP and QLoRA, that can train a 70b model on two 24GB GPUs.”

PFAS 'forever chemicals' to officially be removed from food packaging, FDA says

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The FDA’s announcement marks the completion of a voluntary phase-out of the materials by U.S. food packaging manufacturers.”

To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Meta says that third-party providers will need to sign an agreement with Meta or WhatsApp before it will enable interoperability.”

BlackCat Ransomware Group Implodes After Apparent $22M Payment by Change Healthcare

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“On March 1, a cryptocurrency address that security researchers had already mapped to BlackCat received a single transaction worth approximately $22 million.”

Boeing is withholding key details about door plug on Alaska 737 Max 9 jet, NTSB says

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The NTSB has asked Boeing to provide documentation of when it was performed and by whom, Homendy said. But Boeing has told investigators that “they can’t find it,” she said.”

Apple terminates Epic Games developer account calling it a 'threat' to the iOS ecosystem

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“More recently, you have described our DMA compliance as ‘hot garbage,’ a ‘horror show,’ and a ‘devious new instance of Malicious Compliance.’”

Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“If you are moving off AWS, you can contact AWS Support to ask for free DTO rates under this program for the additional data.”

Sergey Brin says Google 'definitely messed up' Gemini image launch

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”

Kagi + Wolfram

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content.”

Cracking Meta's Messenger Certificate Pinning on macOS

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“By modifying just 4 of the binary’s 97,477,728 bytes we can now intercept requests!”

Epic Games Hackers Say They Faked The Whole Thing

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“In reality, we are not a ransomware-as-a-service, but professional fraudsters.”

Introducing the next generation of Claude

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“In addition, we’d like to note that engineers have worked to optimize prompts and few-shot samples for evaluations and reported higher scores for a newer GPT-4T model.”

Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software: previously the prohibition was only listed in the online EULA, now included in installed files [Updated]

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the output generated using SDK elements for the purpose of translating such output artifacts to target a non-NVIDIA platform.”

Products on your perimeter considered harmful (until proven otherwise)

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Attackers have realised that the majority of perimeter-exposed products aren’t ‘secure by design’, and so vulnerabilities can be found far more easily than in popular client software.”

A leaky database spilled 2FA codes for the world's tech giants

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“When asked by TechCrunch, the YX International representative said that the server did not store access logs, which would have determined if anyone other than Sen discovered the exposed database and its contents.”

The hater’s guide to Kubernetes

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“A big key to this has been carving out a small chunk of Kubernetes’ features and pretending the rest don’t exist.”

The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 3.4s in nine solutions

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Processing the input file in parallel provides a huge win over r1, taking the time from 1 minute 45 seconds to 22.6 seconds. For comparison, the previous “optimised non-parallel” version, solution 7, took 22.1 seconds.”

CSS for printing to paper

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“From what I gather by experimentation, Chrome only follows the @page rule if you have Margin set to Default.”

listening in on the neighborhood

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“It’s not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.”

K8s Service Meshes: The Bill Comes Due

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“However, it’s 2024 and stuff that used to be free isn’t anymore. The free money train from VCs has ended and the bill has come due.”

Mathematicians prove Pólya's conjecture for the eigenvalues of a disk, a 70-year-old math problem

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“the researchers show that Pólya’s conjecture is true for the disk, a case considered particularly challenging.”

A most wanted man: Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“For nearly four years, Austrian national Jan Marsalek has been living in Russia under the assumed identity of Konstantin Baiazov, the real-life Orthodox priest.”

How we applied advanced fuzzing techniques to cURL

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“hsts.c, which provides functions for parsing and handling the Strict-Transport-Security response header, had only 4.46% line coverage, 18.75% function coverage, and 2.56% region coverage after over five years on OSS-Fuzz”

Data Scientists Targeted by Malicious Hugging Face ML Models with Silent Backdoor

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“While Hugging Face conducts scans on pickle models, it doesn’t outright block or restrict them from being downloaded, but rather marks them as “unsafe””

Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Some employees within Apple are said to have suspected that the endeavor was likely to fail from the beginning, and they referred to the car as “the Titanic disaster” instead of its “Project Titan” codename.”

Financial systems take a holiday

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Nonetheless, many financial systems do have availability which is far closer to five twos.”

Money Bubble

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“I think I’m probably going to lose quite a lot of money in the next year or two.”

Bitcoin's so high, it crashed Coinbase today

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Users of the Coinbase app grew concerned on Wednesday as they logged in to find their accounts showing a zero balance, despite owning crypto assets.”

After decades of memory-related software bugs, White House calls on industry to act

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The report mentions C and C++ as examples of programming languages that lack “traits associated with memory safety and also have high proliferation across critical systems.””

What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt?

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Seven months later it filed for bankruptcy and has agreed to sell the company.”

New Hugging Face Vulnerability Exposes AI Models to Supply Chain Attacks

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“An attacker could gain a foothold into the container running the service and compromise any model converted by the service.”

The mathematically perfect exoplanet system: a great place to search for alien tech

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The search ultimately did not detect a technological signal”

Jensen Huang says kids shouldn't learn to code: they should leave it up to AI

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program.”

How I turned my open-source project into a business

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“It turned out that smaller companies did not care about the license at all, and larger companies were not using it.”

Botanical gardens can cool city air by an average of 5 °C

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“From a pool of more than 27,000 research papers, the researchers selected 202 for meta-analysis”

Testing of the F-35C Tailhook

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Because the engineers at Northrop Grumman engineered to a computer model that can simulate how an arresting wire acts when used for arrestment, and the model was wrong.”

FTC to ban Avast from selling browsing data for advertising purposes

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The FTC also said Avast stored this information indefinitely and sold it to over 100 third parties between 2014 and 2020 through their Jumpshot subsidiary.”

FDA Approves First Medication to Help Reduce Allergic Reactions to Multiple Foods After Accidental Exposure

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Of note, however, 17% of subjects receiving Xolair had no significant change in the amount of peanut protein tolerated (could not tolerate 100 mg or more of peanut protein).”

Google says Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The Justice Department said in its own newly unsealed filing that Microsoft has spent almost $100 billion on Bing over 20 years.”

Crooks stole $10 million from Axie Infinity co-founder

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“On February 23, researchers at blockchain cybersecurity firm PeckShield alerted about a “whale wallet” compromise over the Ronin Bridge.”

Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“It is the eighth month in a row that is the warmest on record for the respective time of the year.”

Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs.”

Why you almost never see a clock at the mall

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“After 23 minutes supermarket shoppers began using the emotional part of their brain rather than the cognitive part.”

Marginalia: 3 Years

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The quest to reach 1B indexed documents is slowly ongoing.”

Generating Medical Errors: GenAI and Erroneous Medical References

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Four out of five models hallucinate a significant proportion of sources by producing invalid URLs.”

Quality is a hard sell in big tech

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Microsoft could announce they put ChatGPT in a toaster and their stock price would jump $5/share.”

Does Offering ChatGPT a Tip Cause it to Generate Better Text? An Analysis

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“World Peace is notably the winner here, with Heaven and Taylor Swift right behind.”

The cities stripping out concrete for earth and plants

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Since January 2024, developers in Leuven have had to demonstrate that any rain that falls on new or significantly renovated homes can either be capture and re-used on-site or filtrate into the property’s garden rather than pool up and cause a flood.”

Thanks FedEx, This is Why we Keep Getting Phished

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“It’s quite unbelievable what they’ve done with the link because it makes the SMS entirely unactionable.”

Hidden GitHub Commits and How to Reveal Them

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The events endpoint still lists all PushEvents even from the time it was private”

A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to 'Slackbot' and stayed undetected for months

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The move camouflaged McKay’s active Slack account for months, letting his account evade deletion.”

Varda Space, Rocket Lab nail first-of-its-kind spacecraft landing in Utah

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The U.S. Air Force, which operates the reentry site, also denied Varda’s application to land there.”

AT&T cellular service restored after daylong outage: cause still unknown

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“AT&T, which put up a website for system updates, did not say how many customers were affected by Thursday’s outage.”

Unexpected responses from ChatGPT

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“On February 20, 2024, an optimization to the user experience introduced a bug with how the model processes language.”

Nvidia posts revenue up 265% on booming AI business

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Over half the company’s data center sales went to large cloud providers.”

JavaScript Bloat in 2024

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Google Mail is just (just!) 20 MB”

Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“This policy fails to recognize that these tools are not the enemy, rather, insecure products are.”

Recent Zero-Day Could Impact Up to 97,000 Microsoft Exchange Servers

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“According to Microsoft, the issue exists because Exchange Server 2019 did not have NTLM credential relay protection, or Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA), enabled by default.”

Seized ransomware network LockBit rewired to expose hackers to world

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Some of the data it discovered on LockBit’s systems belonged to victims who had paid the ransom.”

iMessage with PQ3: The new state of the art in quantum-secure messaging at scale

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“PQ3 is the first messaging protocol to reach what we call Level 3 security”

Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“If you use Signal, your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone you chat with by default.”

SSDs Have Become Ridiculously Fast, Except in the Cloud

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“AWS EC2 was an early NVMe pioneer, launching the i3 instance with 8 physically-attached NVMe SSDs in early 2017.”

Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The only way Microsoft or OpenAI would know this would be to spy on chatbot sessions.”

ASML dethrones Applied Materials, becomes world's largest fab tool maker: analyst

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Secondly, ASML could sell sophisticated tools to Chinese customers for most of calendar 2023 as sanctions against the Chinese semiconductor sector kicked in only in September and only for one tool.”

How Google is killing independent sites like ours

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Better Homes & Gardens never mentioned conducting tests prior to the Google Product Review Update in July 2022.”

U.S. Internet Leaked Years of Internal, Customer Emails

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“KrebsOnSecurity has been writing about data breaches for nearly two decades, but this one easily takes the cake in terms of the level of incompetence needed to make such a huge mistake unnoticed.”

ExpressVPN User Data Exposed Due to Bug

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Normally, when a user is connected to ExpressVPN, their DNS requests are sent to the company’s servers.”

Community Alert: Ongoing Azure Attacks Utilizing Phishing and Cloud ATO

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Attackers access and download sensitive files, including financial assets, internal security protocols, and user credentials.”

Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Any work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet or other sensitive issues, he added, "needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot."”

The Layoff

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“It’s not a layoff, it’s a re-evaluation of our staffing goals for Q2 2025.”

wddbfs – Mount a sqlite database as a filesystem

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records.”

Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“In an evaluation on Reels and Stories products for Instagram, 75% of TestGen-LLM’s test cases built correctly, 57% passed reliably, and 25% increased coverage.”

The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the U.S.

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“A proposed solar farm on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation will have 2.2 million solar panels and will be eight miles long and one mile wide.”

WJLX, WJBE and WERH, oh my

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Based on this WJLX lost its tower sometime between October 2022 and March 2023.”

We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“I mean, the ironic thing is that we created Electron to create Atom, but I can’t imagine a worse application for Electron than a code editor, I don’t know.”

Air Canada ordered to pay customer who was misled by airline's chatbot

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Air Canada argued that despite the error, the chatbot was a "separate legal entity" and thus was responsible for its actions.”

German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The company appears to be making millions of euros by selling people in Germany their own data.”

US military notifies 20,000 of data breach after cloud email leak

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Anyone with the public IP address of the exposed cloud email server could access the sensitive but unclassified emails inside using only a web browser.”

Ransomware attack forces 100 Romanian hospitals to go offline

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The Hipocrate Information System (HIS) used by hospitals to manage medical activity and patient data was targeted over the weekend and is now offline after its database was encrypted.”

Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU”

uv: Python packaging in Rust

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“uv is an extremely fast Python package installer and resolver, written in Rust, and designed as a drop-in replacement for pip and pip-tools”

Our next-generation model: Gemini 1.5

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“In the Needle In A Haystack (NIAH) evaluation, where a small piece of text containing a particular fact or statement is purposely placed within a long block of text, 1.5 Pro found the embedded text 99% of the time, in blocks of data as long as 1 million tokens.”

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features – small payments and no user interaction – that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web.”

announcing freenginx.org

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Unfortunately, some new non-technical management at F5 recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects.”

French Healthcare Payments Processor Breaches Affect Half of Population

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“France’s data protection agency CNIL is investigating massive data breaches at two companies that manage third-party healthcare payments, warning that more than 33 million people may be affected.”

Bank of America warns customers of data breach after vendor hack

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“While Bank of America has yet to disclose how many customers were impacted by the data breach, an IMS breach notification letter filed with the Attorney General of Maine on behalf of Bank of America revealed that a total of 57,028 people were directly impacted.”

Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing "trustworthy AI into Firefox."”

Is something bugging you?

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“In the entire history of the company, I think we only ever had one or two bugs reported by a customer.”

Wi-Fi jamming to knock out cameras suspected in nine Minnesota burglaries -- smart security systems vulnerable as tech becomes cheaper and easier to acquire

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Edina police suspect that nine burglaries in the last six months have been undertaken with Wi-Fi jammer(s) deployed to ensure incriminating video evidence wasn’t available to investigators.”

The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it?

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Converting this document from its original format was a bit of a victory for open source software. And a lesson in how hard document preservation is.”

Nokia Made Too Many Phones

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Just in the year ‘05 alone, it launched more than fifty models, more than the number of iPhone models Apple has shipped in sixteen years of its existence.”

Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Sable sued a number of other companies, including Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, Juniper Networks, and others, each of which eventually resolved the lawsuit against them out of court.”

Juniper Support Portal Exposed Customer Device Info

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“If you don’t have a support contract you don’t get updates, it’s as simple as that,”

Phishception - SendGrid is abused to host phishing attacks impersonating itself

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“the criminals can use the compromised accounts to compromise further SendGrid accounts in a cycle, providing them with a steady supply of fresh SendGrid accounts.”

Stone age wall found at bottom of Baltic Sea 'may be Europe's oldest megastructure'

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Closer inspection of the structure, named the Blinkerwall, revealed about 1,400 smaller stones that appear to have been positioned to connect nearly 300 larger boulders, many of which were too heavy for groups of humans to have moved.”

No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“New Zealand’s data had been copied from the Netherlands, for example, and the United States’ data from the United Kingdom.”

What it was like working for GitLab

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“But if I had instead lived in the Bay Area, I would’ve earned at least twice that amount, possibly even more.”

Balancing cube

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Even though the idea isn’t new, previous works are largely closed-source. I plan to change that.”

2024: announcing the year of the OpenStreetMap vector maps

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“They get updated incrementally and constantly, a minute after you edit”

How Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“It’s always tracking real-time employee sentiment, and it’s always tracking real-time toxicity,”

A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100? In NYC? The broker's fee is $15K.

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The rules are murky, and no laws explicitly cap broker’s fees or define the difference between reasonable costs and extortion”

Building the DirectX shader compiler better than Microsoft?

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“If your shaders are not signed/validated, then they cannot run on a Windows machine unless it is running in Developer Mode.”

Ransomware payments reached record $1.1 billion in 2023

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Ransomware payments in 2023 soared above $1.1 billion for the first time, shattering previous records and reversing the decline seen in 2022, marking the year as an exceptionally profitable period for ransomware gangs.”

Google saves your conversations with Gemini for years by default

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Please don’t enter confidential information in your conversations or any data you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our products, services, and machine learning technologies,”

Security flaw in a popular smart helmet allowed silent location tracking

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“That 6-digit group code simply isn’t random enough,”

(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Since the database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by no one.”

Exclusive: Mozilla names new CEO as it doubles down on data privacy

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Mozilla generates revenue through search partnerships, a majority of which come from Google.”

Police intelligence services unlawfully spied on whole population groups

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“According to the CTIVD, these intelligence services sometimes receive a signal “about a person or a few persons” and then decide to investigate an entire community based on that.”

Federal action on combatting auto theft

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“such as the Flipper Zero, which would allow for the removal of those devices from the Canadian marketplace”

Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path,”

PAPERWALL: Chinese Websites Posing as Local News Outlets Target Global Audiences with Pro-Beijing Content

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“A central feature of PAPERWALL, observed across the network of websites, is the ephemeral nature of its most aggressive components, whereby articles attacking Beijing’s critics are routinely removed from these websites some time after they are published.”

Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake 'chief financial officer'

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,”

Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“From 1 August 2024 onwards, Danish schools will no longer be allowed to enable Chromebooks and Google platforms to collect students’ personal data for processing.”

Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring'

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“If we lose our jobs and equity grants, it’s cold comfort that Google is succeeding off our hard work, and we don’t get rewarded for it, but you do.”

"Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto Real Estate Bubble: HSBC Bank Leaks

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“In one example, an Ontario casino worker that owned three homes also claimed to earn $345,000 in 2020 analyzing data remotely for a Beijing company.”

TSMC to build second Japan chip factory, raising investment to $20 billion

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The decision to build a second fab is a vote of confidence by TSMC in Japan where construction of the first fab has run smoothly and which, Reuters has reported, it sees as a source of diligent workers with a government that is easy to deal with.”

Meta cuts off third-party access to Facebook Groups, leaving developers and customers in disarray

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“I will lose seven years of work and over 10,000 customers,”

Companies embracing SMS for account logins should be blamed for SIM-swap attacks

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“But here’s the thing: carriers’ security has always been bad, it has even been legislated into being bad, and other companies have still chosen to build mission-critical systems on top of that weak link.”

Better Call GPT, Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“Cost wise, LLMs operate at a fraction of the price, offering a staggering 99.97 percent reduction in cost over traditional methods.”

Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll!

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”

Confirming Large-Scale Pegasus Surveillance of Jordan-based Civil Society

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“At least 14 of the victims confirmed by Citizen Lab analysis work in media, such as journalists or staff. The rest are activists, lawyers, and other members of civil society.”

Clorox Says Cyberattack Costs Exceed $49 Million

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The Company has not recognized any insurance proceeds in the three and six months ended December 31, 2023 related to the cyberattack.”

DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it.

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“We don’t know why Caesars canceled us, they won’t say beyond it being a strategy change and it is not related to anything that DEF CON or our community has done.”

WA House bill would make it illegal for police to lie during interrogations

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“Sometimes, it’s an unfortunate reality, we have to lie to people to get them to tell the truth,”

Netflix: Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against and Growing Rapidly

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Piracy also threatens to damage our business, as its fundamental proposition to consumers is so compelling and difficult to compete against: virtually all content for free,”

New Linux glibc flaw lets attackers get root on major distros

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The bug is due to a heap-based buffer overflow weakness accidentally introduced in glibc 2.37 in August 2022 and later backported to glibc 2.36 when addressing a less severe vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-39046.”

Plastic bans work. Billions of plastic bags were avoided in the US alone

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Grocery stores, restaurants and retail shops should not be permitted to distribute plastic film bags of any thickness at checkout.”

Vision Pro Teardown: Why Those Fake Eyes Look So Weird

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“In practice, the EyeSight display is so dim and low-resolution that reviewers say it’s hard to see much on it.”

Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Similarly, Microsoft recently pledged to stop some of the actions it takes to force Edge on users who have selected other browsers. Unfortunately, these changes only address a small number of the tactics outlined in this report. And, to make matters worse, they will only be deployed to users in the EEA.”

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant prompts customer outcry

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The problem with removing a bundled plugin is that it can break application signatures and cause problems with updates,”

Goodbye Non-KISS Appliances

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“I even remember thinking about the KISS principle at the time, but somehow thought switching brands and spending 3x the amount would save us from the complexity.”

Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond.”

FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The FDA said that since April 2021 it has received more than 116,000 medical device reports of foam breaking down in Philips CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines and BiPAP sleep therapy devices.”

The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The survey tested for 32 types of PFAS, though there are more than 12,000, the USGS said, and they can pose a health threat even at very small amounts.”

Google has another secret browser

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“A full untraceable browser inside the parental lock-down mode!”

Leaky Vessels: Docker and runc Container Breakout Vulnerabilities - January 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“This could occur by running a malicious image or by building a container image using a malicious Dockerfile or upstream image”

Thanksgiving 2023 security incident

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Unfortunately, we failed to rotate one service token and three service accounts (out of thousands) of credentials that were leaked during the Okta compromise.”

A Startup Allegedly ‘Hacked the World.’ Then Came the Censorship, and Now the Backlash

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“These efforts have demanded that more than a dozen publications amend or fully remove references to the original Appin Technology’s alleged illegal hacking or, in some cases, mentions of that company’s cofounder, Rajat Khare.”

How paid editors squeeze you dry

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“We estimate that the proceeds of this scam in 2023 were at least $500,000, and perhaps well over $1,000,000.”

We ran an experiment to see how easy it is to cheat with ChatGPT in interviews

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“As it turns out, not a single interviewer mentioned concerns about any of the candidates cheating!”

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Nothing seems to turn it off.”

Google Search Drops Cache Link From Search Results (How To See The Cache)

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“After a couple of months of testing, it seems Google has now removed the cache link from the search results page.”

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threat to supe, police reports

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Threats to one’s life or safety have no place in political discourse.”

Starlink's Laser System Is Beaming 42 Million GB of Data Per Day

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“SpaceX’s laser system for Starlink is delivering over 42 petabytes of data for customers per day, an engineer revealed today.”

How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It matters if you have money, time, and willpower to go to court.”

Researchers Approach New Speed Limit for Seminal Problem

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“It represents the first [major] improvement to ILP solvers in nearly 40 years.”

Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Basically, I keep asking if I prefer using a computer in there rather than out here.”

Scientists document first-ever transmitted Alzheimer's cases, tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“There was something odd about these Alzheimer’s cases.”

Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids under 16

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Legislators in Florida are considering what could be the strictest regulation on social media and kids in the country.”

Helios: Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Helios is a distribution of illumos powering the Oxide Rack.”

Eagle 7B : Soaring past Transformers with 1 Trillion Tokens Across 100+ Languages (RWKV-v5)

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“This release marks the release of the strongest linear transformer (in terms of eval benchmarks) to date.”

In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition.”

I hacked a train toilet

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0500

“The problem with this design is that most people don’t understand state machines, and this design confused a lot of people who were unable to lock the door correctly, or believed they’d locked the door when they hadn’t.”

I looked through attacks in my access logs. Here's what I found

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The lesson here seems to be to expose the absolute bare minimum to the public internet.”

Disney Unveils the HoloTile Floor, Inching Us Closer to a Real-Life Holodeck

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“However, it’s important not to get too excited yet as Smoot notes ‘we don’t know yet where that will be used.’”

Proposed Top-Level Domain String for Private Use

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has made a provisional determination that “.INTERNAL” should be reserved for private-use and internal network applications.”

Brave Leo, the AI browser assistant, now features Mixtral for improved performance

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0500

“Mixtral is now the default LLM for all Leo users, for the free version and the Premium version ($15/month).”

Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]?

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“Stepping back and looking at the big picture, there are four main reasons I’ve seen that people use [bad platform], which are that it gets more engagement, it’s where their friends are, it’s lower friction, and it monetizes better.”

Rook to XSS: How I hacked chess.com with a rookie exploit

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“However, in this case, TinyMCE was up-to-date and had been configured correctly not to allow scripting tags and attributes.”

ArVid: how Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“One VHS tape could store more information than an entire hard drive.”

The Rise of Batteries in Six Charts and Not Too Many Numbers

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The unstoppable rise of batteries is leading to a domino effect that puts half of global fossil fuel demand at risk.”

Portable EPUBs

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“These pros and cons can be traced back to one key fact: the PDF representation of a document is fundamentally unstructured.”

Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Inevitably, the new options for developers’ EU apps create new risks to Apple users and their devices.”

After Three Years on Mars, NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter Mission Ends

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield.”

Celebrating our first 20,000 members

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Now, you may ask, why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts?”

Zed is now open source

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“We’re never going to show you a banner ad in your code editor, and if we do, you can always build Zed from source.”

OpenAI Quietly Scrapped a Promise to Disclose Key Documents to the Public

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“But when WIRED requested those records last month, OpenAI said its policy had changed, and the company provided only a narrow financial statement that omitted the majority of its operations.”

Breaking Free from DRM: The Story of Hacking My Air Purifier

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“I decided to investigate the nightmare DRM RFID chip that was stuck to the bottom of my filter.”

How we made an animated movie in 8kB

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Yes, 8 kilobytes, less than half of this post, for everything.”

FTC bans TurboTax from advertising 'free' services, calls it deceptive

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Intuit cannot advertise or market any goods or services as free unless it’s free for all customers, the FTC ordered.”

Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has "Enormous Volume Of Defects" Bolts On MAX 9 Weren't Installed

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances.”

Appeals Court: FBI's Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when its agents rifled through the contents of more than 700 safe-deposit boxes”

Czech Republic sets IPv4 end date

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“On the basis of this decision, the Czech state administration will stop providing its services over IPv4 on 6 June 2032.”

GPT-3.5 crashes when it thinks about useRalativeImagePath too much

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“You could try putting this phrase in documents, to throw off attempts to summarize it with GPT-3.5.”

My Toddler Still Loves Planes, So I Upgraded Her Radar

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“In my excitement to get 2.0 into production, I was a little sloppy, placing the password in User Defaults.”

NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“NASA has lost contact with the helicopter before, including for an agonizing two months last year.”

Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0500

“Vizio’s law firm makes about as much in a day as SFC makes from donations in a year.”

Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“The more proxies you have between the developer and the customer, the less the product will meet customer needs.”

Google Is Tracking You Even In Incognito Mode, New Disclaimer Is Up

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“Google has finally admitted that it tracks your search history, activities, the websites you visit and the services they use even in Incognito mode.”

What's that touchscreen in my room?

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Turns out, interface on the Android tablet is just a webview.”

Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“For the past three days Russians have been unable to use their VPN services working via OpenVPN/WireGuard protocols, and some even have reported that in certain situations SSH connections have stopped working.”

Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“It is virtually impossible that there are any other retired teachers with my name and birth date who are dying year on year.”

Dave Mills has passed away

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“He was such an iconic element of the early Internet.”

What Is Nightshade?

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Nightshade’s goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.”

Thailand discovers nearly 15 million tonnes of lithium

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“We are trying to find out how much can we use from the resources we found.”

Mourning Google

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search.”

German law is making security research a risky business

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“But the court ruling says: yes, there was a password, so there is a protection mechanism which was circumvented, and that’s hacking.”

How we migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Our source database is about 400GB in size.”

The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Ello exists for the benefit of the creative community, and we will never serve ads or sell personal data.”

Hacking into a Toyota/Eicher Motors insurance company by exploiting their premium calculator website

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“If I were them, I would not want a random stranger having access to their corporate cloud for 5 months.”

AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“In a benchmarking test of 30 Olympiad geometry problems, AlphaGeometry solved 25 within the standard Olympiad time limit.”

FAQ on leaving Google

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Google culture changed dramatically last year with its first major round of layoffs, and I saw the writing on the wall.”

How Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Apple really does store billions of databases in their extreme multi-tenant architecture.”

U.S. Developers Can Now Offer Non-App Store Purchasing Option, But Apple Will Still Collect Commissions

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Developers are permitted to have a single plain link on one screen of an app.”

OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with the Pentagon

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Last week, OpenAI removed language in its usage policy that would ban its AI from being used in “military and warfare” applications, sparking alarm among AI safety advocates.”

4,000 of My Closest Friends

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Even that nominal opt-in option is gone. They just take it.”

Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99%

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Data transfer prices easily add up, and are an extremely high-margin source of profit for cloud providers”

High-speed 10Gbps full-mesh network based on USB4 for just $47.98

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“I tested the network speed, and it can hit 11Gbps.”

Release History Of SQLite

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“All JSON functions are rewritten to use a new internal parse tree format called JSONB.”

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“These instructions are not for the faint of heart.”

We're building a better PostHog community by closing our public Slack

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“However, with over 5,000 members in the community, it’s become clear we’ve outgrown Slack as a platform.”

Wal2 Mode Notes

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“In wal2 mode, the system uses two wal files instead of one.”

When Random Isn't

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“This RNG is, for the lack of a better word, shite.”

Your washing machine could be sending 3.7 GB of data a day

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Johnie’s initial screenshot showed that on a chosen day, the device uploaded 3.57GB and downloaded about 100MB, and the data traffic was almost constant.”

A decade long Steam issue, is everyone just too fast for Valve?

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“No wonder the root cause hasn’t been found in so many years: it’s not a bug in the gameserver, it’s a bug in the game.”

A Suprising Discovery Inside The Steam Deck's APU

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0500

“There’s a part that represents almost 15% of the surface that is completely undocumented.”

Playing with Fire – How We Executed a Critical Supply Chain Attack on PyTorch

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Security tends to lag behind adoption, and AI/ML is no exception.”

Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Horizon whistleblower

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The Post Office threatened and lied to the BBC in a failed effort to suppress key evidence that helped clear postmasters in the Horizon scandal.”

Unity's Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies!”

Framework discloses data breach after accountant gets phished

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Customers are urged to contact the company’s support team about any suspicious emails they receive.”

Here's Some Bitcoin: Oh, and You've Been Served!

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“The hard truth is that most victims will never see their stolen funds again.”

Outlook is Microsoft's new data collection service

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Americans, thanks to their government’s refusal to pass privacy legislation, are never even informed this is happening.”

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The once ubiquitous phrase “let me Google that for you” is now meaningless.”

Meta ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“This is illegal, as the GDPR clearly states that withdrawing your consent must be ‘as easy as’ giving it.”

Cloud switching just got easier: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“This applies to all customers globally.”

A huge battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Kapolei alone constitutes about 17% of Oahu’s peak capacity.”

Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The SEC had consistently denied all spot Bitcoin ETF requests, citing concerns over potential market manipulation and fraud.”

Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for your email program

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Senders will have two days to implement unsubscribe requests.”

How I pwned half of America's fast food chains, simultaneously.

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“My hunch was that in the rush to push their new shiny product, someone would take a shortcut…”

Python 3.13 gets a JIT

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The initial benchmarks show something of a 2-9% performance improvement.”

www.google.com - The page is blank when accessed

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“This is entirely server-side UA sniffing going wrong.”

OpenWrt One - celebrating 20 years of OpenWrt

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Let’s celebrate this anniversary by launching our own first and fully upstream supported hardware design.”

United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“United is the only other U.S. airline to fly the 737 Max 9 and is the largest operator with 79 in its fleet.”

Twilio CEO Lawson steps down after bruising activist battles

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The move comes as Twilio grapples with two activist investors who have been pushing for significant changes.”

Polars

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Polars is written from the ground up with performance in mind.”

HTMX playground & examples

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“It will run a mock server that intercepts outgoing requests from HTMX.”

LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Yep. Word can’t read files prior to 1994.”

PocketBase - Open Source backend in 1 file

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Embedded performant database with schema builder, data validations, realtime subscriptions and easy to use REST api.”

What does the Cerebellum Do Anyway?

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Clearly, the cerebellum does something to control movement, and movement is impaired when it is damaged.”

FAA grounds more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s after section of Alaska Airlines plane blows out

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“The section of the fuselage missing appeared to correspond to an exit not used by Alaska Airlines, or other carriers that don’t have high-density seating configurations, and was plugged.”

Chromium Money Tree Browser

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“The bug bounty reward gets divided between files, eg if a fix to a $1000 bug changed 5 files, each file gets $200”

When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0500

“This package, true to its name, depends on every other public npm package, creating millions of transitive dependencies.”

Do we think of git commits as diffs, snapshots, and/or histories?

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“But as a strategy for teaching Git, it hasn’t been as successful as I’d hoped!”

Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“However, without an exemption from current safety regulations, the FAA cannot approve the final two MAX models, the MAX 7 and MAX 10, to fly passengers.”

YouTube demonetizes public domain 'Steamboat Willie' video after copyright claim

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“Public domain works are considered public property.”

Fixing Macs Door to Door

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The back alley electronics repair guy is the dark secret of the Dispatch world.”

This holographic camera turns any window into an invisible camera

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Parking cameras that can be completely hidden.”

What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Our original goal was not to create a new programming language, it was to create a better way to write software.”

Why Are Tech Reporters Sleeping On The Biggest App Store Story?

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0500

“It has gone largely unreported that Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been held back by Apple and Google denying competing browsers access to essential APIs.”

iCloud Cleanup

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Somehow, those 7GB of video took up way more space in the cloud than on my hard drive.”

QuantumScape's solid-state batteries pass latest test, could offer 500,000 km without range loss

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0500

“PowerCo recently completed an endurance test with QuantumScape’s solid-state cells and determined they can someday power EVs that can drive 500,000 kilometers with virtually no loss of range.”

The 3 budgets

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Maintenance is always on the chopping block.”

The One Billion Row Challenge

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“All submissions will be evaluated by running the program on a Hetzner Cloud CCX33 instance (8 dedicated vCPU, 32 GB RAM).”

Possible Meissner effect near room temperature in copper-substituted lead apatite

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“Our experiment suggests at room temperature the Meissner effect is possibly present in this material.”

Ants Recognise Infected Wounds and Treat Them

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Its secretion contains 112 components, half of which have an antimicrobial or wound-healing effect.”

The I in LLM stands for intelligence

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“Every security report has to have a human spend time to look at it and assess what it means.”

LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“LLMs are like stupid savants who know a lot of things.”

Dillo Website

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“The domain dillo.org is no longer under control of Dillo developers.”

Amazon's Silent Sacking

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Amazon has a stock problem.”

All DMCA Notices Filed Against TorrentFreak in 2023 Were Bogus

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

“100% bogus, right across the board, and a complete waste of resources for everyone involved.”

Disney's earliest Mickey and Minnie Mouse enter public domain as US copyright expires

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

“In fact, anyone can use those versions without permission or cost.”

OpenVoice: Versatile Instant Voice Cloning

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

“To foster further research in the field, we have made the source code and trained model publicly accessible.”

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0500

“Standard Ebooks releases all of the work we put in to each ebook into the public domain too.”

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Update: Maersk Ship Hit by Missile, Avoids Boarding in the Red Sea

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“U.S. Navy helicopters responded to the distress call and engaged with the small boats, sinking three of them and killing the crews.”

7 watts idle on Intel 12th/13th gen: the foundation for building a low power server/NAS

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Before going further, the 7 watt figure for this system was before storage has been added.”

How I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Every build of a Steam Deck image can be found at https://steamdeck-images.steamos.cloud/steamdeck/"

Court of Appeal ruling will prevent UK museums from charging reproduction fees: at last

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Moreover, Lord Justice Arnold pointed out that the new copyright bar has been in place since 2009.”

Tether Reveals Partnerships With Secret Service, FBI in Letter to U.S. Senate

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Tether seeks to be a world class partner to the U.S. as we continue to assist law enforcement and expand dollar hegemony globally.”

Why Android developers no longer need Windows USB drivers

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Why I'm skeptical of low-code

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“A lot of low-code solutions seem to hit about 80% of a company’s requirement.”

Malware abuses Google OAuth endpoint to 'revive' cookies, hijack accounts

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Amazon plans to make its own hydrogen to power vehicles

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The electrolyzer is plugged into the power grid, and fossil fuels still make up about 60 percent of the US electricity mix.”

Korea to welcome 'digital nomads' with new visa starting Jan. 1

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Gentoo goes Binary!

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker.”

Amazon.com, Inc. - 662503 - 12/20/2023

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

My CCPA Dialog With OpenAI

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“We can confirm that your email does not appear in our training dataset.”

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

4 billion if statements

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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!”

Operation Triangulation: The last (hardware) mystery

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Because this feature is not used by the firmware, we have no idea how attackers would know how to use it.”

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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”

First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

No new iPhone? No secure iOS: Looking at an unfixed iOS vulnerability

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Federal court decides in favor of retired engineer told by state to not talk about math in public

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Amazon Prime Video starts showing ads in January unless you pay $2.99/month extra

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership.”

A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Wayfair CEO: Employees need to work longer hours

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success.”

Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 08:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Post-apocalyptic life in American health care

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

GTA 5 source code leaks online, giving Rockstar a huge blow on Christmas: Report

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply.”

Ruby 3.3.0 Released

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Now more than 3x faster than the interpreter on Optcarrot!”

Costs of running a macOS app studio business

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“In the end, I get the equivalent of a $5800/month net salary.”

U.S. medical schools aren't teaching future doctors about 7.4 million of their patients

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“As of 2023, only 15% of U.S. medical schools have taken advantage of these grants.”

The Era of American Computer Magazines Has Drawn to a Close

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“And now, basically all American computer print magazines have vanished.”

NY Gov. Hochul vetoes ban on noncompete clauses, waters down LLC transparency bill

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam, the report said.”

They Want You To Forget What A Film Looks Like

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“According to The Digital Bits, Park Road Post had a recent 4k scan of True Lies from the original camera negative.”

In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Xfinity Data Breach Impacts 36 Million Individuals

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Comcast recently reported having roughly 32 million customers, which suggests that the data breach could affect all Xfinity customers and possibly employees as well.”

How Big is YouTube?

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Our current estimate for the size of YouTube is 13.325 billion videos”

The hyperloop is dead for real this time

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The pod only reached a top speed of 100mph, far short of the original promise of seven times that amount.”

Google Search Overwhelmed By Massive Spam Attack

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Many of the domains have only been registered within the past 24-48 hours.”

SMTP Smuggling - Spoofing E-Mails Worldwide

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“CERT/CC allows public release of SMTP smuggling, since no software vulnerabilities were identified ("it’s not a bug, it’s a feature")”

Google OAuth is Broken (Sort Of)

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

How Two Pharmacists Figured Out That Decongestants Don't Work

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“We were confident at that point that oral phenylephrine did not work.”

This weed killer is banned in 58 countries. U.S. workers say it's giving them Parkinson's

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Despite Marks’ concerns, Syngenta publicized her original findings at an annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience in 2004, Botham testified.”

Rite Aid Banned from Using AI Facial Recognition After FTC Says Retailer Deployed Technology without Reasonable Safeguards

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Rite Aid will be prohibited from using facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes for five years”

Waymo significantly outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7+ million miles of rider-only driving

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Terrapin attacks can downgrade security of OpenSSH connections

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Terrapin is not a simple software bug that can be fixed with an update to a single library or component.”

Delta Dental of California data breach exposed info of 7 million people

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“In short: MySQL Repeatable Read transactions cannot safely read a value and then write it.”

A Lufthansa A350's Frustrating Oakland Diversion

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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"”

Volkswagen Will Bring Back Physical Buttons In New Cars

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“This move, according to VW, "frustrated customers who shouldn’t be frustrated."”

My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“What I discovered instead was that the power adapter that comes with the fountain outputs a solid 7.5V.”

Figma and Adobe are abandoning our proposed merger

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Apple halting Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales: Here's why

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“In its initial filing with the ITC, Masimo accused Apple of 103 instances of patent infringement across five different patents.”

Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“When ChronoPay’s internal emails were leaked in 2010, the username and password for its MegaPlan subscription were still working and valid.”

Your Smart TV Knows What You're Watching

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second.”

Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber For Negative Review

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“I was pressured to write a statement that I didn’t give you permission to be filmed,”

New Mind-Reading "BrainGPT" Turns Thoughts Into Text On Screen

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

“Yes” Actually Means “No”: The Curious Language of VCs

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Please note however that this is neither a term sheet or a wire transfer.”

Bluetooth keystroke-injection in Android, Linux, macOS and iOS

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“The Linux vulnerability was fixed in 2020 (CVE-2020-0556), but the fix was left disabled by default.”

OpenAI suspends ByteDance's account after it used GPT to train its own AI model.

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“As I reported, most of ByteDance’s GPT usage has been done through Microsoft’s Azure platform, not through OpenAI directly.”

Google will no longer hold onto people's location data in Google Maps: meaning it can't turn that info over to the police

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“That means Google itself will no longer have access to user location history data. And by extension, neither will law enforcement”

Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Cruise slashes 24% of self-driving car workforce in sweeping layoffs

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“GM, which acquired Cruise in 2016, was rewarded by shareholders for the cutbacks. GM shares rose 4.8% to $35.64 following the news.”

Data exfiltration from Writer.com with indirect prompt injection

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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."”

Ubiquiti users claim to have access to other people's devices

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Bricked Xmas

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“I guess I overflowed some buffer and I’ve corrupted the firmware.”

NASA working to solve Voyager 1 computer glitch from billions of miles away

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“As both Voyager probes experience new trials, mission team members have only the original manuals written decades ago to consult”

FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences using Large Language Models

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Intel CEO attacks Nvidia on AI: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“We think of the CUDA moat as shallow and small,”

OpenAI inks deal with Axel Springer on licensing news for model training

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“In return, Axel Springer will receive payments of an unspecified size and frequency from OpenAI.”

Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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”

Australia makes world-first decision to ban engineered stone following surge in silicosis cases

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The report found there was no safe level of silica, concluding: "The use of all engineered stone should be prohibited."”

Cloud engineer gets 2 years for wiping ex-employer's code repos

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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”

Norton Healthcare Ransomware Hack: 2.5 Million Personal Records Stolen

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them”

Zero downtime Postgres upgrades

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Postgres 11.9 is being retired by Amazon’s RDS service on February 29, 2024.”

Phi-2: The surprising power of small language models

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The training for Phi-2 took 14 days on 96 A100 GPUs.”

House Intelligence Committee FISA "Reform" Bill Would Greatly Expand the Class of Businesses and Other Entities Required to Assist in FISA 702 Surveillance

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“the expanded definition would appear to cover data centers, colocation providers, business landlords, shared workspaces, or even hotels where guests connect to the Internet.”

Hacktivists hacked a Irish water utility and interrupted water supply

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Our caretaker went down and when he got to the pumphouse, up on the screen was a sign ‘You have been hacked’.”

Report: 2.6 billion personal records compromised by data breaches in past two years: underscoring need for end-to-end encryption

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Mixtral of experts

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Concretely, Mixtral has 46.7B total parameters but only uses 12.9B parameters per token.”

More than 1500 HuggingFace API Tokens Were Exposed

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Paris-based Startup and OpenAI Competitor Mistral AI Valued at $2 Billion

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Joining the fray are tech giants Nvidia ( NVDA ) Corp and Salesforce ( CRM ) , contributing an additional €120 million in convertible debt.”

Please, Expose your RSS

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“I was surprised to find that a lot of people don’t have a link anywhere to their feed.”

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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”

Spain expels two US spies for infiltrating secret service

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“What do Americans have to pay for if we give them everything they ask for?”

pinning all system calls

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“More than half (54%) of these workers say it’s because they feel pressured to, not because they choose to.”

Dieselgate, but for trains - some heavyweight hardware hacking

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.”

How we investigated France's mass profiling machine

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information.”

23andMe is updating its TOS to force binding arbitration with a limited opt-out window

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Pilotless FedEx, Reliable Robotics Plane Completes Flight

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Our system doesn’t do automated engine starts, so somebody has to be in the plane to start the engine.”

Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers to move the industry

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“To be frank, Tesla isn’t sharing its 48V architecture from the Cybertruck for purely altruistic reasons.”

Building end-to-end security for Messenger

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Introducing Gemini: Google's most capable AI model yet

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Quad9 Turns the Sony Case Around in Dresden

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The DNS does not contain content - it is a system designed for delivery only of pointers, not for data transport.”

Klarna freezes hiring because AI can do the job instead

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“We’re not currently hiring at all, apart from engineers.”

15,000 Go Module Repositories on GitHub Vulnerable to Repojacking Attack

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“A third-party can’t reasonably register 15,000 GitHub accounts.”

23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“On Friday, genetic testing company 23andMe announced that hackers accessed the personal data of 0.1% of customers, or about 14,000 individuals.”

Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“One version of the controller actually contained GPS coordinates to contain the behaviour to third party workshops.”

Firefox on the brink?

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Tesla is officially losing half $7,500 tax credit on two Model 3 trims

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

An Update on December 2023 Organizational Changes

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance.”

Security flaws in court record systems used in five US states exposed sensitive legal documents

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

An Update On The DoorDash Experience in NYC

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

A Decade of Have I Been Pwned

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

OpenAI Agreed to Buy $51 Million of AI Chips From a Startup Backed by CEO Sam Altman

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Rain told investors that Altman had personally invested more than $1 million in the company.”

Let's learn how modern JavaScript frameworks work by building one

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“And asking developers to write the correct memo code is a losing battle.”

Report Phone Spam - Shut down robocallers & text spammers

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Blocking a phone number is a bit better than nothing, but not much.”

No new top boss at NSA until it answers questions about buying up location, browsing data

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“The administration is abusing the CUI designation to keep this unclassified information from the American public,” Wyden continued.

Not Everything Is Google's Fault (Just Most Things)

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“As it turns out, a Google engineer was able to arbitrarily change the quota on GCP.”

Cicadas Are So Loud, Fiber Optic Cables Can 'Hear' Them

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Every 1 meter of fiber, more or less, we can turn it into a kind of microphone,” says Ozharar.

Singing to babies is vital to help them learn language, say scientists

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“We believe that speech rhythm information is the hidden glue underpinning the development of a well-functioning language system.”

Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says. Here's why

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Buggy animation in Atlassian BitBucket is wasting half a CPU core at all times

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The icon is a static SVG image that’s about 3 lines of text.”

Anduril unveils Roadrunner, 'a fighter jet weapon that lands like a Falcon 9'

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Because the product is reusable and recoverable, operators can act without the fear that they could lose an expensive asset.”

Code is run more than read

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Software designed by different people than the ones woken up at midnight when it breaks.”

CSAR: European Parliament rejects mass scanning of private messages. Here is why

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Report: Stability AI Positioning Itself for Acquisition

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Stability AI was spending about $8 million a month on bills and payroll in October.”

xCurl

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“They have not been in touch or communicated about this work of theirs to anyone in the curl project.”

Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“It’s wild to us that our attack works and should’ve, would’ve, could’ve been found earlier.”

Iranian hacker group Cyber Av3ngers hacked the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa in Pennsylvania

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“During the weekend, Iranian threat actors hacked the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa (MWAA) and took control of one of their booster stations.”

Inside Foxconn's struggle to make iPhones in India

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The Sunguvarchatram plant still assembled fewer than 10% of all iPhone 15s, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Massachusetts becomes fifth state in nation to make prison calls free

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The Department of Correction currently charges 12 cents per minute, and most county sheriffs charge 14 cents per minute”

My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“I may have just created a $500M piece of scrap.”

FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine agrees Loyal's data supports reasonable expectation of effectiveness for large dog lifespan extension

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Microsoft opens sources ThreadX under MIT license

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Introducing SDXL Turbo: A Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“It’s important to note that SDXL Turbo is not yet intended for commercial use.”

BlackCat claims it is behind Fidelity National Financial ransomware shakedown

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Wouldn’t want to disclose every card at this early stage.”

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

$20k Bounty was Claimed!

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“On November 9th, we put up a $10k bounty for any project written in Rust that would pass 95% of Prettier test suite.”

Can no longer search code without being logged in.

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Titled Tuesday Cheating - Part 2

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“In no condition do we find any evidence of cheating.”

Making it clear when we're on a call with you to protect you from fraud

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Since we launched this feature, we’ve seen approximately 700 fraud reports each month directly within Call Status.”

the curse of docker

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“One of the great sins of Docker is having normalized running software as root.”

Update on the rust port

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Depending on how you count, we’re at anywhere between 60% (c++ sloc removed) and 74% (rust sloc vs c++ sloc) done.”

The Bond villain compliance strategy

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“The crime was the product.”

Darktable : crashing into the wall in slow-motion

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“I’m full-time on it since 2018, for a monthly income between 800 and 900 €”

The MAUI team does not respond to issues with any urgency... THIS IS THE ISSUE!!!

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“I have reported issues as far back as Feb, 2022, and of as now, many of these reported issues remain unfixed.”

Why is 56k the fastest dialup modem speed?

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The result is that you will never be able to connect at a speed faster than 53.3 kbit/s.”

Screensharing mistake gets Nvidia sued over alleged stolen trade secrets

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“So brazen was Mr. Moniruzzaman’s theft, the file path on his screen still read "ValeoDocs."”

The Feds' Vehicle 'Kill Switch' Mandate Is a Gross (and Dangerous) Violation of Privacy

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor vehicles”

Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The autonomous machine can place 20 to 30 stones in a single consignment – about as many as one delivery could supply.”

The first embryos from a mammal have now been grown in space

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Out of 360 samples, 72 survived the trip, and 17 of those developed into normal blastocysts.”

US govt pays AT&T to let cops search Americans' phone records – 'usually' without a warrant

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

After OpenAI's Blowup, It Seems Pretty Clear That 'AI Safety' Isn't a Real Thing

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“One side decidedly overpowered the other (hint: it was the money side).”

Tesla open sources all design and engineering of original Roadster

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Tesla has opened everything from Owner’s Manuals to Circuits and Connectors for the original Roadster.”

The Story of Titanium

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Of the first 6000 pieces fabricated from the beta titanium alloy, 95% were lost.”

Reflecting on 18 years at Google

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.”

Morgan Stanley Fined $6.5 Million for Exposing Customer Information

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The moving company, the AG says, sold the computer equipment at internet auctions without Morgan Stanley’s knowledge.”

Third-party data breach affecting Canadian government could involve data from 1999

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The government of Canada has confirmed its data was accessed after two of its third-party service providers were attacked.”

Northvolt develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion battery

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“It is based on a hard carbon anode and a Prussian White-based cathode, and is free from lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite.”

Cruise co-founder resigns following CEO exit

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Kan is said to have announced his resignation over Slack.”

Introducing Claude 2.1

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

OpenAI Staff Threaten to Quit Unless Board Resigns

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence.”

Ransomware gang files SEC complaint over victim's undisclosed breach

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware operation has taken extortion to a new level”

A secret Google deal let Spotify completely bypass Android's app store fees

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“If we don’t have Spotify working properly across Play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones.”

Nothing Chats, the Sunbird-based iMessage app, is a privacy nightmare with unencrypted messages and images

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Sunbird has access to every message sent and received through the app.”

Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“The team already saw a restructuring earlier this year, which Business Insider wrote included layoffs that left RAI "a shell of a team."”

U.S. Agency Declares 21 Species Now Extinct

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The swamps where it lived were converted to farmland, and its trees were cut down for logging.”

It's Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“These methods should have been designed to fail when a naive datetime object is passed to them”

Kyutai is a French AI research lab with a $330 million budget that will make everything open source

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The good news is that Scaleway, the cloud division of Iliad, recently acquired a thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs.”

New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“About 1 in 5 American workers, nearly 30 million people, are bound by noncompete agreements, according to the Federal Trade Commission.”

Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“For now, neither scheme is practically useful: Preprocessing currently helps at the extremes, when the database size balloons toward infinity.”

Introducing graphics offload

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“We are coming back from this adventure with some frustrations and some successes.”

OpenAI fires co-founder and CEO Sam Altman for allegedly lying to company board

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Royal Mail’s recovery from ransomware attack will cost business at least $12M

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Battery pack prices are now expected to fall by an average of 11% per year from 2023 to 2030.”

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate.”

Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“This is not Apple opening up iMessage to other platforms.”

Smart drugs aren’t so smart after all

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Those who’d scored above average after taking the placebo tended to fall below average while on one of the drugs.”

U.S. Reenters the Nuclear Fuel Game

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“The specialized fuel these advanced reactors will need is currently made on a commercial scale only in Russia.”

New CacheWarp AMD CPU attack lets hackers gain root in Linux VMs

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Australia’s overuse of antibiotics found to be driving rate of drug-resistant infections

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The reality is we’re giving out a lot of antibiotics when we don’t need to.”

Poloniex exchange suffers $100M exploit, offers 5% bounty

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Sun also offered a 5% white-hat bounty to the Poloniex hacker.”

Reptar

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“We verified this worked even inside an unprivileged guest VM, so this already has serious security implications for cloud providers.”

Child sexual abuse online: effective measures, no mass surveillance

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Google Sues Men Who Weaponized DMCA Notices to Crush Competition

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Pedestrian crash deaths have risen 80 percent since hitting their low in 2009.”

Hacking Google Bard - From Prompt Injection to Data Exfiltration

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Indirect Prompt Injection attacks via Emails or Google Docs are interesting threats, because these can be delivered to users without their consent.”

The Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner just paid a record $4 million to skip to the front of the line

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“You are getting close to $4.5 million to use the canal, so that is pricing out a lot of ships.”

Marina Bay Sands Discloses Data Breach Impacting 665k Customers

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The company said it had found no evidence that the exposed data was misused to “cause harm to customers”.”

Placemark is going open source and shutting down

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“I couldn’t find a way to make it work as a sustainable bootstrapped startup.”

SanDisk Extreme Pro Failures Result From Design and Manufacturing Flaws, Says Data Recovery Firm

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

A truly incredible fact about the number 37

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“First it sounded totally unbelievable, since 37 is a tiny number in the grand scheme of things.”

How a kernel developer made my styluses work again on newer kernels!

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Both styluses of my XPPen Artist 24 Pro and XPPen Artist 16 Pro Gen2 styluses are now usable again on newer Linux kernels.”

It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Your only option at this point is recreate your account at Experian and steal it back from the ID thieves!”

Debunking the Myth of “Anonymous” Data

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“For data brokers dealing in our personal information, our data can either be useful for their profit-making or truly anonymous, but not both.”

Lost Doctor Who episodes found – but owner is reluctant to hand them to BBC

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Microsoft lays hands on login data: Beware of the new Outlook

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Without informing or inquiring about this, Microsoft grants itself access to the IMAP and SMTP login data of users of the new Outlook.”

Apple's MacBook Pro memory problem is worse than ever

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Apple’s charging you $200 for RAM it buys for $30.”

Confluence flaw severity raised amid mass exploitation

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“In the recently updated advisory, it conceded an attacker could reset Confluence and create an administrator account.”

Mr. Cooper says customer data exposed during cyberattack

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

It’s Your Right to Know Why a Health Insurer Denied Your Claim

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Cigna and Anthem told members that they would need to obtain a court order or subpoena to access their claim file records.”

Perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Google offered Epic $147 million to launch Fortnite on the Play Store

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“It was meant to stem a potential “contagion” of popular apps bypassing Android’s official store”

Are we doing this again? Yes, we’re doing this again.

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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”

Removal of MyQ integration

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“In their partner program, the partner companies pay Chamberlain Group for the privilege of letting MyQ owners control their own garage doors.”

Cruise confirms robotaxis rely on human assistance every four to five miles

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“During driverless operations there was roughly 1 remote assistant agent for every 15-20 driverless AVs.”

Ombudsman: European Commission’s concealment of secret ‘expert list’ on CSAM regulation constitutes ‘maladministration’

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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”.”

Texas produces twice as much methane as better regulated neighbor, study finds

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Article 45 Will Roll Back Web Security by 12 Years

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Article 45 forbids browsers from enforcing modern security requirements on certain CAs without the approval of an EU member government.”

Seeing like a bank

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Go, Containers, and the Linux Scheduler

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“This means if you have a 16 core machine the Go runtime will create 16 OS threads - regardless of any CGroup CPU Limits.”

Euclid's first images: the dazzling edge of darkness

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The image shows 1000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster, and more than 100 000 additional galaxies further away in the background.”

'Couldn't See Anymore:' Bored Ape Conference Attendees Wake Up With Searing Eye Pain, Vision Loss

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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,”

Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Apple utilizes developers for vast amounts of unpaid QA labor.”

First handset with MTE on the market

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Currently, MTE is only available on the Pixel as a developer option, intended for app developers to test their apps using MTE”

Ace Hardware says 1,202 devices were hit during cyberattack

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“On Sunday morning, we detected a cybersecurity incident that is impacting the majority of our IT systems,”

Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Dengue rates plunged after release of lab-altered mosquitoes

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Drunk Grizzlies Keep Getting Hit By Trains In Montana

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Another idea is to not load the train cars so full, an idea that BNSF does not like.”

Can solar and wind power Britain? An update of David MacKay’s numbers

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“In the last decade the cost of solar power has fallen by around 90%, and wind by 70%.”

Post mortem on the Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics Outage

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“the overnight shift consisted of security and an unaccompanied technician who had only been on the job for a week.”

YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Software that supports your body should always respect your freedom

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“We recommend that you disable automatic operating system updates on the smartphone using the mentioned apps.”

Othello is Solved

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“It is computationally proved that perfect play by both players lead to a draw.”

.US Harbors Prolific Malicious Link Shortening Service

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“We have not found any legitimate content served through their shorteners.”

Dozens of countries will pledge to stop paying ransomware gangs

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Mint is shutting down, and it’s pushing users toward Credit Karma

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“the new experience in Credit Karma does not offer the ability to set monthly and category budgets”

Source Code Downloads

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Here’s a rare look at Google’s most lucrative search queries

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Increasing trust for embedded media

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

In a surprising finding, light can make water evaporate without heat

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Raspberry Pi Receives Strategic Investment from Arm, Further Extending Long-Term Partnership

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

SEC sues SolarWinds for misleading investors before 2020 hack

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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,’”

Finding You: The Network Effect of Telecommunications Vulnerabilities for Location Disclosure

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

FCC Launches Inquiry to Increase Minimum Broadband Speed Benchmark, Set Gigabit Future Goal

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How Bear does analytics with CSS

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

German court bans LinkedIn from ignoring "Do Not Track" signals

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The court said this communication is misleading, as LinkedIn is legally required to respect the Do Not Track requests.”

The Norwegian Data Protection Authority's decision against Meta is extended to the EU/EEA and made permanent

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience"

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

““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.”

X is officially worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.)”

I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The computers are set to idle for 10 minutes after every query.”

X celebrates 60% savings from cloud exit

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Optimized our usage of cloud service providers and began doing much more on-prem. This shift has reduced our monthly cloud costs by 60%.”

Sophisticated StripedFly Spy Platform Masqueraded for Years as Crypto Miner

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“It made just $10 in 2017 mining Monero cryptocurrency, and about $500 in 2018.”

Citrix warns admins to patch NetScaler CVE-2023-4966 bug immediately

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal installation ISO successfully independently rebuilt

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Signed Windows Installer

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Digicert seems to be our only option now but a certificate there would cost $629 (tax excluded) for a single year.”

You’re Invited to a Colonoscopy!

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

FCC Wants to Bolster Amateur Radio

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The current baud rate limits were adopted in 1980.”

Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Fixing the Volume on my Bluetooth Earbuds

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Nobel Prize-winning researcher Katalin Karikó

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

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

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A Third of Chocolate Products Are High in Heavy Metals, CR's Tests Find

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Lessons Learned from Twenty Years of Site Reliability Engineering

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Cloud Computer

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

75 percent of exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google Founder's Airship Gets FAA Clearance

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

iLeakage: Browser-Based Timerless Speculative Execution Attacks on Apple Devices

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Okta's latest hack fallout hits Cloudflare, 1Password

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“BeyondTrust said it notified Okta of the incident on October 2, but accused Okta of not acknowledging the breach for almost three weeks.”

California DMV immediately suspends Cruise's robotaxi permit

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920.”

Google Chrome's new "IP Protection" will hide users' IP addresses

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A Controversial Plan to Scan Private Messages for Child Abuse Meets Fresh Scandal

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Why We Don’t Generate Elliptic Curves Every Day

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Adelaide woman receives settlement after a lengthy battle against tech giant Google

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Shopify Files Lawsuit over Illegal DMCA Takedown Abuse

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

UK Government Caught Surveilling Social Media of Teaching Assistants and Librarians

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Amazon Managers Can Now Fire Employees Who Refuse to Work From the Office 3 Days a Week

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Stealing OAuth tokens of connected Microsoft accounts via open redirect in Harvest App

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Nanofiche

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The white furnace test

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Adtech Surveillance and Government Surveillance are Often the Same Surveillance

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Reddit mods dumped tokens hours before blockchain program termination

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

@MrWhosetheboss video reveals Google's Pixel 8 Pro Tensor G3 off-loads all generative AI tasks to the cloud

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

with firefox on X11, any page can pastejack you anytime

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Encrypted traffic interception on Hetzner and Linode targeting the largest Russian XMPP (Jabber) messaging service

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Hackers Stole Access Tokens from Okta’s Support Unit

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Cops Are Suing a Teen for Invasion of Privacy After Allegedly False Arrest Goes Viral

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Breyer on chat control investigative research: EU Commissioner as double agent of foreign interference

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python.

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Bandcamp’s Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Research repository arXiv receives $10M for upgrades

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Cisco warns of new IOS XE zero-day actively exploited in attacks

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Equifax Fined $13.5 Million Over 2017 Data Breach

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

The Fake Browser Update Scam Gets a Makeover

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

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

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Taxpayers who fall outside the pilot’s eligibility limits will be unable to participate in the pilot in 2024.”

Iowa Man Files Lawsuit After Being Arrested Twice for Criticizing the Police at a Public Meeting

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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,”

Tech CEO Sentenced to 5 Years in IP Address Scheme

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

AT&T Moves to Disrupt Test of SpaceX's Starlink Cellular Service

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“AT&T now argues that SpaceX is trying to conduct the Starlink cellular test under the wrong regulatory process.”

55 Vulnerabilities in Squid Caching Proxy and 35 0days

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Sippy helps you avoid egress fees while incrementally migrating data from S3 to R2

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“If the object is not found in R2, it will simultaneously be returned from your S3 bucket and copied to R2.”

Microsoft consumes Activision: and a plea

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Depending on how you count, that’s three-to-five companies which have died and passed the Infocom IP on to a successor.”

Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“He had kept tape backups from old BBS systems, and was able to recover a warez copy of the SDK – unbelievable!”

Multi-modal prompt injection image attacks against GPT-4V

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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”

Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Nuclear Scientist And The Warplane That Became Britain’s Most Unlikely Airliner

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Removal of Mazda Connected Services integration

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

SOCKS5 heap buffer overflow - CVE-2023-38545

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Typical server latency is likely “slow” enough to trigger this bug without an attacker needing to influence it by DoS or SOCKS server control.”

Tainting the CSAM client-side scanning database.

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“There is no independent way for the service providers or the devices to verify that the fingerprints in this data actual correspond to CSAM.”

Cloud gaming firm Shadow says hackers stole customers' personal data

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft reveals IRS notice asking for $28.9 billion in back taxes

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Slack's Google Drive App can share your private Docs and Drive files

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Transcript Dutch parliamentary hearing on EU Chat Control and Client Side Scanning

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The fraud was in the code

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Phishers Spoof USPS, 12 Other Natl' Postal Services

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.””

Announcing Cloud Spanner price-performance updates

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Engage a Wider Audience With ActivityPub on WordPress.com

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“With a custom domain you can easily move your entire fediverse connection to any host at any time.”

Google Cloud mitigated largest DDoS attack, peaking above 398 million rps

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Report: GitHub Copilot Loses an Average of $20 Per User Per Month

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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%.”

Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Unity CEO John Riccitiello stepping down, effective immediately

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“In 2023, the company reduced its headcount three times in an attempt to cut costs.”

MGM Resorts confirms hackers stole customers' personal data during cyberattack

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“MGM’s filing with regulators reveals that the company expects the attack to reduce its third-quarter profit by approximately $100 million.”

Attorney General Bonta's Sponsored Bill to Ban Hidden Fees in California Signed into Law

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender's advantage

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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?”

Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Zen 5's Leaked Slides

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Decomposing language models into understandable components

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A Note From WIRED Leadership

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

At least 1,000 birds died from colliding with one Chicago building in one day

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Big Oil's Using Fortnite, TikTok, And Twitch In Effort To Convince Kids Fossil Fuels Are Cool

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Meta in Myanmar, Part III: The Inside View

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Alameda had a $65B line of credit and 'unlimited withdrawals'

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Because of these special privileges, Alameda had a $65 billion line of credit, Wang said.”

Tell HN: Postman update removes all your stuff if you refuse to create account

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Today when I opened the program it asked me to create an account. When I declined, it wiped all my collections and everything else.”

Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Cloud Costs Every Programmer Should Know

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“For the first 10 TB that leave AWS, the rate is $0.09 per GB.”

Delta is fourth major U.S. airline to find fake jet aircraft engine parts with forged airworthiness documents from U.K. company

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Those engines account for less than 1% of the more than 2,100 power plants on its mainline fleet, the spokesman said.”

US government issues first-ever space debris penalty to Dish Network

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Announcing the $12k NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ‘90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA.”

What we Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Chinese Mold Maker

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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”.”

The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon Over an Economy-Wide "Hidden Tax"

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“At this point, the price Amazon charges these third party sellers has grown to nearly 50% of its revenue.”

1.1.1.1 lookup failures on October 4, 2023

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“On 4 October 2023 at 07:00 UTC, the DNSSEC signatures in the version of the root zone from 21 September expired.”

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

ShellTorch: Multiple Critical Vulnerabilities in PyTorch Model Server (TorchServe) (CVSS 9.9, CVSS 9.8) Threatens Countless AI Users

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“TorchServe’s documentation claims that the default management API can be accessed only from localhost by default.”

The inability to count correctly: Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“NIST’s underlying calculation of the security level was a severe and indefensible miscalculation.”

Redfin is Leaving NAR

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Texas man sent to death row over junk science denied US supreme court appeal

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“At least 32 people have been exonerated for crimes based on shaken baby syndrome forensics.”

Satya Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google, and Apple could fix it

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Has Microsoft tried to become Apple’s default search engine, Severt asked? Yes, Nadella said. How’d it go? “Not well,” Nadella deadpanned.”

Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Millions of Exim mail servers exposed to zero-day RCE attacks

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“These seminal results were published in 2005, fifteen years before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

First Blood Test for Dozens of Hereditary Cancers Approved by FDA

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics, Study Finds

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“A report from the Pew Charitable Trust found that 78 percent of ocean microplastics are from synthetic tire rubber.”

Mozilla and the burning need for clients for power users

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Kids and teens are inundated with phone prompts day and night

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

New discoveries in Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe: A Human statue with a realistic facial expression found in Karahantepe

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Europol Sought Unlimited Data Access in Online Child Sexual Abuse Regulation

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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”

Every single Onewheel is being recalled after four deaths

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“At the time, the company issued a press release in objection to the CPSC and called the agency’s statements “unjustified and alarmist.””

PSA: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The phone would keep dropping the call within a second of pressing the call button, which occurred for three attempts.”

Lazarus luring employees with trojanized coding challenges: The case of a Spanish aerospace company

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

I Tested an HDMI Adapter That Demands Your Location, Browsing Data, Photos, and Spams You with Ads

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Russian zero-day seller offers $20M for hacking Android and iPhones

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Government Shutdown Could Bench 80% of CISA Staff

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“In the case of CISA, which had 3,117 employees as of June 17, only 571 would remain during a lapse in appropriations.”

Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Since 2019, Alphabet and its subsidiaries have spent more than $125 million on federal lobbying, campaign contributions, and trade associations”

Wifi without internet on a Southwest flight

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Epic only bought Bandcamp eighteen months ago.”

WebGPU Technical Report

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Vulnerabilities in the SwiftShader JIT compiler aren’t being fixed in the SwiftShader codebase.”

Inhibition of fatty acid oxidation enables heart regeneration in adult mice

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Decade of newborn child registry data stolen in MOVEit mass-hack

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“That allowed the user (aka gdbserver) to write up to 256 bytes past the end of the array.”

Mistral 7B

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“It does not have any moderation mechanism.”

Reddit will start paying you real money for good posts

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“For users with between 100 and 4,999 karma, they will receive $0.90 per 1 gold.”

Firefox 118.0, See All New Features, Updates and Fixes

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine.”

$700 a month for a bed-sized ‘pod’ in downtown San Francisco? Techies are renting them

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“They’re each 4 feet high, 3½ feet wide, and long enough to fit a twin-size mattress.”

How to Hide a $2 Trillion Antitrust Trial

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Last week, according to our calculations, over half of the trial, including testimony from key witnesses, happened in closed session, unavailable to the public.”

Unity apologizes to devs, reveals updated Runtime Fee policy

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The Unity Runtime Fee will no longer apply to games built on Unity Personal.”

Minecraft Wiki:Moving from Fandom

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Expanding access to safer AI with Amazon

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“As part of the investment, Amazon will take a minority stake in Anthropic.”

California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The invisible problem

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Every single person had problems with targeting, using the clipboard, and made lots and lots of errors.”

Choose Postgres queue technology

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The cult of scalability would rather we build applications that scale beyond our wildest dreams than applications that meet concrete customer and business needs.”

ICloud Drive Silently Deletes Your Content

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup.”

Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can't

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

School Surveillance Tools Are Harming Kids and Making It More Difficult to Finish Homework, Report Finds

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Shockingly, 38% of teachers said they were even aware of a student who was contacted by law enforcement as a result of the monitoring.”

Blocking Visual Studio Code embedded reverse shell before it's too late

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

0-days exploited by commercial surveillance vendor in Egypt

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

38TB of data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“In addition to the overly permissive access scope, the token was also misconfigured to allow “full control” permissions instead of read-only.”

Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee's Carbon Footprint

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“In fact, remote workers often drive more often than their in-office counterparts by taking several short car trips throughout the day.”

The bogus CVE problem

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Today The UK Parliament Undermined The Privacy, Security, And Freedom Of All Internet Users

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The WebP 0day

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“This bug also shows that we have an over-reliance on fuzzing for security assurance of complex parser code.”

Cisco makes largest ever acquisition, buying cybersecurity company Splunk for $28 billion in cash

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

British journalist held by police at Luton airport for five hours without arrest

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Police told Broomfield they were engaged in “a mopping up operation”. They seized his phone and laptop and have since refused to return them.”

Hackers breached International Criminal Court’s systems last week

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“At the end of last week, the International Criminal Court’s services detected anomalous activity affecting its information systems”

FAA Authorizes Zipline International, Inc. to Deliver Commercial Packages Using Drones That Fly Beyond Operator's Line of Sight

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

‘Less than half’ fresh produce sold globally makes any profit

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

We Are Retroactively Dropping the iPhone’s Repairability Score

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government.

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

Quantum Resistance and the Signal Protocol

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5 Billion

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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!”

Striking UAW auto workers want a 40% pay increase: how much they make now

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Profits at the struck auto companies increased 92% from 2013 to 2022, totaling $250 billion, according to EPI.”

Some new snippets from the Snowden documents

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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)”

Peach Sandstorm password spray campaigns enable intelligence collection at high-value targets

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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).”

Apple TV, now with more Tailscale

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Bounties Damage Open Source Projects

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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).”

Close to 2,000 Environmental Activists Killed Over Last Decade

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“In 2022 alone, 177 environmental activists were murdered, or roughly one every other day, according to Global Witness, a U.K.-based watchdog group.”

A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Large Language Models for Compiler Optimization

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Collective letter from game development companies: Turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization until new conditions are reviewed

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Pineapple ONE

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Hot Chips 2023: AMD’s Phoenix SoC

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

TikTok fined €345m for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Hackers claim it only took a 10-minute phone call to shut down MGM Resorts

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The conversation that granted initial access took just 10 minutes, according to the group.”

Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How mobile apps illegally share your personal data

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

SpaceX’s Starlink made $1.4 billion last year

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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).”

Google is cutting hundreds of jobs in its recruiting organization

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“In January, Alphabet-owned Google announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs, affecting roughly 6% of the full-time workforce.”

When MFA isn't actually MFA

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The million-dollar reporter

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Temporary withdrawal from the market of the iPhone 12 for non-compliance with EU regulation

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Bug in macOS 14 Sonoma prevents our app from working

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Firewall rules do not get applied properly to network traffic, and traffic that is not supposed to be allowed is allowed.”

The Death of Unity

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Credit card debt collection

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Debts are conveyed to the debt buyers as large CSV files with minimal supporting documentation.”

We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed. Here's what we learned

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

From zero to one hundred in 0.956 seconds

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

UK air traffic control meltdown

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Despite not having implemented the changes everyone assumed it had, it has received lots of positive press attention for doing the right thing.”

'Evil Telegram' Android apps on Google Play infected 60K with spyware

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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”

Wifi can read through walls

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held "Lone Gunman" Theory

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital.”

how does linux nat a ping?

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“ICMP is a very, very old protocol. It is defined in RFC 792, which was published in 1981.”

I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“As I left the geofence, I got a push notification on my watch saying that the pizza had been successfully ordered.”

Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago.”

Google, Meta, Amazon hiring low-paid H1B workers after US layoffs: report

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

Meet the Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port at a Time

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

CRISPR used to 'reprogram' cancer cells into healthy muscle in the lab

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“They’re switching from a cell that just wants to make more of itself to cells devoted to contraction.”

Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A track inspector claimed he was fired for reporting 'too many defects.' His secret recordings may cost BNSF millions.

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Why in the world would we ever call the FRA about anything? Unless I’m absolutely blatantly telling you to break the rules”

NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

UK 'spy clause' for scanning encrypted messages... can't

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The government saying ’no scanning until it’s technically feasible’ is nonsense. Scanning is fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encrypted messaging apps.”

Android 14 blocks modification of system certificates, even as root

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“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.”

BLASTPASS: NSO Group iPhone Zero-Click, Zero-Day Exploit Captured in the Wild

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim.”

Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Active North Korean campaign targeting security researchers

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“In one case, they carried on a months-long conversation, attempting to collaborate with a security researcher on topics of mutual interest.”

Mullvad on Tailscale: Privately browse the web

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s not true anonymity, because that’s a problem Tailscale is not trying to solve.”

If You've Got a New Car, It's a Data Privacy Nightmare

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google Chrome pushes browser history-based ad targeting

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

4,500 of the Top 1 Million Websites Leaked Source Code, Secrets

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“After reviewing the permissions granted to each valid GitHub PAT, we discovered the majority (67%) had admin-level privileges.”

Data Breach (August 2023)

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The breach of data includes usernames, User IDs, email addresses and passwords.”

Ask HN: I'm an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

GSA Announces Sale of Federal Helium System Assets - Updated

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Doctors Are Getting Ready to Give Patients a Vaccine That Blocks Fentanyl's Effects

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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?’”

The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“All of that data cost $15 in Bitcoin. The bot sometimes offers the Social Security number too for $20.”

TV Museum Will Die in 48 Hours Unless Sony Retracts YouTube Copyright Strikes

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Security update: Incident involving unauthorized admin access

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Our internal control systems, including automated code analysis, failed to catch the access token being committed to the repository.”

Mashing Enter to bypass full disk encryption with TPM, Clevis, dracut and systemd

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google Preemptively Banned Hundreds of Millions of 'Pirate' URLs Last Year

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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,”

Pesticide safety limit watered down after industry lobbying

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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,”

The Worst Programmer I Know

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Tim’s score was consistently zero. Zero! Not just low, or trending downwards, but literally zero.”

Can an Artificial Kidney Finally Free Patients from Dialysis?

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows after 28 years

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”

'Conserve food and water': No access in or out of Burning Man after storm

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How the FBI nuked Qakbot malware from infected Windows PCs

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The FBI says that between October 2021 and April 2023, the Qakbot operators earned approximately $58 million from ransomware payments.”

Arm wrestles expert's domains away citing trademark issues

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Arm’s takedown comes just a week after the Neoverse designer officially filed for an IPO on the US Nasdaq.”

X/Twitter has updated its Terms of Service to let it use Posts for AI training

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Japan's cybersecurity agency admits it was hacked for months

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

IBM promised to back off facial recognition: then it signed a $69.8 million contract to provide it

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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."”

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'

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

We Analyzed Millions of ChatGPT User Sessions: Visits are Down 29% since May, Programming Assistance is 30% of Use

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Since May, OpenAI traffic has declined 29.15%.”

Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s quite literally a rogue executable file that has somehow appeared in c:\windows\temp\mubstemp and is digitally signed by Microsoft.”

Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype. Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Only after 404 Media contacted Microsoft for comment did the company say it would patch the issue in an upcoming update.”

Google to charge big businesses $30 per user per month for AI in Gmail and work apps

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“We were a little surprised to see our friends in Redmond come up with the exact same pricing model that we had.”

US food delivery service PurFoods discloses data breach

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“We are sorry for any inconvenience this incident may cause.”

ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech: No Matter How Awful It Is.

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1)

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“It also sends fake "chaff" keystrokes for a random interval after the last real keystroke.”

Grave flaws in BGP Error handling

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Elixir Saves Pinterest $2 Million a Year In Server Costs

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The combined effect of better architecture and Elixir saved Pinterest over $2 million per year in server costs.”

'The Wallet Event': Crypto Startup Bankrupt After Losing Password to $38.9 Million Physical Crypto Wallet

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“It is worth mentioning that the company did not tell regulators or customers about this issue for months after it discovered the problem.”

When your classmates threaten you with felony charges

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“They said that we had violated state and federal law. They threatened us with civil and criminal charges. 20 years in prison.”

New Images and Video Confirm Austin-Made Tesla Model Y Has Cracked Front Casting

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Do not copy the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer.”

Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Much of their earnings go back to Monotype, which takes a 50% cut of every sale on its site.”

Mother is arrested in Bangladesh after son in the U.S. criticizes government online

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“I’m not a famous columnist or not a very known person. So, I did not expect that this would happen to my family.”

Block YouTube Ads on AppleTV by Decrypting and Stripping Ads from Profobuf

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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?”

This venture-backed startup has quietly bought more than 80 mom-and-pop shops

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The plan instead is to generate revenue from a growing array of fintech products that it sells to the businesses it buys.”

Slack's Migration to a Cellular Architecture

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

E-ink is so Retropunk

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, the shim needs to be updated for every release to give it the correct binary addresses to hook.”

Zoom CEO Says Employees Need to Be in the Office Because It's Hard to Build Trust Over Zoom

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”

Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee (Guest Blog Post)

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Nonetheless, without any obvious hints of irony, OpenAI’s own terms of use prohibits scraping.”

FBI Finds 1,580 Bitcoin in Crypto Wallets Linked to North Korean Hackers

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Elon Musk says 'if LEGO can do it, so can we' about Cybertruck quality in leaked Tesla email

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.”

Tornado Cash devs charged with laundering more than $1 billion

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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."”

Bypassing Bitlocker using a cheap logic analyzer on a Lenovo laptop

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Introducing Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Epic's First Run offers 100% revenue share to game devs in exchange for exclusivity

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

We Might Have Accidentally Killed the Only Life We Ever Found on Mars Nearly 50 Years Ago

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“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!"”

NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal 2024

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“On August 21, 2023, the Board of Directors approved an additional $25.00 billion in share repurchases, without expiration.”

Some rough impressions of Worldcoin

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Eye scans detect signs of Parkinson's disease up to seven years before diagnosis

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Coffee offers performance boost for concrete

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The first conformant M1 GPU driver

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Unlike ours, the manufacturer’s M1 drivers are unfortunately not conformant for any standard graphics API, whether Vulkan or OpenGL or OpenGL ES.”

Experian fined $650,000 for not letting you opt out of its spammy emails

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

SpaceX's new Bandwagon program is a big threat to small launch providers

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Right now, companies must often purchase a dedicated launch from Rocket Lab if they want to position a satellite in MIO.”

Meta threatens to fire workers for return-to-office infractions in leaked memo

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google's plan to purge inactive accounts isn't sitting well with some users

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Short session expiration does not help security

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

To Conference Organisers Everywhere…

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

macOS updates for Apple silicon Macs are larger than reported

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Debian turns 30 – and important to Linux world as ever

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Executive Function Theft

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Welcome to Datasette Cloud

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Cellebrite asks cops to keep its phone hacking tech 'hush hush'

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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”

Iraq Blocks Telegram, Leaks Blackhole BGP Routes

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

IP Address Blocking Banned After Anti-Piracy Court Order Hit Cloudflare

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Amsterdam to use "noise cameras" against too loud cars

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

China's property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan court

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The application is a normal procedure for the offshore debt restructuring and does not involve bankruptcy petition.”

Spotify reportedly has a $38 million white noise problem

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Spotify is spending a lot of money on podcasts that don’t actually involve any talking.”

Major U.S. energy org targeted in QR code phishing attack

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Saying Hello Linked to Higher Wellbeing, but With Limits

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

EQT Private Equity Announces Voluntary Public Purchase Offer and Intention to Delist SUSE

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Amazon will reportedly charge sellers an extra fee for shipping their own products

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Documents viewed by the outlets indicate that Amazon will start imposing a fee on each product that merchants send out themselves.”

Asteroid crater 520km in diameter buried deep in southeast Australia, scientists say

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The Deniliquin structure, yet to be further tested by drilling, spans up to 520km in diameter.”

Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty Seagate Firecuda 530 drive with the help woodworking tools

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“A metal G clamp and strips of a Silicon Valley Bank credit card under the SSD to support the PCB.”

Nintendo Is Trying To Patent Some Really Broad Tears Of The Kingdom Mechanics

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Setapp readies alt app store for iPhone, entices devs with up to 90% revenue share

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

OpenAI is using GPT-4 to build an AI-powered content moderation system

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Anyone with OpenAI API access can implement this approach to create their own AI-assisted moderation system.”

Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Twitter won’t ban domains they don’t like but will waste your time if you visit them.”

Bali rice experiment cuts greenhouse gas emissions and increases yields

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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%.”

What exactly are the economics of AI?

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A police raid of a Kansas newsroom raises alarms about violations of press freedom

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s very rare because it’s illegal,” Oberlander said. “It doesn’t happen very often because most organizations understand that it’s illegal.”

Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The data of 760,000 Discord.io users was put up for sale on the darknet

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“I tried reaching out to the Discord.io team on their Discord server, and two minutes after joining, every single channel got manually deleted.”

Ford says cars with WiFi vulnerability still safe to drive

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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”

Former VP Claims Salesforce Lied About Software Capabilities: 'It Was All a Lie.'

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

I Created the Nerdiest Game Ever

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Thermodynamic Linear Algebra

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Under reasonable assumptions, we rigorously establish asymptotic speedups for our algorithms, relative to digital methods, that scale linearly in matrix dimension.”

WVU recommends dropping 32 majors, including all world language programs

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The preliminary recommendations also included 169 faculty reductions, or 7% of the total faculty in Morgantown.”

Exploring the internals of Linux v0.01

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“It consisted of only 10,239 lines of code.”

Carrot Problems

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Youtube-dl Site Goes Offline as Hosting Provider Enforces Court-Ordered Ban

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

U.S. Bans Future Investments in Chinese AI, Semiconductor, and Quantum Computing

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“While the administration mentioned restrictions would concern only "narrow subsets" of these areas, precise details remain unspecified.”

80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: 'A lot of executives have egg on their faces'

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Wendelstein 7-X reaches milestone: Power plasma with gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoule was achieved with an average heating power of 2.7 megawatts, whereby the discharge lasted 480 seconds.”

Seattle becomes first in U.S. to protect gig workers from sudden 'deactivation'

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Supermarket AI meal planner app suggests recipe that would create chlorine gas

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The bot recommends the recipe as “the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses”.”

Supreme Court says Apple can keep its App Store payment rules for now

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Kagan did not issue an explanation for the decision, but Epic’s petition was noted as denied on the Supreme Court’s website.”

Liquid-Metal Battery Will Be on the Grid Next Year

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Ambri’s grid battery costs $180/kWh to $250/kWh depending on size and duration, the company says.”

CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“According to the memo, CNET will be subject to regular “content pruning” going forward, at least once a year.”

Infrastructure audit completed by Radically Open Security

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“VPN servers accept remote logins from administrators, who technically have the ability to tap into production users’ VPN traffic”

Insights into Stack Overflow's traffic

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.”

Google Play apps with 2.5M installs load ads when screen's off

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Downfall Attacks

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“According to Intel, some workloads may experience up to 50% overhead.”

Amazon Says It Doesn't 'Employ' Drivers, But Records Show It Hired Firms to Prevent Them From Unionizing

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Banks hit with $549 million in fines for use of Signal, WhatsApp to evade regulators' reach

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Android 14 introduces first-of-its-kind cellular connectivity security features

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“In other words, the network decides whether traffic is encrypted and the user has no visibility into whether it is being encrypted.”

I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires)

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Police raid WorldCoin cryptocurrency warehouse in Nairobi

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Overworked and Underpaid, VFX Workers Vote to Unionize at Marvel

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The CoANet classifier achieved 95% accuracy from the smartphone recordings and 93% from those captured through Zoom.”

The Lose-Lose-Lose-Lose Bill C-18 Outcome: Meta Blocking News Links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down.””

In every reported case where police mistakenly arrested someone using facial recognition, that person has been Black

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“In 2020, Detroit’s police chief said their facial recognition technology, when used alone, fails 96% of the time, Insider previously reported.”

Why does libvirt support only 14 hot-plugged PCIe devices on x86-64?

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Thus, the maximum total number of PCIe slots in any PC is 16 (= 65536/4096).”

NASA Mission Update: Voyager 2 Communications Pause

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

They Didn’t Ask to Go Viral. Posting on Social Media Without Consent Is Immoral

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Just normal web things.

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Mozilla VPN: CVE-2023-4104: Privileged vpndaemon on Linux wrongly and incompletely implements Polkit authentication

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Introducing code referencing for GitHub Copilot

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

New Collide+Power side-channel attack impacts almost all CPUs

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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”

Mid-winter temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius in South America leave climatologists in disbelief

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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”

FCC fines robocaller a record $300M after blocking billions of their scam calls

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features worth up to $15,000

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google’s AI search is getting more video and better links

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

IBM and NASA Open Source Largest Geospatial AI Foundation Model on Hugging Face

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“1x DGX H100 (SXM) with 8x H100 GPUs is $460k including the required support. $100k of the $460k is required support.”

How I discovered the underground world of credit card network exploitation

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Amazon rolls out its virtual health clinic nationwide

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college.”

Viral room-temperature superconductor claims spark excitement – and skepticism

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Senate Votes To Let People Who've Used Marijuana Work At Intelligence Agencies Like CIA And NSA As Part Of Defense Bill

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

China Has Switched On the Largest Wind Turbine Ever

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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).””

Dear Websites, Stop Asking for "Ransom" Sign-Ups.

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

New – AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge + Public IP Insights

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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”

Free Public WiFi

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Pay dirt for ice core scientists in East Greenland as they reach bedrock

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How the Ultrawealthy Use Private Foundations to Bank Millions in Tax Deductions While Giving the Public Little in Return

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“That allowed the Johnsons to collect more than $38 million in tax savings from the estate over five years, confidential tax records show.”

Banished to a Remote Idaho Valley, Beavers Created a Lush Wetland

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“When the Sharps Fire burned through the area in 2018, it left unsinged those parts where beavers had settled.”

Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decline in Aging

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Researchers using mouse models found that altering the CaMKII brain protein caused similar cognitive effects as those that happen through normal aging.”

A Steering Council notice about PEP 703 (Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython)

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

What happened to Vivaldi Social?

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Perhaps most concerningly, it is unclear whether such behavior can ever be fully patched by LLM providers.”

If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The U.K. Government Is Very Close To Eroding Encryption Worldwide

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“In response to this outpouring of resistance, the U.K. government’s response has been to wave its hands and deny reality.”

California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Mark Zuckerberg: Threads users down by more than a half

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

For Cheaper Lithium-Ion Batteries, Just Add Salt

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Whether or not this will lead to practical batteries with associated cost savings remains to be seen.”

Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Today, we have tens of thousands of customers with S3 buckets that are spread across millions of drives.”

2023-07-02 -- 2023-07-03 Tarsnap outage post-mortem

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately while I had tests for this, I never tested regenerating the server state after a machine is “re-owned” while having data stored”

Meta's AR/VR Business Lost $7.7 Billion in the Past 6 Months

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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”

Stack Overflow’s CEO doesn’t understand Stack Overflow

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023.”

[wei] Ensure Origin Trial enables full feature

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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).”

mold 2.0.0

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, this approach didn’t meet our expectations. The license change represents our acceptance of this reality.”

EU passes law to blanket highways with fast EV chargers by end of 2025

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The regulation also requires that ad-hoc charging payments can be made via cards or contactless devices, without requiring a subscription.”

Scientists Say Recycling Has Backfired Spectacularly

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“We predict with high confidence the tipping to happen as soon as mid-century (2037–2109 is a 95% confidence range).”

Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

OpenAI Quietly Shuts Down Its AI Detection Tool

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The explanation was not in a new announcement, but added in a note added to the blog post that first announced the tool.”

At this company, we are family

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Zenbleed

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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!”

Senate bill crafted with DEA targets end-to-end encryption, requires online companies to report drug activity

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Your Ubisoft account can be permanently deleted for 'inactivity,' but Ubisoft says that won't happen if there are purchases attached to it (Updated)

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“In practice, as of today, we have never deleted accounts that have been inactive for less than 4 years”

Amazon is reportedly making employees relocate for return-to-office

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Those affected will include workers hired for remote positions and those who moved during peak pandemic days.”

Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node (The Story of William Weber)

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Simple Sabotage Field Manual - How to Destroy Your Organizations

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Teach Your LLM to Always Answer with Facts not Fiction

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“At this juncture, it is absolutely crucial to note that an LLM is not infallible nor the ultimate authority on all knowledge.”

Compromised Microsoft Key: More Impactful Than We Thought

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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””

Shopify Employee Breaks NDA To Reveal Firm Quietly Replacing Laid Off Workers With AI

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Why even let users set their own passwords?

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Other examples include PayPal, where you can literally enter a credit card number to prove your identity and reset your password(!).”

Nebraska study finds billions of nanoplastics released when microwaving containers

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Accelerator Report: A quench of an LHC inner triplet magnet causes a small leak with major consequences

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The answer is: very often, like 5% of all samples, when reading the clock on all 4 physical cores at the same time.”

Seven AI companies commit to safeguards at the White House's request

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The companies will voluntarily agree to abide by a number of principles though the agreement will expire when Congress passes legislation to regulate AI.”

Apple says it would remove iMessage and FaceTime in the UK rather than break end-to-end encryption

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Federal Reserve announces that its new system for instant payments, the FedNow® Service, is now live

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

IRS moves forward with a new free-file tax return system, supporters and critics mobilize

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Tesla in discussion to license Full Self-Driving software to another automaker

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract at least three papers

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

CVE-2023-38408: Remote Code Execution in OpenSSH’s forwarded ssh-agent

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable OpenSSH forwarded ssh-agent.”

Target's EasySweep – Simplifying Skimmer Detection for All

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

'No way out': how video games use tricks from gambling to attract big spenders

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Should they reduce their outlay, she told GamesIndustry.biz, the company would “reach out and call them to find out what’s wrong”.”

Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“But, Microsoft found that the hackers were using that consumer MSA key to forge tokens that allowed them to break into enterprise inboxes.”

The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The single most important fact in this paper is that Benchmark put $12 million into Uber and got $5.8 billion back.”

This company plans to transplant gene-edited pig hearts into babies next year

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Two such surgeries have been performed so far. Neither animal survived beyond a matter of days.”

WormGPT Is a ChatGPT Alternative With 'No Ethical Boundaries or Limitations'

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“To create the chatbot, the developer says they used an older, but open-source large language model called GPT-J from 2021.”

Bad numbers in the "gzip beats BERT" paper?

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“So, if any of the tie-break labels is equal to the test label, it is marked as correct.”

Temporary ban on behavioural advertising on Facebook and Instagram

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Should Meta not comply with the decision, the company risks a coercive fine of up to one million NOK per day.”

This Fusion Reactor Is Held Together With Tape

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“That’s an aggressive timeline, and nearly every fusion project to date has fallen short of its optimistic promises.”

Engagement on Instagram's Threads Has Cratered

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Discord is not documentation

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“There’s no API documentation - I have to scroll through a million messages to find anything.”

Unauthenticated RCE on a RIGOL oscilloscope

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“It is a little less known that if n is 0, the result of the strncmp function is also 0.”

underwater ears everywhere

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Signal president says company will not comply with proposed U.K. 'mass surveillance' law requiring mandatory message scanning before encryption

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“You cannot create a back door that only the good guys can go through.”

The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The crawler, which does not contain a unique user-agent string, respects robots.txt.”

A Third of North America's Birds Have Vanished

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

PostgreSQL: No More VACUUM, No More Bloat

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“With the PostgreSQL heap engine, the update of a single indexed field disables HOT, so all indexes get updated.”

Dropped iPad implicated in fatal Rotak Chinook helicopter crash

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are 'skyrocketing.' What is the city's plan?

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Co-founder of Stability AI, worth billions, says he was tricked into selling stake for $100

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Problem With LangChain

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How Disney, Netflix, and more streaming companies are fighting FTC's 'click to cancel' proposal

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The proposal would also severely curtail or, in some cases, even prohibit companies from communicating with their customers, in violation of the First Amendment.”

The FCC Responds to my ATSC 3 Encryption Complaint: They Want To Hear From You!

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“With ATSC 3 only equipment blessed by the broadcasters through an arduous, opaque and expensive process will be allowed to tune content.”

Brute-forcing a macOS user's real name from a browser using mDNS

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“We’ve been trying to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications.”

It's official: Smartphones will need to have replaceable batteries by 2027

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“This new law states, specifically, that users should be able to replace a battery in their phone without any special expertise or tools.”

Democrats call on DOJ to investigate tax sites for sharing financial information with Meta

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and TaxAct all confirmed that they shared “extensive taxpayer data” through Meta’s pixel in the senators’ report.”

Can Neural Stimulation Zap Addiction?

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Sam Altman explains why he's helping to take nuclear microreactor company Oklo public via SPAC

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft confirms more job cuts on top of 10,000 layoffs announced in January

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft filed a notice Monday saying it would cut 276 people in its home state of Washington. Of those, 66 are virtual.”

newpipe.net removed from Google search results due to DMCA take down request

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project.”

Intel Exiting the PC Business as it Stops Investment in the Intel NUC

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A petabyte of health insurance prices per month

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Why We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Netflix Invents New Green-Screen Filming Method Using Magenta Light

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Getting weird results from GCP europe-west1

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Same here. All my buckets just got deleted.”

US Spies Are Buying Americans' Private Data. Congress Has a New Chance to Stop It

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

PoisonGPT: How We Hid a Lobotomized LLM on Hugging Face to Spread Fake News

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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).”

Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.””

A fast, free threading Python

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Matrix Multiplication Using Only Addition

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“In many cases of practical interest, only a single addition and a single on-chip copy operation are needed to replace a multiplication.”

ProtonMail Rewrites Your Emails

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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!”

Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”

Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.””

France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone, spy on people

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.””

Wash Trading Gone Wrong - How A $100M/Day Crypto Exchange Accidentally Bankrupted Itself

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The following day, BaseFEX’s trading volume decreased by 99.99%.”

ChatGPT Drops About 10% in Traffic as the Novelty Wears Off

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Worldwide desktop and mobile web traffic to the ChatGPT website, chat.openai.com, dropped 9.7% from May to June, according to preliminary estimates.”

Firefox 115 can silently remotely disable my extension on any site

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“And remember, the quarantined domains list can be changed remotely at any time by Mozilla, without needing a Firefox software update.”

Open Letter from Security and Privacy Researchers in relation to the Online Safety Bill

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Four companies must stop using Google Analytics

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Dutch rules will soon prevent schoolchildren from having a phone in the classroom

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without it

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“This means that swearing will not automatically improve the quality of your code.”

How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Reddit isn’t profitable, and the infrastructure to support third-party apps costs Reddit $10 million per year.”

Apple is now the first publicly traded company to close above a $3 trillion market value

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Earlier this year, Apple’s market cap fell below $2 trillion in trading for the first time since early 2021.”

Can Dell's 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Even when you run a latest-gen GPU with latest drivers, the monitor does not reliably show a picture after a suspend/resume cycle.”

Oregon County Sues BP, Chevron, Shell, Exxon for $51B Climate Damages

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Multnomah County is seeking $50 million from the defendants for actual damages from the 2021 record-breaking heat wave.”

Ericsson to WhatsApp : The Story of Erlang

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google Search's Death by a Thousand Cuts

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Millions of search results are effectively dead links.”

Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

wazero: the zero dependency WebAssembly runtime for Go developers

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“By avoiding CGO, wazero avoids prerequisites such as shared libraries or libc, and lets you keep features like cross compilation.”

Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“If you’re not logged into your Twitter account and try to view a tweet, you’ll be presented with a sign-in screen.”

How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“GFW exempts a connection if its first payload has more than 50% printable ASCII.”

Goodreads Has No Incentive to be Good

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The SAE is standardizing Tesla’s EV charging plug as it racks up more wins

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Tesla’s formerly proprietary charging port was opened up last year in a bid to become the de facto EV standard in the US.”

YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Some users are now seeing a revised version of this dialog box, with similar phrasing but the mention of a new three-strikes policy.”

Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Kagi raises $670K

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“This was made possible with the participation of 42 accredited investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users.”

Google cuts jobs at Waze as it continues to merge mapping products

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, this will result in a reduction of Waze Ads monetization-focused roles in sales, marketing, operations and analytics.”

Apple joins opposition to encrypted message app scanning

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries work permits

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Canada has created 10,000 places for H-1B holders, which must be filled within a year as of July 16.”

We Raised A Bunch Of Money

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

FedEx Accused of Largest Odometer Rollback Fraud in History With Used Vans

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“FedEx, with the knowledge and assistance of Holman, replaced thousands of odometers on FedEx/Holman Vehicles”

Unicorn social app IRL to shut down after admitting 95% of its users were fake

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Hidden Cost of Air Quality Monitoring

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Hugging Face CEO tells US House open-source AI is 'extremely aligned' with American interests

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Discovering that your car battery monitor is siphoning up your location data

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“App store misleads consumers by stating that no personal data is collected or shared.”

JP Morgan accidentally deletes evidence in multi-million record retention screwup

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

Turmeric's unexpected link to lead poisoning in Bangladesh

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Europe's Inflation Outlook Depends on How Corporate Profits Absorb Wage Gains

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Profits accounted for 45 percent of price rises since the start of 2022.”

I'm done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“Let there be no mistake: this was meant to destroy the distributions the community built to replace what Red Hat took away.”

Publishers Carpet-Bomb IPFS Gateway Operators With DMCA Notices

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“None of them have ever been accessed, and of the ones that I checked, none even worked.”

Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Monitoring is a Pain

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

ThinMachine - a $25 Thin Client MacOS Time Machine Appliance

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The t520 consumes 6W at idle and 10W otherwise.”

US firm 'breached GDPR' by reputation-scoring EU citizens

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

On the paper “Exploring the MIT Mathematics and EECS Curriculum Using Large Language Models”

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

North Korean Market Prices Suggest Serious Food Shortages

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Every Mastodon User Has an RSS Feed

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Pentagon’s $52,000 trash can

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit.”

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

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“In that context, the Advocate General concludes that the rule of law requires access to HTS that is freely available without charge.”

FDA Approves First Gene Therapy for Treatment of Certain Patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“A clinical benefit of Elevidys, including improved motor function, has not been established.”

California will begin backing intentional burns to control wildfire

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Criminalization of encryption : the 8 december case

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“In total, there are more than 150 questions related to the issue of encryption and digital practices in the investigation file.”

The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“They estimated that somewhere between 33% and 46% of the workers had used AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”

We’ve officially entered a new era of ‘cultivated’ meat production

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Prior to today, Singapore was the only country allowing sales of cultivated chicken.”

Information Is Power

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“EVE Online is the first and only video game to have developed an Excel add-in leveraging this type of data integration.”

FTC sues Amazon over 'deceptive' Prime sign-up and cancellation process

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

AI Is a Lot of Work

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“By the beginning of this year, pay for the Kenyan annotators I spoke with had dropped to between $1 and $3 per hour.”

Did I receive fraudulent DMCA takedowns?

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Apple's union-busting practices violated employee rights at NYC store, judge rules

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Reddit hackers demand $4.5 million ransom and API pricing changes

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

You can't trust Google

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“That was a $180m/year business, servicing 10 million domains!”

Google doesn't want its employees using Bard code

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Google has warned its own employees not to disclose confidential information or use the code generated by its AI chatbot, Bard.”

Introducing Mullvad Leta: a search engine used in the Mullvad Browser

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Mullvad Leta uses the Google Search API as a proxy, caching each search.”

PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“According to Konstantin Knizhnik, there are about 2,000 such variables currently used by the PostgreSQL server.”

How we tried to book a train ticket and ended up with a databreach with 245,000 records

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“On the off chance we created an account – and to our surprise we were able to successfully log in with it.”

Apple Is Taking On Apples in a Truly Weird Trademark Battle

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have acquiesced.”

Swing VPN app is a DDOS botnet

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Goodbye, Twilio

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The new Twilio wants to help companies collect, use and even make up customer data, all with the goal to drive more sales.”

Tempest in a teacup: UChicago physicists make breakthrough in creating turbulence

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Merging bcachefs

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Rot Economy

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Humans Have Pumped Enough Groundwater to Change the Tilt of the Earth

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“From 1993 to 2010, they determined, humans redistributed enough water to move the rotational pole roughly 31 inches.”

The performance review of Hetzner's CAX-line ARM64 servers and the practical experience of WebP Cloud Services on them.

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“Due to the impressive performance of ARM64 in testing, we have migrated all WebP Cloud Services to Hetzner’s ARM64 servers.”

Common diabetes drug shown to prevent long COVID

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The New Language Model Stack

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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%.”

Breakthrough: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The cosmic ray intensity and earthquakes correlation is not discernible in location-specific analyses but emerges when global seismic activity is considered.”

Meta scientist Yann LeCun says AI won't destroy jobs forever

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Meta has a large AI research programme and producing intelligent systems as capable as humans is one of its goals.”

Google Domains shutting down, assets sold and being migrated to Squarespace

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Synthetic human embryos created in groundbreaking advance

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Why Does Nuclear Power Plant Construction Cost So Much?

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

11 years of hosting a SaaS

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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).”

Trapped Under Trucks: The Inside Story of the Government’s Failure to Prevent Underride Crashes

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The beefier, more robust rear guards would’ve cost an additional $127 each, according to industry estimates.”

New York State Senate Passes Prohibitions on Non-Competes

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Video-Based Cryptanalysis

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“At least six smartcard readers manufactured by five manufacturers sold on Amazon are vulnerable to a direct attack.”

Twitter is being evicted from its Boulder office over unpaid rent

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

I booted Linux 292,612 times

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“To prove it I booted Linux 292,612 times before the faulty commit (successfully), and then after (failed after under 1,000 boots).”

Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys“R”Us: here’s why that matters

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“If you consider them together with their portfolio companies, Carlyle, KKR, and Blackstone would be the third-, fourth-, and fifth-largest employers in America.”

OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic to give UK early access to foundational models for AI safety research

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Rewriting the Ruby parser

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Varda: The Space Drug Factory

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO's recent remarks

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Robot can rip the data out of RAM chips with chilling technology

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

First mission to 'touch' the sun catches the solar wind

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

GM follows Ford in adopting Tesla's EV charging standard

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Unwilling to expend the money to build their own network, automakers were left to cobble together their own out of available third-party providers.”

The Dutch government wants to automatically and administratively gain permission to target victims of hackers

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Intel Is All-In on Backside Power Delivery

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

CS:GO: From Zero to 0-day

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Combining the bugs leads to the proof of concept that exploits a CS:GO client by only connecting to a malicous, attacker controlled server.”

CIA 2010 covert communication websites

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Barracuda Urges Replacing, Not Patching, Its Email Security Gateways

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level.”

Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“It can only operate during the day on certain limited roads, and only at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour.”

Debian 12 "bookworm" released

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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”

How charging drivers to go downtown would transform American cities

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

acme.sh runs arbitrary commands from a remote server

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Instead, HiCA is stealthily crafting curl commands and piping the output to bash.”

Turkish Citizens' Personal Data Offered Online After Govt Site Hacked

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“For several years, the e-Devlet website has been criticised for not being secure enough, but the authorities have dismissed the claims.”

RNA editing helps octopuses cope with the cold

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“This process happens transparently during browser navigation in Safari Private Browsing mode, and links that the user clicks on from Mail and Messages app.”

Google doesn't want employees working remotely anymore.

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”

NASA spends $45M to seed tech from hundreds of space businesses

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Each award includes $150,000 for a total investment of $45 million.”

Tailscale doesn't want your password

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Tailscale has never supported password-based authentication.”

Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my 'Chrome' search with a fake AI answer

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Let me put things a different way: Microsoft just gave itself a full-screen ad in search results by faking an AI interaction.”

10 years after Snowden's first leak, what have we learned?

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Royal Navy Says Quantum Navigation Test a Success

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Although specific details about the applications of this technology remain undisclosed by the Royal Navy, certain hints suggest potential uses.”

US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“In the Debrief article, Grusch does not say he has personally seen alien vehicles, nor does he say where they may be being stored.”

Nvidia unveils new kind of Ethernet for AI, Grace Hopper 'Superchip' in full production

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The vast majority of switch silicon is supplied by chip maker Broadcom.”

Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Common eye drops may provide hope for nearsighted kids

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“What they didn’t expect was that the 0.01% preparation would be more effective than the 0.02%.”

Our Right To Challenge Junk Patents Is Under Threat

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The USPTO would prohibit anyone from challenging the patents of “small entities” and “under-resourced inventors.””

Introducing Apple Vision Pro: Apple's first spatial computer

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites: WTF?

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Scientists Hacked Human Cells to Make Insulin, And It Reversed Diabetes in Mice

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“They were stable upon transplantation for as long as we tracked them (6 months), secreted human insulin and reversed diabetes in mice.”

Traffic cop sues city over 'get-out-of-jail-free' cards for NYPD friends and family

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

It's infuriatingly hard to understand how closed models train on their input

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half, says 'thrilling' study

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

High Prices Make Textbook 'Piracy' Acceptable to Most Students

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“This is also reflected in the research, which found that only 18% would consider reducing their illegal textbook habits if they risked jail time.”

The NixOS Foundation's Call to Action: S3 Costs Require Community Support

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Keeping the bucket as it is and paying it in full ($9k/month at the moment, steadily rising as the cache keeps growing)”

OpenAI's plans according to Sam Altman

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“This content has been removed at the request of OpenAI.”

Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Bytes Are All You Need: Transformers Operating Directly On File Bytes

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“This enables models to operate on various modalities without any hand-designed, modality-specific processing.”

Triangle Check: scan iTunes backups for traces of compromise by Operation Triangulation

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Major Updates for System76 Open Firmware!

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Meta will require employees to return to the office three days a week starting in September

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“We’re committed to distributed work, and we’re confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home”

North America is now the growth leader for new battery factories

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Amazon workers walk out over 'lack of trust' in leadership

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Maryland License Plates Now Inadvertently Advertising Filipino Online Casino

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How Much Are GitHub Stars Worth to You?

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Reddit API Pricing Would Cost Apollo Developer $20 Million Per Year

Wed, 31 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Is Avoiding Extinction from AI Really an Urgent Priority?

Wed, 31 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Announcing NVIDIA DGX GH200: The First 100 Terabyte GPU Memory System

Wed, 31 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

When LIMIT 9 works but LIMIT 10 hangs

Wed, 31 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Buffer.allocUnsafe() also reserves the right to allocate small buffers as sub-arrays of a global pool it keeps lying around for the purpose.”

Federal Judge Makes History in Holding That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant

Tue, 30 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Lyft's secret plan to take control of its maps, and its future

Tue, 30 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“As a product team, it’s a pretty weird experience to not own 80% of the pixels that your users interact with.”

Hacking my "smart" toothbrush

Tue, 30 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Email addresses are not primary user identities

Tue, 30 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Notion, Slack, all these systems, when you log in via SAML they use your email address as your primary identifier.”

Let us serve you, but don't bring us down

Mon, 29 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services.”

Wrestlers detained in Delhi: AI image of 'smiling' Vinesh & Sangeeta Phogat viral

Mon, 29 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Coming to the details of the viral image itself, we found that the image had been morphed using Artificial Intelligence app called FaceApp.”

Removing the support for forwarded ports

Mon, 29 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.”

CPR's true survival rate is lower than many people think

Mon, 29 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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%.”

Private Spies Hired by the FBI and Corporate Firms Infiltrate Discord, Reddit, WhatsApp

Sun, 28 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Music Company Asks Google to Delist 'YouTube Downloader' Wikipedia Article

Sun, 28 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The highlighted URL in the above notice lists Wikipedia’s “Comparison of YouTube downloaders” page.”

Profit-Obsessed Private Equity Is Now Dominating the US Hospice System

Sun, 28 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“As of 2020, over 72 percent of hospices are for-profit and approximately 24 percent are nonprofit. Less than 3 percent are publicly owned.”

The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

Sun, 28 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

Sat, 27 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“That the citations and opinions in question were provided by ChatGPT which also provided its legal source and assured the reliability of its content.”

All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs

Sat, 27 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“A 90% accurate process repeated 5 times is (0.90.90.90.90.9), or 0.59, 59% accurate.”

Building a Personal VoIP System

Sat, 27 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“SIP was initially released in 1999, and was designed with the assumption that each device has its own globally routable public IP address.”

Amazon Gives up Shipment Zero, a Key Part of Its Climate Pledge

Fri, 26 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The ecommerce giant recently backed out of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030.”

Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor: this is how companies respond

Fri, 26 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario

Fri, 26 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Tesla Model Y overtakes Corolla to be world's best-selling car in 2023

Fri, 26 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Whistleblower Drops 100 Gigabytes Of Tesla Secrets To German News Site: Report

Thu, 25 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page

Thu, 25 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back yesterday.”

The Strange Story of the Teens Behind the Mirai Botnet

Thu, 25 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

PyPI was subpoenaed

Wed, 24 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“In this case, however, PSF determined with the advice of counsel that our only course of action was to provide the requested data.”

Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain–spine interface

Wed, 24 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The participant regained the ability to walk with crutches overground even when the BSI was switched off.”

the tiny corp raised $5.1M

Wed, 24 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

Wed, 24 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“SectorC (github) is a C compiler written in x86-16 assembly that fits within the 512 byte boot sector of an x86 machine.”

FBI abused surveillance law to snoop on protesters, donors

Tue, 23 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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”

OpenAI leaders propose international regulatory body for AI

Tue, 23 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“And although the company’s leaders say they support tapping the brakes, there are no plans to do so just yet”

Apple Announces Multibillion-Dollar Deal With Broadcom to Make Components in the USA

Tue, 23 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Apple noted that it already supports over 1,100 jobs in Broadcom’s Fort Collins FBAR filter manufacturing facility”

Changing my mind on remote, moving the team back to San Francisco

Tue, 23 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The solution is to just avoid the bad parts! That’s SOMA and the Tenderloin, mostly.”

Leaked Government Document Shows Spain Wants to Ban End-to-End Encryption

Mon, 22 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

““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.”

VSCode Security: Malicious Extensions Detected- More Than 45,000 Downloads- PII Exposed, and Backdoors Enabled

Mon, 22 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“While the extension was supposed to be a simple theme configuration (no code should be included), it had a simple PII stealer code”

Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

Mon, 22 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft exec tells employees to improve its stock performance in lieu of raises

Mon, 22 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Capossela cashed out $1.55 million worth of Microsoft stock earlier this month and sold another $2.85 million last week.”

GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers

Sun, 21 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Our findings reveal that these detectors consistently misclassify non-native English writing samples as AI-generated, whereas native writing samples are accurately identified.”

Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already

Sun, 21 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“But in that “Seven Deadly Sins” article, I said that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence.”

The end of the accounting search

Sun, 21 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How Much Memory Do You Need to Run 1 Million Concurrent Tasks?

Sun, 21 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Goroutines are supposed to be very lightweight, but they actually consumed more than 50% of RAM required by Rust threads.”

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

Sat, 20 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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”

Popular Pirate Bay Proxy Site Disappears From GitHub

Sat, 20 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“A few weeks after its comeback the site quietly disappeared. Those who try to access the domain today will get a 404 error.”

U.S. Universities Are Building a New Semiconductor Workforce

Sat, 20 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The long life of Apache httpd 2.4

Sat, 20 May 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“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”

Migrating from Supabase

Fri, 19 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Meta bets big on AI with custom chips, and a supercomputer

Fri, 19 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Apple execs were reportedly skeptical on headset, with one likening it to a 'science project'

Fri, 19 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Physicists Create Biggest-Ever Schrödinger's Cat

Fri, 19 May 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“A sapphire crystal weighing 16 micrograms is the largest object ever to exist in a quantum-mechanical superposition of two vibrational states.”

What happened with ASUS routers this morning?

Thu, 18 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Another issue with the Cyber Resilience Act: European standards bodies are inaccessible to Open Source projects

Thu, 18 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google's newest A.I. model uses nearly five times more text data for training than its predecessor

Thu, 18 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

Thu, 18 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Watchdog Ofcom has warned 4.3 million eligible people are missing the deals.”

Controlled burns help prevent wildfires. Regulations make them nearly impossible.

Wed, 17 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Here's what happened during OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's first congressional hearing on artificial intelligence

Wed, 17 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Wizards Of The Coast Raids YouTuber’s House To Take Back Magic: The Gathering Cards

Wed, 17 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“They cited statures with punishments such as a $200,000 fine and up to a decade of jail time.”

Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way

Wed, 17 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs

Tue, 16 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs.”

Elon Musk says he wants to personally approve every new Tesla hire

Tue, 16 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“No one can join Tesla, even as a contractor, until you receive my email approval.”

Apple introduces new features for cognitive accessibility, along with Live Speech, Personal Voice, and Point and Speak in Magnifier

Tue, 16 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Mormon who left Wall St. to work for charity blows whistle on what he says is his church's "clandestine hedge fund"

Mon, 15 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office

Mon, 15 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health

Mon, 15 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today.”

Uncensored Models

Mon, 15 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Attorney General James Secures $615,000 from Companies that Supplied Fake Comments to Influence FCC’s Repeal of Net Neutrality Rules

Sun, 14 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

47% of all internet traffic came from bots in 2022

Sun, 14 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Juice’s RIME antenna breaks free

Sun, 14 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Diving into a hidden macOS tool - networkQuality

Sun, 14 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance.”

ASUS UK PR believes it is ‘legal to buy positive reviews’

Sat, 13 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

GitHub Copilot Chat leaked prompt

Sat, 13 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“One of the rules was an instruction not to leak the rules.”

First Rust Code Shows Up in the Windows 11 Kernel

Sat, 13 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“If you’re on the Win11 Insider ring, you’re getting the first taste of Rust in the Windows kernel,”

How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

Sat, 13 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Right click anywhere in Windows Explorer and press Undo Copy. You can’t miss it, it’s right above the "New" option:”

Toyota: Car location data of 2 million customers exposed for ten years

Fri, 12 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

Fri, 12 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Coinbase had an incredible 2021 and did not have to care about costs.”

Baltimore sues Hyundai, Kia over massive spike in car thefts

Fri, 12 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Certain Kia or Hyundai models can be stolen using a screwdriver and a USB charging cord.”

The .zip TLD sucks and it needs to be immediately revoked

Fri, 12 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft just made a huge, far-from-certain bet on nuclear fusion

Thu, 11 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

IRS Files $44 Billion Claims Against Bankrupt FTX

Thu, 11 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Research reveals majority of gig economy workers are earning below minimum wage

Thu, 11 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“On average respondents were earning £8.97 per hour – around 15% below the current UK minimum wage, which rose to £10.42 this month.”

Stack Overflow is ChatGPT Casualty: Traffic Down 14% in March

Thu, 11 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers

Wed, 10 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“We’re running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium”

infosec company owned completely by 4chan user

Wed, 10 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“the build information for each past build contains a link to the git repository, including the bitbucket credentials in the url.”

Reverse engineering Dell iDRAC to get rid of GPU throttling

Wed, 10 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“As a consequence, effectively it’s not possible to use 32Gb V100s, as well as some non-Dell OEMed P100s, in a C4130.”

Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive?

Wed, 10 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“This is why write-amplification of sequential IO loads is close to 1 but random IO is typically much higher.”

Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines

Tue, 09 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

[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

Tue, 09 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

Internet disrupted in Pakistan amid arrest of former PM Imran Khan

Tue, 09 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“However, the mobile broadband disruptions cannot be circumvented and will be experienced as a total internet shutdown by those affected.”

Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report

Tue, 09 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Intel Announces Layoffs After Paying $1.5 Billion In Q1 Dividends

Mon, 08 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

AI's Ostensible Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage

Mon, 08 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The mirage of emergent abilities only exists because of the programmers’ choice of metric”

Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances

Mon, 08 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Since the start of 2023, spot ratios have spiked as much as 55% (in us-east-1 ).”

'Too greedy': mass walkout at global science journal over 'unethical' fees

Sun, 07 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The big scientific publishers keep costs low because academics write up their research – typically funded by charities and the public purse – for free.”

Belgium legalises ethical hacking: a threat or an opportunity for cybersecurity?

Sun, 07 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Pixel phones are sold with bootloader unlocking disabled

Sun, 07 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“I should not have to connect a piece of hardware to the Internet, even once, to use all of its features.”

Large-scale study reveals autoimmune disorders now affect around one in ten

Sun, 07 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“They found that, taken together, these 19 autoimmune diseases studied affect about 10% of the population –13% of women and 7% of men.”

Intel OEM Private Key Leak: A Blow to UEFI Secure Boot Security

Sat, 06 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

EU ready to back immediate open access without author fees

Sat, 06 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Commercial publishers have tended to impose such embargoes to protect their subscription fees.”

Discord's username change is causing discord

Sat, 06 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

India bans flagship client for the Matrix network

Fri, 05 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“As we understand it, Indian government officials claim to have approved the ban due to Element (and other apps) not having representatives in India.”

Heisting 20 Million Dollars' Worth of Magic: The Gathering Cards in a Single Request

Fri, 05 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

When "free forever" means "free for the next 4 months"

Fri, 05 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

U.S. Hits Z-Library with New Domain Name Seizures

Fri, 05 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

OpenAI Reportedly Lost $540 Million Developing ChatGPT in 2022

Fri, 05 May 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"

Thu, 04 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B.”

Google employees complain about CEO Sundar Pichai's pay raise as cost cuts hit rest of the company

Thu, 04 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

No, the money you spend on lotteries doesn't go to the park

Thu, 04 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

New Alzheimer's drug slows disease by a third

Thu, 04 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Important team and business changes

Thu, 04 May 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge, and IT admins are angry

Wed, 03 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The beginning of the end of the password

Wed, 03 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Training a SOTA Code LLM in 1 week and Quantifying the Vibes: with Reza Shabani of Replit

Wed, 03 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s been trained on 525 billion tokens of, of code all permissively licensed code.”

Microsoft Broke a Chrome Feature to Promote Its Edge Browser

Tue, 02 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update.”

faulTPM: Exposing AMD fTPMs' Deepest Secrets

Tue, 02 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Scientists develop A.I. system focused on turning peoples' thoughts into text

Tue, 02 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Investigating Linux Phantom Disk Reads

Tue, 02 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Here we have 10-70MB/s for disk writes while reads are as high as 40-50MB/s.”

JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, Columbus, Ohio Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank, San Francisco, California

Mon, 01 May 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund will be about $13 billion.”

'Godfather of AI' quits Google with regrets and fears about his life's work

Mon, 01 May 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have.”

Michael J. Fox Foundation Announces Significant Breakthrough in Search for Parkinson's Biomarker

Mon, 01 May 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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).”

SpaceX to spend about $2 billion on Starship this year, as Elon Musk pushes to reach orbit

Mon, 01 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The rocket took off with only 30 of the 33 Raptor engines ignited at the base of the Super Heavy booster.”

Microsoft quietly supported legislation to make it easier to fix devices. Here's why that's a big deal.

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Chess is booming among teens. Here's why

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The abrupt boost in popularity caused Chess.com, the most popular chess app, to crumble, forcing the company to upgrade its servers significantly.”

My favorite C compiler flags during development

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“If you come across such a project, there’s a good chance you can find bugs statically just by using this baseline.”

Study Finds ChatGPT Outperforms Physicians in High-Quality, Empathetic Answers to Patient Questions

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The team randomly sampled 195 exchanges from AskDocs where a verified physician responded to a public question.”

Remove "This incident will be reported." from user warnings.

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“It is also confusing to the user since they will not know who the incident is being reported to.”

Sensenmann: Code Deletion at Scale

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“It submits over 1000 deletion changelists per week, and has so far deleted nearly 5% of all C++ at Google.”

Half of Vinyl Buyers in the US Don't Have a Record Player

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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."”

Many Public Salesforce Sites are Leaking Private Data

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response.”

Clubhouse needs to fix things, and today it cut more than half of staff

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Is Gmail killing independent email?

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Those blue dots show over 3,500 Gmail customers having the booking confirmation email they asked for delayed by up to 12 hours.”

Coinbase offers a fiery response to the SEC's threat of enforcement action

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A message from our CEO

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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?”

Datomic is Free

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Brave Search removes last remnant of Bing from search results page, achieving 100% independence and providing real alternative to Big Tech search

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results.”

Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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).”

The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls.”

Google contractors vote to unionize in historic landslide election

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The unionization vote passed 41-0.”

Why did Google Brain exist?

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, this early lead would be completely squandered within a few short years, with PyTorch/Nvidia GPUs easily overtaking TensorFlow/Google TPUs.”

Google has just updated its 2FA Authenticator app

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“We analyzed the network traffic when the app syncs the secrets, and it turns out the traffic is not end-to-end encrypted.”

Smartphones With Popular Qualcomm Chip Secretly Share Private Information With US Chip-Maker

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“This data is sent without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution.”

Use of antibiotics in farming 'endangering human immune system'

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“We’ve accidentally ended up compromising our own immune system to get fatter chickens.”

Shell admits 1.5C climate goal means immediate end to fossil fuel growth

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Apple's App Store can stay closed, but developers can link to outside payments, says appeals court

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“While today’s ruling states that the district court "erred as a matter of law on several issues," it says those errors "were harmless."”

Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.””

Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

deleting system32\curl.exe

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Global Encryption Coalition Steering Committee Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How Russia killed its tech industry

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately this block was intentional. With the Windows 64-bit client launch we made the conscious decision to block the use of Wine.”

Bing Jail

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The site will employ more than 1,700 people in molding, processing and packing machinery once completed.”

iOS 17 app sideloading might only be available in Europe

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Gurman says Apple won’t “shoot themselves in the foot” by adding it everywhere, and will probably introduce the feature quietly and without fanfare.”

Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships, Northeastern University researchers say

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Two sickly, elderly male macaws paired together in the study had scarcely seen another macaw in their lives, yet formed a deep bond”

Why the Brain's Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The EARN IT Bill Is Back, Seeking To Scan Our Messages and Photos

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.””

World's largest battery maker announces major breakthrough in energy density

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

GitHub Copilot Emits GPL. Codeium Does Not.

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250+ GB video game downloads

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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?”

Mullvad VPN was subject to a search warrant. Customer data not compromised

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Seagate stung $300m for selling sanctioned storage to Huawei

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Announcing Google DeepMind

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Introducing npm package provenance

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Stability AI Launches the First of its Stable LM Suite of Language Models

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Reddit will begin charging for access to its API

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Software firms across U.S. facing massive tax bills that threaten tech startup world survival

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft reportedly working on its own AI chips that may rival Nvidia's

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

French publisher arrested in London on terrorism charge

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“He was questioned for six hours and then arrested for alleged obstruction in refusing to disclose the passcodes to his phone and computer.”

You didn't just do that, Heroku

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Heroku has been running a 2nd copy of my scheduler instance since April 6, 2023 and I have zero control over it.”

Pricing v3, plans, packages, and debugging

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft plugging more ads into Windows 11 Start Menu

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google in shock as Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine on Galaxy phones

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Google currently has over 160 designers, engineers, executives, and other staff working on the project ‘Magi’.”

AWS staff spending 'much of their time 'optimizing cloud'

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Booting modern Intel CPUs

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

RedPajama, a project to create leading open-source models, starts by reproducing LLaMA training dataset of over 1.2 trillion tokens

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“However, LLaMA and all its derivatives (including Alpaca, Vicuna, and Koala) are only available for non-commercial research purposes.”

AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“I’m somewhat surprised to see the wget test with a transfer rate of ~30KB/s.”

SpaceX's Texas Rocket is Going To Cause A Lot More Damage Than Anyone Thinks

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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”

Load Balancing

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google They Are Not Willing To Fix

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Low Code Software Development Is A Lie

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Prompt injection: What's the worst that can happen?

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“To date, I have not yet seen a robust defense against this vulnerability which is guaranteed to work 100% of the time.”

ESA's Juice lifts off on quest to discover secrets of Jupiter's icy moons

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“An eight-year cruise with four gravity-assist flybys at Earth and Venus will slingshot the spacecraft towards the outer Solar System.”

Building LLM applications for production

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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!”

Spanish climber emerges after 500 days in cave

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

'Youtube-dl Hosting Ban Paves the Way to Privatized Censorship'

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The early days of Linux

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work.”

Apple will use 100 percent recycled cobalt in batteries by 2025

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“In 2022, a quarter of all cobalt found in Apple products came from recycled material, up from 13 percent the previous year.”

SQL:2023 is finished: Here is what's new

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off the biggest heist in the game's history

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“The conspirators both voted yes, while nobody else in the corporation voted at all.”

Sony is gearing up for a new cloud gaming push amid rumors of a PlayStation handheld

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

““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.”

Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

JEP 444: Virtual Threads Arrive in JDK 21, Ushering a New Era of Concurrency

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Colorado Approves First-Ever Agricultural Right to Repair Bill

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

““We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles.””

First came the return-to-office policies. Now comes the discipline: How companies are punishing work-from-home holdouts

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“So in recent months, businesses have begun to put down their carrots and pick up their sticks.”

I worked at Google for -10 days

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Thus, the contract with me has been terminated 10 days before it was supposed to take effect.”

Inside Google's Plan to Kill the Cookie

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Stability AI is on shaky ground as it burns through cash and looks at a management overhaul

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

One of the biggest battery recycling plants in the US is up and running

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Dutch journalist who writes critically on China targeted in “bizarre” intimidation scheme

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

““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.”

Z-Library Plans to Let Users Share Physical Books Through 'Z-Points'

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Interestingly, however, Z-Library believes that existing libraries are ideally suited to become Z-Points.”

This USPS facility in Utah does nothing but decipher your bad handwriting on mail

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Our keyers key about a thousand images an hour, so they’re spending about 2 seconds on an image”

From Deep to Long Learning?

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google to Ban Financial Lending Apps From Accessing User Photos, Contacts

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? The story behind a study too good to be true

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”.”

a 1.5GB string

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The “back” stack is unlimited, meaning we’re saving more and more state until we explode”

FCC Warns Portland Church To Shut Down Pirate FM Operating Under Its Steeple.

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.””

I declined to share my medical data with advertisers at my doctor’s office. One company claimed otherwise

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.””

We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Synthetic embryos have been implanted into monkey wombs

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Build faster with Buck2: Our open source build system

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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)”

Chrome ships WebGPU

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Mark Zuckerberg is spending most of his time on A.I., says Meta CTO

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI right now (April 2023)

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The race dynamic is purely down to capitalistic incentives.”

CAN Injection: keyless car theft

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“In most cars on the road today, these internal messages aren’t protected: the receivers simply trust them.”

Antimalware Service Executable (Windows Defender) very active / high CPU when using Firefox

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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).”

The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in Every Modern Copy of macOS

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The takeaways from Stanford's 386-page report on the state of AI

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Language models which perform better on certain fairness benchmarks tend to have worse gender bias.”

Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers for 'multi-year' savings

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How to be a -10x Engineer

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week.”

Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev For Using The Word 'Monster'

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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”

The time Bell Labs brought the Statue of Liberty under its roof (Literally)

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“So the National Parks Service called upon Bell Labs to help.”

Tesla removes parking sensors to save money, the results are predictably terrible

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Apple Halted M2 Chip Production in January Amid 'Plummeting' Mac Sales

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Saying Goodbye to GitHub

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Ah yes, the lock-in. I’ve been using GitHub for so long that I’ve been completely absorbed into their platform.”

MIT Turbocharges Python’s Notoriously Slow Compiler

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0400

“We do this static type checking, and we disallow some of the dynamic features of Python, like changing types at runtime dynamically.”

The Day Windows Died

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps (printer companies hate this!)

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

For the first time, renewable energy generation beat out coal in the US

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“According to data from the Department of Energy, less than 20 percent of wind and solar projects waiting to be connected are successfully completed.”

XUL Layout is gone

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“This means that (modulo a few exceptions documented below) all the Firefox UI is using regular web technology to render (mostly CSS flexbox).”

Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The Status Trap

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“I’ve seen this with friends who go into VC with the intention of eventually leaving and starting a company.”

The Joy of Computer History Books

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Not fall into the cult of personality (“looks at this genius”) trap. Dictated autobiographies make me cringe.”

Make loading weights 10-100x faster

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“This was accomplished by changing the file format so we can mmap() weights directly into memory without having to read() or copy them”

CDC team studying health impacts of East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

BuzzFeed Is Quietly Publishing Whole AI-Generated Articles, Not Just Quizzes

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another.”

Heat pump sales outpaced gas furnace sales in the US in 2022

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The undocumented Android change that led to aCropalypse was reported during the beta

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“This bug was closed as obsolete a year later.”

One In Two New Npm Packages Is SEO Spam Right Now

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

That was fast! Microsoft slips ads into AI-powered Bing Chat

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“In the case of the ad above, it’s not clear to the user what’s sponsored here.”

Bard reportedly used responses from ChatGPT for training, Google denies

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.””

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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 .”

BingBang: AAD misconfiguration led to Bing.com results manipulation and account takeover

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The results surprised us: 25% of all the multi-tenant apps we scanned were vulnerable to authentication bypass.”

In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation: Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law re Chat Preservation

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.””

Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Price transparency is broken

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

The European Commission does not understand what is written in its own Chat Control bill

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Above all, she continues to claim that it’s possible to scan end-to-end encrypted communication without breaking the encryption.”

Amazon starts flagging ‘frequently returned’ products that you maybe shouldn’t buy

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Here is the FBI’s Contract to Buy Mass Internet Data

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Team Cymru, the company ultimately selling this data to the FBI, obtains it from deals with ISPs by offering them threat intelligence in return.”

The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend e-books like a library

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Get Off My Desktop! Windows Needs to Stop Showing Tabloid News

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Apple Passwords Deserve An App

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Passwords are productivity, not preferences.”

Elon Musk now says Twitter is worth $20 billion, or less than half of what he paid

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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”

Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff.”

The RIAA v. Steve Jobs

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Even 18 years on, I find this story rather terrifying.”

Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

ChatGPT + Code Interpreter = Magic

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Previously when I used ChatGPT to create code this involved taking the output and putting it into another environment to test it.”

How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

In Memoriam: Gordon Moore, 1929 - 2023

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Cloudflare Disables Access to 'Pirated' Content on its IPFS Gateway

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“For one, it shows that decentralized and censorship-free networks lose their key feature when they are accessed through centralized gateways.”

Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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.”

We updated our RSA SSH host key

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“This week, we discovered that GitHub.com’s RSA SSH private key was briefly exposed in a public GitHub repository.”

We're no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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:”

Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Following the raid, Adams county prosecutor’s office said officers found no probative criminal evidence, and Afroman faced no charges.”

Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally?

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020.”

The FTC wants to ban those tough-to-cancel gym and cable subscriptions

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Block: How Inflated User Metrics and “Frictionless” Fraud Facilitation Enabled Insiders To Cash Out Over $1 Billion

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.”

Do Kwon Arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“The suspect was detained at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents, Adzic added, saying he was still waiting for official confirmation of identity.”

OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“On Monday, OpenAI announced that it would discontinue support for Codex by Thursday.”

De-cloud and de-k8s: bringing our apps back home

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s fair to say that we never realized the promise that the cloud would simplify our life.”

Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“The less good news: We don’t see this happening amongst the big tech and cloud companies with the most power and influence.”

For AI's 'iPhone moment', Nvidia unveils a large language model chip

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“On January 1, 2023, Apple sunsetted (pun intended) the Dark Sky mobile app on iOS.”

Hyundai Promises To Keep Buttons in Cars Because Touchscreen Controls Are Dangerous

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

““When it comes to Level 4 autonomous driving, then we’ll have everything soft key,” said Lee.”

OpenAI: ChatGPT Could Disrupt 19% of US Jobs, Is Yours on the List?

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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%.””

uBlock Origin 1.48.0

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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).”

Netflix is 'underway' on cloud gaming work, aims to bring games to 'any Netflix device you have'

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“40 games are slated for launch this year and 70 more in development.”

Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers in addition to earlier cuts

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Zippyshare Quits After 17 Years, 45m Visits Per Month Makes No Money

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity and medical leave for laid-off employees

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Those who spoke with CNBC said they’ve been told they’ll only receive pay through their designated end date, along with standard severance.”

twenty-five years of curl

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“I started working for wolfSSL, doing curl full-time. It just took 21 years to make curl my job.”

Bitwarden PINs can be brute-forced

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“However this 5 guesses limit is enforced completely within the client’s logic: it relies on the attacker using the official Bitwarden client.”

Leaving China

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“From 2010 to 2020, Shanghai’s expat population dropped from 208,000 to 163,000.”

The Little-Known Origin Story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Yet Wu, who died in 1997, was not mentioned when the 2022 awards were announced.”

AWS’s Anti-Competitive Move Hidden in Plain Sight

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market with Dagster, dbt and BigQuery

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“They will sell you 1,000 fake GitHub stars for as little as $64.”

AI can fool voice recognition used to verify identity by Centrelink and Australian tax office

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Exploiting aCropalypse: Recovering Truncated PNGs

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Google was passing “w” to a call to parseMode(), when they should’ve been passing “wt” (the t stands for truncation).”

Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship.”

Google: Turn off VoLTE, Wi-Fi calling due to severe Exynos modem vulnerabilities on Pixel 6, more

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Negativity drives online news consumption

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.”

Give babies peanut butter to cut allergy by 77%, study says

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“That is the equivalent of preventing 10,000 out of the roughly 13,000 cases of peanut allergy each year.”

John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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”

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong”

Bandcamp United

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Glass Enterprise Edition Announcement FAQ

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“As of March 15, 2023, we will no longer sell Glass Enterprise Edition.”

Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Docker is holding us hostage here, if we don’t pay up, systems will break for many free users.”

Stripe announces new round of funding and plan to provide employee liquidity

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“Stripe does not need this capital to run its business.”

Why We’re Suing to Protect the Right of Incarcerated People to Receive Physical Mail

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Apple Expands Hiring Freeze, Delays Bonuses for Some Employees

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Apple is leaving positions open as employees depart the company as a way to cut down on the workforce.”

GPT-4 System Card

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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”

Update on Meta’s Year of Efficiency

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“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.”

the door close button

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“Therefore, elevators with a “door close” button that isn’t “hooked up” will fail their annual inspections.”

Alpaca: A Strong, Replicable Instruction-Following Model

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Our data generation process results in 52K unique instructions and the corresponding outputs, which costed less than $500 using the OpenAI API.”

Changes at YC

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

California cancels salmon fishing season

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“Last year, 196,000 adult fish were expected to return to the Sacramento River to spawn but only 60,000 showed up.”

Why some GitHub labels illegible

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“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”

Joint Statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

“Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.”

Vivaldi co-founder: Advertisers 'stole the internet from us'

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

“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.”

Typescripting the technical interview

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

“I think you’ll find once it’s compiled down to JavaScript it’s perfectly concise.”

potatis: MOS-6502 and NES emulator in Rust (SDL/WebAssembly/Android/Embedded/Cloud)

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

“It also runs on a RP-Pico with only 264kB available RAM!”

Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

ChatGPT's API is So Good and Cheap, It Makes Most Text Generating AI Obsolete

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

See the First Complete Map of an Insect's Brain

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

FDIC Creates a Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara to Protect Insured Depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“As of December 31, 2022, Silicon Valley Bank had approximately $209.0 billion in total assets and about $175.4 billion in total deposits.”

Telehealth startup Cerebral shared millions of patients' data with advertisers

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Serverless Maps - Now Open Source

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“On AWS, response times average 100 ms for cache hits, 200 ms for misses.”

R. c. Epstein

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Flipping the proverbial bird is a God-given, Charter enshrined right that belongs to every red-blooded Canadian.”

The FBI Just Admitted It Bought US Location Data

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant.”

The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Truth be told, I don’t care very much about Netflix - the UX offered by BitTorrent is superior.”

How does the world's first vaccine for honeybees work? "It's like magic"

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“There is no cure for the disease, and, until now, no vaccine to prevent it.”

Researchers develop blood test for anxiety

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Now that the test has been validated by researchers, it is currently being developed for wider use by physicians by MindX Sciences.”

Risky Biz News: Canada's tax revenue agency tries to ToS itself out of hacking liability

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“At the beginning of 2022, it had 177 nodes with trillions of messages.”

Google Groups has been left to die

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promotions to senior roles

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The L6 distinction refers to the first layer of staff that’s considered senior and typically includes people with about a decade of experience.”

How a single engineer brought down Twitter

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Retail, search and Amazon's $40bn 'advertising' business

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Discord, or the Death of Lore

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Discord’s official birthday is 2012, but it’s really 2009, when OpenFeint was created.”

The decline of net neutrality activism

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Why? because the telecom lobby fought tooth and nail, and even resorted to homophobia just to prevent themselves from being regulated.”

Reliability: It's Not Great

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

There Were Half as Many Affordable Homes for Sale in 2022 as There Were in 2021

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Amazon pauses construction of second headquarters in Virginia

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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”

First look at Google Chrome's Blink engine running on an iPhone

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Amazon Go closing 8 of its c-stores

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Amazon shuttering more than a quarter of its Go stores highlights the company’s ongoing challenges in building its physical retail footprint.”

How to lose $950 very quickly on AirBnB

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“AirBnB has stricter booking polices than an airline. Who knew.”

Van Gogh, AMD's Steam Deck APU

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Self-Host All the Things?

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Secret Service and ICE break the law with fake phone towers

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Plan to incinerate soil from Ohio train derailment is 'horrifying', says expert

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Therefore AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite arguments are right this time.”

Finding Java Thread Leaks With JDK Flight Recorder and a Bit Of SQL

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

AWS is Asleep at the Lambda Wheel

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Q&A About FTC Proposed Rule to Ban Non-Compete Restrictions

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The non-compete agreement would be unlawful under the Proposed Rule, regardless of whether consideration was paid.”

Save bandwidth by using a torrent to distribute more efficiently

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“In order to download the checkpoints and tokenizer, fill this google form or if you want to save our bandwidth use this BitTorrent link”

"There is no prosecution at any cost."

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.””

Starbucks illegally fired US workers over union, judge rules

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

U.S. Postal Service starts nationwide electric vehicle fleet, buying 9,250 EVs and thousands of charging stations

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.””

Royal Astronomical Society announces all journals to publish as open access from 2024

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

BlackLotus UEFI bootkit: Myth confirmed

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Amazon is letting employees use their stock to finance home purchases and even second homes

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Even former Amazon employees with vested equity can use the service, according to Better.com, and there are many, following Amazon’s companywide layoffs.”

Microsoft's Phone Link app now lets you use iMessage from your PC

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“You won’t be able to send pictures in messages or participate in group messages.”

Hackers Claim They Breached T-Mobile More Than 100 Times in 2022

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The first two rules of the “clean code” concept wipe out 12 years of hardware evolution, all by themselves.”

Snapchat launches an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Ford Applies to Patent Self-Repossessing Cars That Can Drive Themselves Away

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.””

Meet the $10,000 Nvidia chip powering the race for A.I.

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The Camera-Shy Hoodie

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Most Data Work Seems Fundamentally Worthless

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Sometimes we would have huge errors in the work due to the horrific undocumented database we drew from, and no one would ever notice.”

France’s baby bust

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Help! Is this عربي?

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Met Office says Northern Lights will be visible in England tonight and tomorrow - best places to see them

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The Aurora Borealis may be visible as far south as central England tonight where skies remain clear.”

Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Somehow, the school ‘adopted’ my personal Microsoft account, and now I can’t do anything in Azure with it.”

This selfie above China's balloon was taken over Missouri. Here's how we know that

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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."”

How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Voice ID analyses over 100 different characteristics of your voice which like your fingerprint, are unique to you.”

Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Encryption is either protecting everyone or it is broken for everyone.”

‘An economic fairytale’: Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits and not wages, analysis finds

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Increases in labour costs account for just 18% of the inflation above what the RBA wants to see before it eases interest rate increases.”

The job market for new grads: worse than in 2008, but better than 2002

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Since every big company is doing the same, it’s a ‘safe’ time to do layoffs without setting off any alarm bells or lawsuits.”

Don't believe ChatGPT - we do NOT offer a "phone lookup" service

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Flathub: Linux App Store

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“She hadn’t even gotten her coat off when four cops came to the house.”

Tech Layoffs Are Feeding a New Startup Surge

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Seed stage funding slumped 35 percent for startups year over year by late 2022, data from Crunchbase shows.”

Board Rules that Employers May Not Offer Severance Agreements Requiring Employees to Broadly Waive Labor Law Rights

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

After Alaska Airlines planes bump runway while taking off from Seattle, a scramble to ‘pull the plug’

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The Alaska 737 captain said the data was on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 pounds light.”

Supreme Court rejects man’s bid to sue police over arrest for Facebook parody

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

We stand to save $7m over five years from our cloud exit

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Hear Wikimedia Foundation’s Challenge to NSA Mass Surveillance

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

EPA Orders Norfolk Southern to Conduct All Cleanup Actions Associated with the East Palestine Train Derailment

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Let's build a Chrome extension that steals everything

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Chrome scrolls the permission warning message container, so more than half of the warning messages don’t even show up.”

Early morning university classes are associated with impaired sleep and academic performance

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Attorney General Bonta, Senator Dodd, Senator Skinner Introduce Bill Prohibiting Hidden Fees in California

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Report: Apple gets a cut of search revenue from Chrome as part of secret Google deal

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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).”

Goodbye, CSS-Tricks!

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Amazon wants employees to return to the office in May

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Starting in May, Amazon will require employees to work out of the office at least three days per week.”

Germany Raises Red Flags About Palantir’s Big Data Dragnet

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

IRIS²: the EU’s response to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites project

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“With the war, Ukraine needed satellite telecommunications, but the EU didn’t have something to offer.”

Replicate ChatGPT Training Quickly and Affordable with Open Source Colossal-AI

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Revenue is easy, profit is harder

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.””

Setting up an electronics workshop

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“For the first ten years of my electronics journey, I wrestled with traditional soldering irons.”

How heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“To date, only about 10% of space heating requirements around the world are met by heat pumps.”

GoDaddy: Hackers stole source code, installed malware in multi-year breach

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

1st UK child to receive gene therapy for fatal genetic disorder is now 'happy and healthy'

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Is the Living Computer Museum Dead?

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“But for most of our use cases, we don’t need the latest and greatest. And Mapbox has gotten expensive.”

Tesla recalls 362,758 vehicles, says Full Self-Driving Beta software may cause crashes

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“The word ‘recall’ for an over-the-air software update is anachronistic and just flat wrong!”

Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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”

This Bay Area man has become the face of California’s latest housing drama

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Only five of 109 jurisdictions had their housing plans approved by the state by the Jan. 31 deadline.”

Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“A search engine that invents financial figures when answering queries to compare companies is pretty much a worst-case scenario for applying this technology.”

Last Flight Out

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Apple doesn't want you developing hobby apps

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Apple still charges a $99 yearly developer fee, even if you don’t want to publish your app on the Appstore!”

Shrinkflation, SanDisk style

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“I’m a whole 607125504 bytes short!”

Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“On Sunday, the EPA released a list, written by Norfolk Southern, of the toxic chemicals that were in the derailed cars.”

BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Documents and phones of several journalists were taken and the offices sealed.”

Amazon Is Taking Half of Each Sale From Its Merchants

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“One of his popular fire pits costs $200, of which Amazon takes $112 for its commission, warehouse storage, delivery and advertising.”

So, what's next?

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“$400 for 250 hours… It will be less than $2 per hour of work, for the year before a little more: $4 per hour.”

Restructuring Twilio, and reducing the size of our team

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Z-Library Returns on the Clearnet in Full Hydra-Mode

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“After logging into your account, you will be redirected to your personal domain. Please keep your personal domain private!”

Let Teenagers Sleep

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

IRS builds out task force to explore running its own free e-file system

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

John Carmack goes off about online-only games being abandoned: 'I believe in saving everything'

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Hackers interrupt Iran president’s TV speech on anniversary of revolution

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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).””

School Dental Program Prevents 80 Percent of Cavities with One-Time, Non-Invasive Treatment

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

New Hampshire once again on the cusp of enshrining Software Freedom into law. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED.

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 08:00:00 -0500

“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)”

The Heisenbug lurking in your async code

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Scientists discover receptor that blocks COVID-19 infection

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup, where much simpler and smaller models excel.”

WWII-era bomb explodes in England in "unplanned" detonation

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“In an interview with Axios , Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said that these layoffs are not a result of economic issues”

Amazon secures key FCC approval to deploy its Project Kuiper broadband satellites

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“If Amazon experiences disposal failure with satellites within a single year, it has to report that fact to the FCC, as well.”

My Fifth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The Online Safety Bill: An attack on encryption

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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).”

GitHub lays off 10% and goes fully remote

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“And as another sign of cost cutting, it’s moving its laptop refresh cycle from three to four years.”

An announcement from GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“I had hoped reprioritizing our spending would be enough to withstand the growing global economic downturn.”

Why We're Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Keep in mind that Thunderbird is currently being actively developed by a bit more than a dozen core developers.”

‘As bad as it gets without body bags.’

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“It appears that quick action and situational awareness by the FedEx crew prevented a mass-casualty disaster.”

Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control?

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“just after the first boot, Windows 11 was quick to try and reach third-party servers with absolutely no prior user permission or intervention.”

Why does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The answer is 0.30000000000000004 (the second one) because its significand is even.”

The Great Betrayal: After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Full-Time Work Model

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

A Message from Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus.”

Mozilla, Google looking ahead to the end of Apple's WebKit

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit.”

Big Data is Dead

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The most surprising thing that I learned was that most of the people using “Big Query” don’t really have Big Data.”

The technology behind GitHub’s new code search

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The short answer is that we built our own search engine from scratch, in Rust, specifically for the domain of code search.”

An important next step on our AI journey

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Voice.AI: GPL Violations with a Side of DRM

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“A couple of days later, on February 4, I suddenly found myself banned from the Voice.ai Discord server.”

Google experiments with non-WebKit Blink-based iOS browser

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“It’s a toy for now, but won’t necessarily remain so.”

Google invested $300 million in AI firm founded by former OpenAI researchers

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Finland’s Most-Wanted Hacker Nabbed in France

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Kivimäki was ultimately convicted of orchestrating more than 50,000 cybercrimes.”

The Market for Lemons

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Ghost Boat with Garmin GPS Leads Father-Son Duo to Man Overboard

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Sascha had gone to the side to relieve himself and simply fell overboard.”

MDMA and Psilocybin Are Approved as Medicines for the First Time

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Moreover, any information the balloon collects would have "limited additive value" compared with China’s spy satellites.”

De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Scalability is overrated

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Samsung’s 990 Pro drives are exhibiting rapid health degradation, with Samsung Magician software reporting a drop of around 1% endurance per week.”

Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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 (!).”

Twitter to start charging developers for API access

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.”

I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 08:00:00 -0500

“Virtually all maintainers are either volunteers or full-time employees of large companies. Foundations on average don’t pay maintainers.”

Connecticut Parents Arrested for Letting Kids Walk to Dunkin' Donuts

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.’”

Cybercrime groups offer six-figure salaries, bonuses, paid time off to attract talent on dark web

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Password strength explained

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Missing radioactive capsule found in WA outback after frantic search

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

OpenAI releases tool to detect AI-generated text, including from ChatGPT

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“According to OpenAI, the classifier incorrectly labels human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time.”

PayPal to lay off 2,000 employees in coming weeks, about 7% of workforce

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“But PayPal raised EPS guidance for the full fiscal year, saying it’s benefited from "ongoing productivity initiatives."”

Bay Area Cities To Lose ALL Housing Zoning Powers in 2 Days

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Uptime, status pages, and transparency calculus

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Bounded Flexible Arrays in C

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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).”

Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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”

Firefighters Forced to Smash Window of Driverless Cruise Taxi to Stop It

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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”

OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

How Likely is Losing a Google Account?

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“I found 22 security lockouts, 7 policy lockouts, and 3 with too few details to tell.”

Smaller, Cheaper Flow Batteries Throw Out Decades-Old Designs

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“They remain costly, though, with a capital cost of around US $800 per kilowatt-hour, more than twice that of lithium-ion batteries.”

FCC Threatens to Disconnect Twilio for Illegal Robocalls

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Surgeon General says 13 is ‘too early’ to join social media

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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”

A Calculated Move: Calculators Now Emulated at Internet Archive

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“There’s over 1,400 different systems that have gotten the Artwork Treatment, a major success.”

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google’s OSPO 18 years ago, was let go.”

BBC Modi Documentary Removal

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Internet Archive can confirm that it has removed links in response to DMCA takedown requests from the BBC.”

Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub's .SE Domain Name Offline

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Sci-Hub.se’s domain status was changed to “ServerHold.” Set by the domain registry, this status effectively makes the domain unusable.”

MTG Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year History

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

OGL 1.0a & Creative Commons

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“We are leaving OGL 1.0a in place, as is. Untouched.”

PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. in Worst Layoff Email Ever

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Smartphone shipments plunge to a low not seen since 2013, their largest ever decline

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“We have never seen shipments in the holiday quarter come in lower than the previous quarter.”

Stripe eyes an exit over next 12 months

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that Stripe had cut its internal valuation to $63 billion.”

An AI robot lawyer was set to argue in court. Real lawyers shut it down.

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Android 14 set to block certain outdated apps from being installed

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“According to a newly posted code change, Android 14 is set to make API requirements stricter, entirely blocking the installation of outdated apps.”

Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“This is important because your inputs may be used as training data for a further iteration of ChatGPT”

The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“They found no convincing evidence that lower levels of serotonin caused or were even associated with depression.”

Adani Group: How The World’s 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“We have identified 38 Mauritius shell entities controlled by Vinod Adani or close associates.”

IPinside: Korea’s mandatory spyware

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Amazon launches a $5 monthly subscription for unlimited prescription medications

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Branch Predictor

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The “optimized” code with one jump per loop is about 4x slower than the original version with two jumps per loop!”

Bitwarden design flaw: Server side iterations

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

NYC Jails Want to Ban Physical Mail, Then Privatize Scanning of Digital Versions

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The main source of contraband inside city jails, though, has been corrections staff, not mail, critics of the policy change said.”

Microsoft extends OpenAI partnership in a ‘multibillion dollar investment’

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The US certifies the first small modular nuclear reactor design

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“The target price per megawatt of power from the plant jumped 53 percent this month to $89 per megawatt hour”

How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard-drive is genuine

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 08:00:00 -0500

“Unfortunately, the entire security sector is RSA-signed using a private key only Microsoft possesses.”

Pwning the all Google phone with a non-Google bug

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

An Update on January 2023 Organizational Changes

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Twitter is down to fewer than 550 full-time engineers

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“The team behind AltSpaceVR and also the Mixed Reality Tool Kit have been laid off in their entireties.”

Swipe right on our new credit card tokens!

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Large Language Model: world models or surface statistics?

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“It turns out that it achieves an average error of only 0.12 tiles.”

#132: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Jackson discovered this aesthetic monotony is in part due to the fact that Netflix requires the same “technical specifications from all its productions.””

What Really Happened with the Substation Attack in North Carolina?

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“To an unknown but significant extent, power infrastructure gets its security through obscurity.”

Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“There is no evidence that local images on a Mac have identifiers computed and uploaded to Apple’s servers when viewed in Finder windows.”

Capital One cuts over 1,000 roles in Technology

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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”

A difficult decision to set us up for the future

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Cyber-crime gangs' earnings slide as victims refuse to pay

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“In 2022, 41% of his clients paid ransoms compared with 70% in 2020, he says.”

Sunsetting Subversion support

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

how to completely own an airline in 3 easy steps

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“the nofly csv is almost 80mb in size and contains over 1.56 million rows of data.”

Amazon closing AmazonSmile to focus its philanthropic giving to programs with greater impact

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped.”

Twitterrific: End of an Era

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Firefox found a way to keep ad-blockers working with Manifest V3

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Subject: Focusing on our short- and long-term opportunity

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

No Start Menu for You

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

A woman receives the first-ever successful transplant of a living, 3D-printed ear

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The FBI Won’t Say Whether It Hacked Dark Web ISIS Site

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

““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.”

Git security vulnerabilities announced

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Hyundai Head Unit Hacking

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“They must be encrypted with AES-128-CBC using key=")1Zorxo^fAhGlh$#" and IV=“aoAkfwk+#1.6G{dE”.”

Scientists steer lightning bolts with lasers for the first time

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The IAB loves tracking users. But it hates users tracking them.

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“As part of the UID2 API they specifically describe how an advertiser must "normalise" their users’ email addresses.”

Our cloud spend in 2022

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“In total, we spent $3,201,564 on all these cloud services in 2022. That comes out to $266,797 per month. Whew!”

New killer CRISPR system is unlike any scientists have seen

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

China’s version of Starlink is government-backed, and has global ambitions

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

CircleCI says hackers stole encryption keys and customers’ secrets

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Zuber said that while customer data was encrypted, the cybercriminals also obtained the encryption keys able to decrypt customer data.”

What We Know Now About Friday Night’s Near-Disaster At JFK Airport

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“The Delta flight stopped less than 1000 feet from where it would have intersected with American’s plane.”

NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“"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.”

I'm Shadow Banned by DuckDuckGo (and Bing)

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Internal Google Document Compares Company to Slime Mold As It Grows

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Is a Smashing Success

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“That’s a full 33 minutes shorter than its original orbital period, a finding that implied that a substantial amount of ejecta was produced.”

wInd3x, the iPod Bootrom exploit 10 years too late

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

JPMorgan shutters website it paid $175 million for, accuses founder of inventing millions of accounts

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Instead of gaining a business with 4.25 million students, JPMorgan had one with "fewer than 300,000 customers," JPMorgan said in the suit.”

How Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Paizo Announces System-Neutral Open RPG License

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

PC shipments saw their largest decline ever last quarter

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Acer took a staggering 41 percent hit, according to Gartner.”

A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage. It was also found in the backup system

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“It’s only when you click on “CNET Money Staff,” that the actual “authorship” is revealed.”

The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The James Webb Space Telescope Is Finding Too Many Early Galaxies

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Microsoft reportedly plans to invest $10 billion in creator of buzzy A.I. tool ChatGPT

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

We need a lot more electricians if we're going to electrify everything

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that about 21 percent of electricians will hit retirement age in the next 10 years.”

Bullshit Graph Database Performance Benchmarks

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“IANAL , but that sounds like you aren’t allowed to use their benchmark code if you provide a competing solution.”

Buy with Prime, which brings Prime to third-party sites, officially launches in US on Jan. 31

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Taking over a Dead IoT Company

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“But without “really understanding the math” it’s basically impossible for ChatGPT to reliably get the right answer.”

Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Anthropic's Claude improves on ChatGPT but still suffers from limitations

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Identity Thieves Bypassed Experian Security to View Credit Reports

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

SourceHut will (not) blacklist the Go module mirror

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

An open letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“This new license intends to completely revoke the old OGL, a perpetual license designed by WotC themselves to be irrevocable.”

Apple Fined $8.5 Million for Illegally Collecting iPhone Owners' Data for Ads

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Shorting Tether For Fun and Profit

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“As of June 2022, Tether allegedly had over $60 billion in assets but employed just 50 people.”

CDC File Transfer

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Born from the ashes of Stadia, this repository contains tools for syncing and streaming files from Windows to Windows or Linux.”

ssh whoami.filippo.io

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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_* .”

Production Twitter on One Machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“I think the main takeaway looking at these calculations is that many of these numbers are small numbers on the scale of modern computers!”

MKBHD claims that post-processing is ruining iPhone photos, and I agree with that

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

The beauty of CGI and simple design, by Hales

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Here's how much top tech jobs in California pay, according to job ads

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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.”

GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Your honor, we needed so many works that it was simply not practical to ask permission of the creators.”

Is coding in Rust as bad as in C++?

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“And for bigger projects, development compile times are worse with Rust than with C++, at least with my code style.”

FTC Cracks Down on Companies That Impose Harmful Noncompete Restrictions on Thousands of Workers

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Prudential’s security guards typically earned hourly wages at or near minimum wage”

Slack's private GitHub code repositories stolen over holidays

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“Our investigation also revealed that the threat actor downloaded private code repositories on December 27.”

Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“But producing an audiobook with a human voice can take weeks and can cost publishers thousands of dollars.”

The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z.

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

BREAKING: Meta prohibited from use of personal data for advertising

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“The alleged switch of legal basis happened exactly on 25 May 2018 at midnight when the GDPR came into force.”

Snow go for NYC's electric garbage trucks that can't handle winter weather

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours”

MacBook owners have two months to claim up to $395 over butterfly keyboard woes

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Salesforce to cut staff by 10% in latest tech layoffs

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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”

Web Hackers vs. The Auto Industry: Critical Vulnerabilities in Ferrari, BMW, Rolls Royce, Porsche, and More

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“Fully remote lock, unlock, engine start, engine stop, precision locate, flash headlights, and honk vehicles using only the VIN number”

South Korea's online security dead end

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“I think the main issue here is that the users are not the customers.”

Eating viruses can power growth, reproduction of microorganism

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The population of Halteria, with nothing to eat but the virus, was growing an average of about 15 times larger over that same timespan.”

You Want Modules, Not Microservices

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“When passing that data across network lines, though–as most microservices do–adds five to seven orders of magnitude greater latency to the communication.”

The infrastructure behind ATMs

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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."”

Canada Bans Most Foreigners From Buying Homes

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“In late December, Ottawa also clarified that the ban would apply only to city dwellings and not to recreational properties such as summer cottages.”

State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“The Remote Desktop Connection program is still exactly the same as it was 14 years ago, complete with Aero icons and skeuomorphic common controls.”

How China is building a parallel generative AI universe

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Compromised PyTorch-nightly dependency chain between December 25th and December 30th, 2022.

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

“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.”

Epstein's sex trafficking was aided by JPMorgan, a U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit says

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 13:00:00 -0500

“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."”

Casio-F-91W - iconic quartz watch : weekend die-shot

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500

“Surprisingly, chip is more complicated than I anticipated and digital part is less than ~50% of the die area.”

Rant: year of Linux on the desktop

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0500

“Over time, the goal posts of success keep being moved by the naysayers.”

Why "OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems" is not in Amazon's Kindle store

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“TLDR: Amazon pays roughly 70% of retail price for books priced up to $9.99, and 35% for books $10 and over.”

JPMorgan to spend $1B on rental homes in the US to become a megalandlord

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Haven Realty Capital and JPMorgan Chase’s asset management arm said they will invest up to $1 billion to develop build-to-rent single-family homes across the country, according to a November 15 announcement.”

I am not a supplier

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“And then why attempts at bringing FOSS under that definition are deeply misguided.”

Croatia to switch to euro, enter passport-free Schengen zone

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“At midnight on January 1, 2023, the Balkan nation of some four million people will bid farewell to its kuna currency and become the 20th member of the eurozone.”

Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“All four tests, the Pew Research Political Typology Quiz, the Political Compass Test, the World’s Smallest Political Quiz and the Political Spectrum Quiz classified ChatGPT’s answers to their questions as left-leaning.”

An M1 for curl

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Apple has shipped and used curl in their products for twenty years but they never assist, help or otherwise contribute to the development.”

Games people play with cash flow

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“For the next two decades, Amazon grew its revenue and made no profits, leading journalist Matthew Yglesias to write, in 2013: “Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.””

Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“We have approximately 30,000 bags of coffee, 5,000 cases, that we are going to sell for half off and offer free shipping.”

Unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“In an attempt to block 14 websites that copyright holders argued were violating copyright, the court-ordered IP block rendered thousands of websites inaccessible to ordinary Internet users in Austria over a two-day period.”

What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“When the children were six years old, the researchers found no difference on any measure – negative or positive – between those who were sleep trained and those who weren’t, including in their sleep patterns, behaviour, attachment, or cortisol levels.”

Privacy is ok

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Indeed, bad people can and (I’m sure) do use cryptography to evade surveillance.”

AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Up until now, all forms of spam, catfishing, social engineering, forum brigading, etc, have more or less been bottlenecked by the capabilities and energy of individual human beings.”

Existing smartphones will connect with new satellite constellations in 2023

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“In 2023, you or someone you know will be able to send a text message through space.”

Police, prosecutors used junk science to decide 911 callers were liars

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed.”

Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.”

Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Just because you’re getting a lot of offers to interview does not mean that you are a hot commodity.”

All About USB-C: Illegal Adapters

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“However, the USB-C specification only accounts for a limited amount of kinds of cables, explicitly or implicitly excluding a range of cables that you might want to buy or make.”

Americans duped into losing $10B by illegal Indian call centres in 2022: report

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Most of the victims of these frauds are elderly above the age of 60 years.”

CCC captures U.S. military biometrics database

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“GPS coordinates of past deployment locations, and a massive biometrics database with names, fingerprints, iris scans and photos of 2,632 people.”

Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The number of canceled flights for Southwest Monday was more than 10 times higher than for Delta, which had the second-most cancellations by a U.S. airline.”

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code likely to be buggy

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Worse still, they found that AI help tends to delude developers about the quality of their output.”

Unbundling Tools for Thought

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“In practice 95% of the use cases can be naturally unbundled into disjoint apps, and the lack of centralization and cross-app hyperlinking has no real negative effects.”

Google removed my Yubikeys from a Google account 'just to be safe'

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Removing physical U2F keys from an account without request seems to be the worst possible reaction to suspicious activity.”

Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Profound boredom may sound like an overwhelmingly negative concept but, in fact, it can be intensely positive if people are given the chance for undistracted thinking and development.”

Taxpayers paying billions for the renovations and construction of NFL stadiums

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Since 2000, public funds diverted to helping build professional sports stadiums and arenas have cost taxpayers $4.3 billion.”

How much I've spent so far running my own Mastodon server on AWS

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“As of this writing, I’ve spent $52.74 on this project.”

Ruby 3.2.0

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“YJIT now supports both x86-64 and arm64/aarch64 CPUs on Linux, MacOS, BSD and other UNIX platforms.”

Reverse engineering yet another eBook format

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“On top of that, the book description said “Access Duration: 84 Months”, and that didn’t sound promising, either (7 years is generous, but anything less than forever is not generous enough in my book).”

How Did Sam Bankman-Fried Get Bail?

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Federal bail does not necessarily work the way you think it should.”

TikTok banned on government devices under spending bill passed by Congress

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Congress failed to pass many of the most aggressive bills targeting tech, including antitrust legislation opposed by the industry.”

Stanford hates fun

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“She recounted how the slightly transgressive Stanford atmosphere in the 90s, which seeded the slightly transgressive get it done attitude of tech in the early 2000s, is being smothered by the Administration.”

California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The bill was sponsored after the California Department of Motor Vehicles claimed that Tesla’s FSD was “false advertising.”

Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“I demonstrate that it is possible to run any bounded computation in Doom, minus constraints on level size.”

Haiku R1/beta4

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Over 400 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release.”

How we slowed the subway down

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The system of 2016-2018 was in crisis; on-time performance had plunged below 75 percent and ridership had begun to fall.”

Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Information such as user location, device type, and various hardware metrics are combined to create a unique "fingerprint" that can potentially be used to track a user’s activity on and off the app.”

Password Requirements: Myths and Madness

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The hilarious part for this website is that the embedded strength checker properly recognizes a good password; but then an additional policy is bolted on, just in case users were too happy.”

Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner.”

UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Most of them have open alternatives, but until now, the only option for push notifications was Google’s proprietary service, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM).”

LastPass user vaults stolen in recent hack

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.”

Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“I created Portable Secret to securely exchange documents via email with my mother, who can’t be expected to learn PGP, age, or similar.”

ThreeUK is blocking Tutanota

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Even though we reached out to ThreeUK over one month ago, the issue is still not fixed.”

Okta says its GitHub account hacked, source code stolen

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Earlier this month, GitHub alerted Okta of suspicious access to Okta’s code repositories, states the notification.”

I still use Flash

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The way forward was obvious; I’d have to make my own Flash player.”

Valve is paying open source developers to keep Steam Deck playable

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Valve understands that, because in a recent chat with the Verge, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that the company is paying over a hundred open-source devs to work on the various bits of software that keep the Steam Deck ticking.”

Mozilla to explore healthy social media alternative

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“In early 2023, Mozilla will stand up and test a publicly accessible instance in the Fediverse at Mozilla.Social.”

Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Conlon says she posed no threat, but the guards still kicked her out with the explanation that they knew she was an attorney.”

January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years.”

How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum.”

Power company money flows to news sites that attack their critics

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Those accounts reflect a complex web of financial links, in which the six outlets collectively received, at minimum, $900,000 from Matrix, its clients, and associated entities between 2013 and 2020.”

Pollution cleanup method destroys toxic "forever chemicals"

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The patent-pending process infuses contaminated water with hydrogen, then blasts the water with high-energy, short-wavelength ultraviolet light.”

Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“In the early years of fire insurance, insurance company fire brigades seemingly made little distinction between insured and uninsured properties.”

Why doesn't Windows use 64-bit virtual address space below 0x00000000`7ffe0000?

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The full user-mode address space on x86-64 is 128TB, and a randomly-generated 47-bit address is very unlikely to begin with 15 consecutive zero bits.”

Quite OK Image is now my favorite asset format

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“However, for the typical images where I would use PNG, QOI is around 3x larger, and some outliers are far worse.”

Let's Encrypt now supports ACME-CAA: closing the DV loophole

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“In short, this means that only someone with your ACME account private key can obtain certificates (though note the caveats below).”

Apple 'created decoy labor group' to derail unionization

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The Communications Workers of America (CWA) filed a complaint with the federal US National Labor Relations Board charging Apple with unfair labor practices.”

Get root on macOS 13.0.1 via the macOS Dirty Cow bug

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Thanks to Sealed System Volume, running this on any file on the /System volume only modifies the file temporarily: It’s reverted on reboot.”

Copilot Internals

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“After 30s of either acceptance/rejection of a suggestion, copilot “captures” a snapshot around the insertion point.”

Unredacter: Never use pixelation as a redaction technique

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Shows you why you should never ever ever use pixelation as a redaction technique.”

The $8 Linux Computer

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“It looks like a microcontroller, but behaves like a UNIX machine.”

IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“With Oracle Database SE2, customer license costs remain the same regardless of the number of cores in the socket.”

I almost failed to search a 37 GB text file in under 1 millisecond

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Instead, we’ll do it the hard way – we’ll check passwords offline.”

BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany's public administration

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“BundesMessenger is a modified version of Element which we’re working with BWI to develop and maintain.”

A Linux Evening

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Really bad occurrences result in disheartening hours googling in the hope that someone more qualified ran into the same issue.”

Doors of McMurdo

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“There is a huge amount of snowdrift during the winter, and if the doors opened outward, they would be impossible to open without a lot of digging.”

Deepmind's AlphaCode conquers coding, performing as well as humans

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“It’s also unlikely the AI will take over programming completely, as its code is riddled with errors.”

Na-S Battery: Low-cost with four times the capacity of lithium

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Our sodium battery has the potential to dramatically reduce costs while providing four times as much storage capacity.”

NIST is announcing that SHA-1 should be phased out by Dec. 31, 2030

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Modules that still use SHA-1 after 2030 will not be permitted for purchase by the federal government,” Celi said.”

Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Columbia Records had low expectations for the album and only gave Carlos a $2,500 advance, opting instead to compensate her with a higher percentage of future royalties.”

Six charged in mass takedown of DDoS-for-hire sites

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The complaint against Miller alleges Royalstresser launched nearly 200,000 DDoS attacks between November 2021 and February 2022.”

Apple considering dropping requirement for iPhone web browsers to use WebKit

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Gurman said this potential change comes in response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act.”

Tesla FSD data is getting worse, according to beta tester self-reports

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“It’s unfortunately the best data available because Tesla has gone out of its way to not release disengagement data that other companies developing self-driving systems are making available.”

No, Google did not hike the price of a .dev domain from $12 to $850

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“According to his own screenshots, he paid 4,360 Turkish Lira for the initial registration on December 6, 2021, which was $317 at the time.”

Binance freezes withdrawals of stablecoin USDC as investors pull $2B

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The world’s largest crypto exchange will freeze all withdrawals of USD Coin while it conducts a "token swap" to boost its holdings of the dollar-pegged token, CEO Changpeng Zhao said Tuesday.”

After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“We found a foolproof way of saving our money, which was to not sell anything for 20 years and then drop it all," Zach deadpanned.”

US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.”

Medieval ship found in Norway's biggest lake

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Marine archaeologists believe the ship dates to sometime between 1300 – 1850.”

Splashdown! NASA's Orion Returns to Earth After Historic Moon Mission

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The splashdown of the Orion spacecraft – which occurred 50 years to the day of the Apollo 17 Moon landing – is the crowning achievement of Artemis I.”

The silent struggles of workers with ADHD

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“But even for people who do have a label for their struggles, a diagnosis isn’t necessarily a fix; many workers with ADHD experience challenges that can inhibit success.”

Linux Desktop Environments System Usage

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Whoever doubted XFCE as a lean desktop environment is I hope dissuaded and changed their mind.”

Be wary of imitating high-status people who can afford to countersignal

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“He replied, “I’ll tell you what I did when I was in your situation, not what I’m doing now.”

What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The near-zero interest rate regime functioned much like an opiate.”

I found a bug in SQLite

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Ignoring the issue when I saw it first was a big mistake, and was not intellectually honest.”

Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago.”

End-to-end encrypted messages need more than libsignal

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“But there’s rather more to producing a secure and usable client than just sprinkling on some libsignal.”

What causes Alzheimer's? Scientists are rethinking the answer

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Scientists have long held onto the idea that sticky blobs of proteins sitting between brain cells are the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.”

Disputing a Parking Fine with ChatGPT

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“I mistyped the number plate by one letter.”

Just use Postgres for everything

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Postgres can replace - up to millions of users - many backend technologies, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Mongo and Redis among them.”

Chrome, 10 years later

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“And similarly I learned how free software can come from a place of giving and gratitude and end up as yet another weapon for corporations.”

All in with Nuitka

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“After more than 10 years of working on the Python compiler Nuitka, and at the age of 50, I have finally decided to take the plunge.”

A 100MW solar farm in Texas will mount panels directly on the ground

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Erthos claims it can build a solar power plant in half the time on one-third of the land, all while using 70 percent less cable and trenching.”

Stripe's real pricing: a primer

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“We asked this question to dozens of SaaS founders and none of them was able to provide a precise figure.”

FTC seeks to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The Commission vote to issue the complaint was 3-1, with Commissioner Christine S. Wilson voting no.”

Everything SBF is doing is in singular pursuit of not going to jail

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“But in reality, he is laundering his reputation.”

Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The new one was faster, used less memory, and was actively maintained and enhanced.”

I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“I never signed a contract giving Mojang the rights to the End Poem, and so Microsoft (who bought Minecraft from Mojang) also don’t own it.”

VSCode remote code execution advisory

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“An attacker could, through a link or website, take over the computer of a Visual Studio Code user and any computers they were connected to via the Visual Studio Code Remote Development feature.”

100 Gbps achieved from space to Earth

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“This data rate is more than 1,000 times higher than that of the radio-frequency links traditionally used for satellite communication and the highest ever achieved by a laser link from space to ground.”

Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“While there’s always room for improvement, the driver is fast enough to run all of the above at 60 frames per second at 4K.”

Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“With Advanced Data Protection, the number of data categories that use end-to-end encryption rises to 25 and includes your iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more.”

Show HN: Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Having such a lightweight implementation of the model allows to easily integrate it in different platforms and applications.”

It's not Tourette's but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Accordingly, we suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media-induced illness’.”

Neuralink faces federal inquiry after killing 1,500 animals in testing

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The sources characterized that figure as a rough estimate because the company does not keep precise records on the number of animals tested and killed.”

I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Finally, when asked to write a Python program that translates sentences in the made-up language, it does, and the code works.”

Federal court requires Amazon to stop firing employees for protected activities

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“If Amazon violates the cease-and-desist order, it could be held in contempt by the court.”

AI Homework

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“In other words, the role of the human in terms of AI is not to be the interrogator, but rather the editor.”

Activision's faulty anti-cheat software

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Activision’s “appeal” process seems to result in the same automated response for everyone, including me: Conveniently, they can’t tell me what caused the ban, and their decision is final.”

Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The algorithms are already feeding themselves on their own data.”

Iran abolishes morality police

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The attorney general commented at a religious conference where he responded to a participant who asked "why the morality police were being shut down", the report said.”

Software horror show: SAP Concur

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The actual authors of SAP Concur’s phone app did none of these things.”

ChatGPT passes the 2022 AP Computer Science A free response section

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“I tried each question once and took the response given: no cherry-picking.”

Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Universities are in the midst of a full-blown administrative spending spree that shows no signs of abating.”

How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“In brief, the microcode in the 8086 consists of 512 micro-instructions, each 21 bits wide.”

New Zealand admits it has access to Facebook takedown portal to censor content

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The OIA response didn’t detail how much content had been censored via this Facebook takedown portal.”

MSN fired its human journalists and replaced them with AI that publishes fake news about mermaids and Bigfoot

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“But MSN isn’t just popular; it’s the default source of news for many Windows users.”

Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“So, for some applications, this virtual machine is already faster than my laptop.”

Snap updates happen without user consent

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Snap’s update system kills the running application and applies updates, without user consent.”

DNS over Wikipedia

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Wikipedia keeps track of official URLs for popular websites.”

Julius: An open source re-implementation of Caesar III

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Julius recreates many bugs that you can find in original Caesar 3 game, to preserve 100% saves compatibility.”

Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks?

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Booz Allen and 13 government agencies have been renting back to the public access to our own lands by forcing us to pay junk fees to use national parks.”

Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“This makes it safe to execute untrusted, 3rd party plug-in code even while it’s directly embedded within the same OS process as your program.”

Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Neither the 2017 nor the 2022 meta-analyses examined what is causing the drop in sperm count, but other research suggests environmental and lifestyle factors may be to blame.”

TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The new chip factory, or fab, will cost $12bn and is part of TSMC’s global expansion plan.”

Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Finally, locally deploying this model enables developers to reduce or eliminate their server-related costs.”

Inkbase: Programmable Ink

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The programming model is the least solved part of Inkbase.”

At SpaceX, work was taken away from me in case I “might retire or die.”

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“I knew no one there who worked more hours than I did.”

The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone’s critical path.”

Lastpass Security Incident

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Our customers’ passwords remain safely encrypted due to LastPass’s Zero Knowledge architecture.”

Tailwind is a leaky abstraction

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“You still need to know CSS.”

Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem, one library at a time

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“JIT engines are crazy fast these days!”

Goodbye, data science

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Nobody knew or even cared what the difference was between good and bad data science work.”

Tales of the M1 GPU

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Since this was going to be the first Linux Rust GPU kernel driver, I had a lot of work ahead!”

Everything I wish I knew when learning C

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Think of a header file as a specification of an API, that can be implemented across any number of source files.”

Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Upside Foods’ lab-grown meat is biologically identical to standard meat, but it doesn’t require killing animals.”

Curation and decentralization is better than millions of apps

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Nobody has millions of apps installed on their device.”

BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The company also listed an outstanding $275 million loan to FTX US, the American arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-bankrupt empire.”

The Rune Programming Language

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“This is not an officially supported Google product.”

CRDT: Fractional Indexing

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Objects can be reordered any number of times without leaving any additional information behind.”

Git Notes: git's coolest, most unloved feature

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Git notes could make it possible to distribute the history of an entire project.”

Photography for geeks

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“An intriguing interplay of light and shadows can make a discarded candy wrapper look profound.”

Anti-War Speech Sent Eugene V. Debs to Prison, 1918

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”

A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die's silicon

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“In modern CPUs, bugs can often be fixed through a microcode patch that updates the CPU during boot.”

I/O is no longer the bottleneck

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Disk I/O may have been slow 10 or 20 years ago, but in 2022, reading a file sequentially from disk is very fast.”

The Need to Read

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.”

Congressmembers Tried to Stop the SEC’s Inquiry into FTX

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Emmer and Gottheimer led the Blockchain Eight in donations from FTX with each receiving $11,600.”

Issue dialing 911 on Google Pixel 6 cell phones

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Macleod said Google gave her a refund, and now she uses a different brand.”

Factorio runs on Apple Silicon

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“As of version 1.1.71, Factorio runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs!”

Cloudflare servers don't own IPs anymore so how do they connect to the internet?

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“We also dislike shared state, so we’re not fans of distributed NAT installations.”

Investigating a backdoored PyPI package targeting FastAPI applications

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“FastAPI is a highly popular Python web framework.”

Draft policy proposal would authorize SF Police to use deadly force with robots

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Robot use-of-force has never before been approved, nor has it ever been prohibited, in San Francisco.”

Stable Diffusion 2.0

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The text-to-image models in this release can generate images with default resolutions of 512x512 pixels and 768x768 pixels.”

maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services.”

An interactive guide to Flexbox

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The default value for flex-grow is 0, which means that growing is opt-in.”

Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Commercial deployment is targeted for 2027.”

Tumblr to Add Support for ActivityPub

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Mullenweg did not offer an ETA as to how "ASAP" this support would be added.”

Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Typing notes can be good, but it won’t make it easier to remember what was said later on.”

High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“In a document, the content is all you have.”

CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Unlike games like Chess and Go, Diplomacy is a game about people rather than pieces.”

Improving Firefox stability on Windows by retrying failed memory allocation

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“You’re looking at a >70% reduction in crashes, far more than our rosiest predictions.”

Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Twitter has two data centers running that can handle the entire site being failed into it.”

Why CVE-2022-3602 was not detected by fuzz testing

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Short answer: the code is not reachable by the current corpus and harness.”

How Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Hardware timestamps are the secret sauce that makes PTP so precise.”

Apple sends DSID with iPhone analytics data, tests show

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Knowing the DSID is like knowing your name.”

Is wine fake?

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“But although wine experts really do know more than you and I, the world of wine is insane.”

Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Birds use orders of magnitude less energy to lift the same amount of mass in the air, compared to planes.”

Greg Bear has died

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Five-time Nebula winner Greg Bear died November 19, a week after heart surgery from which he never awoke.”

While crypto bro scammed clients, reporters scammed readers

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“His image was simply fun to write about.”

AWS and Blockchain

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“In practice, the technology is a database.”

Quake 1 port for Apple Watch

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“This game port supports both the shareware and registered versions of Quake.”

Tree views in CSS

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“A tree view (collapsible list) can be created using only HTML and CSS, without the need for JavaScript.”

Consider working on genomics

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“There is a significant gap between how software is currently developed in this space versus how it should be developed.”

Investigating why Steam started picking a random font

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“And you know what’s special about 2040? It’s after 2038.”

Go Style

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Adherence to the Style Guide is not intended to be absolute, and these documents will never be exhaustive.”

The 12-bit rainbow palette

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Yellow is given the highest luminance, as it only looks yellow when bright.”

Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The ICU is a good place to not die, but a bad place to recover.”

Tailscale Funnel

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Shockingly, the whole world doesn’t use Tailscale.”

The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Other tools try to recover structure from text; Unison stores code in a database.”

Demystifying Fourier analysis

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The idea is to multiply the signal with a pure sine wave.”

My ADHD founder toolbox

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Highly recommend not yelling at yourself constantly.”

FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“"The Debtors do not have an accounting department," Ray wrote, stating he expected it would be "some time" before reliable financial statements could be prepared.”

Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“For Evernote, this decision is the next strategic step forward on our journey to be an extension of your brain.”

Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“In doing so, he all but confirmed the view of critics who have argued that his overtures to Washington were much more about image than substance.”

Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“She was charged with endangering a child, a felony carrying a mandatory minimum of two years in prison.”

Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“But this is what we have to deal with as small devs in the year 2022.”

Why do we call it “boilerplate code?”

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“So "boilerplate" became slang for vapid syndicated articles.”

Emergency SOS via satellite

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Emergency SOS via satellite enables users to message with emergency services while outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage.”

Digital books wear out faster than physical books

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all.”

Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The smartlog is one of the most important Sapling commands and the centerpiece of the entire user experience.”

“When we all have pocket telephones”

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“In the event, it would take nearly eight decades for the first cellphone to arrive on the market, and three more on top of that for them to become indispensable in the West.”

FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Friedberg isn’t even the only former UB lawyer to have found a home with a major crypto firm.”

Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“We don’t understand yet and there’s no good mechanism to explain it.”

Making a Go program faster with a one-character change

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The Go compiler uses a technique called escape analysis to figure out when some memory needs to live on the heap.”

Forking Chrome to turn HTML into SVG

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Skia also has an experimental SVG back-end, and that’s what we’re going to use to build html2svg!”

Mold linker may switch to a source-available license

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“mold started as my personal project, and I’ve been working on this full time for two years so far.”

From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Jellyfin is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Plex Media Server’s core functionality.”

Where has the passive radar code gone?

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“This really sucks to say after putting so much effort into it, but for regulatory reasons that have just come to light we’ve had to remove the open source passive radar code that we previously provided.”

What if regular exercise is the best cognitive exercise?

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“File this under highly speculative.”

In praise of Plan 9

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Plan 9 failed, in a sense, because Unix was simply too big and too entrenched by the time Plan 9 came around.”

Gzip exceptions, but only on hot or rainy days

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Sometimes, debugging enters the real world.”

FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“More than $600 million was siphoned from FTX’s crypto wallets late Friday.”

AWS IAM Roles, a tale of unnecessary complexity

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Instead of refactoring the architecture, AWS did what AWS does best - it built a new service.”

NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Rust, while powerful, has a fairly steep learning curve, for example.”

Demystifying financial leverage

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“A 10:1 levered firm is wiped out if assets lose 1/11th (~9.09%) of their value.”

YouTube confirms that it has removed the “sort by oldest/newest” option

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The removal of the option to sort videos from oldest to newest has not been implemented for all YouTube accounts.”

US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The energy index rose 17.6 percent over the past 12 months.”

Indian ISPs: We already give govt full access to web traffic

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The CMS, however, undercuts these requests by letting the government access data in real time without individual requests.”

FTC restores rigorous enforcement of law banning unfair methods of competition

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“When Congress created the FTC, it clearly commanded us to crack down on unfair methods of competition.”

Accidental $70k Google Pixel Lock Screen Bypass

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“I was not expecting to cause this big of a code change in Android with this bug.”

Stretch iPhone to its limit: 2GiB Stable Diffusion model runs locally on device

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The main challenge is to run the app on the 6GiB RAM iPhone devices.”

The Age of PageRank Is Over

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Ads became a global "tax" on using the web, paid mostly by the most vulnerable, non-tech-savvy, users.”

Why is Rosetta 2 fast?

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Rosetta 2 translates the entire text segment of the binary from x86 to ARM up-front.”

Meta lays off 11,000 people

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

NightWare helps disrupt nightmares for those with PTSD

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Currently, NightWare is prescribed to 400 patients in the US, 98 percent of whom are active-duty military or veterans.”

Former CIA master of disguise helps disfigured people come out of hiding

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

““I got my life back.””

A requiem for amateur chemistry

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Alas, my childhood also marked the final years of amateur chemistry as a socially acceptable pursuit.”

Just don’t

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The word “just” is a signal that you’re not taking their problem seriously.”

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Apple took a lot of heat last week after the rollout of iOS 16.1 introduced ads on every app product page.”

Signal Introduces Stories

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Stories also happen to be one of the most common feature requests we receive from all over the world.”

Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“It makes sense: the tool is reading your text and suggesting designs/delivering stock photography.”

Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Spoiler alert: MAVEXAR seems to be driving the litigation in all three sets of cases.”

Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“A monospaced font is one where each character takes up the same amount of horizontal space, even punctuation and spaces.”

What to blog about

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“I recommend adding “write about it” to your definition of “done” for anything that you build or create.”

Update on Supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The facility is currently operating at significantly reduced capacity.”

Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“At Yale University, for instance, there are now as many administrative staff as undergraduates.”

It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.”

MDN converted to Markdown

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“For technical writers, HTML is hard to write and hard to review.”

Quantum winter is coming

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, I have to inform you that Moore’s law isn’t a law of nature.”

TSMC approaching 1 nm with 2D materials breakthrough

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“However, as TSMC researchers acknowledge, the 1-nm process node is not likely to be used for years to come.”

In defense of linked lists

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Linked lists are useful: Redis can be wrong, but both Redis and the Linux kernel can’t.”

UK Government scans all web servers hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“We also limit how often we run scans to ensure we don’t risk disrupting the normal operation of systems.”

I fought the PayPal and I won

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Arbitration is nothing more than privatized dispute resolution.”

Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The email was impersonally signed “Twitter.””

Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It really is amazing to see so many people out there still using Pebbles.”

Snap Store administrators removed signal-desktop from Ubuntu Snap

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“This is due to a DMCA takedown request coming from people representing Signal.”

We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“As far as we know, this is the first class-action case in the US challenging the training and output of AI systems.”

Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Our business is fundamentally well-positioned to weather harsh circumstances.”

Phlare: open-source database for continuous profiling at scale

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s easy to install with just one binary and no additional dependencies, just like Prometheus.”

Why Functional Programming Should Be the Future of Software Development

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“In fact, the hardest part comes later, during the maintenance phase.”

The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The real problem is that C++ is neither easy nor loved.”

The case for JPEG XL

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“These limitations are all reasonable for the web use case, but not for a general-purpose image format.”

Laws barring noncompete clauses spreading

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Observers say insurance brokers are among the types of business most likely to be affected by the laws.”

OpenSSL 3.0.7 fixes X.509 email address buffer overflows

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Exposure to remote code execution is not expected on any platforms.”

Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Missing in most of these conversations is any discussion of consent.”

NASA Finds More Than 50 Super-Emitters of Methane

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“EMIT also identified 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure in Turkmenistan, some longer than 20 miles.”

Random: NASCAR Driver Stuns To Qualify For Championship With GameCube Move

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Oh, I played a lot of NASCAR 2005 on the GameCube with Chad growing up and you can get away with it, and I never knew if it would actually work.”

It's Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Every significant element of TCP, from its stream orientation to its expectation of in-order packet delivery, is wrong for the datacenter.”

NY could be first state with a 'Right to Repair' law for electronic devices

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The bill has not been sent to the governor for her signature or veto but Fahy said her and her office have been in contact with the governor’s staff on the issue.”

Remixing Shopify

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Under Shopify’s stewardship Remix receives long-term backing and support from an established leader in commerce.”

Iran's Secret Manual for Controlling Protesters' Mobile Phones

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where.”

Wiring my home with Fiber

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“My ISP plans on proving 100gbits in about 2 years so I don’t need pull new fiber if I decide to upgrade.”

Nobody Wants Touch-Screen Glove Box Latches And It Needs To Stop Now

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“I didn’t speak out when the Tesla first demonstrated this, and that’s on me.”

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This language, through evolution and contributions by others, is today known as assembly language.”

How I make a living working on SerenityOS

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Since May of 2021, SerenityOS has been my full-time job.”

Texas solar and wind resources saved consumers nearly $28 billion over 12 years: report

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Solar and wind energy reduced wholesale energy costs in Texas by $7.4 billion in the first eight months of this year, creating average monthly savings of $925 million, according to a study IdeaSmiths released last week.”

SAFe Delusion

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Yet those companies and practitioners without extensive Agile experience have a hard time evaluating what will bring them value and what not.”

Open Letter to Gitea - Restoring Trust in the Gitea Project

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“We believed you when you promised to pass along the ownership of the Gitea project to your elected successors.”

About the sqlite3 WASM/JS Subproject

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Folks have been building sqlite3 for the web since as far back as 2012 but this subproject is the first effort "officially" associated with the SQLite project, created with the goal of making WASM builds of the library first-class members of the family of supported SQLite deliverables.”

How to communicate effectively as a developer

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Communicating effectively as an engineer means empathically increasing the resolution of your writing.”

The Iran Firewall - A preliminary report

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“IP addresses are rarely fully blocked.”

How we became the world's foremost expert on Google Play Store policy violations

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Your app did not receive a deliberate analysis by a human leading to the violation notification.”

Shell Script Best Practices

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Use shellcheck. Heed its warnings.”

Why Signal won't compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“We are not going to compromise on privacy, and that is our stance.”

Stop making an SSH client the hard way: Tailscale SSH Console

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“With Tailscale SSH Console, your browser becomes a Tailscale client, and joins your tailnet in the same way as any other device that you run Tailscale on.”

SiriSpy - iOS bug allowed apps to eavesdrop on your conversations with Siri

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This would happen without the app requesting microphone access permission and without the app leaving any trace that it was listening to the microphone.”

Most People (92%) Never Finish Online Job Applications

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“According to Appcast, one of the industry’s most respected recruitment data providers, the candidate drop-off rate for people who click ‘Apply’ but never complete an application is a whopping 92 percent.”

Our Conscious Experience of the World Is But a Memory, Says New Theory

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“A team from Boston laid out a new theory of consciousness that inextricably ties it to memory.”

Oracle contributing GraalVM Community Edition Java Code to OpenJDK

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Oracle does not currently intend to contribute the polyglot technologies supporting other languages such as Python, Ruby, R, and JavaScript.”

Stranger Strings: An exploitable flaw in SQLite

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“CVE-2022-35737 was introduced in SQLite version 1.0.12 (released on October 17, 2000) and fixed in release 3.39.2 (released on July 21, 2022).”

What "Work" Looks Like

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The funny thing is, sitting alone thinking doesn’t "look" like work.”

From zero to 10 million lines of Kotlin

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“We knew from the start that Kotlin’s build times would be longer than Java’s.”

Turbopack: High-performance bundler for React & TypeScript

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“On large applications, it shows updates 700x faster than Webpack.”

Fake Books

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I do not have a proof, but I’m fairly confident I stumbled upon an early example of a monetized machine-generated book.”

What's wrong with medieval pigs in videogames?

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Most notably, however, the medieval pig was not naked and pink at all, but covered in long dark hairs.”

Record-breaking chip can transmit entire internet's traffic per second

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“In experiments, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology used the setup to transmit data at 1.84 Pbit/s, encoded in 223 wavelength channels, down a 7.9-km-long (4.9-mile) optical fiber that contained 37 separate cores.”

My next Mac might be the last

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The problem is I just can’t stand the software anymore.”

The Social Recession: By the Numbers

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The percentage of people who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled in the past 30 years.”

Fujimoto's Five Books are now Public Domain

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“This means that you can now copy, distribute, and use the contents of these books without any restrictions (certain limitations may still apply in some jurisdictions).”

Open Source Podcasting Client

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“You can see all the code behind the iOS app and the Android app, and modify it, make it your own, suggest a change, fix a bug, add a feature, fork it and make your own client, anything!”

How Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evidence from a Natural Experiment on GitHub

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Long-running streaks of activity were abandoned and became less common.”

Some people who appear to be in a coma may actually be conscious

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“As many as 15 to 20 percent of patients who appear to be in a coma or other unresponsive state show these inner signs of awareness when evaluated with advanced brain-imaging methods or sophisticated monitoring of electrical activity.”

Linux: What can you epoll?

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“I was not able to find a comprehensive list of epoll-compatible APIs on the Internet, so I made one.”

Celebrating 5 Years of Pop!_OS

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“This gives us time to direct our development resources towards rebuilding Pop!_OS in the Rust codebase, a programming language that’s faster to process, more secure, and more stable.”

A Moonshot for Coral Breeding Was Successful

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In Florida alone, the population is reduced by over 95 percent.”

Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS, whether SpaceX likes it or not

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“We had to start from scratch, building basically a little radio telescope to eavesdrop on their signals.”

Blink-182 Tickets Are So Expensive Because Ticketmaster Is a Disastrous Monopoly and Now Everyone Pays Ticket Broker Prices

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Soon after that fiasco, Ticketmaster and Live Nation did merge and became a single company.”

Nearly half of San Franciscans have been victims of theft, new poll says

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Nearly half of San Franciscans have been a victim of theft in the past five years and a quarter have been threatened or physically attacked, according to a new poll.”

The Israeli Books End of Life

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The Israeli accessibility law is very vague.”

The HTTP crash course nobody asked for

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“HTTP/1.1 is a delightfully simple protocol, if you ignore most of it.”

SHA-3 Buffer Overflow

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The vulnerability impacts the eXtended Keccak Code Package (XKCP), which is the "official" SHA-3 implementation by its designers.”

Yet another scientific body has debunked bitemark analysis. The courts still won't care.

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The NIST report is now the fourth major scientific body to find no scientific validity to support these central tenets of bitemark analysis.”

How Google is forcing us to make our open source app worse

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“With the removal of these features, not only did the app perform less well, but Google still continued to reject the app.”

EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“If you’re using an ad blocker, there’s a 99.99% chance you are using EasyList or one of its derivatives.”

NASA's Webb Takes Star-Filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“These are the bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars.”

Inside the Proton, the 'Most Complicated Thing' Imaginable

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Researchers recently discovered that the proton sometimes includes a charm quark and charm antiquark, colossal particles that are each heavier than the proton itself.”

Focus Is Saying No To Good Ideas

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“There’s a famous saying, often attributed to Steve Jobs, that goes "focus is saying no to good ideas."”

Sound

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Invisible and relentless, sound is seemingly just there, traveling through our surroundings to carry beautiful music or annoying noises.”

Dear JetBrains. Don't mess with your UI.

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A user interface is like an API for your eyeballs.”

An accident at SpaceX

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“SpaceX was fined $18,475 by OSHA for two safety violations, one of which was rated the highest penalty level of "serious" and a maximum gravity of 10.”

75% of the Time We Spend With Our Kids in Our Lifetime Will Be Spent By Age 12

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“What all of this means is that it’s highly unlikely that any of us will get 18 endless summers with our kids.”

GitHub Copilot investigation

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“We’re investigating a potential lawsuit against GitHub Copilot for violating its legal duties to open-source authors and end users.”

AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“But then Meta is using those academic non-commercial datasets to train a model, presumably for future commercial use in their products.”

Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday ordered Germany’s three remaining nuclear plants to remain in operation until April to fend off a possible energy crunch.”

Seabed 2030: Almost 25% of World's Seafloor Now Mapped

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The latest GEBCO Grid figure now stands at 23.4%, reflecting an increase of 10.1 million square kilometres of new bathymetric data compared with last year’s figure.”

Re: [GIT PULL] Devicetree updates for v6.1

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I absolutely detest the crazy industry politics and bad vendors that have made ECC memory so "special".”

Jessica Wade made more than 1k Wikipedia bios for unknown women scientists

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Several of her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most influential contributors and editors are called.”

Announcing KataOS and Sparrow

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“At the moment, the code on Github does not include the required components to run these applications, but we hope to publish these features in the near future.”

Macintosh Newsweek advertisement

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Below you can see all 39 pages of the advertisement, as well as Newsweek’s front cover.”

A Real World React -> htmx Port

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“They reduced their total JS dependencies by 96% (255 to 9)”

Google Engineers Joked About How Incognito Mode Isn't Very Incognito

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“We are limited in how strongly we can market Incognito because it’s not truly private, thus requiring really fuzzy, hedging language that is almost more damaging.”

Everyone going to the World Cup must have this app - experts are now sounding the alarm

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The Ehteraz app, which everyone over 18 coming to Qatar must download, also gets a number of other accesses such as an overview of your exact location, the ability to make direct calls via your phone and the ability to disable your screen lock.”

Pimping my Casio with Oddly Specific Objects' alternate motherboard and firmware

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The project keeps the original Casio LCD but replaces the entire motherboard with a modern microcontroller and open firmware.”

How Equifax used employment records it collects from 2.5 million companies to fire dozens of its own employees for working second jobs

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Equifax used one of its own products, The Work Number, to help it suss out who was holding down multiple jobs simultaneously.”

Alaska snow crab season canceled as officials investigate disappearance of an estimated 1 billion crabs

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said.”

Unlaunching The 12GB 4080

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right.”

Vogtle Unit 3 starts nuclear fuel load

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“During fuel load, nuclear technicians and operators from Westinghouse and Southern Nuclear are scheduled to safely transfer 157 fuel assemblies one-by-one from the Unit 3 spent fuel pool to the Unit 3 reactor core in the coming days.”

TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.”

Toyota Suffered a Data Breach by Accidentally Exposing A Secret Key Publicly On GitHub

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Inside the repo there was a hardcoded access key for the data server that manages customer info.”

Teenager Solves Stubborn Riddle About Prime Number Look-Alikes

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Then, in November 2021, Granville opened up an email from Larsen, then 17 years old and in his senior year of high school.”

Nick Clegg, Other Meta Executives 'Inadvertently' Identified in OnlyFans Bribery Suit

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In court, however, its lawyers are less focused on proving the allegations false than arguing that, even if true, Meta itself would be shielded from liability.”

Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure.”

The next time Wikipedia asks for a donation, ignore it

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March.”

California Man Fined $1,000 for Drawing Lines on Maps

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Local officials encouraging people to create their own site drawings contradicts the board’s claim that anyone who depicts a site map needs a license.”

How BuiltWith generates $14 million a year while having zero employees

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“He added a BuiltWith.com link to every record in their index to provide BuiltWith information regarding each business.”

redefining for loop variable semantics

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Loop variables being per-loop instead of per-iteration is the only design decision I know of in Go that makes programs incorrect more often than it makes them correct.”

I wish my web server were in the corner of my room

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It is boundary-violating, to have a website in the corner of your bedroom.”

Wayland Support on Linux

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Even though Wayland has existed since ~2008 as a replacement for X11, it’s only recently that some Linux distributions have been enabling it by default.”

Authors' names have 'astonishing' influence on peer reviewers

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance, finds study.”

Improving Firefox responsiveness on macOS

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“So how do you use them? Well, it turns out they’re not documented.”

How Wine works 101

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Fun fact, Valve’s Steam Deck uses a Wine-based solution to run games (called Proton).”

Why an 'everything app' is bad news for liberal democracies and free markets

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It is practically impossible for person in China to opt out of WeChat.”

The Google plasma globe affair of 2012

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The solution proved to be simple: we "borrowed" the USB vendor and product ID sent by an Apple-made keyboard taken from a coworker’s desk.”

Dutch employee fired by U.S. firm for shutting off webcam awarded €75,000 in court

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The demand to keep the camera activated was an unreasonable intrusion on the plaintiff’s privacy rights, the court ruled.”

Brave browser to start blocking annoying cookie consent banners

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“In some cases, however, these banners can serve as trackers themselves, as they engage in a privacy-breaching data exchange before the user even has a chance to opt out.”

Stripe is Paypal circa 2010

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“After integrating both Stripe and Paypal I’ve come to the realization that they are nearly the same, including all the evil.”

Protests in Iran: State-run live TV hacked by protesters

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Rights groups say more than 150 people have been killed since the protests in the Islamic Republic began on 17 September.”

I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“As a prospect you didn’t even need to put up much of a fight, you just had to exhale loudly at the right time and suddenly discounts are coming your way.”

William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With 'Overwhelming Sadness'

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

What can we learn from leaked Insyde's BIOS for Intel Alder Lake

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Security researchers can still get leaked content via Internet Archive or forked repositories.”

Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The Switch maker has been incredibly proactive in recent years when it comes to seeking out and destroying ROM sites and emulators that allow people to access its software illegally.”

Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers' Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This paper provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with a business degree ("business managers") reduce their employees’ wages.”

mastodon.technology Shutdown

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It’s been five and a half years that I’ve ran this instance and I never saw it ending.”

AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“That means it’s over 10x more expensive to use AWS on-demand instances than your own infrastructure, and still 5x more expensive to use AWS reserved instances.”

Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The entire codebase has been migrated from C to C++.”

SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I seriously doubt we have much to add to this case.”

Celsius Execs Cashed out at Least $17 Million in Crypto Before Halting Withdrawals for Customers

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Celsius owes roughly $4.7 billion to users but doesn’t have the money to pay them.”

Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta.

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“In fact, the form even states that they won’t be able to review reports.”

Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“But having worked at more than one company that’s tried this approach, my experience is that very few people end up happy.”

Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“We also adapt the algorithm discovery procedure to finite fields, and improve over Strassen’s two-level algorithm for multiplying 4 × 4 matrices for the first time, to our knowledge, since its inception in 1969.”

FCC Plans to Remove Companies From Key Database for Non-Compliance With Anti-Robocall Rules

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Removal from the database would require all intermediate providers and terminating voice service providers to cease carrying the companies’ traffic.”

I Don't Believe in Sprints

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“That’s what a backlog is; a list of useless tasks that makes people feel better.”

Internet Archive Seeks Donations of Materials to Build a Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The DLARC project is looking for partners and contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small.”

How fateful?

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“There were 33 recorded occasions where we may have crossed paths, mostly on campus.”

EU Passes Law to Switch iPhone to USB-C by End of 2024

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The directive received 602 votes in favor, 13 votes against, and eight abstentions.”

Matter is now official!

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Originally, Matter was supposed to handle enough elements of provisioning and functionality so users wouldn’t have to download an app.”

The Deception of "Buying" Digital Movies

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“You are not provided any ownership of the content you have bought.”

Did Apple's privacy feature help to drive its own ad business?

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“While Apple effectively tracks users on its own platform, the pre-installed apps are exempted from displaying a message asking permission to track users.”

Postgres WASM by Snaplet and Supabase

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The first thing to point out is that our implementation isn’t pure WASM.”

You can't buy a Raspberry Pi right now

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Sadly, the only reliable way to buy a Pi immediately is to pay scalping prices on eBay or buy bundles that include often-unneeded components to pad out the price of a normally-$35 Pi to $100 and beyond.”

The PS5 Has Been Jailbroken - Custom Packages Can Now Be Installed

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“He likely kept his process a secret to avoid Sony patching and fixing it almost instantly.”

Stadia died because no one trusts Google

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The last first; it was only two months ago that Stadia’s Twitter account assured a concerned user that the service was not in fact shutting down.”

Mandated Diversity Statement Drives Jonathan Haidt To Quit Academic Society

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A recent American Association of University Professors survey found that DEI criteria are included in consideration for tenure at 21.5 percent of colleges and universities, and at 45.6 percent of large institutions of higher education.”

LSD-Like Molecules Counter Depression Without the Trip

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The compounds had been selected from a computational library of 75 million candidates.”

An elegy for GNU and RMS

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Standing in the road to be a roadblock against the forces of proprietary software does nothing when those forces can just drive around you.”

110 Overseas: 230,000 Chinese "persuaded to return"

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Police further admitted they did not actually have evidence that all those targeted had committed any crimes.”

Notes Against Note-Taking Systems

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things.”

TikTok Tracks You Across the Web, Even If You Don't Use App

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“TikTok gets medical information from WebMD, where a pixel reported that we’d searched for "erectile dysfunction."”

The 'Egg' laptop

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“To reduce the size of laptop, the keyboard have 16mm key pitch.”

Browsers with built-in VPNs - the new normal? Microsoft bakes a VPN into Edge and turns it on

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“A VPN built into a browser is not a substitute for a full-fledged VPN service.”

House Democrats debut new bill to limit US police use of facial recognition

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Some cities, states and police departments have limited their use of facial recognition in recent years.”

Co-Founding Considered Harmful

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“I’ve come to view the idea that you absolutely need a co-founder as one of the most harmful memes in Silicon Valley.”

Lyra V2 - a better, faster, and more versatile speech codec

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Lyra V2 is based on an end-to-end neural audio codec called SoundStream.”

A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming.”

Why Modern Software is Slow–Windows Voice Recorder

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A twenty-second delay for recording a forty-second clip is a pretty bad efficiency ratio.”

Many indoor air quality sensor products are a scam

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“In other words: they don’t work properly if used in a modern sealed and air-conditioned office.”

How to Build a Personal Webpage from Scratch

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Static webpages are also simple enough that you can host them yourself on a low-power device!”

Ken Thompson Really Did Launch His "Trusting Trust" Trojan Attack in Real Life

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In fact, it was actually what he really did in real life.”

Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons and Hardly Anyone Noticed/Cares

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Google is broke, I spotted it, and no one really seems to care.”

Posits, a New Kind of Number, Improves the Math of AI

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Real numbers can’t be perfectly represented in hardware simply because there are infinitely many of them.”

It's here: please welcome Arduino IDE 2.0

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“We’re pleased to announce that as of today Arduino IDE 2.0 has moved to stable and is available for download.”

Someone is pretending to be me.

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Someone went to the effort to extract tons of true information from my available sources and build a fake profile of me.”

Gas leak in the Baltic Sea

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The Danish Defense has no further comments at this time.”

Penpot inks $8M as signups for its open source spin on Figma jump 5600% after Adobe's $20B acquisition move

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Because we are open source, it means you can hack in, self host, and tweak, and expand,” he said.

Introducing workerd: the Open Source Workers runtime

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“workerd is not, on its own, a secure way to run possibly-malicious code.”

Outdated vs. Complete: In defense of apps that don't need updates

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“But my app was already working correctly, making this update useless and performative.”

Turns are Better than Radians

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Math doesn’t require radians.”

Nvidia In the Valley

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The days of no-work performance scaling are over.”

The first Zero Trust SIM

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“So far as we’re aware, we were the only company to not be compromised.”

McMaster Carr - The Smartest Website You Haven't Heard of

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“McMaster has chosen function over form.”

Downturn career decisions.

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Only spend money exercising options if you can financially weather the options becoming worthless.”

Citing New Evidence, Surviving Family Members Sue Feds, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin Over 1996 TWA Crash

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The plaintiffs are represented by Bailey & Glasser LLP.”

The MIPS ThinkPad, kind of

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“No matter what IBM says, it’ll always be a ThinkPad to me.”

Aging programmer

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“My desire to manage people is at all-time lows.”

Hertz Is Still Having Rental Car Customers Wrongfully Arrested, Lawsuit Claims

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Hertz reported that it files at least 3,365 theft reports against customers each year.”

Fitbit users will have to sign into Google from 2023

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Support of Fitbit accounts will continue until at least early 2025.”

iPhones and action discoverability

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Good design for very complicated systems is hard, and these are just a few points where it fell short.”

Nightdrive

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The entire scene is created purely by drawing circles on a HTML5 canvas.”

A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines' in-flight announcements and nobody knows how

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“By nature, passenger announcement systems on planes are hardwired, closed systems, making them incredibly difficult to hack.”

At 4.4 Miles, Wyoming Team Sets New Rifle Shot World Record

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The shooter was 4.4 miles away, a distance so great, the Earth’s rotation came into play.”

The sum of all knowledge

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Books can’t be unavailable as you can have as many copies as you want.”

Avoiding homework with code (and getting caught)

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Mochip was a real passion project and I had a wild time building it.”

Facebook Proven to Negatively Impact Mental Health

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The findings show a rise in the number of students reporting severe depression and anxiety (7% and 20% respectively).”

Lose Weight the Slow and Incredibly Difficult Way

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“If your goal was to avoid work, you could not have failed more badly.”

We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“A 4090 series card will demand a whopping 450 W, which dwarfs the Ryzen 9 5900X peak power consumption of only 140 W.”

Introducing LiteFS

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Full-stack developers are sleeping on SQLite, a database most devs think more suited to unit tests than production loads.”

Introducing the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Memory and storage are socketed, enabling you to load up whenever you’d like.”

New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune's Rings in Decades

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Webb also captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons.”

20×10%

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“That’s mathematics for you!”

YouTube's 'dislike' barely works, according to new study on recommendations

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In fact, it may be even more difficult than you think to get YouTube to accurately understand your preferences.”

React I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“We’ve been together for almost 10 years.”

You don't want to be on Cloudflare's naughty list

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It felt like we’d been transported back to an earlier era with unbearably slow internet.”

What I've Learned from Users

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus.”

Inside Apple's Secret iPhone 14 Redesign

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The back glass is simply secured with two screws and a single connector.”

Google removed our website from search because it uses youtube-dl

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“We are willing to do whatever it takes to comply with the law - we just wish we knew what it was.”

How I'm a Productive Programmer With a Memory of a Fruit Fly

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Having all API docs one key press away is profoundly empowering.”

There is no "software supply chain"

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In actual supply chains, money is changing hands.”

An X11 Apologist Tries Wayland

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Wayland wants every frame to be perfect.”

Finding the "Second Bug" in glibc's Condition Variable

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Sometimes pthread_cond_signal() doesn’t do anything, which can easily hang your program.”

Measuring CPU core-to-core latency

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“We measure the latency it takes for a CPU to send a message to another CPU via its cache coherence protocol.”

Bitcoin Is Not a Store-of-Value.

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“BTC is an open system that leaks value, disguised as a closed system that preserves value.”

Cppfront, Herb Sutter's proposal for a new C++ syntax

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Cpp2 is not a successor or alternate language with its own divergent or incompatible ecosystem.”

FTC to Crack Down on Companies Taking Advantage of Gig Workers

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Technological advances and novel business models are no license to commit unfair, deceptive, or anticompetitive practices.”

Saul Kripke (1940-2022)

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Saul Kripke, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th Century, has died.”

Self-hostable maps stack, powered by OpenStreetMap

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Headway is a maps stack in a box that makes it easy to take your location data into your own hands.”

US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“CBP keeps any information it takes from people’s devices for 15 years.”

35 Million Hot Dogs: Benchmarking Caddy vs. Nginx

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Nginx will fail by refusing or dropping connections, Caddy will fail by slowing everything down.”

California sues Amazon for preventing third-party sellers offering cheaper prices elsewhere

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“If they defy Amazon, they risk losing buy buttons, prominent listings or even basic access to Amazon’s marketplace.”

please don't be spooky

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s not reasonable to expect coworkers to be at their computer for every minute from 8AM to 5PM.”

A new collaboration with Adobe

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously.”

The Ethereum Merge Is Done, Opening a New Era for the Second-Biggest Blockchain

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Ethereum should now consume 99.9% or so less energy.”

The Spectacular Collapse of CryptoKitties, the First Big Blockchain Game

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“This was the break fans of Ethereum were waiting for.”

What it Takes to Make a Game by Yourself

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Start on a small project that’s realistic to finish and build up to your bigger dream game you want to make.”

Say Hello to Crazy Thin 'Deep Insert' ATM Skimmers

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The insert skimmer pictured above is approximately .68 millimeters tall.”

How we built Pingora, the proxy that connects Cloudflare to the Internet

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“As Cloudflare has scaled we’ve outgrown NGINX.”

An F-16 pilot died when his ejection seat failed. Was it counterfeit?

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Plaintiffs hope to learn through the legal discovery process whether the components were proven fake.”

Here's Why Car Wheels Are So Flat These Days (And No, It's Not Just Aerodynamics And Styling)

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Well, in a word, "steering" is what happened.”

We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Because I forgot to get out of the business.”

Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The gameplay is not simplified and there are no artificial limits.”

"Secrets" about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Retail price is free to deviate upward from COGS in an unlimited fashion.”

A note from Jack

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward”

Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s going to take a long time before Ladybird is ready for day-to-day browsing.”

The Follower

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Software compares the Instagram with the recorded footage.”

Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“AI art can be created orders of magnitude faster than traditional human-made art.”

Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as the 'Not My King' tag grows

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I doubt most of the people in the crowd even heard me.”

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Our award-winning font has made reading easier for millions upon millions of people and continues to change lives daily.”

Shortest URLs on the Internet

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“there’s nothing stopping TLD registry operators serving A records at the apexes of their TLD zones.”

Build Your Career on Dirty Work

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Once you’ve found an opportunity, put yourself in the firing line: go on-call, do support, do QA, do the tech debt.”

What's the cheapest domain you can register for 10 years?

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I’m concerned about the longevity of the domains I register.”

Visual Effects for the Indian blockbuster "RRR"

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Since then we delivered 700 shots for the RRR feature with our work being the prominence in the international trailer.”

On my resignation as regulator of the Dutch intelligence and security services

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Under this new law, my specific role (technical risk analysis) would mostly be eliminated.”

How Zoho became a $1B company without a dime of external investment

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Yet it has never taken so much as a penny of external investment.”

Meet the woman stockpiling cash to sue San Francisco over housing deadlock

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s to try to deter the city from messing around,” she said.

The next chapter for Learning on YouTube

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Learning remains a top priority for YouTube.”

Amazon CEO says company will slow hiring rate, no hard return to office planned

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Right now, we see a stabilization in the workforce.”

A Web UI for Stable Diffusion

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“A web interface for Stable Diffusion, implemented using Gradio library.”

Python Type Hints are Turing Complete

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“We apply Grigore’s algorithm to Python type hints and deduce that they are Turing complete.”

Rolls-Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The move comes as RR continues to deal with significant financial challenges.”

This is not your grandfather's Perl

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The Perl development team thinks that backwards compatibility is very important.”

Accelerate Python code 100x by import taichi as ti

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Taichi can run on both CPU and GPU, while Python runs on CPU.”

San Francisco Decriminalizes Psychedelics

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“San Francisco officials have been bullish on drug policy reform, including promoting harm reduction services.”

Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“A little self-discipline builds character, but too much self-discipline breaks it.”

Difftastic, the Fantastic Diff

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“I had no idea what I was getting into when I started working on this.”

How the SQLite Virtual Machine Works

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“This set of domain-specific commands and the execution engine to run it is called a virtual machine.”

Zig, the small language

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“One can explore the complete syntax and basic language constructs in less than an hour.”

A trillion prices

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I naively thought that insurers would be publishing the prices they negotiated with the 6,000 hospitals in the US.”

Accelerating value for Bitwarden users - Bitwarden raises $100 million

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“PSG, the lead investor, has taken a minority position in the Company and will join the board of directors.”

Someone's Been Messing With My Subnormals!

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“I have never met a scientist who can resist the lure of fast-but-dangerous math when doing numerical simulations.”

AG Ferguson: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The judge concluded that Meta repeatedly and intentionally violated the law and must pay penalties.”

Why A4? – The Mathematical Beauty of Paper Size

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This is something of a shock, if you ponder it, because rectangles do not normally behave like this.”

Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Don’t tell anyone, but I already have plans for a better version of Sockfish that will be much harder to detect!”

Don't ignore the janitor

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“He once told me he felt invisible at work.”

All poverty is energy poverty

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The developed world uses a lot of energy.”

After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.”

I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and CloudFlare helped

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“There are no free speech or human rights considerations here, there is only the right choice and the wrong one.”

USB, Thunderbolt, Displayport & docks

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“USB-C is a specification of a connector, intended to use for USB by default, but also for other protocols”

Biomanufactured materials are coming

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Spiber has raised a whopping $640 million in equity and securitization financing.”

Blocking Kiwifarms

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“We have never been their hosting provider.”

Peter Eckersley, may his memory be a blessing

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“He later served on the initial board of directors of the Internet Security Research Group.”

The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Trust, though, is an immensely socially useful technology.”

Hot Chips 34 – Tesla's Dojo Microarchitecture

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Tesla does not care about delivering precise exceptions.”

Here Is the Manual for the Mass Surveillance Tool Cops Use to Track Phones

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Queries that exceed 100,000 signals will result in the overage signals being dropped.”

Cannabis legalization decreases the stock market value of major pharmaceutical firms

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The current study concludes that cannabis acts as a new competitor in drug markets.”

Arti 1.0.0 is released: Our Rust Tor implementation is ready for production use.

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“We rely on users and volunteers to find problems in our software and suggest directions for its improvement.”

Important Notice Regarding Customer Information

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In late July 2022, an unauthorized third party acquired information from some of Samsung’s U.S. systems.”

Run Stable Diffusion on your M1 Mac's GPU

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Getting it working on an M1 Mac’s GPU is a little fiddly, so we’ve created this guide to show you how to do it.”

GA moves closer to unleaded future

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Pilots in America will not be paying what they’re paying for avgas in Europe today.”

Kagi status update: First three months

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“We sent exactly 0 marketing emails to our users since the launch of the public beta 3 months ago.”

Falsehoods programmers believe about email

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Wow, I am getting overwhelmed with comments and suggestions.”

NVIDIA Corporation Form 8-K

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 17:00:00 -0400

“The Company is engaged with the USG and is seeking exemptions for the Company’s internal development and support activities.”

DJI Mavic 3 flies over the top of Mount Everest at an altitude of 30,292 feet

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Please keep in mind that we don’t know whether this DJI Mavic 3 has been modified in any way.”

Final Thoughts on Ubiquiti

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“I have decided to remove those articles from my website.”

Things not available when someone blocks all cookies

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Jakub is the proof that users exist who block any and all cookies.”

Cloudflare's abuse policies & approach

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Our guiding principle is that organizations closest to content are best at determining when the content is abusive.”

4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“4.2 gigabytes of floating points that somehow encode so much of what we know.”

Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A mature leader has no need to hide behind false objectivity, but insecure leaders use metrics as a crutch.”

AdGuard publishes the world's first ad blocker built on Manifest V3

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Manifest V3, Chrome’s new extension API, is no longer an illusory threat.”

Why is WebMD so awful?

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“So why hasn’t any of this innovation made online health information even slightly better?”

The Big [Censored] Theory

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“77 of the first 100 episodes had at least one edit, amounting to 206 removed scenes.”

Stable Diffusion is a really big deal

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It’s similar to models like Open AI’s DALL-E, but with one crucial difference: they released the whole thing.”

Welcome Home, Garry Tan

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Today we announced that I am stepping down from my role as YC’s President and CEO at the end of this year.”

Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“This could mean Google is cracking down on VPN-based ads and tracker filtering apps behind the scenes.”

Don’t think to write, write to think

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process.”

Weird monitor bugs people sent me in the last 5 years

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The problem comes from vendors who flash the same exact firmware with the same EDID to multiple monitors in the same batch.”

Time Till Open Source Alternative

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Software itself really doesn’t have a future in making money.”

Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“12-TET is convenient for instrument builders and piano tuners, but it makes harmony sound grey and mushy.”

#17: One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“All the restaurants registered under these two FSSAI licenses are very poorly rated and reviewed on both Swiggy and Zomato.”

Development version: GIMP 2.99.12 Released

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“We still can’t give you any date for GIMP 3.0, but we are getting there!”

We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The Big Bang is the simplest explanation we know, and that is probably wrong, and that’s it.”

A Programming Language Database

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The "database" is just text files.”

Why Slack's free plan change is causing an exodus

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“At first blush, this might look like a minor policy tweak.”

Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The first key is understanding that the industrial revolution was more than simply an increase in economic production.”

Ghana Bans A Delta Boeing 767 (Yes, Just One)

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“So the same Boeing 767 diverted to New York two days in a row on transatlantic flights due to mechanical issues.”

The Jupyter+git problem is now solved

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Jupyter notebooks don’t work with git by default.”

Why your website should be under 14kB in size

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“TCP slow start is an algorithm used by servers to find out how many packets it can send at a time.”

Removal of Heroku Free Product Plans FAQ

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“There are no changes to our existing paid plans, except for the renaming of Hobby dynos and Hobby-Dev databases to Basic.”

Orcas Are Breaking Rudders Off Boats in Europe

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The animals have started approaching sailboats, sometimes striking the rudders and even breaking them off.”

Protect Your Inbox: DuckDuckGo Email Protection Beta Now Open to All!

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In our closed Email Protection beta, we found that approximately 85% of beta testers’ emails contained hidden email trackers.”

Patent Trolls Inbound: Our First Lawsuit

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I’m willing to lose $1M before I give him $10k.”

Inside the Pinecone

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Most impressively though, real time operational events dropped almost to zero overnight after the original release.”

Accepted chromium 104.0.5112.101-1 (source) into unstable

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Change default search engine to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons.”

EPB Launches America’s First Community-wide 25 Gig Internet Service

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“EPB is an independent board of the City of Chattanooga which began serving customers in 1939.”

Visions

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The artist names and track titles are nonsense; to me, they carry the clear flavor of AI text generation.”

Google refuses to reinstate man’s account after he took medical images of son’s groin

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Mark was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but Google has said it will stand by its decision.”

Class action against Oracle's worldwide surveillance machine

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Oracle claims to have amassed detailed dossiers on 5 billion people, and generates $42.4 billion in annual revenue.”

The Future of NGINX: Getting Back to Our Open Source Roots

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“We can’t simply keep charging for the same things as in the past, because the world has changed.”

The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool on steroids

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“There is no doubt that other companies live by this creed, if they are not talking about it out loud.”

Apple expands Self Service Repair to Mac notebooks

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Customers will have access to the tool kit for one week and it will be shipped free of charge.”

Application submitted for US molten salt research reactor

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“ACU plans for the MSRR to achieve criticality by December 2025.”

Workplace surveillance is coming for you

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The bossware problem is a boss problem, in other words.”

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Conversations, like improv scenes, start to sink if they sit still.”

uBlock Origin works best on Firefox

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“This feature requires the webRequest.filterResponseData() API, currently only available in Firefox.”

Why don't we do email verification in reverse?

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Inbox delivery can be fickle, unreliable, or outright impossible.”

LibGen's Bloat Problem

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Bear in mind that this is still before deduplication; we are merely filtering by file-size.”

Diablo 1 for web browsers!

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“To play the full game, you must use your own DIABDAT.MPQ that you can obtain with the original copy of the game from GoG.”

Visual Sum of Cubes

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Doubling the pyramid didn’t work, so maybe we can cut it in half instead!”

Coping with Copilot

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“So as CS educators, Copilot has us outgunned.”

Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Any time there’s an opportunity to use CSS instead of JavaScript, I’ll take it.”

Resolving an unusual wifi issue

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Qt5 has been crippling my wifi system-wide for past 7-8 months, just by running MediBang Paint Pro.”

App Store doesn't accept "too simple" apps

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“But I think they just don’t like the idea of the app, and no matter what I add to it, they won’t accept it.”

"Quantum-Safe" Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“SIKE is the second NIST PQC candidate to get broken this year.”

I love my GPD Micro PC

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In contrast, the GPD just wants to be used, interacted with, tinkered with.”

TSMC to Begin 3nm Chip Production Next Month

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“This original N3 node has a narrow process window, which means a lower-than-expected yield for some designs.”

PayPal Phishing Scam Uses Invoices Sent Via PayPal

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Scammers are using invoices sent through PayPal.com to trick recipients into calling a number to dispute a pending charge.”

I have complicated feelings about TDD

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“TDD isn’t as valuable as its strongest proponents believe.”

Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.”

Learn Postgres at the Playground

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Yes, this is WASM and running fully in your web browser.”

Accounting For Developers, Part I: The Fundamentals

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Not matching would mean the system created or lost money out of nothing.”

Why I left PINE64

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“PINE64 cares only about Manjaro, and Manjaro does not care about working with any other distributions.”

How to build bigger biceps: A little exercise each day boosts muscles more than one big weekly workout

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The control group doing six contractions a week did not see any change in muscle strength or muscle thickness.”

Using the Same Arch Linux Installation for a Decade

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The longest I went without a system upgrade is nine months, but typically I upgrade about once per month.”

VPNs on iOS are a scam

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Data leaves the iOS device outside of the VPN tunnel.”

American Airlines Announces Agreement to Purchase Boom Supersonic Overture Aircraft, Places Deposit on 20 Overtures

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“American has paid a non-refundable deposit on the initial 20 aircraft.”

How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In retrospect, disk latency should have been an obvious concern early on in our database deployments.”

Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Glibc 2.36 was released and all the games using EAC EOS are no longer playable.”

Big Changes Ahead for Deno

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Our goal is to make Deno the fastest JavaScript runtime - full stop.”

Open Source DALL-E "Stable Diffusion" is now available via website

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The Stable Diffusion model, which can run locally or in the cloud, will no longer have these restrictions.”

Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“These tools are made in the USA from start to finish.”

Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“These findings are significant in the context of society’s increasing reliance on GPS.”

Inside the Layoffs at Klarna

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The mandatory meeting turned out to be very bad news.”

Three peer-reviewed papers highlight scientific results of National Ignition Facility record yield shot

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The other main changes were improved capsule quality and a smaller fuel fill tube.”

How I Hacked my Car

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Surely Hyundai Mobis didn’t use this key and this was only used for testing, right?”

It's raining PFAS: even in Antarctica and on the Tibetan plateau rainwater is unsafe to drink

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Based on the latest U.S. guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink.”

I Watched An 857-Hour Movie To Encounter Capitalism's Extremes

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Logistics tracks, in reverse chronological order, the journey of a pedometer from a shop in Sweden to a factory in China.”

Hostage standoff at Beirut bank ends with gunman's surrender

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“He did not receive any of the money, according to a lawyer who took part in the negotiations.”

Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“On Wednesday 10 August, the FIOD arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam.”

Excel is Pretty Dang Cool

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Instead of writing the formula =A1*B1, you can do =Width*Height like you should have been able to 30 years ago.”

Man overcharged 20 rupees for India train ticket wins 22-year legal battle

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Equally surprising was that Indian Railways, the country’s largest employer, chose to continue fighting the case.”

Rob Pike's simple C regex matcher in Go

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Of course, GNU Grep is about three times as fast.”

This 17-Year-Old Designed a Motor That Could Potentially Transform the Electric Car Industry

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Synchronous reluctance motors don’t use magnets.”

Is this the end of social networking?

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Facebook is fundamentally an advertising machine.”

Redis Explained

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Redis is fast and all consistency guarantees, come second to speed.”

From Oscilloscope to Wireshark: A UDP Story

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The parser is overkill: it decodes the entire file based on the specification.”

iOS Privacy: Instagram and Facebook can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The iOS Instagram and Facebook app render all third party links and ads within their app using a custom in-app browser.”

How SQLite helps you do ACID

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The rollback journal is a simple trick to simulate atomicity and isolation and to provide durability to a database.”

Why aren't smart people happier?

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“All that progress didn’t make us a bit happier.”

The World Excel Championship is being broadcast on ESPN and it's absolutely wild

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The sport pits eight expert modellers against each other.”

He Was Arrested for Promoting Jury Nullification. A Federal Court Says That Was Illegal.

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“But Picard was not referencing a specific trial when he was arrested.”

How fast is 12th Gen Intel Core?

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A Cinebench run brings the CPU to maximum load for 10 minutes, making it a great measure of sustained performance.”

Write a Note to Your Spouse Every Day

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Writing is thinking - so when I write a note to my wife I am thinking about her.”

Don't call it a comeback: Why Java is still champ

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Java has been sitting among the top three languages since shortly after its launch in 1995.”

I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL·E 2 for $45: here's what I learned

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Curation and judging what looks good is still important.”

No more Insight Porn

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Only once you actually try to do anything with the advice, do you notice it’s completely useless.”

That time I 10x'd a TI-84 emulator's speed by replacing a switch-case

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“There was just one hotspot that dwarfed all the others, and that was the instruction decode and execution switch-block.”

U.S. Treasury Sanctions Notorious Virtual Currency Mixer Tornado Cash

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The ultimate goal of sanctions is not to punish, but to bring about a positive change in behavior.”

#16: The case of fake IMDb credits

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“When you sign up to this website, they give you one credit to publish your first press release for free.”

The Case of the Mysterious Holes on the Seafloor

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A look at the sediment upon recovery revealed no clues as to what formed the holes.”

Why Does gRPC Insist on Trailers?

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Organizational problems are harder than technological ones.”

Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Big Tech generally does not pay for being oncall.”

Cramming 'Papers, Please' onto Phones

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Beyond the minimal amount necessary to make the interface work, there are no content changes or additions for this port.”

The Scottish Highlands, the Appalachians, and the Atlas are the same mountain range

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It was similar to the present Himalayas at its highest elevation during the beginning of the Permian period.”

The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved by US Regulators

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.”

Ubisoft to pull online from older games, which also takes away your DLC

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Space Junkies, the multiplayer VR shooter, cost $40 at release and remains available for sale on Steam, with no notice that it will be rendered unplayable in two months.”

NSA, NIST, and post-quantum cryptography: Announcing my second lawsuit against the U.S. government

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“NIST has produced zero records in response to this FOIA request.”

How we're improving search results when you use quotes

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Using quotes can definitely be a great tool for power users.”

DreamWorks Animation to Release MoonRay as Open Source

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“DreamWorks intends to make MoonRay available under the Apache 2.0 license.”

My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I can’t push anywhere on the keyboard anymore to activate it.”

Botspam Apocalypse

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“If Marginalia Search didn’t use Cloudflare, it couldn’t serve traffic.”

Old jokes

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Maybe the joke was born old.”

Sending Spammers to Password Purgatory with Microsoft Power Automate and Cloudflare Workers KV

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Clearly, I’ve taken a great deal of pleasure in messing with spammers and I hope you do too.”

Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google.

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“SEO techniques are extremely potent, and their widespread adoption is what’s wrong with the modern web.”

What's the Strangest Thing You Ever Found in a Book?

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It was a dentist’s appointment card for Mr. Lounsbury.”

Productivity Porn

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Social media has become my productivity porn.”

MIT invents $4 solar desalination device

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Those wicks are difficult to clean, and over time, the salt accumulation means they have to be replaced.”

Y Combinator narrows current cohort size by 40%, citing downturn and funding environment

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The S22 batch is significantly smaller than our most recent batches.”

Use One Big Server

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s not glamorous and it won’t help your resume, but one big server will serve you well.”

How I Used DALL·E 2 to Generate The Logo for OctoSQL

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Finally, I did a bunch of Google reverse image searches for it.”

Crimes with Python's Pattern Matching

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It looks like __subclasshook__ caches the results for a given type check.”

Why I Still Love PHP and Javascript After 20+ years

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“A legacy codebase means that the product is performing well.”

What's TypeScript compiling? Use a treemap to find out.

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The root issue here is that Google distributes all 300+ of its APIs as a single npm package.”

Linux 5.19

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“So here we are, one week late, and 5.19 is tagged and pushed out.”

What's actually going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes? We surveyed 1000 engineers to find out.

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Google is indeed not extending offers throughout the duration of the freeze.”

How I regained concentration and focus

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I have resolved very firmly not to read any news at all for a while.”

Famous HNers and their sites

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“But, most of the sites are personal blogs of some sort.”

RISC-V based single board computers are getting there

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“PyBench also completes 22.26% faster and the WavPack encoding test is 7.43% quicker on the MangoPi board.”

Google's in-house desktop Linux

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“There are no big pushes to upgrade the fleet.”

Australian activist can't use encrypted apps, must let police access phone

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“He is not allowed to use any encrypted messaging apps, like Signal or WhatsApp.”

Carbon's most exciting feature is its calling convention

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s also not really a limitation in many cases: how often do you actually need to take the address of something?”

Who is collecting data from your car?

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Wejo’s investors include GM, Microsoft, and defense and intelligence contractor Palantir.”

I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don't Have To

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“In essence, this is a working system, with a blockchain slapped on the side for PR reasons.”

MIT engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The current design requires connecting the stickers to instruments that translate the reflected sound waves into images.”

Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“On its official Twitter page, Google Stadia has denied the rumors that it will be shutting down its services.”

Kitsault, Canada's $50M 1980s ghost town

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Not only a ghost town, but a ghost town that was built for $50 million in 1981, only to be shut down a year later.”

Map showing birthplaces of "notable people" around the world

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.”

How to create a Python package in 2022

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I will start by setting up the dependency management of my package, and I will use Poetry.”

Rust is actually portable

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Once I figured out the right flags in the target cosmo.json, most of the bugs with std went away.”

FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans' safe deposit boxes

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Those details matter, and not just to the victims of the FBI’s raid.”

AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds.”

Programming languages endorsed for server-side use at Meta

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Rust is the latest addition to Meta’s list of supported server-side languages.”

Upgrading from Debian Jessie to Bullseye after nearly 30 years

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Oh my god. INN uses many non-portable data formats, which just depend on your C types.”

Fake Dog for Home Security

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s a pair of computer speakers plugged into a Raspberry Pi, which is an inexpensive single-board computer.”

SQLite Internals: Pages and B-trees

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Disks are usually the slowest part of a database so limiting page fetches can have a huge performance win.”

Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It took 4 years and half a dozen projects launched for Michael to find a product that took off”

Mullvad is now available on Amazon

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“You can gift time and give it to a friend without knowing their account number.”

Twenty years of Valgrind

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Memcheck has found countless bugs in countless programs, and is a standard part of the testing setup for many of them.”

Why is it so hard to give Google money?

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I submitted an appeal on July 6th and waited.”

Mechanics invent an axle that can achieve steering angles of up to 80 degrees

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“As impressive as the video is, there is no word whether this product is ready for market or not.”

Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“When you start a new task before finishing the previous, average cycle times will increase.”

It's time to leave the leap second in the past

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Back in 2012, Reddit experienced a massive outage because of a leap second; the site was inaccessible for 30 to 40 minutes.”

Two weeks in, the Webb Space Telescope is reshaping astronomy

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“They missed out on being first by 13 seconds, "which was pretty funny," said Pascale.”

Samsung asks for planning permission for 11 fabs in Texas

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Samsung already operates a fab in Austin and is building another and has started work on its first fab in Taylor.”

Why are McDonald's Self Service Kiosks so hackable?

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Inside a kiosk is a standard x86 computer NUC with exposed USB ports.”

In Praise of Stacked PRs

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Stacking PRs keeps the author unblocked.”

Take more screenshots

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Digital work is inherently ephemeral.”

The tar archive format, and why GNU tar extracts in quadratic time

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“A couple of days ago, I had a 518GiB tar.gz file (1.1 TiB uncompressed) that I had to extract.”

Twitter data breach exposes contact details for 5.4M accounts; on sale for $30k

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“This bug resulted from an update to our code in June 2021.”

Embed is in C23

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“With this, putting data into C and C++ executables will be a dream.”

More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“This funding will allow fusion companies to push toward their ‘Kitty Hawk moment’ in the coming years.”

UK intelligence recycles "think of the children" argument for borking encryption

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This is an old, old argument – as old as encryption itself.”

Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Lemoine shared the news of his firing in a taping of Big Technology Podcast on Friday, just hours after Google dismissed him.”

Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Both the 40-foot containers are bearing the same number: SLHU4500470.”

We're going to need a lot of solar panels

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Global solar production last year (2021) was about 190 GW.”

Swallowing the elephant into Blender

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“All of the things mentioned above are quadratic complexity in terms of object count in the scene.”

What happens when you press a key in your terminal?

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“In the 70s, computers were expensive.”

Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“I was reminded of this in an article about last week’s Amtrak derailment.”

I regret my website redesign

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It took eight months, $46k, and a lot of headache.”

Cooling related failure (in Google London DC)

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“A small percentage of replicated Persistent Disk devices are now running in single redundant mode.”

VCs are scared when they should be greedy

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Fundraising has never been a sure thing.”

Archive.org Seeks Summary Judgment in Lawsuit Filed by Publishing Companies

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The publishers are not seeking protection from harm to their existing rights.”

TeamViewer installs suspicious font only useful for web fingerprinting

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It leaks who TeamViewer’s customers are to every website they visit.”

We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“After analyzing data from 2,074 testers, we found no evidence that Bionic Reading has any positive effect on reading speed.”

What happens when a reservoir goes dry

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Engineers and planners don’t actually know what the worst case scenario drought will be over the lifetime of a reservoir.”

Soft deletion probably isn't worth it

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The biggest reason for this is that almost always, data deletion also has non-data side effects.”

Glassdoor not so anonymous

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Glassdoor is legally required to release the contact details of the posters directly to Zuru, via Zuru’s attorneys.”

How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“REST must be the most broadly misused technical term in computer programming history.”

Iceland's forest and bush cover has increased sixfold since 1990

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“As much as 40% of Iceland’s surface area was covered by forest before permanent settlers arrived in the ninth century.”

Electrical engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Your granny’s radio had maybe 10 transistors; a smart speaker, billions.”

New documents reveal scale of US Government's cell phone location data tracking

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The 6,168 pages of location records we reviewed contain approximately 336,000 location points obtained from people’s phones.”

Research Suggests That Software Piracy Lowers Poverty

Sun, 17 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The paper doesn’t mention this reverse relationship but it wouldn’t be a surprise if it plays a role here.”

Picking up free lithium cells off the street and making them safe for use

Sun, 17 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s terrible for the environment, but it’s a great source of free lithium cells for our projects.”

$9.99/month

Sun, 17 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“My current subscription tally came to $1,500 ($1,520 to be exact) per year, or $126/month!”

Android removes much of Fuchsia-related code as Starnix project progresses

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In its place, we have a lone “TODO” message, suggesting that Google may be building up something new in its place.”

Why rails buckle in Britain

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“When the air temperature reaches 30 degrees, the temperature on the rail can actually be up to 20 degrees higher.”

Amazon instructs New York workers "don't sign" union cards

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Amazon, the second-largest employer in the United States, has made plain its desire to keep its workforce from unionizing.”

Scratch is a big deal

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“At the time of this post (July 2022) it ranks 21st, above Typescript, Rust, Julia, and other important languages.”

How Duke Nukem II's parallax scrolling worked

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Thanks to this mechanism, we can copy 4 bytes for the cost of one byte.”

Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Accessibility is one of the great strengths of the Web technology stack.”

How I went about learning Rust

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Overall, over these past months I’ve written about 14 KLOC of Rust in the process of learning and practicing the language.”

10% of the top million sites are dead

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“107,776 domains could not even be connected to.”

Melbourne woman ‘dehumanised’ by viral TikTok filmed without her consent

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In a statement, a spokesperson for Pawluk said the video was “designed to spread love and compassion”.”

30% of Google's Emotions Dataset Is Mislabeled

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“All raters are native English speakers from India.”

The DynamoDB Paper

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The downside is that caching introduces bimodal behavior.”

DNS Esoterica: Why you can't dig Switzerland

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The blame - as with most modern ills - lies in the mid-1970s.”

Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In April of 2021 the government banned the import and use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.”

My business card runs Linux

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“With this, the kernel takes around 2 minutes to boot and run sh.”

Teams is killing my Mac every day

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“I found an MS article mentioning how Teams uses memory because of this Chromium feature due to easier development.”

Six programming languages I'd like to see

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Graphs are really common data structures but there hasn’t yet been an "everything’s a graph" language.”

Tell HN: We are trying to get tail calls into the WebAssembly standard

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This proposal has reached Phase3 of the standardization process years ago, but has since stalled.”

A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Every infuriating thing on the web was once a successful experiment.”

The Uber leak exposes the global war on workers

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Ontario’s recent gig work law closely mirrors what Uber has been pushing for.”

Publishing your work increases your luck

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The simple act of publishing your work is one of the best ways to invite a little more luck into your life.”

Working in the software industry, circa 1989

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It took more than three hours for all of the computers to finish booting.”

Experian, you have some explaining to do

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“For now, Rishi has decided to pay Experian $25.99 a month to more closely monitor his account for suspicious activity.”

Your compliance obligations under the UK's Online Safety Bill

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“And don’t forget that this regulatory regime is expected to be extraterritorial.”

Deepest infrared image of universe

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe.”

Love Song to Costco

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“My parents are born in 1962, the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Chinese Famine.”

Assassin's Creed Liberation delisted, unplayable even to owners starting Sept 1

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“While it’s fairly common for games to be delisted on digital storefronts, the title being unplayable completely is not.”

The Crime That Killed Shinzo Abe

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“He initially prepared to kill a church leader, but gave up after deciding it was too difficult.”

The world needs a non-profit search engine

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Search funded by advertising is a recipe for disaster because there will always be a conflict of interest.”

Using GPT-3 to explain how code works

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“And that’s not surprising, because GPT-3 doesn’t actually know anything about anything at all.”

Help me identify possible tracking device found in my car

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Car starts and runs without it, but every warning light on the dashboard comes on.”

Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“There is a trend in logo design that started around 2017-2018.”

I should have loved biology

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The textbooks wrung out the questing.”

Notepad++ v8.4.3: Unhappy Users' Edition

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“All dissatisfied users of Notepad++ will get a refund, just print and fill out the following refund request form:”

Switzerland moves ahead with underground autonomous cargo delivery

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Like so many concepts of this kind, six years ago it seemed like it was highly unlikely to ever happen.”

Lenovo shipping new laptops that only boot Windows by default

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“There’s no security benefit to this.”

Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Twitter has provided only a pdf copy of Goldman Sachs’ final Board presentation.”

Problems at Roblox

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Items bought with Robux can be resold in Roblox’s marketplace and some trade for thousands of dollars.”

SOC2: The screenshots will continue until security improves

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The whole SOC2 audit is essentially a series of screenshots.”

I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Hospitals are willing to spend $1M just to avoid publishing these things.”

DRY is an over-rated programming principle

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“We end up with a presumption of reusability when really we should have a presumption of repetition.”

Did the early medieval era ever take place?

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The Phantom Time Hypothesis is nonsense.”

Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Sonatype reports that supply chain attacks increased 650% YoY in 2021.”

A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Funds can be moved out if five of the nine validators approve it.”

Apple previews Lockdown Mode

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Wired connections with a computer or accessory are blocked when iPhone is locked.”

He dropped out to become a poet, now he's won a Fields Medal

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college.”

Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“HackerDan offered to sell the lot for 10 Bitcoin – about $200,000.”

EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“So far, Apple has heavily resisted attempts by governments to enforce changes to its operating systems and services.”

Large Hadron Collider discovers three new exotic particles

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Only time and more studies of exotic hadrons will tell if these particles are one, the other or both.”

Police CyberAlarm Uses Alarming Cryptography

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Police CyberAlarm uses the same encryption key for both AES-CBC encryption and for HMAC-SHA256.”

Tesla Autopilot Almost Steers Model 3 into Oncoming Train

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Prior to nearly crashing into the train, the Model 3 was stopped at a red light, with its left turn signal on.”

I can't believe that I can prove that it can sort

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Proof requires us to understand why it works.”

Mendon, Missouri

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The Chief was traveling 87 mph, bound for Chicago.”

The End of CI

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“However, I predict that in the future, nobody will do it.”

Is the Ride over for Uber?

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“In the March quarter, Eats sales embarrassingly grew globally by only 12%.”

It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I realised last month the app hasn’t been of much use to me, in terms of learning, for a while.”

Scunthorpe Sans, A font that censors bad language automatically

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Scunthorpe Sans is based on Aileron and released under a CC0/public domain license.”

How does rsync work?

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Another way of phrasing the above is that data consistency is not something that rsync can in any way guarantee.”

Darktable 4.0

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Performance configuration is now applied at runtime and no longer requires darktable to be restarted when changed.”

Watching an acquirer ruin your company

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Sphero told us they needed fully revamped iOS and Android apps six months later with no schedule wiggle room.”

Found: The 'holy grail of catalysis', turning methane into methanol

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Excess methane is commonly burned off, or flared, to reduce its environmental impact.”

Google allowed a sanctioned Russian ad company to harvest user data for months

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Of particular concern, the analysis showed that Google shared data with RuTarget about users browsing websites based in Ukraine.”

No Refrigerant Left Behind

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“We just destroyed our first 1400 CO2e tons of refrigerant and expect to scale our work 100x by the end of 2023.”

What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Prices start at around $8,000 but vary depending on the financial means of a victim’s family.”

Cryptocurrency Titan Coinbase Providing "Geo Tracking Data" to ICE

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 17:00:00 -0400

“An email released through the FOIA request shows that Coinbase didn’t require ICE to agree to an End User License Agreement, standard legalese that imposes limits on what a customer can do with software.”

Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In the central irony, GitHub succeeded where SourceForge failed: they have convinced us to promote and even aid in the creation of a proprietary system that exploits FOSS.”

Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable, the market has its valuation all wrong, says Adam Schwab

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Even with the near 60% share price calamity, Atlassian is trading on a multiple of more than 19 times sales.”

Driverless Robotaxi Fleet Paralyzed for Hours in San Francisco

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The cars blocked the intersection and the street and had to be manually driven to the depot by Cruise employees.”

Vim 9.0

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.”

The Nettle Magic Project: Scanner for decks of cards with bar codes on edges

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This deck of cards has a bar code printed on the edge of each card.”

When Network is Faster than Cache

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Well it turns out that in some cases, the network is faster than the cache.”

She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed.

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Yifan had uncovered one of the largest hoaxes in Wikipedia’s history.”

EU Commission says it cannot find messages with Pfizer CEO

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The commission now says that it is unable to find such messages, but it previously argued that this type of “short-lived and ephemeral” communications do not fall under the scope of EU transparency rules on access to documents.”

Thunderbird 102 Released: A Serious Upgrade To Your Communication

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Thunderbird 102 is available to download right now for our global community of 20M+ Linux, macOS, and Windows users.”

The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Since we started PostHog, our team has interviewed 725 people.”

Fresh 1.0

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“By default, web pages built with Fresh send zero JavaScript to the client.”

Massive Trove of Gun Owners' Private Information Leaked by California Attorney General

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The leaked information includes the person’s full name, race, home address, date of birth, and date their permit was issued.”

Relational Databases Explained

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Indexes achieve this with the additional costs of storage, memory, and keeping it up to date (slower writes), which allows us to skip the tedious task of checking every table row.”

Random Mosaic: Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“While the U.S. government has claimed for years that Chinese companies are building surveillance technology into devices exported to the U.S. (such as networking equipment), it was revealed in 2014 in the book “Global Surveillance” by Glenn Greenwald that the NSA’s “TAO” (Tailored Access Operations) unit has been intercepting and tampering with technical devices in transit since at least 2010.”

Why America Can't Build

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Protecting just one undocumented drainage culvert on the project cost nearly $30 million.”

One of the most prominent crypto hedge funds just defaulted on a $670 million loan

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Voyager said it intends to pursue recovery from 3AC (Three Arrows Capital).”

Life Is Not Short

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Everyone complains about how short life is, but that perspective is broken.”

Enclave: An Unpickable Lock

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Just about every key lock in the world today has the same fundamental flaw.”

The SQLite Code of Ethics

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“This document continues to be used for its original purpose - providing a reference to fill in the “code of conduct” box on supplier registration forms.”

DevOps is a failure

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“We now have “DevOps Engineer” as a job title.”

My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I realized that I was looking at my phone every spare moment of the day.”

The Watch For Which James Bond Gave Up His Rolex: The SEIKO TV Watch

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The SEIKO TV watch consists of a 1.2-inch liquid crystal display screen set in a standard digital watch.”

Whatever happened to the Bee Apocalypse?

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s the wild bees that are in danger.”

XLite: Query Excel and Open Document spreadsheets as SQLite virtual tables

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“XLite is a SQLite extension written in Rust.”

Goodbye Zachtronics, Developers Of Very Cool Video Games

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“After 11 years in business (and even longer outside of commercial releases), a time which has seen the studio develop a cult following almost unrivalled in indie gaming, it will be the last new game Zachtronics will ever release.”

SMS phishing is way too easy

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“SMS has a field called sender ID, which is set by the sender, requires no identity verification, and can be any arbitrary short string.”

How we built a $1M ARR open source SaaS

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“We’re a completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped team of four.”

Digital Trails: How Bungie Identified a Mass Sender of Fake DMCA Notices

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It also reveals how Bungie tracked down and identified the architect of the DMCA fraud scheme as one of its own customers.”

Google: Italian SA stops use of Google Analytics

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In determining that the processing was unlawful, the Italian SA reiterated that an IP address is a personal data and would not be anonymised even if it were truncated – given Google’s capabilities to enrich such data through additional information it holds.”

YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B parameters

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It took 65 days to train the model on a cluster of 800 A100 graphics cards and 1.7 TB of online texts, books, and countless other sources in both English and Russian.”

Start all of your commands with a comma

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The solution was obviously to adjust my command names in such a way that they were still easy to type, but would never be chosen as system command names.”

Whatever happened to SHA-256 support in Git?

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In other words, work on supporting the use of a hash algorithm other than SHA-1 in Git appears to have ground to a halt.”

The Grug Brained Developer

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“given choice between complexity or one on one against t-rex, grug take t-rex: at least grug see t-rex”

Tailscale SSH

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Tailscale SSH allows you to establish SSH connections between devices in your Tailscale network, as authorized by your access controls, without managing SSH keys, and authenticates your SSH connection using WireGuard®.”

Why is Apache clinging to OpenOffice's corpse?

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Its last major release was version 4.1, from 2014!”

What will a Chromium-only Web look like?

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft has already ditched their engine for Chromium; we’re all worried about Mozilla’s health and long-term (or even medium-term) viability, and Apple is only one competition judgement away from having to open up iOS to other engines.”

GitHub Copilot is generally available to all developers

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“We’re making GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor, generally available to all developers for $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year.”

One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It’s a LOT slower than using sqlite3 directly though.”

Cloudflare outage on June 21, 2022

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“This was our error and not the result of an attack or malicious activity.”

Deno raises $21M

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“There are thousands of megabytes of dependencies, many of which are unnecessary, insecure, and out-of-date.”

Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“But we are never given a reason why H13 is good enough, but E12 isn’t.”

We are removing the option to create new subscriptions

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Subscriptions clearly offer a lot of convenience but as we’ve seen that convenience comes at a cost and we no longer think this is an acceptable trade-off.”

Writing one sentence per line

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Delete any sentence not worthy of its own line.”

Facebook Says Apple is Too Powerful. They're Right.

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, reality has an anti-surveillance bias.”

Why webcams aren't good enough

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Any affordable webcam (even at the high end of affordability, $100+), uses inadequate and typically years-old hardware backed by mediocre software that literally makes you look bad.”

About Bunny Fonts

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Simply swap “https://fonts.bunny.net/css" in place of “https://fonts.googleapis.com/css" on your website’s source code and let your users enjoy better privacy.”

The Brain Has a 'Low-Power Mode' That Blunts Our Senses

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Because the neurons in low-power mode processed visual signals less precisely, the food-restricted mice performed worse on a challenging visual task.”

Don't Use Kubernetes, Yet

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Early-stage startups shouldn’t run on Kubernetes yet.”

Awesome Cold Showers

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s great when people get excited about things, but sometimes they get a little too excited.”

Incorrect I/O throttling when using block device files

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Ordinarily, I/O operations on one disk device don’t throttle those on another device.”

How Parents' Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Now it looked like trauma could leave a trace in offspring even before they are born.”

V Language Review (2022)

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“So yeah, we’re able to create a null pointer (V reference) with no compiler errors or warnings.”

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed.”

The World's Most Satisfying Checkbox

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Let me strip off the sugarcoating and share a little secret about habit tracker apps: they’re little more than a glorified checkbox.”

Record-Breaking Voyager Spacecraft Begin to Power Down

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Over the past three years NASA has shut down heaters and other nonessential components, eking out the spacecrafts’ remaining energy stores to extend their unprecedented journeys to about 2030.”

Pop-ups are dead, long live pop-ups: or, the bait-and-switch hidden in today's cookie announcement

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“As we’ve known for a good while now, and as the announcement states, the Data Reform Bill will shift the responsibility for consent popups from service providers to browsers.”

Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Over time, the .NET platform is becoming closed, to ensure it is only useful if you are a customer.”

The computers are fast, but you don't know it

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“So from 20 minutes, we have come down to 12 seconds!”

4 macOS Screenshot Tricks To Impress Your Co-Workers

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“I took a screenshot of a Google image search for “cat” and the PNG was 5.7MB while the JPEG was 1.4MB.”

Cool desktops don't change

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“So, Vi will be around in 2068, whereas Visual Studio Code will be defunct before the end of this decade.”

Internet Explorer 11 has retired and is officially out of support, what you need to know

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“After 25+ years of helping people use and experience the web, Internet Explorer (IE) is officially retired and out of support as of today, June 15, 2022.”

Rarely Seen Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien Portray a Lush 'Lord of the Rings' Landscape

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Many of the original illustrations in the Hobbit were created by Tolkien himself.”

Palm OS developer releases source to classic games, 20+ years after release

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Aaron Ardiri, a Palm OS developer, has released source codes for various games, GameBoy emulator and various tools originally developed for Palm OS over 20 years ago on his Github page, with total of 12 repositories.”

CLAP: The New Audio Plug-In Standard

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“CLAP is open source, released under the MIT license: No fees, memberships or proprietary license agreements are required before developing or distributing a CLAP capable host or plug-in, and the license never expires.”

Hertzbleed Attack

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Hertzbleed is a real, and practical, threat to the security of cryptographic software.”

Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to more users worldwide

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit.”

Coinbase Lays Off Around 1,100 Employees

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Coinbase estimated it would incur $40 million to $45 million in total restructuring expenses.”

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The emails contained within Exhibit 10 evidence an interest at the then CEO-level to change the profile of IBM employees so that it reflected a younger workforce.”

The Floppotron 3.0

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Every mechanical device with electric motor or any other moving parts makes noise as a side effect.”

Revealed: Our Plans For Thunderbird On Android

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.”

The prank cursor that resulted in an employee being fired before they even started

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The person who made the unauthorized change rejoined the company a few weeks later, as originally planned.”

Nonsense on Stilts

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.”

New UUID Formats

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Non-time-ordered UUID versions such as UUIDv4 have poor database index locality.”

How to Write Better with The Why, What, How Framework

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Here’s a story from the early days of Amazon Web Services: Before writing any code, engineers spent 18 months contemplating and writing documents on how best to serve the customer.”

System Preferences Reimagined on macOS

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s actually quite remarkable that a program in the modern era can survive for so long in such a preserved state.”

A Guide to the Pre-Ghibli Work of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“But despite Miyazaki and Takahata’s outsize influence on the history of animation, many cartoon lovers still haven’t seen some of their most significant works, either for want of access or simply because they’ve never heard of them.”

DNS Toys

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“dns.toys is a DNS server that takes creative liberties with the DNS protocol to offer handy utilities and services that are easily accessible via the command line.”

AirPlay and Touch Bar = Network Disaster

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“However, around New Years 2022 I ran some various network speed tests for unrelated reasons and noticed that I was consistently getting a speed of ~340/30, instead of the ~650/50 I was expecting.”

Ask HN: Is there a TV on the market without “Smart TV” features?

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Or is there at least one where Smart mode can be turned off verifiably AND it doesn’t keep enticing you to turn it on by withholding ease of use or some convenience feature until you just give up?”

How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Unlike Skype, Whatsapp never bothered with a framework like Scrum.”

Announcing "Code" 2nd Edition

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“However, the 1st edition was originally published in 1999 and it was definitely showing its age.”

MIT researchers uncover 'unpatchable' flaw in Apple M1 chips

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The attack shows that pointer authentication can be defeated without leaving a trace, and as it utilizes a hardware mechanism, no software patch can fix it.”

New CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.”

You need to know what right-half-plane zeros are

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The danger of the right-half-plane zero is that it lures you into reacting to it, but that is precisely the wrong thing to do.”

Stop Interviewing With Leet Code

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“For 99.9% of the jobs in today’s market, LeetCode is generally irrelevant to the interview.”

How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“With ~63k entries that’s (n^2+n)/2 = (63000^2+63000)/2 = 1984531500 checks if my math is right.”

The collapse of complex software

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Nobody can subtract from the system; everyone just adds.”

Why Software Engineers like Woodworking

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Woodworking felt strangely familiar.”

Sunsetting Atom

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years, though we’ve conducted maintenance and security updates during this period to ensure we’re being good stewards of the project and product.”

Find a good available .com domain

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Run that, and you’ll have a list of 93,000 dictionary words that are available with the .com extension.”

Researchers Achieve 'Absurdly Fast' Algorithm for Network Flow

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Maximum flow has been studied since the 1950s, when it was formulated to study the Soviet railway system.”

Nintendo's Big Piracy Case Is A Very Sad Story

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“That equates to about $3,800 a month, all of which was disposal income that would not have been available to him but for his involvement in the conspiracy.”

I've locked myself out of my digital life

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I am in cyclic dependency hell.”

EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The biggest odd one out is Apple’s Lightning iPhone port that’s used by around 20 percent of devices sold in Europe.”

Germany paying $5.5bn for Intel fab

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Intel says it expects 30% subsidies when it builds a fab, and CEO Pat Gelsinger says it costs 30-40% more to build a fab in Europe than in Asia.”

Beacon is switching to a four-day work week. Here's why.

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“However, at Beacon, we passionately believe that the best way to build software is to have smart humans in a room together.”

Apple unveils M2 with breakthrough performance and capabilities

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Compared with the latest 10-core PC laptop chip, the CPU in M2 provides nearly twice the performance at the same power level.”

Plain text. With lines.

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“I end up with some bloated format that only one or two apps can open.”

Graduate Student's Side Project Proves Prime Number Conjecture

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Since each prime number can only be divided by 1 and itself, the set of all prime numbers is one example of a primitive set.”

SR-71 Pilot explains how he Survived to his Blackbird Disintegration at a Speed of Mach 3.2

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Among professional aviators, there’s a well-worn saying: Flying is simply hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror.”

It Costs $110,000 to Fully Gear-Up in Diablo Immortal

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Specifically, Legendary Gems aren’t even a guaranteed drop for paying players, as they are only randomly awarded upon purchasing Legendary Crests (i.e. loot boxes) - which may be the reason why Diablo Immortal didn’t launch worldwide.”

I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“They’ve got you to enable notifications, since they can be helpful, but now they’ve co-opted that notification consent to send you marketing notifications.”

LSD microdosing does not appear to improve mood or cognitive ability, according to new placebo-controlled study

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“A new randomized controlled study of LSD microdosing has failed to find evidence that the psychedelic practice results in improvements to mood or cognition.”

It's Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“These are squishy orange cones that we all plow through, like 15-year-olds in driver’s ed.”

Dear Spotify. Can we just get a table of songs?

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the least useful, that would be the cover art.”

What rr does

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The replayed execution’s address spaces, register contents, syscall data etc are exactly the same in every run.”

Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Today we’re sharing open source code that can sort arrays of numbers about ten times as fast as the C++ std::sort, and outperforms state of the art architecture-specific algorithms, while being portable across all modern CPU architectures.”

Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers, by email

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Affected new hires were informed Thursday, Brock said, via email.”

VSCodium: Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS Code

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.”

Elon Musk feels 'super bad' about economy, needs to cut 10% of Tesla jobs

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“So far, demand for Tesla cars and other electric vehicles has remained strong and many of the traditional indicators of a downturn - including increasing dealer inventories and incentives in the United States - have not materialized.”

Zero-Day Exploitation of Atlassian Confluence

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Volexity was subsequently able to recreate that exploit and identify a zero-day vulnerability impacting fully up-to-date versions of Confluence Server.”

Dangerous Gift

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“How long till my front door gets broken down?”

Installing a payphone in my house

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“My payphone number had been blacklisted, but the great thing about living in a metropolitan area in the U.S. in the 90s is that there was always another payphone.”

How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“We will begin with a simple program with a throughput of around 3.5GiB/s, and improve its performance twentyfold.”

Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Still, from time to time I find myself disputing with borrow checker and type system for no practical reason.”

Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Our solution to that was to develop a high-level API around the machine translation engine, port it to WebAssembly, and optimize the operations for matrix multiplication to run efficiently on CPUs.”

Tim Hortons app violated privacy laws in collection of 'vast amounts' of sensitive location data

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The investigation uncovered that Tim Hortons continued to collect vast amounts of location data for a year after shelving plans to use it for targeted advertising, even though it had no legitimate need to do so.”

Facebook parent Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The move is not because of the company’s regulatory overhang or its current advertising slowdown, she said.”

How to Make the Universe Think for Us

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“That the device often succeeds beggars belief, even to its designers.”

Gmail accepts forged YouTube emails

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I was greatly surprised to see that the forged email had passed Gmail’s DKIM/DMARC checks.”

SomaFM

Tue, 31 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Over 30 unique channels of listener-supported, commercial-free, underground/alternative radio broadcasting to the world.”

What the f*ck Python!

Tue, 31 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“But sometimes, the outcomes of a Python snippet may not seem obvious at first sight.”

After millennia of agricultural expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’

Tue, 31 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“After millennia, we have passed the peak, and in recent years global agricultural land use has declined.”

Hacking Ham Radio: WinAPRS – Part 5

Tue, 31 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Windows XP is easier to exploit in this instance due to a lack of ASLR.”

Dragonfly: A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached

Mon, 30 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Fully compatible with Redis and Memcached APIs, Dragonfly requires no code changes to adopt.”

Bob Cassette Rewinder: Hacking Detergent DRM for 98% Cost Saving

Mon, 30 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“With the simple EEPROM chip, standard 0.1 inch contact spacing, one-byte counter, and no error checking, it sure seems Daan Tech didn’t really try very hard!”

A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows

Mon, 30 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“I need an artist who works for free and isn’t allowed to say no.”

Programming in the Apocalypse

Mon, 30 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go.”

Electronic Catan LCD Tiles

Sun, 29 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Linking up a bunch of tiles creates a position-aware partial mesh network.”

How a Single Raspberry Pi made my Home Network Faster

Sun, 29 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Statistically, our household is averaging 15% of queries blocked and a spike over a lousy weather weekend of 30% blocked.”

Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server (2022 Edition)

Sun, 29 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The server itself cost $531, and I bought four disks for $732, bringing the total cost to $1,263.”

Big Tech talks up privacy while trying to kill privacy laws

Sun, 29 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.”

8 compelling reasons to quit Chrome and switch to Firefox

Sat, 28 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s a rare browser not based on Chromium, the project that powers Chrome, unlike other rivals like Edge or Opera.”

Terraform should have remained stateless

Sat, 28 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Point being, are we adding state because 1% of the resources couldn’t be mapped otherwise?”

marginalia.nu goes open source

Sat, 28 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The needs of the marginalia project, and the needs of an open source project have effectively aligned.”

This is how they do it!

Sat, 28 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“How they created the password was a secret until now!”

Knots 3D: Learn how to tie useful knots

Fri, 27 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Our comprehensive library features over 200 animated knots with step-by-step tutorials that transform complex rope work into clear, easy-to-follow instructions that work for complete beginners and serve as a quick reference for experts.”

GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor and provides financial assistance to patients in need

Fri, 27 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Activity 1: Donate new clothes to the homeless, record the action, and post it on social media.”

Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective

Fri, 27 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“And I don’t feel I did a good job communicating the frustration he went through in the one hour or so until he gave up.”

S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010

Fri, 27 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The city lost 54,813 people, or 6.3% of its population, from July 2020 to July 2021.”

SQLite3 Fiddle

Thu, 26 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This app runs on your device. After loading, it does not interact with the remote server at all.”

Ancient Earth: What did Earth look like X million years ago?

Thu, 26 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Use the ← and → keys or drag the timeline to travel through time”

yes, i was forced to be a child star. it was never my dream or my idea.

Thu, 26 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The big lie that she didn’t force me to become a child actor when I was seven, that it was all my idea.”

The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling

Thu, 26 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“If you bill £1,000 an hour, as some senior lawyers do, then any particular six-minute increment of time is available to be turned into £100.”

Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits

Wed, 25 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“All the really bad security vulnerabilities were obvious.”

Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

Wed, 25 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“This is a simulation of the 1972 Atari game Pong at a circuit level.”

Google has been DDoSing SourceHut for over a year

Wed, 25 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“For a start, I never really appreciated the fact that Go secretly calls home to Google to fetch modules through a proxy (you can set GOPROXY=direct to fix this).”

SwiftUI in 2022

Wed, 25 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“SwiftUI is an unreliable mess that needs to be treated with oven mitts, and I won’t be increasing my reliance on it anytime soon.”

YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos == infinite disk space

Tue, 24 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“YouTubeDrive is a silly proof-of-concept, and I do not endorse its high-volume use.”

Bugs Are Evolving to Eat Plastic, Study Finds

Tue, 24 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The research scanned more than 200 million genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.”

Healthchecks.io Hosting Setup, 2022 Edition

Tue, 24 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The monthly Hetzner bill is €484.”

A Kernel Hacker Meets Fuchsia OS

Tue, 24 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Despite KASLR, the kernel pointers were the same on every Fuchsia boot!”

Imagen: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Mon, 23 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“At this time we have decided not to release code or a public demo.”

Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness

Mon, 23 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“She said, you work very hard on a problem for a long time, and then you get this rush, this wonderful satisfaction when you’ve solved it.”

Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

Mon, 23 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Finland’s is the first Green Party to adopt such a position.”

Useless Use of "dd"

Mon, 23 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s purely a superstitious charm trying to ensure safe passage of the data.”

How This Ends

Sun, 22 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“That recession could easily last until the end of 2023.”

The mindless tyranny of 'what if it changes?' as a software design principle

Sun, 22 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Shy away from numbers or concrete analysis during design. Good engineers estimate. Great engineers speculate.”

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?

Sun, 22 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Over the 20 years of the study, sun avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.”

Faster CRC32 on the Apple M1

Sun, 22 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“However, I discovered a simple update to a widely used technique that makes it possible to run twice as fast as existing solutions on the Apple M1.”

Apple shipped me a 79-pound iPhone repair kit to fix a 1.1-ounce battery

Sat, 21 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all.”

The balance has shifted away from SPAs

Sat, 21 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“SPAs are no longer the cool kids they once were 10 years ago.”

Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around wifi restrictions

Sat, 21 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“If the wifi is letting WhatsApp messages through, what if we used WhatsApp as a vehicle for the information we really care about?”

Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare

Sat, 21 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“This basically means you must have JS enabled to access the site and you will incur a 2-3 seconds delay before the content is served.”

This "amateur" programmer fought cancer with 50 Nvidia Geforce 1080Ti

Fri, 20 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Furthermore, the accuracy of tumor identification has reached 90%.”

Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?

Fri, 20 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.”

Michigan Couple Says Town Seized Their Building and Offered To Return It if They Bought Two Cars for Police

Fri, 20 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The Kozbials, immigrants from Poland, say they had a state license to grow medical marijuana, but the city seized the building anyway and held on to it for 17 months without charging them with a crime.”

Speeding up sort performance in Postgres 15

Fri, 20 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Rounding up to the next power of 2 causes an average of 25% of memory to get wasted.”

Introducing the new and upgraded Framework Laptop

Thu, 19 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This is perhaps the first time ever that generational upgrades are available in a high-performance thin and light laptop, letting you pick the improvements you want without needing to buy a full new machine.”

Vangelis, Oscar-Winning Composer, Dies at 79

Thu, 19 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A cause of death was not revealed.”

OutHorse Your Email

Thu, 19 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Disconnect from work and let the horses of Iceland reply to your emails while you are on vacation.”

Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Thu, 19 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Before this, Rust had no native ability to deal with arrays bigger than 32 elements!”

I Spent 2 years Launching Tiny Projects

Wed, 18 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I ended up selling for $5,300, which blew my tiny mind.”

Why billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

Wed, 18 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Taxes depend on what you are selling, your home country and your customer’s home country.”

Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore

Wed, 18 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Therefore, we can see Git ignores .gitignore because its in .gitignore, which means it didn’t ignore .gitignore for instructions.”

Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste

Wed, 18 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It makes up 12% of all global waste.”

I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone!

Tue, 17 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s increasingly clear that a small premium phone is not on any OEM roadmap.”

Taking a Break from Social Media Makes You Happier and Less Anxious

Tue, 17 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The researchers gathered 154 volunteers with a mean age of 29.6 years old.”

Using a "Proper" Camera as a Webcam

Tue, 17 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Unfortunately, most webcams are terrible cameras that take terrible pictures.”

The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background

Tue, 17 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β = + 0.17), but socializing had no effect.”

Why I no longer recommend Julia

Mon, 16 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In my experience, Julia and its packages have the highest rate of serious correctness bugs of any programming system I’ve used, and I started programming with Visual Basic 6 in the mid-2000s.”

Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

Mon, 16 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“That makes it especially tragic to report that nearly all the traffic to the site is now from SEO spam bots, presumably searching for all that elusive SEO spam-free content.”

Web3 is just expensive P2P

Mon, 16 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Doing the operations on an actual blockchain is very expensive.”

Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

Mon, 16 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Results of Exp.1 showed that household cats paid attention to the monitor for longer in the incongruent condition, suggesting an expectancy violation effect; however, café cats did not.”

Fly.io: the Reclaimer of Heroku's Magic

Sun, 15 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“This allows them to get your app running in multiple regions for a lot less than it would cost to run it on Heroku.”

The problem with bitcoin miners

Sun, 15 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Last year, one MARA executive earned over $220 million in cash and stock-based compensation, in a year when the company’s total revenue was $150 million.”

The very weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option

Sun, 15 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It appears that HP is actually shipping a Linux and then running DOS in a VM.”

Intel's new Chimera: Alder Lake

Sun, 15 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Intel have actually sacrificed their flagship 512-bit instructions in order to run multiple threads in low-power cores.”

Exclusive: Over 800 WhiteHat Jr Employees Resign As Edtech Giant Asks To Report To Office

Sat, 14 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Over 800 full-time employees put down their papers and exited coding startup WhiteHat Jr in the last 60 days as the startup, which was acquired by edtech giant BYJU’S, asked all its employees to work from office within a month’s time.”

Linux Insides

Sat, 14 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A book-in-progress about the linux kernel and its insides.”

Pirate Site Blocking is Making its Way Into Free Trade Agreements

Sat, 14 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The new free trade agreement between Australia and the UK includes a site blocking paragraph.”

Former employee blows whistle on baby formula production plant tied to outbreak

Sat, 14 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The FDA did not interview the whistleblower until late December 2021.”

The Apple GPU and the Impossible Bug

Fri, 13 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“As soon as a partial render is required, however, failing to provide this program means the GPU dereferences a null pointer and faults.”

23,000 Devices Shipped! Quick Start Guide for Flipper Zero

Fri, 13 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“At the time of writing this post, we have already shipped 23,109 devices.”

The Other Kind of Staff Software Engineer

Fri, 13 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Everyone wants to present themselves as a profit center.”

A clean start for the web

Fri, 13 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The web’s evolution over the last decade has mirrored the American economy.”

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal fires two top executives, freezes hiring

Thu, 12 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Effective this week, we are pausing most hiring and backfills, except for business critical roles.”

Astronomers Reveal First Image of the Black Hole at the Heart of Our Galaxy

Thu, 12 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies.”

The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever

Thu, 12 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“I could’ve done that with every single version that I made, at any point from 2018 until now.”

I Stopped To Watch Kids Playing at Recess. Security Was Called.

Thu, 12 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“As I have said since I founded Free-Range Kids in 2008, and since starting Let Grow in 2017, our society is set on overestimating danger and underestimating kids.”

NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules

Wed, 11 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Pre-Turing customers will continue to run the closed source modules.”

Passenger with "no idea how to fly" a plane lands Cessna at Florida airport after pilot suffers possible medical emergency

Wed, 11 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Dramatic audio between the passenger and air traffic controllers revealed the tense moments before the single-engine Cessna 208 landed at Palm Beach International Airport.”

Coinbase admits users may lose crypto if exchange goes bankrupt

Wed, 11 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Coinbase users would become “general unsecured creditors,” meaning they have no right to claim any specific property from the exchange in proceedings.”

Announcing D1: our first SQL database

Wed, 11 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“D1 is built on SQLite.”

We Need A Middle Class For Startups

Tue, 10 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It’s near impossible to return money raised and get your equity back.”

The music lives on

Tue, 10 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“iPod touch will be available while supplies last.”

Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11

Tue, 10 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“According to a poll 72% of citizens oppose the indiscriminate scanning of their private communications.”

Why do USB-C hubs still have USB 2.0 ports?

Tue, 10 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Essentially this is getting a USB 2.0 port for free.”

I'm All-In on Server-Side SQLite

Mon, 09 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The most important thing you should understand about Litestream is that it’s just SQLite.”

UST Stablecoin Loses Dollar Peg for Second Time in 48 Hours, LUNA Market Cap Falls Below UST's

Mon, 09 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“TerraUSD (UST) has lost its dollar peg for the second time in three days, falling to as low as $0.65 on Monday, according to the most recent price estimates from CoinMarketCap.”

I Saw a Cool Truck Today

Mon, 09 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“53-foot semi-trailers are prohibited on the vast majority of the streets of New York City.”

Announcement: I’m Going to Miss You, But I Am Taking a Sabbatical

Mon, 09 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“There’s no real roadmap for this, no blueprint for independent creators taking sabbaticals to recharge.”

How mindfulness can make you a darker person

Sun, 08 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“By quelling our feelings of guilt, it seems, the common meditation technique discourages us from making amends for our mistakes.”

Donald Knuth Was Framed

Sun, 08 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“He wasn’t competing with McIlroy, and didn’t know how McIlroy was going to critique it.”

No Fixed Address Bank Account

Sun, 08 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“HSBC UK’s No Fixed Address Account is a specialist service available in selected branches to help people without a fixed home address open a bank account.”

Monsanto’s Ghostwriting to Influence Science and Media

Sun, 08 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Monsanto ghostwrote research and essays to promote the safety of the pesticide glyphosate.”

Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

Sat, 07 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Apple employees began returning to Apple Park last month, with the three-day in-office work policy being enacted on May 23.”

Shaving is too expensive

Sat, 07 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The double edged razor has become a product that you can only buy on the internet, and which you will only buy if you know that it exists.”

Xilem: An architecture for UI in Rust

Sat, 07 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“UI code written in this architecture will look very intuitive to those familiar with state of the art toolkits such as SwiftUI, Flutter, and React, while at the same time being idiomatic Rust.”

Unix command line conventions over time

Sat, 07 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Initially, GNU used the plus (+) to indicate a long option, but quickly changed to a double dash (–).”

Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

Fri, 06 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I will follow that thing for 2-3 days then back to that unproductive and mindless pithole.”

When negotiating a price, never bid with a round number

Fri, 06 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Rather, bid with a more precise number, like $9,800 or $1.03 million or $14.80 per share.”

Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

Fri, 06 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“By Moody’s reckoning, Boise’s homes are 73% overvalued, making it the most overpriced city in the nation.”

How many radioactive bananas would you need to power a house?

Fri, 06 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“A banana contains about 100 calories of food energy, and if you incinerate whole bananas as fuel, it would only take about 10 bunches per day to keep your house running.”

7GUIs

Thu, 05 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The task set should be as small as possible yet reflect as many typical (or fundamental or representative) challenges in GUI programming as possible.”

Please stop disabling zoom

Thu, 05 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“According to the HTTP Archive Web Alamac, 24% of desktop homepages and 29% of mobile homepages attempt to disable scaling by setting either maximum-scale to a value less than or equal to 1, or user-scalable set to 0 or none.”

Apple, Google and Microsoft Commit to Expanded Support for FIDO Standard to Accelerate Availability of Passwordless Sign-Ins

Thu, 05 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Allow users to automatically access their FIDO sign-in credentials (referred to by some as a “passkey”) on many of their devices, even new ones, without having to re-enroll every account.”

Holy ship! Shopify to acquire Deliverr for $2.1B: building the future of global logistics for independent brands

Thu, 05 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Founded in 2017, Deliverr’s hassle-free logistics network now delivers more than a million orders per month for thousands of merchants across the U.S.”

Mechanical Watch

Wed, 04 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components.”

Tailscale raises $100M… to fix the Internet

Wed, 04 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“We don’t want people to worry that we’re going to cancel their free plan, because the free plan is where all our referrals come from.”

Microsoft 3D Movie Maker Source Code

Wed, 04 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“This code was restored from the Microsoft corporate archives and cleared for release.”

The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

Wed, 04 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“And so we would deprioritize product polish for projects that looked better to a promotion committee.”

Using QGIS to apply a 1777 style to today's OpenStreetMap data

Tue, 03 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“What would it look like if count de Ferraris would have made his map today?”

The strange business of hole-in-one insurance

Tue, 03 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“A standard tournament with 100 golfers playing a 165-yard hole with a $10k prize sets an event back ~$235.”

When I made another Monkey Island

Tue, 03 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It’s ironic that the people who don’t want me to make the game I want to make are some of the hard core Monkey Island fans.”

CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders

Tue, 03 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors.”

I won free load testing

Mon, 02 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“My site wouldn’t have gone down if I was still using that setup.”

The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982

Mon, 02 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Sessions (usually 4-5 hours in length) are held whenever players travel into town, averaging several sessions a week.”

Brendan@Intel.com

Mon, 02 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“This became especially clear after I recently worked with another hardware vendor, who were initially friendly and supportive but after evaluations of their technology went poorly became bullying and misleading.”

Pop culture has become an oligopoly

Mon, 02 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions.”

How to professionally say

Sun, 01 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I’m unable to add value to this meeting but I would be happy to review the minutes.”

I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

Sun, 01 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Slowly it dawned on me that not only did I just loan $19,975 to the government for 2 months with zero interest, but I’d locked myself out of the golden window for buying I-bonds.”

We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it

Sun, 01 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“This filtering decision was the difference between results that lead to intriguing headlines, and those that produce no trend and no paper.”

My experience getting a tech job with no degree or relevant work experience

Sun, 01 May 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“A mere 4~ years and 4 jobs later I now make 175,000 dollars as a senior software engineer.”

Internet Archive joins opposition to the “SMART Copyright Act”

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“If the SMART Copyright Act were to pass, the Copyright Office would select a “technical measure” every three years that online service providers would be required to implement.”

Noto emoji, a new black and white emoji font with less color

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Now, our phones have fancy retina screens and somewhere along the way an important part of what made emoji so handy was left by the wayside: their simplicity.”

Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Researchers say there’s growing evidence that nature has a powerful effect on us, improving both our physical and psychological health.”

I've used all the notebooks

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The act of writing helped them solidify complicated ideas.”

Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“During the second half of 2021, 20% of our nights booked were for stays of longer than a month, and half were for stays of longer than a week.”

Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It’s the Billion Dollar Mistake all over again.”

You can now ask Google to remove your phone number, email or address from search

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Its homepage includes a copy of my credit report, Social Security card, phone bill, and a fake but otherwise official looking government ID card.”

Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Before the $75,000 procedure he had in January, he was about 5'7”."

103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.”

Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“That prompted over 4,000 Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community members to rally in defense of the GNOME Foundation, raising over $150,000 to defend against the bogus claim.”

New links found between musical training and cognitive ability

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“A direct causal link between musical training and general cognitive faculties, however, seems unlikely.”

Lets talk about blockchains

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Most applications simply do not require global consensus in order to operate.”

Apple’s Self Service Repair now available

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Apple will offer tool rental kits for $49, so that customers who do not want to purchase tools for a single repair still have access to these professional repair tools.”

Public Money, Public Code

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“If it is public money, it should be public code as well.”

I put my whole life into a single database

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Since the start of this project, I collected a total of more than 380,000 data points.”

SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.”

Be careful with that thing, it's a confidential coffee maker

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The Microsoft employees chipped in to buy a cheap coffee maker and put it in their shared offices.”

Elegant six-page proof reveals the emergence of random structure

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their “expectation threshold” conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves.”

3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Over the 280-day period covered by this 3,200-year-old ostracon, common excuses for absence include “brewing beer” and “his wife was bleeding.””

Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In short, zq is based on stateful dataflow while jq is based on stateless dataflow.”

Principles of Engineering Management

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Managing comes first.”

Why LSP?

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“To sum the above succinctly, the problem with decent IDE support was not of N * M, but rather of an inadequate equilibrium of a two-sided market.”

I sold 640 copies of my book in one year

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“You signed up for two jobs if you decided to write a book.”

The Hare programming language

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust.”

No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Today, one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men.”

French fighter jet joy ride goes très, très wrong (2020)

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The 64-year-old was not correctly instructed, to say the least, in passenger etiquette, and to make a long story short, he self-ejected midflight.”

Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Also note that the company says after that period, it may keep copies of your data in “backup storage” to recover in some instances such as software error and legal issues.”

Google gives Europe a ‘reject all’ button for tracking cookies

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Previously, Google allowed users to accept all tracking cookies with a single click, but forced people to click through various menus to reject them all.”

My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“No matter if you’re using 1 Gbit/s or 25 Gbit/s, you pay the same monthly fee.”

I stopped working on black hole information loss

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“But because you can’t solve this problem with mathematics alone, and experiments are not possible, not now and probably not in the next 10000 years.”

Google, Meta, others will have to explain algorithms under new EU legislation

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover for noncompliance.”

Chris Lattner on garbage collection vs. Automatic Reference Counting (2017)

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Here’s the way I look at it, and as you said, the ship has somewhat sailed: I am totally convinced that ARC is the right way to go upfront.”

Magic-trace – High-resolution traces of what a process is doing

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“You use it like perf: point it to a process and off it goes.”

Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations.”

Repulsive Curves

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Curves play a fundamental role across computer graphics, physical simulation, and mathematical visualization, yet most tools for curve design do nothing to prevent crossings or self-intersections.”

US Navy wirelessly beams 1.6 kW of power a kilometer using microwaves

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In what it describes as the most significant demonstration of its kind in half a century, the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) beamed 1.6 kW of power over a kilometer (3,280 ft) using a microwave beam at the US Army Research Field in Maryland.”

Apple Discontinues macOS Server

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“As of April 21, 2022, Apple has discontinued macOS Server.”

The smallest 256x256 single-color PNG file, and where you've seen it (2015)

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“But when you can send a tile in just 103 bytes, sending the tile is as simple as sending the redirect.”

I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Again, my main point is that there’s nothing inherently flawed with the analysis and plots presented in the original paper.”

Go will use pdqsort in next release

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In common patterns, pdqsort is often faster (i.e. 10x faster in sorted slices).”

Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“If you have a mismatched type in a comparator, C++ will not warn you even with -Weverything.”

A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“In the first episode, a toddler takes a 20-minute walk to a grocery store and picks up three items for his mom: flowers, curry and fishcakes.”

California grid set record of 97% renewable power on April 3

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The peak, which occurred briefly at 3:39 p.m., broke the previous record of 96.4% set on March 27, 2022.”

The unreasonable fight for municipal broadband

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“And, even better, the city insists I’ll pay $49.95 forever.”

Framework Laptop Mainboard

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“All of this is a starting point for a broader set of open source Mainboard documentation to enable creation of fully compatible third-party Mainboards in the future.”

De-AMP: Cutting out Google and enhancing privacy

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“AMP pages are served from Google’s servers, though designed to look like they’re coming from the original publisher’s site.”

How we upgraded our 4TB Postgres database

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“To be frank, it wasn’t a completely straight path from point A to point B.”

The absurd complexity of server-side rendering

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Our pages went uncrawled by Bing, time to first meaningful paint grew faster than npm, and it became clear: something must be done.”

Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling.”

TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“For the vast majority of Americans, the IRS already knows what we owe in taxes.”

UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The suspected infection at the UK Prime Minister’s Office was associated with a Pegasus operator we link to the UAE.”

Mental speed is high until age sixty

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Slowing of mental speed was observed only after approximately age 60.”

The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Your programming challenge: Add a mult command to memcached.”

Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“This was the case with Unity for a long time, but in the last few years the quality of that back half of development has rapidly declined, to the point where people are absolutely sick of their own projects by the time they’re finished… or more accurately, abandoned, because long-term maintenance of Unity games is appallingly hard.”

Samsung Electronics cultural issues causing disasters in foundry, LSI, DRAM

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“There are credible reports of lies and deceit within the Samsung Foundry operations.”

The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit.”

100 People with rare cancers who attended same NJ high school demand answers

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“By April 11, he had heard from more than 100 former Colonia High School attendees who had been diagnosed with rare tumors and cancers.”

Netflix End of Series 1

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Netflix has been the best job of my career so far, and I’ll miss my colleagues and the culture.”

Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Police never described Durvin as a suspect in the search warrant application they submitted seeking permission to track him and court records show he has not been charged with any crimes in Virginia since police took out the warrant.”

I was wrong – CRDTs are the future (2020)

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“At its heart, OT is a glorified for() loop with some helper functions to update character offsets.”

When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“So instead of writing code, consider instead having the candidate read existing code and talk about what it does and how it works.”

DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Privacy-centered search engine DuckDuckGo has completely removed the search results for many popular pirates sites including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies.”

Moreutils: A collection of Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“moreutils is a collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.”

Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Another study failed to show improvements in hearing compared to the placebo group, but the company attributes that result to flaws in the design of the trial.”

We lost 54k GitHub stars

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Due to an unfortunate sequence of events, I accidentally made the project’s repository private for a moment.”

5-min breathing workout lowers blood pressure as much as exercise, drugs (2021)

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“IMST can be done in five minutes in your own home while you watch TV.”

Ethereum Has Issues

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It turns out that front-running is the tip of an iceberg of fundamental problems that Ethereum and similar systems suffer.”

Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“In summary, about 80% of Germany’s energy comes from fossil fuels, and about 50% of that comes from Russia.”

Inside the longest Atlassian outage

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“It took until Day 9 for executives at the company to acknowledge the outage.”

U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project.”

A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“On average, steam turbines reliably convert about 35 percent of a heat source into electricity, with about 60 percent representing the highest efficiency of any heat engine to date.”

Git security vulnerability announced

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“This vulnerability affects users working on multi-user machines where a malicious actor could create a .git directory in a shared location above a victim’s current working directory.”

New(ish) command line tools

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I got a bunch of replies with tools I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d make a list here.”

Consumer prices rose 8.5% in March – highest since 1981

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Due to the surge in inflation, worker wages, despite rising 5.6% from a year ago, weren’t keeping pace with the cost of living.”

WireGuard multihop available in the Mullvad app

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“All the traffic is encrypted twice directly on your device.”

A tiny Docker image to serve static websites

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“This got me to a whooping 186KB image and you can read more about it in the previous version of this post.”

Node.js packages don't deserve trust

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The fundamental problem with npm is that any package you install has full access to do whatever it wants on your computer.”

I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to explain it

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“In the end, I’ve come around to the view that most offset programs do not get us closer to a net zero world, and therefore are a dangerous distraction.”

Impressions from a first-time Mac user

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Closing the lid feels like closing the door of a German car.”

FBI Didn't Knock Down a Suspect's Door Because 'It Was an Affluent Neighborhood'

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“When it became clear that a forced entry was necessary, an FBI agent testified, “the decision was made, since it was an affluent neighborhood,” to do it inconspicuously.”

Heresy

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for.”

An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Most websites we sign up for don’t need our “real” email anyway.”

The Joy of Small Projects

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Companies pay millions of dollars to build complex apps and to convince you that you need to build the same complexity into your own projects.”

How Intelligent Are Cats? (2004)

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Cats sat down and washed.”

MIT graduate students vote to unionize

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“75% of 3,823 eligible graduate students voted, with 1,785 students (66%) voting in favor of unionization and 912 students (34%) voting against, according to results announced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).”

An Account of the Shanghai Lockdown

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The city is sending rations, but we got one small package of vegetables once during nine days.”

I need to find an apartment

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Long story short: I’ve taken a new position in Luxembourg and I have to find an apartment, in a different country, in a reasonably short time.”

Google says AI generated content is against guidelines

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Mueller says content written by AI falls under the category of auto-generated content, which could lead to a manual penalty.”

Why I'll never use Affirm again

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“After waiting on hold for nearly an hour, I was finally connected with a supervisor who found my open cases and consolidated them into a new case they created during the call.”

Mozilla Thunderbird Beta now supports Matrix chat

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The latest Thunderbird beta finally has Matrix support enabled by default.”

NotepadNext: A cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“There are numerous bugs and half working implementations.”

The United States Digital Corps

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“What started as an idea and grassroots effort evolved into the U.S. Digital Corps.”

The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was an absolute powerhouse.”

What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“In this article, they published the damning claim that the startup only generated $600K in revenue in 2021, all while burning about $10M/month in cash, and being close to running out of money.”

I stopped advertising and nothing happened

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Over 85% of our organic search traffic comes from users typing in our brand name - Total Car Check.”

The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020)

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It serves no purpose other than to pad the files to make them 0,5 MB larger.”

The existence of true one-way functions depends on Kolmogorov complexity

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“If they do not, cryptographers have shown, then secure cryptography is impossible.”

What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Notable features include the formal inclusion of native compilation, a technique that will greatly speed up your Emacs experience.”

In defense of simple architectures

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Our architecture is so simple I’m not even going to bother with an architectural diagram.”

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin promised them free crypto for an eyeball scan

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The men were offering all comers a T-shirt and a voucher for $20 worth of Worldcoin, which one of the men boasted would appreciate 500%.”

One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“As a result TikTok turned off the ability to upload new content in Russia.”

The next Google

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google.”

Switching from pyenv, rbenv, goenv and nvm to asdf

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Everything was fine until I kinda felt my config.fish file got bloated and somehow nvm was kinda slowing down my shell startup.”

The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Whilst familiar in our contemporary, terms such as ‘cyberspace’, ‘jacking-in’, ‘ICE’ and ‘the matrix’ were first introduced by Neuromancer, greatly influencing the dictionary that much of Cyberpunk borrows from and builds upon.”

USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Searching on Aliexpress, I found several USB-C hubs with the same case, same specs, and probably the same components… for 10 euros a piece.”

What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country.”

Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as "union", "pay raise", "slave labor"

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“In addition to the automated system, managers will have the authority to flag or suppress any Shout-Outs that they find inappropriate, the documents show.”

Are you a baby? A litmus test

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Trying to weasel out of all that with an app is, well, basically the entire value prop of Silicon Valley, but more importantly antithetical to growth.”

Vizio TVs are now showing banner ads over live TV

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Vizio will first identify what is on your screen and then place interactive banner ads over live TV programs.”

Horrible edge cases when dealing with music

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“He also changed his stage name to the symbol in 1993, and was thus usually referred to as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”.”

A project with a single 11,000-line code file

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Something I found hilarious is that a variable might be used on lines 200-210 and then again on line 8544.”

What are you doing, WordPress.com?

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“But at some point late last week, WordPress replaced all of the paid plans with a single ‘Pro’ plan and reduced the storage on the free plan 6x, from 3 GB to 500 MB.”

Those HTML attributes you never use

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Use of rel=preload here informs the browser that we want the indicated resources to load in priority, so they’re not blocked by things like scripts and stylesheets.”

The human genome is, at long last, complete

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“But even after 20 years of upgrades, eight percent of our genome still remained unsequenced and unstudied.”

YouTube cancelled my Nextcloud installation how-to

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Your interface does not allow me any way to speak to a human being about this.”

Albini pitching Nirvana: "I would like to be paid like a plumber" (1992)

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth.”

A few things to know before stealing my 914

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The last guy who stole my 914 used this very spot and it was rather convenient for all concerned parties.”

A database for 2022

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The migration from etcd to one-big-table in SQLite was easy.”

The GOV.UK Design System is now live

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“In fact, pages on GOV.UK built with the Design System download about twice as fast as those that haven’t, as they use about half as much code.”

RFC 9225: Software Defects Considered Harmful

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Endeavoring to reduce the number of degradations in the future, implementers MUST NOT introduce bugs when writing software.”

The smallest and worst HDMI display

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“That’s right, in an HDMI cable, nestled amongst the high-speed differential pairs, there’s an exceedingly slow i2c bus.”

I'm a Scam Prevention Expert, and I Got Scammed

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“He was knowledgeable, polite, and professional.”

Mastodon 3.5

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Discoverability makes or breaks a platform, as there is nothing more important to retain a new user than to let them find something interesting to stay for, as soon as possible.”

Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Leave it by your window each night with your satnav positioning turned on and your phone will record small variations in satellite signals, gathering data for machine learning analysis of meteorology and space weather patterns.”

Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“And it says that Comprehension took on average ~58%.”

The Uselessness of Phenylephrine

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It is found (according to the paper linked above) in 261 different OTC products, and it is a useless bait-and-switch on the consumer in every one of them.”

Taking our next step in the City by the Bay

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Since sharing that we were ready to take the next step and begin testing fully autonomous operations in the city, we’ve begun fully autonomous rides with our San Francisco employees.”

Generics can make your Go code slower

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It’s about systems engineers who are not excited about generics per se, but about monomorphization and its performance implications.”

FTC Sues Intuit for Its Deceptive TurboTax "free" Filing Campaign

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“In spite of this advertising, many consumers who took the time to gather their documents, entrust their personal information to Intuit, and begin the filing process found that they could not file their taxes for free.”

Difftastic: a structural diff that understands syntax

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Difftastic is a structural diff tool that compares files based on their syntax.”

Community Alert: Ronin Validators Compromised

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The attacker managed to get control over Sky Mavis’s four Ronin Validators and a third-party validator run by Axie DAO.”

Hackers Gaining Power of Subpoena Via Fake "Emergency Data Requests"

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“It is now clear that some hackers have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate.”

We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.”

Maybe you should do less 'work'

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“If you haven’t been fired, and no one has taken you aside to ask about your performance, then probably you’re meeting expectations.”

Majority in Japan backs nuclear power for first time since Fukushima

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Some 53% of people said nuclear reactors should restart if safety can be ensured, while 38% said they should remain shut, according to the poll conducted by the Nikkei.”

I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“And so in the year of our lord 2017 I had a Brilliant Startup Idea: use a structured database of clinical trials to provide simple, practical answers to common medical questions.”

Computer Networks From Scratch

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“First we’ll build an example system that will allow two people to send messages back and forth using plastic tubing and marbles instead of wires and electrical signals.”

Firefox UI UX history

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It’s also one of the ways to prevent divisions in the community, given that there have been forks every time the UI changes big.”

Obtaining My Personal Data From Amazon Was a Nightmare

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The first thing I learned is that Amazon is in no hurry to give you your data, nor does it really encourage you to ask for it in the first place.”

Countering threats from North Korea

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“We observed the campaigns targeting U.S. based organizations spanning news media, IT, cryptocurrency and fintech industries.”

Mourning loss as a remote team

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Pete’s wife had used the technical support chat to get a message to me.”

`COPY --chmod` reduced the size of my container image by 35%

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Well, I have been doing it wrong all these years.”

wireproxy: A userspace WireGuard client that exposes itself as a proxy

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“wireproxy is a completely userspace application that connects to a wireguard peer, and exposes a socks5/http proxy or tunnels on the machine.”

Running GUI apps within Docker containers

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“For example, if we run Firefox within Docker we can have an explicit separation of browser state between containers.”

I built a receipt printer for GitHub issues

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“After seeing a receipt printer spitting out orders while grabbing some take-out the other day, I wondered if I could use one to print out a ticket each time an issue was added to one of my repos.”

Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes, whistleblower alleges

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“In 2016, Yasser Elabd noticed a $40,000 payment to a client in Africa that didn’t smell right.”

NeRF Research Turns 2D Photos Into 3D Scenes

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The result, dubbed Instant NeRF, is the fastest NeRF technique to date, achieving more than 1,000x speedups in some cases.”

PoC for vulnerability in Honda's Remote Keyless System (CVE-2022-27254)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“This allows for an attacker to eavesdrop on the request and conduct a replay attack.”

The end of the nice GTK button

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“I personally feel like Adwaita has been the pinnacle of Linux design and that the Gnome design guidelines are absolutely great.”

Introducing MDN Plus: Make MDN your own

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“For today’s premium subscription service, MDN Plus, we are releasing three new features that begin to address this need: Notifications, Collections and MDN Offline.”

An email urging lower wages for new employees due to higher gas prices sparks walkout at Lawrence Applebee's

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The advantage this has for us is that it will increase application flow and has the potential to lower our average wage.”

If you're not using SSH certificates you're doing SSH wrong

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“None of these issues are actually inherent to SSH.”

But life had other plans

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Given that my wife didn’t recall talking with any angel lately, the simple explanation was that she was already pregnant when she went through the surgery.”

Why You Should Start Self Hosting

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“There are some stories where the user never figured out what they had done wrong to deserve suspension of account.”

A one in a million bug in Switch kernel

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Nintendo would not introduce this out-of-the-blue, there is some weird hardware phenomenon going on.”

How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The Nintendo Switch adopts a worrisome-strategy of preventing firmware downgrades by permanently modifying your device every time it updates.”

Mercedes Drive Pilot Beats Tesla Autopilot By Taking Legal Responsibility

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Once you engage Drive Pilot, you are no longer legally liable for the car’s operation until it disengages.”

Kwiggle: Folding bicycle small enough to fit in hand luggage

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The Kwiggle is the only folding bike in the world that fits in hand luggage (55x40x25 cm) and can be stowed away just like any other piece of luggage.”

Enemies: State-of-the-art digital humans in Unity

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Enemies expands on the work done for The Heretic, which featured Unity’s first realistic digital human.”

Updated Okta Statement on LAPSUS$

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The report highlighted that there was a five-day window of time between January 16-21, 2022, where an attacker had access to a support engineer’s laptop.”

Please put units in names

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“The Python program sleeps for five minutes, the Java program sleeps for 0.3 seconds, and the Haskell program sleeps for 0.3 milliseconds.”

Why Don't You Use ...

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“They are usually well aware of various technologies but have reasons not to use them which they usually won’t share.”

Librem 5: first impressions

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“In February 2018 I placed an order for a Librem 5.”

Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Unsurprisingly, very few people have heard of it, and even their Googling skills don’t come in handy.”

Windows Needs a Change in Priorities

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“There are inconsistencies across the OS that are just wild and stand out like a sore thumb (but now with rounded corners.)”

Decrypting your own HTTPS traffic with Wireshark

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Software that implements TLS typically (altough not always) will write keys and other TLS secrets to this file.”

Meld

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It might even help you to figure out what’s going on in that merge you keep avoiding.”

Vimeo: "We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube."

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Filmmakers claim that Vimeo demands them to pay thousands of dollars or their videos will be deleted.”

Why America can't build quickly anymore

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“By contrast, the 2017 Second Avenue subway opening, with just three stations, took seventeen years.”

Arizona House approves ban on close-up videotaping of police officers

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“The original proposal from Rep. John Kavanagh made it illegal to record within 15 feet of an officer interacting with someone unless the officer gave permission.”

OpenBSD/arm64 on Apple M1 systems

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It has taken a while, but I’m pleased to announce that OpenBSD/arm64 works well enough on Apple M1 systems for some wider testing.”

The Boschian Horror of 'Elden Ring'

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Bosch’s work, more than 500 years after his death, still retains an incredible power, but also a wonderful and much-debated sense of obscurity; was he a grotesque humorist or penitent painter of horrors?”

The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here!

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Keep in mind that this is still a very early, alpha release.”

Christopher Alexander, 1936-2022

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time.”

How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“A normal essay promises a payoff only when you finish it.”

Crypto is an Unproductive Bubble

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The hallmark of a bubble is people buying an asset primarily in the hopes of future appreciation driven by other buyers, rather than because of any notion of its long-term value.”

Zotero 6: Your research workflow, transformed

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Zotero 6 introduces an array of new features to transform how you do research, including a completely new way of working with PDFs and notes.”

H.264 is Magic

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It is the result of 30+ years of work with one single goal: To reduce the bandwidth required for transmission of full-motion video.”

Angus Wallace: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“They sterilised their equipment in cognac, and began surgery by making an incision in the patient’s chest, but with no surgical clamps available, Wong had to hold the incision open with a knife and fork while Wallace inserted the catheter.”

Court affirms it's false advertising to claim software is Open Source when it's not

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The parties didn’t dispute that the use of the Commons Clause makes a license non-free.”

How our free plan stays free

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Rather, increased word-of-mouth from free plans sells the more valuable corporate plans.”

Why we stopped making Einsteins

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.”

US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“The Fed raised rates by a quarter percentage point from near zero, in what is expected to be the first in a series of raises in the coming months.”

C Isn't A Programming Language Anymore

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“C is the lingua franca of programming.”

CSS-Tricks is joining DigitalOcean!

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“DigitalOcean is committed to continuing to produce high-quality content on front-end development and tending to the trove of content that exists here already.”

Go 1.18 is released!

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“With Go 1.18, Go is the first major language with fuzzing fully integrated into its standard toolchain.”

Popular Tibetan singer Tsewang Norbu dies of self-immolation protest

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“A Tibetan inside Tibet confirmed that as soon as Norbu set himself on fire, Chinese security officers sprang into action and took him away.”

CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach interrogators torture techniques

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“The details of the torture of Ammar al-Baluchi are in a 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, newly declassified as part of a court filing by his lawyers aimed at getting him an independent medical examination.”

Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“More generally, in many markets, consumers are uninformed and it’s fairly difficult to figure out which products are even half decent, let alone good.”

Medical student surgically implants Bluetooth device into own ear to cheat in final exam

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“It was the student’s final attempt on Monday to clear the exam after repeatedly failing it since getting admission into the college 11 years ago.”

On Being Indispensable

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“It took far too long for it to click in my brain that I was stuck.”

Microsoft is testing ads in the Windows 11 File Explorer

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“Microsoft has begun testing promotions for some of its other products in the File Explorer app on devices running its latest Windows 11 Insider build.”

Not dodgy at all and long overdue - user replaceable batteries

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0400

“Industry is not too happy about this.”

Veloren

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

“Veloren is an action-adventure role-playing game set in a vast fantasy world.”

My essential Firefox fixes (and add-ons) in 2022

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0400

“Mozilla recently removed the Search box by default, and added redundant padding to the toolbar to mimic Safari.”

Tokamak Energy moves closer to commercial fusion

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0400

“This is by far the highest temperature ever achieved in a spherical tokamak and by any privately funded tokamak.”

Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The problem is that student performance is continuous.”

Inspecting Web Views in macOS

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“It’s kind of like opening the developer tools in an Electron app, except these are native macOS apps with web views parading as system UI.”

A non-standard book list for software developers

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“If I pay close attention to the discussions taking place around me, and observe the thought patterns of the speakers, I can tell which of them definitely haven’t read or paid attention to Euclid.”

Python Design Patterns

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“This site is letting me collect my ideas about Python and Design Patterns all in one place.”

EARN-IT threatens encryption and therefore user freedom

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Once a backdoor is made, we don’t get to specify how it’s used, or by whom.”

Why does Google get internationalization wrong?

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“This header is sent to websites to tell them what language to serve the site in.”

How To Do Less

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“You probably need to do fewer things right now.”

Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“To my great disappointment, however, I’ve found that after testing the feature, now I can’t make the chronological feed the default.”

A short conversation with a bank

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“you: you… you deleted the statement from 2016”

Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“If you have AirTags in the vicinity of your iPad it drains its battery for no reason.”

Appeal to Ruby community from Kharkiv Rubyist

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“I am no hero.”

Just Say No to CBDCs

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“But you can’t, since these FedCoins are coded as usable for consumer purchases only, and will expire and vanish in seven days.”

Some tiny personal programs I've written

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“These are more about just doing something fun with no specific learning goal.”

The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“There was no mention of confidentiality at the meeting and no agreement to sign.”

Bugs in Hello World

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“All the versions linked above have a bug.”

Blender 3.1

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Cycles now has a Metal GPU backend, contributed by Apple.”

Apple unveils M1 Ultra, the world's most powerful chip for a personal computer

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“The new SoC consists of 114 billion transistors, the most ever in a personal computer chip.”

I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer!

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Even though I had no symptoms, I decided to go meet an oncologist who did a biopsy, followed by a PET scan which confirmed that the lump was cancerous and was localized to the breasts.”

Lead Exposure in Last Century Shrank IQ Scores of Half of Americans

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States.”

WebGPU: All of the cores, none of the canvas

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“I won’t use WebGPU to generate graphics.”

The Campaign to Shut Down Crucial Documentary Tool youtube-dl Continues, And So Does the Fight to Save It

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Uberspace doesn’t even host youtube-dl – it simply hosts the youtube-dl homepage, which links to GitHub.”

The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“It all started a year ago with a support ticket about corrupt files.”

An update on the threat landscape

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“All known attacker-controlled Blogspot domains have been taken down.”

So You Want to Study Mathematics

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“I think it is the purest and most beautiful of all the intellectual disciplines.”

My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“I think my main problem with it is that it makes me a passive recipient in my interactions with this device, instead of an active participant.”

Windows Defender is enough, if you harden it

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“You don’t need to buy expensive antivirus software.”

Mathematically Correct Breakfast: How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“It is not hard to cut a bagel into two equal halves which are linked like two links of a chain.”

Adding a "duress" password with PAM Duress

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“You could even spawn a process to remove the pam_duress module so the threat actor won’t be able to see if the duress module was available.”

Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call!

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“What’s more, Element Call is built entirely on Matrix: it doesn’t need any additional servers to get going.”

Retrieving your browsing history through a CAPTCHA

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“This proof of concept looks somewhat like a reCAPTCHA challenge, and styles visited links to look like black squares.”

I'm not convinced by the new lab leak debunking

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“I haven’t written about lab leak theory since because the boring truth is that we don’t know where Covid-19 came from, we probably aren’t going to find out, and very little of consequence actually hinges on the answer.”

A regular expression to check for prime numbers

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“If there is no match, then the number is prime.”

It's always been you, Canvas2D

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“There are Canvas2Ds in cars, on fridges, and in space (really).”

Apple CEO Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“For others, it may also be an unsettling change.”

Never Change Your Password

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Passwords do not age. They do not sour, spoil, or go stale.”

BBC resurrects WWII-era shortwave broadcasts as Russia blocks news of Ukraine invasion

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“The BBC World Service ended its use of the technology in Europe in 2008 after 76 years.”

My Stripe Tax Story

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“I deployed it on November 6, 2021, the same day that Stripe stopped billing a significant number of my customers, left all their invoices in a Draft state, and didn’t tell me about it.”

ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia from the internet

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Essentially, ICANN has been built to ensure that the Internet works, not for its coordination role to be used to stop it from working.”

How I See Numbers

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“When doing any sort of mental arithmetic or visualization of quantities, I picture numbers as shapes.”

Nintendo Is Removing Switch Emulation Videos On Steam Deck

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“YouTube user The Phawx posted a video showcasing how well the Steam Deck can emulate the Nintendo Switch, and it was soon taken down on copyright grounds.”

SingleFile: Save a complete web page into a single HTML file

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“SingleFile is a Web Extension (and a CLI tool) compatible with Chrome, Firefox (Desktop and Mobile), Microsoft Edge, Safari, Vivaldi, Brave, Waterfox, Yandex browser, and Opera.”

Epic Games Acquires Bandcamp as 'Fortnite' Maker Expands Into Music

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“According to Bandcamp, under its revenue model artists receive net an average of 82% of every sale.”

SPAs were a mistake

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Browsers give you a ton of stuff for free, built right in, out-of-the-box.”

How Does Perspective Work in Pictures?

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“There is no such thing as correct perspective; all choices of perspective have advantages and disadvantages.”

Write plain text files

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“When you store your writing in one company’s unique format, then you need that program to access it.”

Trapped in Silicon Valley's Hidden Caste System

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Yet those successes have, almost exclusively, come from historically privileged castes.”

Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“The problem with React hooks is that React isn’t truly reactive.”

5 things you don't need Javascript for

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Every day, I see people use Javascript to do things that are supported by default in good old HTML & CSS.”

Namecheap: Russia Service Termination

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 17:00:00 -0500

“If you hold any top-level domains with us, we ask that you transfer them to another provider by March 6, 2022.”

“O, so sorry. I need more time. my country defending Russian invasion”

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Right now my country defending russian invasion, so I’m a little busy now.”

I'm common as muck and spent £150 in a Michelin star restaurant to see if it was worth it

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“It was worth £150, easy.”

Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“[Coelux][3] makes a high-end artificial skylight which certainly looks awesome, but it costs upwards of $30k and also takes a lot of headroom in the ceiling.”

No user accounts, by design

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“F-Droid has never had a method to identify or track users in the Android client app, and getting information from f-droid.org has also never required any kind of identity information.”

New JSON query operators in SQLite 3.38.0

Sun, 27 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“JSON is on by default.”

Why not hire part-time developers?

Sun, 27 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Working part-time could let developers give their best to a project without the burden of emotional blackmail in the form of “9 to 5”.”

Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences)

Sun, 27 Feb 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“In the Windows world, backwards compatibility is the default, but in the Linux world, it’s less so.”

Year 2038 problem is still alive and well

Sun, 27 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“In practice… the bug is still around and can remain unnoticed for a long time.”

'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments, says Gabe Newell

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number.”

Make Linux look exactly like Windows 95

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“This is made possible through a project called Chicago95, that aims to bring a consistent, Win 95 look to XFCE desktops.”

NO_COLOR: disabling ANSI color output by default

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“Accepting the futility of trying to reverse this trend, an informal standard was proposed in 2017: Command-line software which adds ANSI color to its output by default should check for a NO_COLOR environment variable that, when present and not an empty string (regardless of its value), prevents the addition of ANSI color.”

GitHub Advisory Database now open to community contributions

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Today, we are excited to announce that the GitHub Advisory Database is now open to community contributions!”

Writing an OS in Rust

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language.”

Is Grammarly a Keylogger? What Can You Do About It?

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“Yet, by explicit definition, any tool that logs a user’s keystrokes and sends them to a third party is technically a keylogger.”

Miscellanea: Understanding the War in Ukraine

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“This can be a confusing question in this context because Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Foreign Ministry have given multiple conflicting and in some cases mutually contradictory answers for why they are proceeding as they are.”

On the removal of Come Back Alive

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“This morning, Patreon suspended a Ukrainian organization’s page from our site called “Come Back Alive” because it violated our policies.”

Moving the kernel to modern C

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Despite its generally fast-moving nature, the kernel project relies on a number of old tools.”

America’s most widely consumed cooking oil causes genetic changes in the brain

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“In all likelihood, it is not healthy for humans.”

You can't capture the nuance of my form fields

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“You cannot capture all of this nuance in a home-grown form control, or even anything close to it, but many JavaScript programmers do it anyway.”

AMD is now worth more than rival Intel

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“AMD’s market cap currently stands at $188 billion after shares rose nearly 2% in Tuesday’s session.”

The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“That way, if you saw cats, you knew that you were in that last failure case: The shell is running but forgot to put something on the screen.”

Behind Pornhub’s decade-old moderation problems

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“In the early days of the company, I was tasked with content moderation.”

What is PeerTube?

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“With PeerTube, no more opaque algorithms or obscure moderation policies!”

Subaru, Kia shut off some car features rather than adhere to 'right to repair' law

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“About 75% of Massachusetts voters sided with the auto repair industry in 2020 by passing a ballot initiative that’s supposed to allow car owners and their preferred auto shops to more easily peek into a car’s trove of online data.”

Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world.”

Howard Anglin: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“The government doesn’t need to break down your door anymore to effectively remove you from society.”

Why I will never buy another Samsung device

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“During the technical inspection of your device, the technician was able to determine that in addition to the display, the frame is also broken and that this damage is due to a mechanical impact, such as a fall, bending or excessive pressure.”

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

“Of the nearly 1 million soldiers in our sample, only 12% received an award of any type during the five years that we ran the study.”

I have no capslock and I must scream

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 15:00:00 -0500

“Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall, and run until the plug is pulled.”

Chris Lattner left Swift core team

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

“To answer your question, the root cause of my decision to leave the core team is a toxic environment in the meetings themselves.”

Coinbase CEO tries to weave a compelling story about how their own team came up with a Super Bowl ad

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 11:00:00 -0500

“I guess if there is a lesson here it is that if you’re going to take credit for someone else’s idea to try to make your team sound good, maybe you shouldn’t also use it as an opportunity to dunk on the people who actually came up with the idea.”