Posts from 2024

December 2024 118 posts

More telcos confirm China Salt Typhoon security breaches as White House weighs in theregister.com · “In one instance, the spies broke into an admin account that then gave them access to more than 100,000 routers, she added.”
Dec 31
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 simonwillison.net · “The model was trained on 2,788,000 H800 GPU hours at an estimated cost of $5,576,000.”
Dec 31
Why China Is Building a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor spectrum.ieee.org · “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.”
Dec 31
Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts wbur.org · “He was trying to make gold, she said, but he ended up concocting a combination of copper and tin.”
Dec 31
Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category pod.geraspora.de · “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).”
Dec 30
Dumping Memory to Bypass BitLocker on Windows 11 noinitrd.github.io · “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.”
Dec 30
Colliding with the SHA prefix of Linux's initial Git commit people.kernel.org · “Doing the 12-character prefix collision took about 6 hours on my OpenCL-enabled RTX 3080 GPU.”
Dec 30
Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior caltech.edu · “Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second.”
Dec 30
OpenAI's Board, Paraphrased: 'To Succeed, All We Need Is Unimaginable Sums of Money' daringfireball.net · “There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble.”
Dec 29
4.5 Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Scams, and Malware arxiv.org · “the majority of fake stars are used to promote short-lived malware repositories masquerading as pirating software, game cheats, or cryptocurrency bots”
Dec 29
Can LLMs Accurately Recall the Bible benkaiser.dev · “Many models struggled to recall Obadiah 1:16 NIV word for word, often mixing up the words with other translations.”
Dec 29
The Zombocom Problem newsletter.squishy.computer · “This is the Zombocom Problem: sure, it can be anything, but first it has to be something specific.”
Dec 29
Intel's $475 million error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug righto.com · “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.”
Dec 28
EU law mandating universal chargers for devices comes into force france24.com · “The law was first approved in 2022 following a tussle with US tech giant Apple.”
Dec 28
Billionaire Daniel Ek Shuts Down Spotify Unwrapped Calculator digitalmusicnews.com · “removed at the request of Spotify’s legal team”
Dec 28
Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus fishshell.com · “Over the 11 years fish used C++, only 17 people have at least 10 commits to the C++ code.”
Dec 28
Russia-linked cable-cutting tanker seized by Finland 'was loaded with spying equipment' lloydslist.com · “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”
Dec 27
VW Suffers Major Breach Exposing Location of 800,000 Electric Vehicles cyberinsider.com · “In some cases, the GPS data was precise to within 10 centimeters.”
Dec 27
They have not been trained for this ccc.de · “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”
Dec 27
A fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and it's not clear YouTube can stop him theverge.com · “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.”
Dec 27
Bill requiring US agencies to share custom source code with each other becomes law fedscoop.com · “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.”
Dec 26
OpenAI is Visa sherwood.news · “As Visa’s technological moat dried up, it built a legal moat, and there are already signs OpenAI is doing the same.”
Dec 26
Seconds Since the Epoch aphyr.com · “The POSIX time number is twenty-seven seconds lower.”
Dec 26
Cashing in on GIF by charging royalties dfarq.homeip.net · “On December 24, 1994, Compuserve and Unisys tried to give themselves a Christmas gift and make the Internet pay for it.”
Dec 26
Russian air defence missile incident emerges as likely cause of Azerbaijan Airlines crash euronews.com · “surviving passengers heard an explosion followed by what looked like shrapnel hitting the plane and damaging the fuselage.”
Dec 25
Three-quarters of the world's land is drying out, 'redefining life on Earth' grist.org · “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.”
Dec 25
Portspoof github.com · “Instead of informing an attacker that a port is CLOSED or FILTERED, Portspoof returns SYN+ACK for every connection attempt.”
Dec 25
Ruby 3.4.0 Released ruby-lang.org · “String literals in files without a frozen_string_literal comment now emit a deprecation warning when they are mutated.”
Dec 25
Intel shareholders look to yank back ex-CEO, CFO compensation cfodive.com · “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”
Dec 24
Cloudflare Must Block 'Piracy Shield' Domains and IP Addresses Across its Service torrentfreak.com · “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.”
Dec 24
Open source projects drown in bad bug reports penned by AI theregister.com · “These reports appear at first glance to be potentially legitimate and thus require time to refute.”
Dec 24
Trying out QvQ: Qwen's new visual reasoning model simonwillison.net · “It produced a very lengthy chain of thought that was almost entirely incorrect, but had some interesting “ideas” in it”
Dec 24
Ascension: Health data of 5.6 million stolen in ransomware attack bleepingcomputer.com · “The company now mails data breach notifications to 5,599,699 affected individuals via the United States Postal Service.”
Dec 23
'United Healthcare' Using DMCA Against Luigi Mangione Images Which Is Bizarre & Wildly Inappropriate abovethelaw.com · “The idea that UHC now owns every depiction of the guy accused of killing their employee is laughably frivolous.”
Dec 23
Why Are Cancer Guidelines Stuck in PDFs? seangeiger.substack.com · “The guidelines represent hundreds of thousands of hours of expert oncologists’ time. But the end result is a dense and hard to navigate PDF.”
Dec 23
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says search giant has slashed manager roles by 10% in efficiency drive nypost.com · “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 23
Dec 22: Why we use our own hardware at Fastmail fastmail.com · “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.”
Dec 22
Classified fighter jet specs leaked on War Thunder – again ukdefencejournal.org.uk · “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.”
Dec 22
i sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS'24 kyunghyuncho.me · “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.”
Dec 22
How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster avi.im · “They used a Bloom filter, which is very space efficient and fits in a CPU cache line.”
Dec 22
Pegasus spyware maker NSO Group is liable for attacks on 1,400 WhatsApp users theverge.com · “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.”
Dec 21
The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed honest-broker.com · “According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names.”
Dec 21
dropping hyper daniel.haxx.se · “There simply were no users asking for it and there were almost no developers interested or knowledgeable enough to work on it.”
Dec 21
Introducing S2 s2.dev · “Our Standard storage class provides end-to-end p99 latencies of under 500 milliseconds.”
Dec 21
OpenAI o3 Breakthrough High Score on ARC-AGI-Pub arcprize.org · “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.”
Dec 20
I'm Lovin' It: Exploiting McDonald's APIs to hijack deliveries and order food for a penny eaton-works.com · “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.”
Dec 20
Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push theregister.com · “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”
Dec 20
Do Autonomous Vehicles Outperform Latest-Generation Human-Driven Vehicles? A Comparison to Waymo's Auto Liability Insurance Claims at 25 Million Miles waymo.com · “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).”
Dec 20
Alignment faking in large language models anthropic.com · “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.”
Dec 19
First baby conceived via breakthrough fertility tech born newatlas.com · “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.”
Dec 19
GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot techcrunch.com · “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.”
Dec 19
Satellite powered estimation of global solar potential research.google · “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.”
Dec 19
More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD theguardian.com · “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.”
Dec 18
How to Lose a Fortune with Just One Bad Click krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Dec 18
Klarna's CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI but still advertises many open positions techcrunch.com · “Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 roles around the globe, according to the job postings page on its website.”
Dec 18
Dwingeloo telescope receives signals from Voyager 1 camras.nl · “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.”
Dec 17
ISO 8583: The language of credit cards increase.com · “As a result, these specifications still largely follow the rules set forth by the original standard from 1987.”
Dec 17
Partnering with Nihon Kotsu and GO on our first international road trip waymo.com · “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.”
Dec 17
Temu is the most downloaded app on the US App Store in 2024 techcrunch.com · “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.”
Dec 17
Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far 9to5mac.com · “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.”
Dec 16
UnitedHealth's Optum left an AI chatbot, used by employees to ask questions about claims, exposed to the internet techcrunch.com · “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?””
Dec 16
Rhode Island's online benefits system shuts down after cyberattack theverge.com · “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.”
Dec 16
Supply-chain attack analysis: Ultralytics blog.pypi.org · “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.”
Dec 16
Tenstorrent and the State of AI Hardware Startups irrationalanalysis.substack.com · “I ate one cookie and drank a bottle of water.”
Dec 15
Why Dumb TVs Deserve a Comeback makeuseof.com · “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.”
Dec 15
Scientists sheds light on how our brains create mental "chapters" with new event segmentation study psypost.org · “The major new finding in this study is that these chapters don’t just come from the way the story is written.”
Dec 15
School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood york.ac.uk · “On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban, and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night.”
Dec 14
You're a Mean One shirtpocket.com · “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.”
Dec 14
What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know. quantamagazine.org · “Entropy depends not on the difference between the gases, but on their distinguishability.”
Dec 14
Fast LLM Inference From Scratch andrewkchan.dev · “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.”
Dec 14
McKinsey & Company to pay $650 million for role in opioid crisis npr.org · “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”
Dec 13
US Bitcoin ATM operator Byte Federal suffered a data breach securityaffairs.com · “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.”
Dec 13
300,000+ Prometheus Servers and Exporters Exposed to DoS Attacks aquasec.com · “Such misconfigurations allow anyone to query the exposed environments to list labels or metrics.”
Dec 13
Harvard and Google to release 1 million public-domain books as AI training dataset techcrunch.com · “The new dataset isn’t available yet, and it’s not clear when or how it will be released.”
Dec 13
Microsoft Recall screenshots credit cards and Social Security numbers, even with the "sensitive information" filter enabled tomshardware.com · “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.”
Dec 12
Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say techcrunch.com · “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.
Dec 12
Fermat's Last Theorem: how it's going xenaproject.wordpress.com · “This story really highlights, to me, the poor job which humans do of documenting modern mathematics.”
Dec 12
Over 2,400 Voice Service Providers Face Removal for Failing to Comply with the Robocall Mitigation Database Filing Requirements docs.fcc.gov · “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.”
Dec 11
Court orders Automattic to restore WP Engine's access to WordPress.org techcrunch.com · “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.”
Dec 11
Wyden proposes bill to secure US telecoms after Salt Typhoon hacks bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Dec 11
X41 Reviewed Mullvad VPN x41-dsec.de · “The most serious vulnerabilities are considered to be race conditions and temporal safety violations leading to memory corruption issues in the signal handler code.”
Dec 11
GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house cnbc.com · “After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service.”
Dec 10
Lawsuit: A chatbot hinted a kid should kill his parents over screen time limits npr.org · “This was ongoing manipulation and abuse, active isolation and encouragement designed to and that did incite anger and violence.”
Dec 10
The Google Willow thing scottaaronson.blog · “We’re now deeply into the unverifiable regime that I warned about.”
Dec 10
U.S. math scores drop on major international test chalkbeat.org · “We have countries leapfrogging over us,” Carr said.
Dec 10
Compromising OpenWrt Supply Chain via Truncated SHA-256 Collision and Command Injection flatt.tech · “I immediately noticed that the length of the hash is truncated to 12, out of 64 characters.”
Dec 9
Why Gelsinger was wrong for Intel bcantrill.dtrace.org · “With regard to these cultural issues (and his other strengths aside), Pat Gelsinger was indisputably wrong for Intel.”
Dec 9
Atrium Health Data Breach Impacts 585,000 People securityweek.com · “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.”
Dec 9
Airline informant received thousands from passenger cash seizures atlantanewsfirst.com · “The DEA wasn’t keeping records of its encounters unless it found cash or drugs,” Horowitz said.
Dec 8
The £25,000 Tom Evans Pre-Amp Repair And A Copyright Strike hackaday.com · “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.”
Dec 8
How Much Do I Need to Change My Face to Avoid Facial Recognition? gizmodo.com · “Asking our governments to create laws to protect us is much easier than changing our faces dramatically all the time.”
Dec 8
UK bans daytime TV ads for cereals, muffins and burgers france24.com · “The government hopes the new measures could help prevent some 20,000 cases of childhood obesity a year.”
Dec 8
"Eat What You Kill" propublica.org · “Then you’re going to pay me more, because I’m doing more work.”
Dec 7
"BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home aaka.sh · “BGP peering in a residential setting proved to be an entirely different story.”
Dec 7
We all took the DVD boom era for granted filmstories.co.uk · “Sadly, the DVD boom couldn’t last forever.”
Dec 7
Employee lawsuit accuses Apple of spying on its workers semafor.com · “For Apple employees, the Apple ecosystem is not a walled garden. It is a prison yard.”
Dec 6
Tokyo government gives workers 4-day workweek to boost fertility, family time cnn.com · “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.”
Dec 6
Telecom Giant BT Group Hit by Black Basta Ransomware hackread.com · “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.”
Dec 6
Disclosure of the Metaserver CDN Source Code github.com · “This subtle, almost unnoticed modification effectively privatized the open-source repository by this individual, preventing any further open-source collaboration.”
Dec 6
McKinsey unit will pay $123 million to settle claims it bribed South African officials cnbc.com · “The bribery scheme helped McKinsey and McKinsey Africa net approximately $85 million in profits, the DOJ said.”
Dec 5
OpenAI confirms new $200 monthly subscription, ChatGPT Pro, which includes its o1 reasoning model techcrunch.com · “Oddly enough, though, the full o1 performs worse than the preview version on a number of common benchmarks.”
Dec 5
Next stop: Miami waymo.com · “In early 2025, we’ll begin reacquainting Waymo’s all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs to Miami’s streets.”
Dec 5
GPS-alternative tech swaps satellites for Earth fingerprints newatlas.com · “In fact, the system is reportedly simple enough that it doesn’t utilize any AI.”
Dec 5
FTC bans data brokers from selling Americans' sensitive location data bleepingcomputer.com · “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).”
Dec 4
Why Phishers Love New TLDs Like .shop, .top and .xyz krebsonsecurity.com · “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”
Dec 4
Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model deepmind.google · “Genie 2 can generate consistent worlds for up to a minute, with the majority of examples shown lasting 10-20s.”
Dec 4
Stop Using Predictable Bucket Names: A Failed Attempt at Hacking Satellites securityrunners.io · “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.”
Dec 4
Introducing Amazon Nova foundation models: Frontier intelligence and industry leading price performance aws.amazon.com · “Every generated image and video include digital watermarking.”
Dec 3
Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley commoncog.com · “He stated it was going to be problematic if Adchemy was embroiled in litigation while discussing the Microsoft deal.”
Dec 3
12-pound US robot balloons capture NYC-sized areas in jaw-dropping details interestingengineering.com · “Many insurance companies are still relying on aerial data collection methods from the 1950s to assess 2024’s climate risks”
Dec 3
Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger intel.com · “On behalf of the board, I want to thank Pat for his many years of service and dedication to Intel”
Dec 2
Proposed amendment to legal presumption about the reliability of computers postofficescandal.uk · “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.”
Dec 2
Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world, sources say techcrunch.com · “Critically, Meta will be the sole owner and user of this subsea cable”
Dec 2
SpyLoan Android malware on Google Play installed 8 million times bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Dec 2
Beekeepers halt honey awards over 'huge fraud' in global supply chain theguardian.com · “This change to remove honey as a category was necessitated by the inability to have honey fully tested for adulteration.”
Dec 1
First Router Designed Specifically For OpenWrt Released sfconservancy.org · “Priced at US$89 for a complete OpenWrt One with case, it’s ready for a wide variety of use cases.”
Dec 1
Researchers Use AI To Turn Sound Recordings Into Accurate Street Images news.utexas.edu · “Our study found that acoustic environments contain enough visual cues to generate highly recognizable streetscape images that accurately depict different places.”
Dec 1
The World's Rarest Mineral Is So Rare It's Only Ever Been Found Once sciencealert.com · “There’s a mineral so rare that only one specimen of it has ever been found in the entire world.”
Dec 1

November 2024 118 posts

A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com follow.agwa.name · “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.”
Nov 30
Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US solarboi.com · “It truly is shitty that Deye didn’t run this geographical check at the initial installation of these inverters.”
Nov 30
AMD Disables Zen 4's Loop Buffer chipsandcheese.com · “They did so without any announcement or fanfare.”
Nov 30
A transport protocol's view of Starlink blog.apnic.net · “Finally, within each 15-second satellite tracking interval, the latency variation is relatively high.”
Nov 30
New York Fines Geico and Travelers $11 Million Over Data Breaches securityweek.com · “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.”
Nov 29
NHS major 'cyber incident' forces hospitals to pen and paper theregister.com · “We have reverted to our business continuity processes and are using paper rather than digital in the areas affected.”
Nov 29
The deterioration of Google baldurbjarnason.com · “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.”
Nov 29
Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed phys.org · “They account for 28% of microplastics entering the environment globally.”
Nov 29
Children and teenagers under 16 to be banned from social media after parliament passes world-first laws abc.net.au · “There are no penalties for young people or parents who flout the rules.”
Nov 28
Hetzner raises prices while significantly lowering bandwidth (US) adriano.fyi · “Bandwidth allotments are decreasing on average, across all products, 88.19% from previous allotments.”
Nov 28
Bootkitty: Analyzing the first UEFI bootkit for Linux welivesecurity.com · “That said, its existence underscores an important message: UEFI bootkits are no longer confined to Windows systems alone.”
Nov 28
Engineers Do Not Get To Make Startup Mistakes When They Build Ledgers news.alvaroduran.com · “Ledgers are systems that track down money.”
Nov 28
Lights Out: Tools for controlling webcam LED on ThinkPad X230 github.com · “These were created as a practical demonstration that malware can record video through the webcam without the LED indication.”
Nov 27
Cloudflare incident on November 14, 2024, resulting in lost logs blog.cloudflare.com · “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.”
Nov 27
Introducing some changes to our Web API developer.spotify.com · “Applications with existing extended mode Web API access that were relying on these endpoints remain unaffected by this change.”
Nov 27
Software firm Blue Yonder providing services to US and UK stores, including Starbucks, hit by ransomware attack securityaffairs.com · “It’s unclear if the attackers have stolen information from the company.”
Nov 27
D-Link says it won't patch 60,000 older modems, as they're not worth saving techradar.com · “Roughly 60,000 vulnerable devices are currently connected to the internet, the majority being located in Taiwan.”
Nov 26
Tesla appears to be building a teleoperations team for its robotaxi service techcrunch.com · “In 2019, the billionaire executive predicted that Tesla would have over a million robotaxis on the road by 2020.”
Nov 26
Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows: it's not just AI code editors techcrunch.com · “YC commonly accepts startups that are building similar or nearly identical products to previous YC grads.”
Nov 26
Google is inserting search links into webpages in the Google App now theverge.com · “The difference, though, is that site owners have to opt into the ad intents, instead of opting out.”
Nov 26
Do you need ID to read the REAL-ID rules? papersplease.org · “You shouldn’t need ID to read the law, just as you shouldn’t need ID to travel by common carrier.”
Nov 25
Deno v. Oracle: Canceling the JavaScript Trademark deno.com · “Oracle neither controls nor has ever controlled the language’s specification or usage.”
Nov 25
Italian food delivery app Foodinho eats another privacy fine techcrunch.com · “Foodinho has also been banned from using riders’ biometric data, such as facial recognition, for identity verification.”
Nov 25
Amazon S3 adds new functionality for conditional writes aws.amazon.com · “Amazon S3 can now perform conditional writes that evaluate if an object is unmodified before updating it.”
Nov 25
Senators Say TSA's Facial Recognition Program Is Out of Control, Here's How to Opt Out gizmodo.com · “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”
Nov 24
The two factions of C++ herecomesthemoon.net · “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.”
Nov 24
Pushing AMD's Infinity Fabric to its Limits chipsandcheese.com · “Latency shoots past 400 ns when fighting with five bandwidth threads.”
Nov 24
Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes macchaffee.com · “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.”
Nov 24
'I have no money': Thousands of Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis cnbc.com · “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.”
Nov 23
Antenna diodes in the Pentium processor righto.com · “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.”
Nov 23
Check Out the Highest-Resolution Images Ever Captured of the Sun's Entire Surface smithsonianmag.com · “Each image is actually a mosaic of 25 high-resolution shots snapped by the Solar Orbiter mission on March 22, 2023.”
Nov 23
Revisiting the DOS memory models blogsystem5.substack.com · “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.”
Nov 23
The Nearest Neighbor Attack: How A Russian APT Weaponized Nearby Wi-Fi Networks for Covert Access volexity.com · “The Enterprise Wi-Fi network, however, did not require MFA and only required a user’s valid domain username and password to authenticate.”
Nov 22
Feds Charge Five Men in 'Scattered Spider' Roundup krebsonsecurity.com · “The group then used their access to Twilio to attack at least 163 of its customers.”
Nov 22
Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival cnbc.com · “From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.”
Nov 22
The AI Reporter That Took My Old Job Just Got Fired wired.com · “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.””
Nov 22
Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 billion, says Menlo Ventures cnbc.com · “Menlo is an investor in Anthropic.”
Nov 21
How Oxide Cuts Data Center Power Consumption in Half oxide.computer · “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.”
Nov 21
Handling Cookies is a Minefield grayduck.mn · “Python invisibly aborts the loading of additional cookies inside SimpleCookie.load() as soon as it encounters one it doesn’t understand.”
Nov 21
OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now dynomight.net · “In many ways, this feels less like engineering and more like a search for spells.”
Nov 21
Fintech Giant Finastra Investigating Data Breach krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Nov 20
Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting in 2025 news.mit.edu · “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”
Nov 20
Strava closes the gates to sharing fitness data with other apps theverge.com · “The policy is effective as of November 11th, even though Strava’s own post about the change is dated November 15th.”
Nov 20
Weight-loss drug found to shrink heart muscle in mice, human cells ualberta.ca · “up to 40 per cent of the weight lost by people using weight-loss drugs is actually muscle.”
Nov 20
Llama 3.1 405B now runs at 969 tokens/s on Cerebras Inference cerebras.ai · “Cerebras Inference generated 969 output tokens/s when given a 1,000 token prompt.”
Nov 19
Which Power Plant Does My Electricity Come From? practical.engineering · “Power brokers (mainly Enron) were manipulating the newly de-regulated market for bulk electricity, forcing prices to skyrocket.”
Nov 19
Rust Foundation Releases Problem Statement on C++/Rust Interoperability foundation.rust-lang.org · “This “Interop Initiative” was launched in February 2024 with a generous $1M contribution from Google.”
Nov 19
I'm a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive: their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life theconversation.com · “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.”
Nov 19
Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted, sparking warnings of possible ‘hybrid warfare’ cnn.com · “We can confirm that the internet traffic disruption was not caused by equipment failure but by physical damage to the fiber optic cable.”
Nov 18
Teen Behind Hundreds of Swatting Attacks Pleads Guilty to Federal Charges wired.com · “Between approximately August 2022 to January 2024 Filion made more than 375 swatting calls, according to the plea agreement.”
Nov 18
We are shutting down Ondsel ondsel.com · “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.”
Nov 18
Electricity provider Tibber hacked, 50,000 German customers affected heise.de · “They are authentic: the data records originate from a breach in the Tibber store.”
Nov 18
Oxford relying on ‘Deliveroo-style’ contracts with most tutorials not taught by full-time staff theguardian.com · “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.”
Nov 17
Humans have already caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates lancaster.ac.uk · “Our study shows that human societies have caused more than 1.5 degrees of long-term global warming.”
Nov 17
Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? devblogs.microsoft.com · “A better option is to just write one version of Windows 95 setup and use it for all three starting points.”
Nov 17
AlphaProof's Greatest Hits rishimehta.xyz · “Finding these mathematical ideas is hard enough, and having to prove them in Lean makes things even harder.”
Nov 17
How many people watched Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson? Netflix fight draws huge audience despite streaming issues sportingnews.com · “What viewers got instead was an amalgam of buffering issues, choppy analysis and the dreaded "black screen of death."”
Nov 16
YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design zach.be · “LLMs primarily pump out mediocre Verilog code.”
Nov 16
M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS eclecticlight.co · “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.”
Nov 16
Astronomers discover two galaxies aligned in a way where their gravity acts as a compound lens phys.org · “A compound lens, as its name suggests, is made up of two lenses.”
Nov 16
Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands: Study roadandtrack.com · “Tesla vehicles have a fatal crash rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven, according to the study”
Nov 15
Five Eyes infosec agencies list 2023's most exploited software flaws theregister.com · “We cover these lists every year, but the same names keep cropping up.”
Nov 15
ModeLeak: Privilege Escalation to LLM Model Exfiltration in Vertex AI unit42.paloaltonetworks.com · “This research highlights how a single malicious model deployment could compromise an entire AI environment.”
Nov 15
Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users openrss.org · “Cloudflare shouldn’t expect people to contact every owner of every Cloudflare website that blocks their RSS reader.”
Nov 15
I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and was Charged $1,100 elliott-king.github.io · “I hadn’t selected the most expensive OS instance type. I hadn’t even used it much at all.”
Nov 14
Just Eat is selling Grubhub to Marc Lore’s Wonder for $650M theverge.com · “Just Eat is selling off Grubhub to fancy food hall delivery startup Wonder in a deal worth $650 million.”
Nov 14
O2 unveils Daisy, the AI granny wasting scammers’ time news.virginmediao2.co.uk · “It’s a bad day to be a phone scammer.”
Nov 14
Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs arxiv.org · “The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents.”
Nov 14
Amazon shuts down secret project to develop fertility tracker cnbc.com · “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.”
Nov 14
No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains blog.transitapp.com · “No tracking. No cookies. Your vibration data is your own damn business!”
Nov 13
Snowflake hackers identified and charged with stealing 50 billion AT&T records techcrunch.com · “AT&T is just one of several victims who had sensitive data stolen from their Snowflake instances.”
Nov 13
Genetic testing firm 23andMe cuts 40% of its workforce amid financial struggles theguardian.com · “The company has been left with few options as its value has plummeted in the aftermath of a massive data breach.”
Nov 13
Abusing Ubuntu 24.04 features for root privilege escalation labs.snyk.io · “Do not be afraid to temporarily decrease your privileges if it might help you get higher privileges on the way out.”
Nov 13
Amazon Confirms Employee Contact Info Stolen Through Hack pcmag.com · “The only Amazon information involved was employee work contact information, for example, work email addresses, desk phone numbers, and building locations.”
Nov 12
Bufstream 0.1.0 jepsen.io · “Records written as a part of a committed transaction could vanish, never to be seen again.”
Nov 12
Bypassing regulatory locks, Faraday cages and upgrading your hearing lagrangepoint.substack.com · “To build our initial version of the cage, we lined and wrapped a cardboard box with Aluminium foil.”
Nov 12
This $8,000 Suzuki From India Received A 5-Star Crash Test Rating jalopnik.com · “Even the standard Dzire has six airbags, ESP, hill hold assist, and pedestrian protection.”
Nov 12
D-Link won't fix critical flaw affecting 60,000 older NAS devices bleepingcomputer.com · “D-Link has confirmed that a fix for CVE-2024-10914 is not coming”
Nov 11
Voyager 1 Breaks Its Silence With NASA via a Radio Transmitter Not Used Since 1981 smithsonianmag.com · “it takes almost 23 hours for a command to reach the craft and another 23 hours for its response to reach scientists.”
Nov 11
Inside the $20 million business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies sfgate.com · “According to Jose Mendoza, the company’s affable warehouse manager of two decades, about 65% of the inventory comes from shuttered tech companies.”
Nov 11
New Elliptic Curve Breaks 18-Year-Old Record quantamagazine.org · “Mathematicians need at least 29 independent points to characterize them.”
Nov 11
Hackers now use ZIP file concatenation to evade detection bleepingcomputer.com · “The technique exploits the different methods ZIP parsers and archive managers handle concatenated .ZIP files.”
Nov 10
OpenID Connect specifications published as ISO standards self-issued.info · “This should foster even broader adoption of OpenID Connect”
Nov 10
π0: Our First Generalist Policy pi.website · “More complex and dexterous tasks may require the model to be fine-tuned to specialize it to downstream challenges.”
Nov 10
Somebody moved UK's oldest satellite, and no-one knows who or why bbc.co.uk · “Someone moved the UK’s oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why.”
Nov 9
When Machine Learning Tells the Wrong Story jackcook.com · “if a model can reliably predict user activity, it proves the presence of a signal, but not the cause of that signal.”
Nov 9
Memories are not only in the brain, human cell study finds medicalxpress.com · “It shows that the ability to learn from spaced repetition isn’t unique to brain cells”
Nov 9
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models opencoder-llm.github.io · “A high-quality, reproducible code pretraining corpus comprising 960 Billion tokens across 607 programming languages.”
Nov 9
FDA Proposes Ending Use of Oral Phenylephrine as OTC Monograph Nasal Decongestant Active Ingredient After Extensive Review fda.gov · “after an agency review of the available data determined that oral phenylephrine is not effective for this use.”
Nov 8
A New Era of macOS Sandbox Escapes: Diving into an Overlooked Attack Surface and Uncovering 10+ New Vulnerabilities jhftss.github.io · “There are 5 reports still in the patching queue”
Nov 8
Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers techcrunch.com · “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)”
Nov 8
Cops Suspect iOS 18 iPhones Are Communicating to Force Reboots, Making Unlocking Harder macrumors.com · “This can be very detrimental to the acquisition of digital evidence”
Nov 7
How WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill recall.ai · “Chromium’s WebSocket implementation would fragment it into 24 separate WebSocket frames.”
Nov 7
Google Banned Me From Google Voice dannyguo.com · “We have reviewed your request and cannot reinstate your Google Voice service.”
Nov 7
OpenAI acquired Chat.com techcrunch.com · “As of this morning, Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT.”
Nov 7
Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada: but Canadians can still use it cbc.ca · “The statement stressed that the government is not blocking Canadians from accessing the app or using it to create content.”
Nov 6
Okta AD/LDAP Delegated Authentication - Username Above 52 Characters trust.okta.com · “The Bcrypt algorithm was used to generate the cache key where we hash a combined string of userId + username + password.”
Nov 6
INTERPOL cyber operation takes down 22,000 malicious IP addresses interpol.int · “Of the approximately 30,000 suspicious IP addresses identified, 76 per cent were taken down and 59 servers were seized.”
Nov 6
Upcoming hardening in PHP dustri.org · “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.”
Nov 6
Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division techcrunch.com · “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.””
Nov 5
Regulators deliver successive blows to Amazon and Meta’s nuclear power ambitions techcrunch.com · “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.”
Nov 5
Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe bbc.co.uk · “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.”
Nov 5
For the first time ever, AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space tomshardware.com · “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.”
Nov 5
Ticketmaster's Attempt to Game Arbitration Services Fails-Heckman v. Live Nation blog.ericgoldman.org · “In an effort to curb mass arbitration, Ticketmaster sought to switch arbitration service providers to New Era ADR, including for past ticket purchases.”
Nov 4
How Albertsons Kills Rural Grocers with Land Use Restrictions thebignewsletter.com · “They even have a name, “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zones,” according to one executive on the stand.”
Nov 4
From Naptime to Big Sleep: Using Large Language Models To Catch Vulnerabilities In Real-World Code googleprojectzero.blogspot.com · “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.”
Nov 4
Booking.com Phishers May Leave You With Reservations krebsonsecurity.com · “One post last month on the Russian-language hacking forum BHF offered up to $5,000 for each hotel account.”
Nov 4
Touchscreens Are Out, and Tactile Controls Are Back spectrum.ieee.org · “There was this kind of touchscreen mania, where all of a sudden everything became a touchscreen.”
Nov 3
Security flaws found in all Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Update drivers ASAP! pcworld.com · “According to Nvidia, it’s possible for attackers to gain access to your entire system by exploiting one of the vulnerabilities.”
Nov 3
Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux kevinboone.me · “But this functionality is mostly not needed in an embedded application, so the additional complexity of systemd is a cost without a benefit.”
Nov 3
Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google data-center networking evolution cloud.google.com · “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!”
Nov 3
131M American Buildings tech.marksblogg.com · “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.”
Nov 2
Rewrite it in Rails dirkjonker.bearblog.dev · “After probably a good year of writing Rust and Svelte, it dawned on me that our users didn’t benefit from any of this.”
Nov 2
Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection railsatscale.com · “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.”
Nov 2
Hacking cars in JavaScript (Running replay attacks in the browser with the HackRF) charliegerard.dev · “My ultimate goal was to answer the question… is it possible to hack a car using JavaScript?”
Nov 2
Tens of thousands of taxpayer accounts hacked as CRA repeatedly paid out millions in bogus refunds cbc.ca · “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.”
Nov 1
Nvidia to join Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing rival chipmaker Intel cnbc.com · “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.”
Nov 1
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" tomshardware.com · “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.””
Nov 1

October 2024 121 posts

RCE Vulnerability in QBittorrent sharpsec.run · “qBittorrent has had this behaviour from June 2015 until the present, affecting v3.2.1 through v5.0.0 inclusive.”
Oct 31
Matt Mullenweg says Automattic is 'very short-staffed' amid WordPress vs. WP Engine drama techcrunch.com · “This second deal offered nine months of severance, but employees only had four hours to respond.”
Oct 31
Sorry, Gas Companies - Parody Isn't Infringement (Even If It Creeps You Out) eff.org · “TotalEnergies also sent a demand to the website’s hosting service, Netlify, that got repaer.earth taken offline.”
Oct 31
Fuzzing between the lines in popular barcode software blog.trailofbits.com · “Even with this simple approach, we managed to find some bugs in the library.”
Oct 31
Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages gamingonlinux.com · “However, it’s only being forced for kernel-level anti-cheat.”
Oct 30
An update from Drew blog.dropbox.com · “We continue to see softening demand and macro headwinds in our core business.”
Oct 30
CrowdStrike, Delta sue each other over flight disruptions techcentral.co.za · “CrowdStrike sued Delta Air Lines on Friday after a faulty software update prompted a global outage in July.”
Oct 30
International law enforcement operation dismantled RedLine and Meta infostealers securityaffairs.com · “Authorities discovered that over 1 200 servers in dozens of countries were running the malware.”
Oct 30
One weird trick to get the whole planet to send abuse complaints to your best friend(s) delroth.net · “The internet was broken 25 years ago and is still broken 25 years later.”
Oct 29
Tesla releases rare blog post and it's an interesting one: Standardizing Auto Connectivity electrek.co · “Tesla introduced a new 48-volt low-voltage electronic architecture in the Cybertruck, or a hybrid version of it, to be fair.”
Oct 29
China's first space tourism venture sells first pair of tickets theregister.com · “The two ticket holders will pay an initial ¥50,000 ($7,000) deposit.”
Oct 29
RIP botsin.space muffinlabs.com · “However, they’ve generated something like 32 million statuses.”
Oct 29
buy payphones and retire computer.rip · “Edwards sold nearly 50,000 payphones on this basis, many of them in deals of over $100,000.”
Oct 28
Over 70 zero-day flaws get hackers $1 million at Pwn2Own Ireland bleepingcomputer.com · “Team Cluck used a chain of six vulnerabilities to move from the QNAP QHora-322 to the Lexmark CX331adwe.”
Oct 28
Fortinet warns of new critical FortiManager flaw used in zero-day attacks bleepingcomputer.com · “Fortinet warns that not all IOCs may be present on exploited devices.”
Oct 28
Insurance admin Landmark says data breach impacts 800,000 people bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Oct 28
Four REvil Ransomware members sentenced for hacking and money laundering securityaffairs.com · “Russian authorities sentenced four members of the REvil ransomware operation to several years in prison in Russia.”
Oct 28
Character Amnesia in China globalchinapulse.net · “Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand.”
Oct 27
How we shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size by 94% jonathancreamer.com · “The most recent clone I did of the repo clocked in at an astonishing 178GB.”
Oct 27
Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative ibis.wiki · “Ibis is still in a very early stage, but it has the potential to completely change the way online encyclopedias work.”
Oct 27
New Windows Driver Signature bypass allows kernel rootkit installs bleepingcomputer.com · “Microsoft still has to address the Windows Update takeover issue.”
Oct 26
ZombAIs: From Prompt Injection to C2 with Claude Computer Use embracethered.com · “Claude happily clicked the link to download the Support Tool”
Oct 26
The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source theregister.com · “However, the EU still doesn’t have a clear definition of open source AI.”
Oct 26
Understanding Round Robin DNS hyperknot.com · “To my biggest surprise, Safari always selects the closest server correctly.”
Oct 26
Victory Is Sweet: We Can Now Fix McDonald's Ice Cream Machines ifixit.com · “It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame.”
Oct 25
LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches techcrunch.com · “As well as being fined, LinkedIn has been given three months to bring its European operations into compliance with the GDPR.”
Oct 25
Penn State pays DoJ $1.25M to settle cybersecurity compliance case theregister.com · “Penn State told the government in late 2020 that it hadn’t implemented all the requirements”
Oct 25
Security research on Private Cloud Compute security.apple.com · “We provide this source under a limited-use license agreement to allow you to perform deeper analysis of PCC.”
Oct 24
Improve licensing language github.com · “Anything contained within a directory named bitwarden_license is covered solely by the BITWARDEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT LICENSE.”
Oct 24
Apple analyst Kuo says company cut iPhone 16 orders 10 million units cnbc.com · “However, significant growth in iPhone shipments will likely require further hardware innovation to accompany this AI development.”
Oct 24
Tesla has been testing a robotaxi service in the Bay Area for most of the year theverge.com · “The vehicles arrive with safety drivers behind the wheel, ready to intervene in case anything goes wrong.”
Oct 24
The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Oct 23
Goldman and Apple 'illegally sidestepped' obligations to credit-card customers: CFPB finance.yahoo.com · “As part of the agreement, Apple had the right to impose a $25 million penalty for each 90-day delay caused by Goldman.”
Oct 23
Google: 70% of exploited flaws disclosed in 2023 were zero-days bleepingcomputer.com · “Specifically, of the 138 vulnerabilities disclosed as actively exploited in 2023, Mandiant says 97 (70.3%) were leveraged as zero-days.”
Oct 23
Most Forest Service Trail Workers Are About To Lose Their Jobs: Here's Why backpacker.com · “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.”
Oct 23
Here's What TurboTax's Boss Doesn't Want You to Hear gizmodo.com · “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.”
Oct 22
Unlocking Arkansas' Hidden Treasure: USGS Uses Machine Learning to Show Large Lithium Potential in the Smackover Formation usgs.gov · “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”
Oct 22
LTESniffer: An Open-source LTE Downlink/Uplink Eavesdropper github.com · “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.”
Oct 22
against /tmp dotat.at · “It’s a bad idea because it’s shared global mutable state that crosses security boundaries.”
Oct 22
US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’ theguardian.com · “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.”
Oct 21
Omni Family Health Data Breach Impacts 470,000 Individuals securityweek.com · “In total, 468,344 individuals were affected, Omni told the US Department of Health and Human Services.”
Oct 21
TikTok owner sacks intern for sabotaging AI project bbc.com · “The individual was an intern with the [advertising] technology team and has no experience with the AI Lab”
Oct 21
Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort bbc.com · “Certification is granted when a country proves that the transmission chain is interrupted for at least the previous three consecutive years.”
Oct 21
Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens bleepingcomputer.com · “As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K+ support tickets sent to [email protected] since 2018.”
Oct 20
Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers' cloud products techcrunch.com · “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.”
Oct 20
The AI Investment Boom apricitas.io · “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.”
Oct 20
Discontinuing Syncthing Android forum.syncthing.net · “Reason is a combination of Google making Play publishing something between hard and impossible and no active maintenance.”
Oct 20
QUIC is not Quick Enough over Fast Internet arxiv.org · “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.”
Oct 19
The long road to lazy preemption lwn.net · “There are hundreds of these calls in the kernel.”
Oct 19
AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%: replaces complex floating-point multiplication with integer addition tomshardware.com · “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.”
Oct 19
Untangling biological threads from autism’s phenotypic patchwork reveals four core subtypes thetransmitter.org · “Each group is associated with specific genetic variants that influence gene expression at different stages of development, the investigation revealed.”
Oct 19
Secret 3D Scans in the French Supreme Court cosmowenman.substack.com · “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.”
Oct 18
The Feds Are Coming for John Deere Over the Right to Repair gizmodo.com · “The investigation has been ongoing since 2021, and we know more about it now thanks to a court filing made public on Thursday.”
Oct 18
Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years world.hey.com · “For 2024, we’ve brought the cloud bill down from the original $3.2 million/year run rate to $1.3 million.”
Oct 18
Hackers are extorting Globe Life with stolen customer data techcrunch.com · “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.”
Oct 18
Meta fires staff for ‘using free meal vouchers to buy household goods’ theguardian.com · “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.”
Oct 18
NASA Freezes Starliner Missions After Boeing Leaves Astronauts Stranded gizmodo.com · ““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.”
Oct 17
Escaping the Chrome Sandbox Through DevTools ading.dev · “But why would this exact oversight still exist even though it should have been patched 4 years ago?”
Oct 17
Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors cnbc.com · “Amazon is the latest large tech company to buy into nuclear power to fuel the growing demands from data centers.”
Oct 17
P3477R0: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte open-std.org · “C and C++ code targeting non-8-bit byte are incompatible dialects of C and C++.”
Oct 17
Internal blog post reveals Automattic's plan to enforce the WordPress trademark using 'nice and not nice lawyers' techcrunch.com · ““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.”
Oct 16
Benchmarking Qualcomm's NPU on the Microsoft Surface Tablet github.com · “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.”
Oct 16
macOS sometimes leaks traffic after system updates mullvad.net · “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.”
Oct 16
Casio confirms customer data compromised in ransomware attack techcrunch.com · “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.”
Oct 16
The Internet Archive is back as a read-only service after cyberattacks theverge.com · “The Internet Archive is now back online in a “provisional, read-only manner,” according to founder Brewster Kahle.”
Oct 15
TikTok Lays Off Hundreds of Staff: to Replace Them With AI pcmag.com · “One moderator explained that they have to review 900 videos a day, and only watching 700 videos a day is considered "work avoidance."”
Oct 15
FIDO Alliance Publishes New Specifications to Promote User Choice and Enhanced UX for Passkeys fidoalliance.org · “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.”
Oct 15
Meta’s open AI hardware vision engineering.fb.com · “With Catalina we’re introducing the ORv3, a high-power rack (HPR) capable of supporting up to 140kW.”
Oct 15
1 bug, $50,000+ in bounties, how Zendesk intentionally left a backdoor in hundreds of Fortune 500 companies gist.github.com · “Because my bug relied on email spoofing, which was considered "out of scope" for their HackerOne program, they rejected my report.”
Oct 14
Fidelity says data breach exposed personal data of 77,000 customers techcrunch.com · “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.”
Oct 14
Cargo airships are happening elidourado.com · “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.”
Oct 14
Hackers took over robovacs to chase pets and yell slurs theverge.com · “Ecovacs told the outlet in a statement that it had “identified a credential stuffing event” and blocked the IP address it originated from.”
Oct 14
ACF has been hijacked anderegg.ca · “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.”
Oct 13
Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object simonwillison.net · “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.”
Oct 13
Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning shchegrikovich.substack.com · “On math word problems GPT4 with CoT managed to solve 12.5% of all problems, but GPT4 and Prolog solved 100%.”
Oct 13
FLUX is fast and it's open source replicate.com · “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.”
Oct 13
Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS androidauthority.com · “Google is developing the framework to let you run Debian in a virtual machine on your Android device.”
Oct 12
AMD's Turin: 5th Gen EPYC Launched chipsandcheese.com · “All 64 cores could hit up to 5GHz in single threaded test.”
Oct 12
Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX blog.jreyesr.com · “The syntax of the Typst language is way closer to Markdown than it is to LaTeX.”
Oct 12
Marriott agrees to pay $52 million settlement after multiple data breaches theverge.com · “The FTC’s complaint alleges that Marriott failed to implement appropriate password controls, firewall controls, or network segmentation.”
Oct 11
$2 H100s: How the GPU Rental Bubble Burst latent.space · “Last year, H100s were $8/hr if you could get them.”
Oct 11
The FBI secretly created a coin to investigate crypto pump-and-dump schemes theverge.com · “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.””
Oct 11
Lamborghini Carjackers Lured by $243M Cyberheist krebsonsecurity.com · “Prosecutors say the couple was beaten and briefly kidnapped by six young men”
Oct 11
Why we're helping more wikis move away from Fandom weirdgloop.org · “Fandom keeps their copy of the wiki up, even though it no longer has a community.”
Oct 10
Mozilla fixes Firefox zero-day actively exploited in attacks bleepingcomputer.com · “An attacker was able to achieve code execution in the content process by exploiting a use-after-free in Animation timelines.”
Oct 10
Amazon's new warehouses will employ 10x as many robots techcrunch.com · “We do know, however, that the company already has nearly a million robotic systems deployed in centers across the U.S.”
Oct 10
Zap Energy shows off its new fusion power prototype, Century techcrunch.com · “Ultimately, to operate as a commercial power plant, Zap’s reactor will need to spark 10 pulses per second for months on end.”
Oct 10
The Internet Archive is under attack, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts theverge.com · “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!”
Oct 9
H-1B visa: Company supplying tech workers to Silicon Valley discriminated against non-Indians: jury siliconvalley.com · “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.”
Oct 9
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain every.to · “In return for a 99-year lease for the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius.”
Oct 9
Patch Tuesday, October 2024 Edition krebsonsecurity.com · “If that sounds familiar it’s because this is the fourth MSHTML vulnerability found to be exploited in the wild so far in 2024.”
Oct 9
Mind the (air) gap: GoldenJackal gooses government guardrails welivesecurity.com · “We detected GoldenJackal tools at a South Asian embassy in Belarus in August and September 2019, and again in July 2021.”
Oct 8
End of the Road for Google Drive in Transmit blog.panic.com · “They promised a discounted minimum price, but no maximum price.”
Oct 8
Do U.S. Ports Need More Automation? construction-physics.com · “On average, per this index the U.S. has the worst-performing ports of any country in the world.”
Oct 8
A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase devblogs.microsoft.com · “In both examples, converting the string to uppercase causes the string to get longer.”
Oct 8
Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge theverge.com · “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.”
Oct 7
China-linked group Salt Typhoon hacked US broadband providers and breached wiretap systems securityaffairs.com · “The WSJ states that the compromise remained undisclosed due to possible impact on national security.”
Oct 7
Can You Get Root With Only a Cigarette Lighter? da.vidbuchanan.co.uk · “It’s just one resistor (15 ohms) and one wire, soldered to DQ26.”
Oct 7
UK nuclear site Sellafield fined $440,000 for cybersecurity shortfalls bleepingcomputer.com · “roughly 75% of Sellafield’s servers were vulnerable to attacks with potentially catastrophic consequences.”
Oct 7
So thieves broke into your storage unit - again oldvcr.blogspot.com · “If this smells like a kickback deal, you’re right, and virtually every self-storage company engages in it.”
Oct 6
AI is an impediment to learning web development ben.page · “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.”
Oct 6
Wi-Fi Goes Long Range on New WiLo Standard spectrum.ieee.org · “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.”
Oct 6
AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted! arnaud-carre.github.io · “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.”
Oct 6
The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms vox.com · “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.”
Oct 5
Aegir GPS/LTE/Iridium Tracker github.com · “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 (!?).”
Oct 5
Whence '\n'? rodarmor.com · “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.”
Oct 5
Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta AI to analyze techcrunch.com · “The only way to “opt out” is to simply not use Meta’s multimodal AI features in the first place.”
Oct 4
perfctl: A Stealthy Malware Targeting Millions of Linux Servers aquasec.com · “When a new user logs into the server, it immediately stops all “noisy” activities, lying dormant until the server is idle again.”
Oct 4
Reverse Engineering and Dismantling Kekz Headphones nv1t.github.io · “In addition, the connection string to this Azure cosmos database is accessible within the Decompilation of the application itself and therefore is disclosed.”
Oct 4
Cloudflare blocks largest recorded DDoS attack peaking at 3.8Tbps bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Oct 4
Patent troll Sable pays up, dedicates all its patents to the public! blog.cloudflare.com · “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.”
Oct 3
ABC News hacks into popular robot vacuum, watches owner through camera abc.net.au · “His robot was vulnerable to being hacked from afar, and Ecovacs hadn’t done anything about it, despite being warned back in December 2023.”
Oct 3
How North Korea Infiltrated the Crypto Industry coindesk.com · “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.”
Oct 3
Tesla cancels its cheapest electric car electrek.co · “Tesla often changes its vehicle trims without making any announcement or giving any explanation for the changes.”
Oct 3
Automattic: WP Engine Term Sheet automattic.com · “Given WP Engine’s behavior, deception, and incompetence since September 20th these terms are no longer sufficient.”
Oct 2
T-Mobile pays $31.5 million FCC settlement over 4 data breaches bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Oct 2
American WWII bomb explodes at Japanese airport, causing large crater in taxiway cnn.com · “Hundreds of tons of unexploded bombs from the war remain buried around Japan and are sometimes dug up at construction sites.”
Oct 2
The bunkbed conjecture is false igorpak.wordpress.com · “Why look for a counterexample if the conjecture is so obviously true? Well, because you always should.”
Oct 2
Bots, so many Bots wakatime.com · “In the end, I detected over 60% of user signups to be automated bot accounts.”
Oct 1
Y Combinator is being criticized after it backed an AI startup that admits it basically cloned another AI startup techcrunch.com · “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.”
Oct 1
ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared map ever of our Milky Way eso.org · “At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.”
Oct 1

September 2024 121 posts

AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO to take on Nvidia cnbc.com · “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.”
Sep 30
A tiny town just got slammed by Helene. It could massively disrupt the tech industry npr.org · “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.”
Sep 30
Bop Spotter walzr.com · “Somewhere in the Mission district of San Francisco is a microphone, pointed down at the street below.”
Sep 30
NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective simonwillison.net · “And that turns out to be crucial because you cannot listen to two robots talking to each other.”
Sep 30
SB 1047 Veto Message gov.ca.gov · “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.”
Sep 29
FTC Report Confirms: Commercial Surveillance is Out of Control eff.org · “The FTC also found that some companies were not actually deleting user data in response to deletion requests.”
Sep 29
A Bendy RISC-V Processor spectrum.ieee.org · “The research team found Flex-RV could run as fast as 60 kilohertz while consuming less than 6 milliwatts of power.”
Sep 29
Do AI companies work? benn.substack.com · “Every LLM vendor is eighteen months from dead.”
Sep 29
Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text engadget.com · “Some of the passwords had been stored in easily readable format in the company’s servers since 2012.”
Sep 28
Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes ukdefencejournal.org.uk · “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.”
Sep 28
The perils of transition to 64-bit time_t blogs.gentoo.org · “So what you actually may get is runtime breakage, potentially going as far as to create security issues.”
Sep 28
Everything you need to know about Python 3.13 – JIT and GIL went up the hill drew.silcock.dev · “The performance degradation when Python is built with free-threading support is significant – around 20%.”
Sep 28
Kaspersky deletes itself, installs UltraAV antivirus without warning bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Sep 27
CNN and USA Today Have Fake Websites, I Believe Forbes Marketplace Runs Them larslofgren.com · “I believe Marketplace has since been running CNN Underscored Money with little, if any, oversight from the main CNN team.”
Sep 27
New California law means digital stores can’t imply you’re buying a game when you’re merely licensing it polygon.com · “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.”
Sep 27
Moving Bricks: Money-Laundering Practices in the Online Scam Industry globalchinapulse.net · “Company P alone has thousands of groups on Telegram that are used to facilitate transactions and provide a channel for the circulation of information.”
Sep 27
Hacking Kia: Remotely Controlling Cars With Just a License Plate samcurry.net · “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.”
Sep 26
Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS, Part I evilsocket.net · “And I’ve got back connections from hundreds of thousands of devices, with peaks of 200-300K concurrent clients.”
Sep 26
U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers, Issues Broad Injunction torrentfreak.com · “While this is a win on paper, it’s unlikely that the publishers will get paid by the LibGen operators, who remain anonymous.”
Sep 26
WordPress.org bans WP Engine, blocks it from accessing its resources techcrunch.com · “As a result of this block, sites using WP Engine’s solutions cannot install plug-ins or update their themes.”
Sep 26
Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source security.googleblog.com · “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.”
Sep 25
Timeshare Owner? The Mexican Drug Cartels Want You krebsonsecurity.com · “The FBI warns the timeshare fraud schemes have been linked to the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel in Mexico.”
Sep 25
Kansas water plant cyberattack forces switch to manual operations bleepingcomputer.com · “Out of caution, the Water Treatment Facility has switched to manual operations while the situation is being resolved.”
Sep 25
Rearchitecting: Redis to SQLite wafris.org · “SQLite was roughly a 3x speed improvement over a locally deployed Redis instance.”
Sep 25
Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that affects price of 'nearly everything’ cnbc.com · “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.”
Sep 24
Updated production-ready Gemini models, reduced 1.5 Pro pricing, increased rate limits, and more developers.googleblog.com · “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.”
Sep 24
Google Cache Is Now Fully Dead seroundtable.com · “Now, the direct link to see the Google Cache has been fully disabled.”
Sep 24
How much energy does desalinisation use? Is it “absurdly cheap”? hannahritchie.substack.com · “This was far cheaper than I’d have guessed, and in a water crisis I would agree that this is “absurdly cheap”.”
Sep 24
Telegram will now hand over your phone number and IP if you’re a criminal suspect theverge.com · “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.”
Sep 23
Cloudflare's new marketplace will let websites charge AI bots for scraping techcrunch.com · “While it’s a bold idea, Cloudflare is not sharing a fully fleshed-out idea of what its marketplace will look like.”
Sep 23
X will let people you’ve blocked see your posts theverge.com · “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.””
Sep 23
This Windows PowerShell Phish Has Scary Potential krebsonsecurity.com · “Executing this series of keypresses prompts the built-in Windows Powershell to download password-stealing malware.”
Sep 23
WP Engine is not WordPress wordpress.org · “WP Engine needs a trademark license to continue their business.”
Sep 22
Uber Caught Overcharging? How Having Credits in Your Account Might Be Costing You viewfromthewing.com · “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.”
Sep 22
They stole my voice with AI jeffgeerling.com · “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”
Sep 22
London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids grist.org · “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.”
Sep 22
The FCC wants all phones unlocked in sixty days, AT&T and T-Mobile aren't so keen on the plan androidauthority.com · “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.”
Sep 21
Using YouTube to steal your files lyra.horse · “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!”
Sep 21
Apple Shares Full iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro Repair Manuals macrumors.com · “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”
Sep 21
What happened to the Japanese PC platforms? blog.mistys-internet.website · “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.”
Sep 21
Microsoft taps Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power AI techcrunch.com · “Microsoft has agreed to purchase all of the power from the reactor over the next 20 years, a Constellation spokesperson told TechCrunch.”
Sep 20
Google employees’ attempts to hide messages from investigators might backfire theverge.com · “LaSala responded, instructing the employee to “start a ping with history turned off.””
Sep 20
Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over DOJ, DHS and HUD use of facial recognition technology therecord.media · “As a result, the report said it is impossible to know how many evictions from public housing FRT played a role in.”
Sep 20
Germany seizes 47 crypto exchanges used by ransomware gangs bleepingcomputer.com · “We have their data – and therefore we have your data. Transactions, registration data, IP addresses.”
Sep 20
gaining access to anyones browser without them even visiting a website eva.ac · “this is against arc’s privacy policy which clearly states arc does not know which sites you visit.”
Sep 19
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 ftc.gov · “The report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans’ personal data”
Sep 19
Filing Lawsuit for Infringement of Patent Rights against Pocketpair, Inc. nintendo.co.jp · “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.”
Sep 19
GM electric vehicles can finally access Tesla Superchargers theverge.com · “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.”
Sep 19
Why wordfreq will not be updated github.com · “Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing.”
Sep 18
Is Tor still safe to use? blog.torproject.org · “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.”
Sep 18
Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray theregister.com · “The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year’s survey.”
Sep 18
Ticketmaster boss who repeatedly hacked rival firm sentenced bitdefender.com · “The illegal access was projected on a conference room’s screen in front of at least 14 Live Nation and Ticketmaster employees.”
Sep 18
Warning: DNS encryption in Little Snitch 6.1 may occasionally fail obdev.at · “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.”
Sep 18
How Google got away with charging publishers more than anyone else theverge.com · “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.”
Sep 17
Fixing an Elgato HD60 S HDMI capture device with the help of Ghidra downtowndougbrown.com · “All I needed to do was replace three chips for a total of less than $1 to bring this thing back to life.”
Sep 17
Chipotle's testing an avocado-peeling robot and an automated bowl assembly line theverge.com · “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.”
Sep 17
"Golden Lettuce" genetically engineered to pack 30 times more vitamins newatlas.com · “The levels of beta-carotene in the Golden Lettuce leaves were up to 30 times higher than those of regular lettuce.”
Sep 17
Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week cnbc.com · “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.”
Sep 16
23andMe to pay $30 million in genetics data breach settlement bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Sep 16
Fortinet confirms data breach after hacker claims to steal 440GB of files bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Sep 16
Apple Watch sleep apnea detection gets FDA approval techcrunch.com · “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.”
Sep 16
How to succeed in MrBeast production (leaked PDF) simonwillison.net · “Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result!”
Sep 15
g1: Using Llama-3.1 70b on Groq to create o1-like reasoning chains github.com · “From initial testing, g1 accurately solves simple logic problems 60-80% of the time that usually stump LLMs.”
Sep 15
The 6.11 kernel has been released lwn.net · “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.”
Sep 15
'The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out': Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman theconversation.com · “In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up.”
Sep 14
Degrees of deception: How America's universities became debt factories anandsanwal.me · “Nearly 40% of federal student loan borrowers aged 65 and older are in default.”
Sep 14
LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This arxiv.org · “It is, therefore, impossible to eliminate them through architectural improvements, dataset enhancements, or fact-checking mechanisms.”
Sep 14
My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures louwrentius.com · “The 4 TB HGST drives have roughly 6000 hours on them after ten years.”
Sep 14
Why Scrum is Stressing You Out rethinkingsoftware.substack.com · “They are forever repeating, back-to-back deadlines.”
Sep 14
CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process' semafor.com · “Quality control was not really part of our process or our conversation.”
Sep 13
We Spent $20 To Achieve RCE And Accidentally Became The Admins Of .MOBI labs.watchtowr.com · “Effectively, we had inadvertently undermined the CA process for the entire .mobi TLD.”
Sep 13
Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option abc.net.au · “Ms Claybaugh admitted to the inquiry that those opt-out options were not offered to Australians.”
Sep 13
New Vo1d malware infects 1.3 million Android streaming boxes bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Sep 13
FDA Authorizes First Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Software fda.gov · “The HAF was evaluated in a clinical study with 118 subjects with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss, at multiple U.S. sites.”
Sep 12
NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive gizmodo.com · “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.”
Sep 12
Google will now link to The Internet Archive to add more context to Search results 9to5google.com · “That was previously possible to a certain extent through cached pages in Search, but that functionality was removed earlier this year.”
Sep 12
Review: IFixit’s FixHub May Be The Last Soldering Iron You Ever Buy hackaday.com · “You could get a nice soldering station from Weller or Hakko for half the price.”
Sep 12
Bug Left Some Windows PCs Dangerously Unpatched krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Sep 11
Feeld dating app – Your nudes and data were publicly available fortbridge.co.uk · “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.”
Sep 11
Bug lets anyone bypass WhatsApp’s ‘View Once’ privacy feature techcrunch.com · “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.”
Sep 11
Payment gateway data breach affects 1.7 million credit card owners bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Sep 11
Apple must pay 13 billion euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules cnbc.com · “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.”
Sep 10
[tor-relays] Artikel 5 e.V. - Another police raid in Germany - general assembly on Sep 21st 2024 forum.torproject.org · “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.”
Sep 10
A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time blog.cloudflare.com · “To put that in perspective, the total cpu time consumed by pingora-origin is 40,000 compute-seconds per second.”
Sep 10
Passwords have problems, but passkeys have more world.hey.com · “Unfortunately, the user experience kinda sucked, so we ended up ripping it all out again.”
Sep 10
Lab-grown diamonds worksinprogress.co · “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.”
Sep 9
Breaking Down OnlyFans’ Stunning Economics matthewball.co · “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.”
Sep 9
ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention Alex Morgan awfulannouncing.com · “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.”
Sep 9
New RAMBO attack steals data using RAM in air-gapped computers bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Sep 9
Amazing engineering: How to stretch a cruise ship newatlas.com · “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.”
Sep 8
Researchers discover a surprising way to jump-start battery performance eurekalert.org · “Experiments confirmed that charging at high currents has a huge impact, increasing the lifespan of the average test battery by 50%.”
Sep 8
How I Built an NFC Movie Library for my Kids simplyexplained.com · “A Disney+ subscription costs €10,99/month, but for that price I can buy 3-4 Blu-rays on second hand websites.”
Sep 8
Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks? theguardian.com · “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.”
Sep 8
A Post-Google World thebignewsletter.com · “One consequences was that Google charged high prices, keeping between 30-50% of every advertising dollar that went through its system.”
Sep 7
Keyhole massgrave.dev · “As it turns out, data after the signature block isnt checked at all… and it can even override data that came before it.”
Sep 7
Ford Patents In-Car System That Eavesdrops So It Can Play You Ads motortrend.com · “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.””
Sep 7
Cracking an old ZIP file to help open source the ANC's "Operation Vula" secret crypto code blog.jgc.org · “23 minutes later bkcrack spit out the key to the ALLBAS.ZIP file and was able to decrypt it.”
Sep 7
Clearview AI Faces €30.5M Fine for Building Illegal Facial Recognition Database thehackernews.com · “Facial recognition is a highly intrusive technology that you cannot simply unleash on anyone in the world,”
Sep 6
Revival Hijack supply-chain attack threatens 22,000 PyPI packages bleepingcomputer.com · “Three months later, JFrog noticed that the packages in their repository had close to 200,000 downloads from automated scripts and user mistypes.”
Sep 6
Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo? blog.nuclearsecrecy.com · “It’s literally the logo they use for this particular software package.”
Sep 6
2M users but no money in the bank. Tough times exercism.org · “Right now, we have about 800 monthly donors and about $7,500 in monthly donations.”
Sep 6
Inside the Tense Decision Between NASA and Boeing to Send Starliner Home Alone inverse.com · “But within a day of launching, Starliner leaked helium and five of its thrusters failed off.”
Sep 5
AlphaProteo generates novel proteins for biology and health research deepmind.google · “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.”
Sep 5
Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent theguardian.com · “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.”
Sep 5
Deploying Rust in Existing Firmware Codebases security.googleblog.com · “Memory unsafety is the leading cause of vulnerabilities in Android, Chrome, and many other code bases.”
Sep 5
Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive storage.courtlistener.com · “We conclude, contrary to the district court, that IA’s use of the Works is not commercial in nature.”
Sep 4
Microsoft Copilot: From Prompt Injection to Exfiltration of Personal Information embracethered.com · “It is unclear how exactly Microsoft fixed the vulnerability, and what mitigation recommendations were implemented.”
Sep 4
Should truckers be allowed to sing along with the radio? freightwaves.com · “Amazon denies they have asked their partners not to sing.”
Sep 4
Sextortion Scams Now Include Photos of Your Home krebsonsecurity.com · “In this case, the demand is just shy of $2,000, payable by scanning a QR code embedded in the email.”
Sep 4
EUCLEAK ninjalab.io · “The EUCLEAK attack requires physical access to the device, expensive equipment, custom software and technical skills.”
Sep 3
Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all mashable.com · “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,”
Sep 3
The Hidden Engineering of Landfills practical.engineering · “Actually, leachate management is one of the biggest costs of running a facility like this.”
Sep 3
Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question blog.jgc.org · “The expected value is $0.20 (calculated discretely using the code below).”
Sep 3
NGate Android malware relays NFC traffic to steal cash welivesecurity.com · “This is the first time we have seen Android malware with this capability being used in the wild.”
Sep 2
Owners of 1-Time Passcode Theft Service Plead Guilty krebsonsecurity.com · “NCA investigators said more than 12,500 people were targeted by OTP Agency users during the 18 months the service was active.”
Sep 2
Unprotected container registries dreher.in · “Shockingly, a follow-up scan in 2024 still showed more than 10,000 unsecured registries.”
Sep 2
Amazon to Launch New AI-Powered Alexa Using Anthropic's Claude macrumors.com · “In other words, it won’t be included in existing Prime memberships.”
Sep 2
The Pentium as a Navajo weaving righto.com · “A group of 20 Indians armed with high-power rifles took over the plant, demanding that Fairchild rehire the employees.”
Sep 1
Extreme Pi Boot Optimization kittenlabs.de · “We reduced the energy required by a factor of 5 (compared to stock Debian at 9.5 Ws until user space).”
Sep 1
Honey, I shrunk {fmt}: bringing binary size to 14k and ditching the C++ runtime vitaut.net · “This reduces binary size to just 14kB:”
Sep 1
A Real Life Off-By-One Error leejo.github.io · “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.”
Sep 1

August 2024 120 posts

Did your car witness a crime? Police may be coming for your Tesla sfchronicle.com · “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.”
Aug 31
Nearly half of Nvidia's Q2 revenue came from four customers buying over $3 billion in AI chips each fortune.com · “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.”
Aug 31
Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian jonathancarter.org · “As it stands now, bcachefs-tools is impossible to maintain in Debian stable.”
Aug 31
Iron as an inexpensive storage medium for hydrogen ethz.ch · “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.”
Aug 31
Brazilian court orders suspension of Elon Musk's X after it missed deadline theguardian.com · “The decision imposes a daily fine of R$50,000 (£6,800) on individuals and companies that attempt to continue using X via VPN.”
Aug 30
State-backed attackers and commercial surveillance vendors repeatedly use the same exploits blog.google · “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.”
Aug 30
Park'N Fly notifies 1 million customers of data breach bleepingcomputer.com · “Park’N Fly discovered that an unauthorized third party accessed our network through remote VPN access.”
Aug 30
UK researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long COVID patients uknow.uky.edu · “According to Jiang, "the slowing and abnormality of intrinsic brain activity in COVID-19 patients resemble those seen in Alzheimer’s and related dementias."”
Aug 30
Bypassing airport security via SQL injection ian.sh · “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.”
Aug 29
Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People's Medicaid Benefits gizmodo.com · “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.”
Aug 29
Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch blog.hopefullyuseful.com · “Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable, I have no idea…”
Aug 29
Elasticsearch Is Open Source. Again! elastic.co · “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.”
Aug 29
Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines gamengen.github.io · “Human raters are only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing short clips of the game from clips of the simulation.”
Aug 28
Appliance and Tractor Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair 404media.co · “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.”
Aug 28
American Radio Relay League confirms $1 million ransom payment bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Aug 28
How some Let's Encrypt renewal failures pointed to an AWS traffic hijacking issue chair6.net · “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.”
Aug 28
Mono: Cross platform, open source .NET framework mono-project.com · “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).”
Aug 27
New 0-Day Attacks Linked to China's 'Volt Typhoon' krebsonsecurity.com · “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."”
Aug 27
Anthropic publishes the 'system prompts' that make Claude tick techcrunch.com · “If the prompts for Claude tell us anything, it’s that without human guidance and hand-holding, these models are frighteningly blank slates.”
Aug 27
Introducing Cerebras Inference: AI at Instant Speed cerebras.ai · “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.”
Aug 27
Local Networks Go Global When Domain Names Collide krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Aug 26
Dutch DPA imposes a fine of 290 million euro on Uber because of transfers of drivers' data to the US autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl · “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.”
Aug 26
Audit finds notable security gaps in FBI's storage media management bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Aug 26
Google Play Bug Bounty Program Shutting Down securityweek.com · “Google will soon shut down the Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) after determining that it has achieved its goal.”
Aug 26
Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app? blog.cryptographyengineering.com · “Telegram clearly fails to meet this stronger definition for a simple reason: it does not end-to-end encrypt conversations by default.”
Aug 25
Albuquerque's Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off reason.com · “Even more troubling, Medina said he "purposefully did not record because he was invoking his 5th Amendment right not to self-incriminate."”
Aug 25
Finding a therapist who takes your insurance can be nearly impossible. Here's why npr.org · “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.”
Aug 25
SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL simonwillison.net · “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.”
Aug 25
NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew nasa.gov · “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.”
Aug 24
Telegram app founder Pavel Durov reportedly arrested at French airport theguardian.com · “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.”
Aug 24
Japan on edge of EUV lithography chip-making revolution asiatimes.com · “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.”
Aug 24
17-Year-old Student Exposes Germany's 'Secret' Pirate Site Blocklist torrentfreak.com · “This ‘secrecy’ is not an oversight but a feature that’s codified in the agreement between rightsholders and Internet providers.”
Aug 23
DOJ sues Georgia Tech over allegedly failing to meet cyber requirements for DOD contracts cyberscoop.com · “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.”
Aug 23
This confidential government report proves that we need to liberate the Postcode Address File takes.jamesomalley.co.uk · “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”
Aug 23
Meta Cancels High-End Mixed Reality Headset After Apple Vision Pro Struggles macrumors.com · “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.”
Aug 23
What the fuck is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care mjg59.dreamwidth.org · “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.”
Aug 22
Amazon Cloud CEO Predicts a Future Where Most Software Engineers Don't Code: and AI Does It Instead entrepreneur.com · “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”
Aug 22
Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS allthingsdistributed.com · “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.”
Aug 22
Apple is shaking up how it manages the App Store theverge.com · “Apple decided to break up the division after European regulators started requiring Apple to allow third-party payment methods and alternative app stores”
Aug 22
National Public Data Published Its Own Passwords krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Aug 21
Design flaw has Microsoft Authenticator overwriting MFA accounts, locking users out csoonline.com · “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.”
Aug 21
Accident Forgiveness fly.io · “The saving grace here, which you’ll learn if you ever become that $200,000 story, is that nobody pays those bills.”
Aug 21
Breaking Down a Record-Setting Day in ERCOT blog.gridstatus.io · “Shattering the previous record, battery discharge peaked 20% higher than the previous record, which was set only the day before.”
Aug 21
Data Exfiltration from Slack AI via indirect prompt injection promptarmor.substack.com · “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.”
Aug 20
Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries sparcopen.org · “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.”
Aug 20
Tesla is hiring people to do the robot theverge.com · “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”
Aug 20
Sourcegraph went dark eric-fritz.com · “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.”
Aug 20
The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud berthub.eu · “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.”
Aug 19
Roblox is Already the Biggest Game In The World. Why Can't It Make a Profit (And How Can It)? matthewball.co · “Over the last twelve months it has averaged $138 in costs for every $100 in revenue.”
Aug 19
Bucket Monopoly: Breaching AWS Accounts Through Shadow Resources aquasec.com · “During February 2024, we discovered critical vulnerabilities in six AWS services.”
Aug 19
460k Impacted by Kootenai Health Ransomware Attack securityweek.com · “Kootenai Health discovered that the attackers had access to its network for over a week, and that certain data was exfiltrated on February 22.”
Aug 19
Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an arrest, federal court rules reason.com · “When the government seizes property incident to a lawful arrest, the Fourth Amendment requires that any continued possession of the property must be reasonable”
Aug 18
Google took three months to remove scam app that stole over $5 million in crypto: lawsuit theblock.co · “But Vaca’s lawsuit alleges Google took three months to remove the app from the Play Store.”
Aug 18
The brain simulates actions and their consequences during REM sleep biorxiv.org · “Strikingly, these motor commands, despite not being executed, shift the internal representation of direction as if the animal had turned.”
Aug 18
X ordered to pay €550,000 to Irish employee fired for not replying to Elon Musk's yes-or-resign 'extremely hardcore' ultimatum fortune.com · “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.”
Aug 17
FlightAware Leaks Customer Data (Name, Email Addresses & Passwords) loyaltylobby.com · “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.”
Aug 17
Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google tinystruggles.com · “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…”
Aug 17
MIFARE Classic: exposing the static encrypted nonce variant eprint.iacr.org · “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.”
Aug 16
Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’ theverge.com · “But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content”
Aug 16
GitHub Vulnerability 'ArtiPACKED' Exposes Repositories to Potential Takeover thehackernews.com · “GitHub, for its part, has categorized the issue as informational, requiring that users take it upon themselves to secure their uploaded artifacts.”
Aug 16
NASA and Rocket Lab aim to prove we can go to Mars for 1/10 the price techcrunch.com · “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.”
Aug 16
Disney says man can't sue over wife's death because he agreed to Disney+ terms of service nbcnews.com · “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+.”
Aug 15
Kim Dotcom's Extradition to the U.S. Given Green Light By New Zealand torrentfreak.com · “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.”
Aug 15
Epic judge says he’ll ‘tear the barriers down’ on Google’s app store monopoly theverge.com · “We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen”
Aug 15
Stripe's monorepo developer environment blog.nelhage.com · “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.”
Aug 15
Inside the "3 Billion People" National Public Data Breach troyhunt.com · “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.”
Aug 14
State of Texas v. General Motors LLC and OnStar LLC texasattorneygeneral.gov · “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.”
Aug 14
Compromising Microsoft's AI Healthcare Chatbot Service tenable.com · “The resulting list of resources contained hundreds and hundreds of resources belonging to other customers.”
Aug 14
NIST Releases First 3 Finalized Post-Quantum Encryption Standards nist.gov · “We encourage system administrators to start integrating them into their systems immediately, because full integration will take time.”
Aug 14
Ex-Kansas police chief who raided local newspaper criminally charged theguardian.com · “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.”
Aug 13
CrowdStrike Exec Shows Up to Accept 'Most Epic Fail' Award in Person pcmag.com · “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.”
Aug 13
Apple says Patreon must switch to its billing system or risk removal from App Store techcrunch.com · “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.”
Aug 13
Brands should avoid this popular term. It’s turning off customers cnn.com · “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.”
Aug 13
Federal Appeals Court Finds Geofence Warrants Are "Categorically" Unconstitutional eff.org · “the quintessential problem with these warrants is that they never include a specific user to be identified”
Aug 12
NASA Investigation Finds Boeing Hindering Americans' Return to Moon flyingmag.com · “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.”
Aug 12
0.0.0.0 Day: Exploiting Localhost APIs From the Browser oligo.security · “Eighteen years have passed, with hundreds of comments, but the bug remains open to this day.”
Aug 12
Vulnerability Allowed Eavesdropping via Sonos Smart Speakers securityweek.com · “A low-privileged, close-proximity attacker could exploit this vulnerability to remotely execute arbitrary code”
Aug 12
The surveilled society: Who is watching you and how rnz.co.nz · “Sometimes you are just asked to trust the FR function is not switched on.”
Aug 11
The Days Are Long but the Years Are Short stevecoast.com · “OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all.”
Aug 11
Progress on porting Firefox discuss.haiku-os.org · “It is currently meaningless to talk about stability before solving Rust problems.”
Aug 11
DEFCON 32 Statement entropicengineering.com · “We billed DEFCON for our most recent work, discounting our labor by 25% in order to meet the agreed upon targets.”
Aug 10
EFF's Concerns About the UN Draft Cybercrime Convention eff.org · “The proposed UN Cybercrime Convention is an extensive surveillance pact.”
Aug 10
Watch How a Hacker's Infrared Laser Can Spy on Your Laptop's Keystrokes wired.com · “The Apple logo is nearly a mirror”
Aug 10
Caltech Team Develops First Noninvasive Method to Continually Measure True Blood Pressure caltech.edu · “Our method broadens access to hospital-grade monitoring of blood pressure and cardiac health metrics.”
Aug 10
Windows Update Flaws Allow Undetectable Downgrade Attacks securityweek.com · “I was able to make a fully patched Windows machine susceptible to thousands of past vulnerabilities, turning fixed vulnerabilities into zero-days”
Aug 9
Researchers discover potentially catastrophic exploit present in AMD chips for decades engadget.com · “The researchers have also noted that the flaw dates back to at least 2006 and that it impacts nearly every AMD chip.”
Aug 9
Ransomware Attack Cost LoanDepot $27 Million securityweek.com · “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”
Aug 9
How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary quantamagazine.org · “It turns out that ternary is the most economical of all possible integer bases for representing big numbers.”
Aug 9
X officially kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate workers to South Bay sfstandard.com · “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.”
Aug 8
Intel reportedly gave up a chance to buy a stake in OpenAI in 2017 tomshardware.com · “Former Intel CEO Bob Swan reportedly scuttled the deal because had didn’t see AI models hitting the broad market anytime soon”
Aug 8
Inside the company that gathers 'human data' for every major AI firm semafor.com · “The $1 billion startup has also moved beyond coding and is providing specialized data from a wide array of industries.”
Aug 8
How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months figma.com · “Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years.”
Aug 8
MDM vendor Mobile Guardian attacked, leading to remote wiping of 13,000 devices theregister.com · “In Singapore, the incident resulted in 13,000 devices being remotely wiped and saw the nation’s Education Ministry cut ties with the vendor.”
Aug 7
Apple memory holed its broken promise for an OCSP opt-out lapcatsoftware.com · “The company apparently hopes we forget that it ever made the promise.”
Aug 7
Ransomware Attack Cost Keytronic Over $17 Million securityweek.com · “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”
Aug 7
1970 Clean Air Act Was Intended to Cover Carbon Dioxide, Study Finds e360.yale.edu · “A new study finds evidence that Congress intended for the 1970 Clean Air Act to cover carbon dioxide emissions.”
Aug 7
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will join rival Anthropic cnbc.com · “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.”
Aug 6
Every Microsoft employee is now being judged on their security work theverge.com · “A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses.”
Aug 6
Downcycled: The story of Samsung's failed deal with iFixit, as told by iFixit's CEO androidauthority.com · “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.”
Aug 6
Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI simonwillison.net · “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.”
Aug 6
Google loses antitrust case over search cnbc.com · “The court found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies.”
Aug 5
Nvidia reportedly delays its next AI chip due to a design flaw theverge.com · “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.”
Aug 5
Hackers breach ISP to poison software updates with malware bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Aug 5
How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner drew.silcock.dev · “That’s because Postgres doesn’t bother actually deleting the data, it just marks the data as deleted.”
Aug 5
Puget Systems' Perspective on Intel CPU Instability Issues pugetsystems.com · “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.”
Aug 4
Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers, And They Don't Know What To Do About It viewfromthewing.com · “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.”
Aug 4
How I Use "AI" nicholas.carlini.com · “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.”
Aug 4
Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason phoboslab.org · “I decided to polish my code, write extensive documentation for it and then released Impact. Not for free, but for a rather steep $99.”
Aug 4
Boeing takes another $125M hit thanks to Starliner theregister.com · “The losses incurred by Boeing thanks to Starliner have comfortably breezed past $1 billion, and will likely surpass $1.6 billion before long.”
Aug 3
How developers trick App Store into approving malicious apps 9to5mac.com · “After Apple approves the app with its basic functionalities, developers use CodePush to update it with anything they want.”
Aug 3
"We ran out of columns": the best, worst codebase jimmyhmiller.github.io · “At one point we had 3 interns whose full-time job was writing these SQL statements.”
Aug 3
Game Informer is shutting down theverge.com · “The magazine’s entire staff is being laid off, Kotaku reports.”
Aug 3
Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees and will stop ‘non-essential work’ theverge.com · “The company just reported a loss of $1.6 billion for Q2 2024, substantially more than the $437 million it lost last quarter.”
Aug 2
DigiCert mass-revoking TLS certificates due to domain validation bug bleepingcomputer.com · “DigiCert says the root cause was a system update in August 2019 that led to removing automatic underscore addition in some validation paths.”
Aug 2
'Error' in Microsoft's DDoS defenses amplified Azure outage theregister.com · “For yesterday’s event, Microsoft’s DDoS protection mechanisms were indeed triggered correctly. However, the response did not go so well.”
Aug 2
Twilio kills off Authy for desktop, forcibly logs out all users bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Aug 2
Don’t Let Your Domain Name Become a “Sitting Duck” krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Aug 1
Reddit CEO says Microsoft needs to pay to search the site theverge.com · “At the beginning of July, its robots.txt file was updated to block web crawlers it doesn’t have agreements with.”
Aug 1
Threat Actor Abuses Cloudflare Tunnels to Deliver RATs proofpoint.com · “Specifically, the activity abuses the TryCloudflare feature that allows an attacker to create a one-time tunnel without creating an account.”
Aug 1
TikTok is throwing $20 million a month at OpenAI via Microsoft qz.com · “TikTok’s big buys have made up about 25% of Microsoft’s AI revenue.”
Aug 1

July 2024 125 posts

Amazon must recall dangerous products properly: even ones sold by third parties theverge.com · “The CPSC says Amazon failed to adequately notify the public about more than 400,000 recalled products.”
Jul 31
Ransomware operators exploit ESXi hypervisor vulnerability for mass encryption microsoft.com · “ESXi hypervisors do not validate that such a group exists when the server is joined to a domain.”
Jul 31
Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar theregister.com · “It went from something like less than 3 percent to nearly a 100 percent attack success rate.”
Jul 31
Cyber ransom payments will need to be disclosed by businesses under new laws abc.net.au · “It also said ransomware attacks had increased roughly five-fold since the pandemic.”
Jul 31
Meta to pay Texas $1.4 billion for using facial recognition technology without users' permission texastribune.org · “The settlement, announced Tuesday, does not act as an admission of guilt and Meta maintains no wrongdoing.”
Jul 30
Our audit of Homebrew blog.trailofbits.com · “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.”
Jul 30
Calculating the Cost of a Google Deepmind Paper 152334H.github.io · “In the grand scheme of things, 5.42e24 is “not that big”.”
Jul 30
Announcing Swift Homomorphic Encryption swift.org · “BFV is based on the ring learning with errors (RLWE) hardness problem, which is quantum resistant.”
Jul 30
After 10 Years, Yelp Gave My App 4 Days observationalhazard.com · “They sent the email on a Friday and wanted a response by Monday.”
Jul 29
Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service? jpetazzo.github.io · “2.2m images should cost $110/mo.”
Jul 29
Running One-man SaaS, 9 Years In blog.healthchecks.io · “Healthchecks.io currently has 652 paying customers, and the monthly recurring revenue is 14043 USD.”
Jul 29
Amazon's Exabyte-Scale Migration from Apache Spark to Ray on Amazon EC2 aws.amazon.com · “For BDT, this efficiency gain translates to an annual saving of over 220,000 years of EC2 vCPU computing time.”
Jul 29
How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic? haxrob.net · “Facebook had acquired Onavo for approximately $120M USD in 2013 and needed to put this technology in good use.”
Jul 28
A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes blog.davidv.dev · “Why are we generating a structured language (YAML), with a computer, by manually adding spaces to make the syntax valid?”
Jul 28
tolower() with AVX-512 dotat.at · “On Zen 4 it’s very fast, and the intrinsic functions are reasonably easy to use.”
Jul 28
How Simultaneous Multithreading Works Under the Hood blog.codingconfessions.com · “The reorder buffer is split equally between the two logical processors in an SMT enabled core.”
Jul 28
There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs: any damage is permanent theverge.com · “Intel has not halted sales or clawed back any inventory.”
Jul 27
Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts bret.dk · “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?”
Jul 27
Learning about PCI-e: Driver & DMA blog.davidv.dev · “Bus mastering is a feature which allows devices to directly manipulate system memory without involving the CPU.”
Jul 27
"It's Easy To Get A Bit Over-Ambitious" - Roguecraft Devs On Developing For Amiga In 2024 timeextension.com · “Roguecraft was supposed to take about 6 months to develop and ended up taking 2 years.”
Jul 27
Courts Close the Loophole Letting the Feds Search Your Phone at the Border reason.com · “The Fourth Amendment still applies at the border, despite the feds’ insistence that it doesn’t.”
Jul 26
PKfail: Untrusted Platform Keys Undermine Secure Boot on UEFI Ecosystem binarly.io · “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.”
Jul 26
Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub trufflesecurity.com · “This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way.”
Jul 26
Security Firm Discovers Remote Worker Is Really a North Korean Hacker pcmag.com · “This was a real person using a valid but stolen US-based identity.”
Jul 26
Crooks Bypassed Google's Email Verification to Create Workspace Accounts, Access 3rd-Party Services krebsonsecurity.com · “The weakness Google fixed allowed attackers to bypass this validation process.”
Jul 26
AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems deepmind.google · “Our systems solved one problem within minutes and took up to three days to solve the others.”
Jul 25
Reddit now blocks all search engines other than Google 9to5google.com · “Reddit has updated its robots.txt file to block all bots from scraping any part of the site.”
Jul 25
Unfashionably secure: why we use isolated VMs blog.thinkst.com · “In other words, we run a VM per customer.”
Jul 25
The AI job interviewer will see you now restofworld.org · “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.”
Jul 25
Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR): Content Configuration Update Impacting the Falcon Sensor and the Windows Operating System (BSOD) crowdstrike.com · “Due to a bug in the Content Validator, one of the two Template Instances passed validation despite containing problematic content data.”
Jul 24
AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data nature.com · “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.”
Jul 24
Phish-Friendly Domain Registry “.top” Put on Notice krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Jul 24
Verizon to pay $16 million in TracFone data breach settlement bleepingcomputer.com · “The number of exposed individuals and SIM-swapping incidents have been censored in the public version of the Consent Decree document.”
Jul 24
Intent to End OCSP Service letsencrypt.org · “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.”
Jul 23
Google Chrome is no longer 'deprecating third-party cookies' 9to5google.com · ““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.””
Jul 23
Traveling this summer? Maybe don’t let the airport scan your face. vox.com · “Everyone, regardless of citizenship, can opt out when it comes to domestic flights in the US.”
Jul 23
Wiz walks away from $23 billion deal with Google, will pursue IPO cnbc.com · “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.”
Jul 23
How Olympics Officials Try to Catch "Motor Doping" spectrum.ieee.org · “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.”
Jul 23
Judge Dismisses Major SEC Charges Against SolarWinds and CISO securityweek.com · “These do not plausibly plead actionable deficiencies in the company’s reporting of the cybersecurity hack. They impermissibly rely on hindsight and speculation.”
Jul 22
Ryanair wins case against Booking.com in US court rte.ie · “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.”
Jul 22
MNGI Digestive Health Data Breach Impacts 765,000 Individuals securityweek.com · “The incident occurred on August 20, 2023, but it took MNGI almost one year to determine that personal and protected health information was accessed.”
Jul 22
Scientists Discover a New Hormone that Can Build Strong Bones ucsf.edu · “In some female mice who lacked all estrogen or were very old, CCN3 was able to more than double bone mass.”
Jul 22
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 tomshardware.com · “The laptops crash in the exact same way as the desktop parts including workloads under Unreal Engine, decompression, ycruncher or similar.”
Jul 21
Why Discover is no American Express popularfintech.com · “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).”
Jul 21
When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind. ea.rna.nl · “To summarise, you need to understand what the paper is saying. To shorten text, not so much.”
Jul 21
Tabletop game forumite achieves posting godhood, emerging from the void after 100,000 hour 11 year ban to continue the same argument from 2013 pcgamer.com · “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.”
Jul 21
how to pwn a billion dollar vc firm using inspect element kibty.town · “this was. horrifying, it was the entire process.env of a heroku instance, in the JS.”
Jul 20
minuteman missile communications computer.rip · “HICS, as originally installed, operated at 1.3Kbps.”
Jul 20
Public toilets are vanishing and that's a civic catastrophe psyche.co · “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.”
Jul 20
Bringing cloud and AI capabilities to the tactical edge: Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped appliance is generally available cloud.google.com · “Weighing approximately 100lbs, it’s human-portable, making it easy to transport and deploy in various locations.”
Jul 20
FCC Votes Unanimously to Significantly Lower Phone and Video Communication Costs After Decades of Exploitation by Prison Telecoms worthrises.org · “For decades, the cost of an ever-expanding suite of invasive surveillance services has been passed on to incarcerated people and their loved ones.”
Jul 19
WazirX Cryptocurrency Exchange Loses $230 Million in Major Security Breach thehackernews.com · “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.”
Jul 19
Python grapples with Apple App Store rejections lwn.net · “The problem at hand is that Apple’s macOS App Store is automatically rejecting apps that contain the string “itms-services”.”
Jul 19
Google's goo.gl links will stop working in August 2025 9to5google.com · “On August 25, 2025, “these URLs will no longer return a response” (404).”
Jul 19
USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap techcrunch.com · “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.”
Jul 18
Give Me the Green Light Part 1: Hacking Traffic Control Systems redthreatsec.com · “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.”
Jul 18
Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes ras.ac.uk · “It’s important to note that this is not a silver bullet for detecting fake images”
Jul 18
Mistral NeMo mistral.ai · “Mistral NeMo was trained with quantisation awareness, enabling FP8 inference without any performance loss.”
Jul 18
Jailbreaking RabbitOS: Uncovering Secret Logs, and GPL Violations da.vidbuchanan.co.uk · “There was no end-user-facing way of factory-resetting the device, making the logs effectively permanent.”
Jul 17
SAPwned: SAP AI vulnerabilities expose customers' cloud environments and private AI artifacts wiz.io · “By executing arbitrary code, we were able move laterally and take over the service”
Jul 17
Email addresses of 15 million Trello users leaked on hacking forum bleepingcomputer.com · “Trello had an open API endpoint that allows any unauthenticated user to map an email address to a trello account”
Jul 17
NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules developer.nvidia.com · “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.”
Jul 17
Banks in Singapore to phase out one-time passwords in 3 months bleepingcomputer.com · “The digital token will authenticate customers’ login without the need for an OTP that scammers can steal, or trick customers into disclosing”
Jul 17
For advertising: Firefox now collects user data by default heise.de · “More serious, however, is the fact that Mozilla also activates the feature directly - users must therefore deactivate the PPA manually by opting out.”
Jul 16
We Created A Fake Delivery Company blog.kashevko.com · “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?”
Jul 16
Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content vincentschmalbach.com · “Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content.”
Jul 16
Attempting to stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email from me by adding a postfix header neilzone.co.uk · “If every feature required a specific header to signal that it is unwanted, that would get irritating rather rapidly.”
Jul 16
Researchers: Weak Security Defaults Enabled Squarespace Domains Hijacks krebsonsecurity.com · “anyone who enters that email@domain in the squarespace form now has full access to control to the domain.”
Jul 15
User alleges Gemini AI scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without explicit permission: Google says otherwise tomshardware.com · “Just pulled up my tax return in @Google Docs–and unbidden, Gemini summarized it.”
Jul 15
Mangled fingers, no time off: Why the women who make Samsung's semiconductors are striking english.hani.co.kr · “If too many people want to use their vacation days, we have to play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets to”
Jul 15
CA4: No REP in one's Google location data fourthamendment.com · “There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in one’s Google location data. It’s willingly shared with Google.”
Jul 14
A Simple Firmware Update Completely Hides a Device's Bluetooth Fingerprint today.ucsd.edu · “This defense can be rolled out incrementally, requiring only software modification on at least one widely-used Bluetooth Low Energy chipset”
Jul 14
Building and scaling Notion's data lake notion.com · “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”
Jul 14
Building the Bell System construction-physics.com · “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.”
Jul 14
Houston-area residents frustrated as they enter sixth day without power and air conditioning in punishing heat cnn.com · “CenterPoint Energy says it’s hoping to restore power to an additional 350,000 customers by Sunday”
Jul 13
Disney's Internal Slack Breached? NullBulge Leaks 1.1 TiB of Data hackread.com · “almost 10,000 channels, every message and file possible, unreleased projects, raw images, code, logins, links to internal API/web pages, and more!”
Jul 13
Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again lucvandonkersgoed.com · “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.”
Jul 13
Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas simonwillison.net · “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!”
Jul 13
Crooks Steal Phone, SMS Records for Nearly All AT&T Customers krebsonsecurity.com · “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).”
Jul 12
CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months theregister.com · “The passwords for both accounts had not been updated in over eight years and were not enrolled in the organization’s identity management (IDM).”
Jul 12
Binary secret scanning helped us prevent (what might have been) the worst supply chain attack you can imagine jfrog.com · “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.”
Jul 12
Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs alderongames.com · “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.”
Jul 12
Second Factor SMS: Worse Than Its Reputation ccc.de · “IdentifyMobile, a provider of 2FA-SMS, shared the sent one-time passwords in real-time on the internet.”
Jul 11
New HIV Prevention Drug Shows 100% Efficacy in Clinical Trial sciencealert.com · “During the randomised phase of the trial none of the 2,134 women who received lenacapavir contracted HIV.”
Jul 11
ICPEN Sweep finds majority of websites and mobile apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscription services icpen.org · “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.”
Jul 11
How Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit quickwit.io · “Binance was retaining most logs for only a few days.”
Jul 11
Scientists Discover a Cause of Lupus and a Possible Way to Reverse It news.feinberg.northwestern.edu · “Up until this point, all therapy for lupus is a blunt instrument. It’s broad immunosuppression,”
Jul 10
Russia forces Apple to remove dozens of VPN apps from App Store bleepingcomputer.com · “If you need additional information regarding this removal or the laws and requirements in Russia, we encourage you to reach out directly to Roskomnadzor.”
Jul 10
Tesla insiders say Elon optimized Full Self-Driving routes for himself and influencers electrek.co · “It seemed like we were purposely making his car better to make Autopilot look different than it was. It felt dishonest.”
Jul 10
Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space esa.int · “With this first successful launch by Ariane 6, Europe has finally recovered its capacity to access space.”
Jul 10
Linksys Velop routers send Wi-Fi passwords in plaintext to US servers stackdiary.com · “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.”
Jul 9
Microsoft's Xandr grants GDPR rights at a rate of 0% noyb.eu · “However, despite collecting vast amounts of detailed information about people, Xandr reports an astonishing 0% response rate to access and erasure requests in 2022.”
Jul 9
Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit theregister.com · “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.”
Jul 9
PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights robertheaton.com · “Depending on network conditions on the plane I might be able to hit speeds of several bytes per second.”
Jul 9
Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 Max crashes cnbc.com · “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.”
Jul 8
Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 incident on June 27, 2024 blog.cloudflare.com · “This caused immediate unreachability for the DNS resolver address from over 300 networks in 70 countries”
Jul 8
Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction torrentfreak.com · “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.”
Jul 8
Z-Library Admins "Escape House Arrest" After Judge Approves U.S. Extradition torrentfreak.com · “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.”
Jul 8
I'm Funding Ladybird Because I Can't Fund Firefox jackkelly.name · ““Search partnerships” means “Google”, who made up 81% of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue in 2022.”
Jul 7
YouTube Embeds are Bananas Heavy and it's Fixable frontendmasters.com · “YouTube Embeds are like 1.3MB in size with no shared resources between multiple embeds.”
Jul 7
Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor righto.com · “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.”
Jul 7
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 pme.uchicago.edu · “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.”
Jul 6
Properly Testing Concurrent Data Structures matklad.github.io · “it very much depends on the timing, so you can’t reproduce it deterministically and you can’t debug it.”
Jul 6
Record 4 Camera Angles at Once Using Only iPhones and iPads pcmag.com · “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).”
Jul 6
OVHcloud blames record-breaking DDoS attack on MikroTik botnet bleepingcomputer.com · “OVHcloud found nearly 100,000 Mikrotik devices that are reachable/exploitable over the internet, making up for many potential targets for DDoS actors.”
Jul 5
Latest Intel CPUs impacted by new Indirector side-channel attack bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Jul 5
Europol Announces Crackdown on Cobalt Strike Servers Used by Cybercriminals securityweek.com · “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.”
Jul 5
Why Vivaldi browser won't follow the current AI trend? vivaldi.com · “So, as we have seen, LLMs are essentially confident-sounding lying machines with a penchant to occasionally disclose private data or plagiarise existing work.”
Jul 5
Twilio Confirms Data Breach After Hackers Leak 33M Authy User Phone Numbers securityweek.com · “Twilio has detected that threat actors were able to identify data associated with Authy accounts, including phone numbers, due to an unauthenticated endpoint.”
Jul 4
Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click blog.cloudflare.com · “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.”
Jul 4
Batteries: how cheap can they get? aukehoekstra.substack.com · “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.”
Jul 4
Meta's Threads hits 175 million users one year after launch theverge.com · “It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet.”
Jul 4
AI's $600B Question sequoiacap.com · “If you run this analysis again today, here are the results you get: AI’s $200B question is now AI’s $600B question.”
Jul 3
Evolve Bank data breach impacted fintech firms Wise and Affirm securityaffairs.com · “We no longer work with Evolve Bank & Trust, and USD account details are provided by a different bank.”
Jul 3
Google Pixel 6 series phones bricked after factory reset bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Jul 3
Juniper Networks flings out emergency patches for perfect 10 router vuln theregister.com · “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”
Jul 3
With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation's Limits quantamagazine.org · “They’ve finally verified the true value of a number called BB(5), which quantifies just how busy that fifth beaver is.”
Jul 2
This is Big Tech's playbook for swallowing the AI industry theverge.com · “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.”
Jul 2
Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows theguardian.com · “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”
Jul 2
Why Bridges Don't Sink practical.engineering · “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.”
Jul 2
regreSSHion: RCE in OpenSSH's server, on glibc-based Linux systems qualys.com · “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()”
Jul 1
TeamViewer's corporate network was breached in alleged APT hack bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Jul 1
Shipt's Algorithm Squeezed Gig Workers. They Fought Back spectrum.ieee.org · “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.”
Jul 1
Google to Block Entrust Certificates in Chrome Starting November 2024 thehackernews.com · “Affected website operators are urged to move to a publicly-trusted certificate authority owner to minimize disruption by October 31, 2024.”
Jul 1
CISA: Most critical open source projects not using memory safe code bleepingcomputer.com · “52% of critical open-source projects analyzed contain code written in memory-unsafe languages.”
Jul 1

June 2024 120 posts

How to Get Root Access to Your Sleep Number Bed dillan.org · “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.”
Jun 30
MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI techcrunch.com · “When you have 10,000 orders that just came in that you have to ship in two hours, you have to optimize for that.”
Jun 30
Inside a 1 dollar radar motion sensor maurycyz.com · “I recently got some cheap microwave motion sensors, mostly because I was wondering how China managed to make a radar for under a dollar”
Jun 30
Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News arxiv.org · “The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977.”
Jun 30
Do a firmware update for your AirPods – now blogs.gnome.org · “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”
Jun 29
Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws memorycorruption.net · “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.”
Jun 29
The Economics of Writing Technical Books architectelevator.com · “I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one.”
Jun 29
Swiss Broadcasting Corporation to pull plug on FM radio swissinfo.ch · “Remaining, pure FM usage is stagnating at less than 10%.”
Jun 29
Critical GitLab bug lets attackers run pipelines as any user bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Jun 28
The Death of NYC Congestion Pricing apricitas.io · “Yet just before implementation, congestion pricing was indefinitely paused at a press conference framed around inflation and cost of living concerns”
Jun 28
German firm Synhelion opens 'world's 1st' industrial solar fuel plant interestingengineering.com · “It also set a target of achieving an annual production volume of one million tonnes of syncrude within 10 years.”
Jun 28
A Eulogy for DevOps matduggan.com · “Money was (effectively) free so it was better to increase speed regardless of monthly bills.”
Jun 28
ID Verification Service for TikTok, Uber, X Exposed Driver Licenses 404media.co · “The breach highlights that identity services could themselves become a target for hackers.”
Jun 27
Google is testing facial recognition technology for campus security, starting at site near Seattle cnbc.com · “At the Kirkland testing site, people entering the building will not be able to opt out of the facial screening.”
Jun 27
25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gone as Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site latenighter.com · “Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.”
Jun 27
SpaceX is building a NASA craft to intentionally destroy the International Space Station after retiring cnbc.com · “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded an $843 million contract to SpaceX to build the so-called "U.S. Deorbit Vehicle."”
Jun 27
FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't npr.org · “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.”
Jun 26
Stability AI stabilized by cash from Silicon Valley VCs theregister.com · “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.”
Jun 26
Project Naptime: Evaluating Offensive Security Capabilities of Large Language Models projectzero.google · “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).”
Jun 26
Federal whistleblowers are entitled to damages for missed future pay, court rules govexec.com · “Employees can receive compensatory payments if their firings caused harm that prevented future earnings.”
Jun 26
Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites sansec.io · “The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites.”
Jun 25
Apple wants to replace 50% of iPhone final assembly line workers with automation 9to5mac.com · “The machinery necessary to automate iPhone production can sometimes cost hundreds of millions of dollars each year.”
Jun 25
Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco waymo.com · “Our track record for safe operations is unparalleled.”
Jun 25
From 0/10 to 8/10: Microsoft Puts Repair Front and Center ifixit.com · “The manuals were made available the very day the device was released, something we rarely see in any product category.”
Jun 25
Apple found in breach of EU competition rules theguardian.com · “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.”
Jun 24
US prosecutors recommend Justice Department criminally charge Boeing as deadline looms voanews.com · “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.”
Jun 24
1-click Exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app stulle123.github.io · “However, we didn’t receive any reward as only Koreans are eligible to receive a bounty.”
Jun 24
MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline variety.com · “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.”
Jun 24
More Memory Safety for Let's Encrypt: Deploying ntpd-rs letsencrypt.org · “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.”
Jun 24
Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy nature.com · “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.”
Jun 23
Traffic engineers build roads that invite crashes because they rely on outdated research and faulty data theconversation.com · “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.”
Jun 23
Singapore doubles down on lab-grown meat as Silicon Valley backs off restofworld.org · “The industry raised just $226 million last year, a steep fall from $922 million in 2022.”
Jun 23
Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets righto.com · “Since the password is transmitted without encryption, the security is weak, but better than nothing.”
Jun 23
Solar generates fifth of global electricity on summer solstice midday peak ember-climate.org · “In absolute terms, Ember expects solar to rise by 28%, from 157 TWh in June 2023 to 201 TWh in June 2024.”
Jun 22
Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary arxiv.org · “This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs.”
Jun 22
My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore howtogeek.com · “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.”
Jun 22
Andrew S. Tanenbaum receives ACM Software System Award vu.nl · “MINIX was also the basis for the MeikOS operating system for Meikotransputer-based computers and runs inside popular microchips.”
Jun 22
New Government Ban on Kaspersky Would Prevent Company from Updating Malware Signatures in U.S. zetter-zeroday.com · “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.”
Jun 21
Kraken Crypto Exchange Hit by $3 Million Theft Exploiting Zero-Day Flaw thehackernews.com · “This individual discovered the bug in our funding system, and leveraged it to credit their account with $4 in crypto.”
Jun 21
Massachusetts 911 Outage Caused by Errant Firewall securityweek.com · “The firewall prevented calls from getting to the 911 dispatch centers, also known as Public Safety Answer Points (PSAPs).”
Jun 21
Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design blog.jitx.com · “If you’re not within 10% or so of the global optimal performance in EE, your suggestions have near-zero value.”
Jun 21
EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control stackdiary.com · “Belgium’s draft law, which was supposed to be adopted as the Council’s negotiating position, was instead postponed indefinitely.”
Jun 20
How small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline engadget.com · “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.”
Jun 20
How free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life lwn.net · “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.”
Jun 20
Introducing Claude 3.5 Sonnet anthropic.com · “In an internal agentic coding evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet solved 64% of problems, outperforming Claude 3 Opus which solved 38%.”
Jun 20
This Bridge Should Have Been Closed Years Before It Collapsed practical.engineering · “Since 2007, every single inspection report that included recommendations said to repair the stiffener plates in the legs that were heavily corroded.”
Jun 19
Security bug allows anyone to spoof Microsoft employee emails techcrunch.com · “Microsoft just said they couldn’t reproduce it without providing any details.”
Jun 19
UK's Total Fitness exposed nearly 500K images of members, staff through unprotected database theregister.com · “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.”
Jun 19
Astronomers see a massive black hole awaken in real time eso.org · “In late 2019 the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 suddenly started shining brighter than ever before.”
Jun 19
How React 19 (Almost) Made the Internet Slower blog.codeminer42.com · “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.”
Jun 18
Nature retracts highly cited 2002 paper that claimed adult stem cells could become any type of cell retractionwatch.com · “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.”
Jun 18
Off-path TCP hijacking in NAT-enabled Wi-Fi networks blog.apnic.net · “Additionally, we conducted measurement studies on 93 real-world Wi-Fi networks and found that 75 (81%) of them were susceptible to this attack.”
Jun 18
Introducing a new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing frame.work · “The DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard uses a JH7110 processor from StarFive which has four U74 RISC-V cores from SiFive.”
Jun 18
FTC Takes Action Against Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions ftc.gov · “Adobe trapped customers into year-long subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous cancellation hurdles”
Jun 17
Alleged Boss of 'Scattered Spider' Hacking Group Arrested krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Jun 17
DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate dronedj.com · “The bill as it stands does not provide any compensation to those that could be affected by this ban, if it is retroactive.”
Jun 17
OpenAI adds former NSA chief to its board cnbc.com · “The company said Nakasone will also join OpenAI’s recently created Safety and Security Committee.”
Jun 17
In First Case of its Kind, NLRB Judge Declares Non-Compete Clause Is an Unfair Labor Practice nlrbedge.com · “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.”
Jun 16
What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 days blog.sofiane.cc · “There were a total of 11,599 login attempts. Divided by 30 days, this means an average of 386 login attempts per day.”
Jun 16
The Raspberry Pi 5 Is No Match for a Tini-Mini-Micro PC louwrentius.com · “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.”
Jun 16
MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5 axio.ms · “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”
Jun 16
Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent rknight.me · “So they’re using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string.”
Jun 15
Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention torrentfreak.com · “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!”
Jun 15
Tesla's FSD - a Useless Technology Demo tomverbeure.github.io · “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.”
Jun 15
'The big problem is water': UK ebike owners plagued by failing motors theguardian.com · “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.”
Jun 15
Security firm Cylance says it has been hacked, data put up for sale online techradar.com · “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.”
Jun 14
Arm warns of actively exploited flaw in Mali GPU kernel drivers bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Jun 14
How I Found A 55 Year Old Bug In The First Lunar Lander Game martincmartin.com · “Eventually I found a bug: a missing “divide by two” that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years.”
Jun 14
Fungus breaks down ocean plastic nioz.nl · “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.”
Jun 14
Microsoft Chose Profit Over Security and Left U.S. Government Vulnerable to Russian Hack, Whistleblower Says propublica.org · “Not only could Microsoft lose a multibillion-dollar deal, but it could also lose the race to dominate the market for cloud computing.”
Jun 13
Arm says it wants all Snapdragon X Elite laptops destroyed xda-developers.com · “Arm’s argument is that the Nuvia license was canceled when it was taken over by Qualcomm.”
Jun 13
Ikea's boss solved the Swedish retailer's global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries, introducing flexible working and subsidizing childcare fortune.com · “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.”
Jun 13
Tesla claims it has 2 Optimus humanoid robots working autonomously in factory electrek.co · “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.”
Jun 13
Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret: Founder Liquidity stefantheard.com · “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.”
Jun 12
Snowflake Breach Exposes 165 Customers' Data in Ongoing Extortion Campaign thehackernews.com · “The earliest infostealer infection date observed associated with a credential leveraged by the threat actor dated back to November 2020.”
Jun 12
Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time theregister.com · “Oracle has started to dispatch Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time, according to one licensing expert.”
Jun 12
OpenAI ex-employees worry about company's control over their millions of dollars in shares cnbc.com · “OpenAI recently circulated a document indicating that ex-employees who work at competitors are not included in the tender offers.”
Jun 12
Banana giant Chiquita held liable by US court for funding paramilitaries bbc.com · “The regular payments continued even after the AUC was designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organisation in 2001.”
Jun 11
Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit theregister.com · “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.”
Jun 11
Why Triplebyte failed otherbranch.com · “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.”
Jun 11
Announcing ARC Prize arcprize.org · “ARC-AGI was created in 2019 and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) high score was 20%. Today, only 34%.”
Jun 11
Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud security.apple.com · “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.”
Jun 10
Google's $2.3 million check helped the company get a trial by judge instead of jury theverge.com · “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.”
Jun 10
Apple blocks PC emulator from being available in iOS App Store and third-party app stores 9to5mac.com · “App Review rejected UTM, deciding that a “PC is not a console”.”
Jun 10
750k Impacted by Frontier Communications Data Breach securityweek.com · “Frontier Communications is offering 12 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft services to the impacted individuals.”
Jun 10
The censorship circumvention extension has disappeared from the Russian version of Mozilla Addons discourse.mozilla.org · “We have not changed any visibility settings, nor have we received any emails regarding this action.”
Jun 9
How a single ChatGPT mistake cost us $10,000+ asim.bearblog.dev · “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.”
Jun 9
Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centres windytan.com · “It’s probably just a misconfiguration that was never fixed because the people working on it couldn’t experientially confirm any issue with it.”
Jun 9
Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling arxiv.org · “We demonstrate that MatMul operations can be eliminated from LLMs while maintaining strong performance, even at billion-parameter scales.”
Jun 9
Disaster narrowly avoided as plane clears Bristol Airport runway with just seconds to spare independent.co.uk · “Boeing told investigators looking into the incident that they were aware of a “long history of nuisance disconnects during takeoff mode engagements”.”
Jun 8
South Pole Water Infrastructure brr.fyi · “There are millions of gallons of raw, untreated wastewater stored in outfalls beneath South Pole Station.”
Jun 8
Claude's Character anthropic.com · “Claude then ranks its own responses to each message by how well they align with its character.”
Jun 8
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive blog.archive.org · “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.”
Jun 8
Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash wired.com · “If you don’t proactively choose to turn it on, it will be off by default.”
Jun 7
OpenSSH introduces options to penalize undesirable behavior undeadly.org · “Repeated offenses by the same client address will accrue greater penalties, up to a configurable maximum.”
Jun 7
FBI obtains 7,000 LockBit ransomware decryption keys statescoop.com · “Though the gang still operates, reports show the mission disrupted its activities.”
Jun 7
Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects theregister.com · “A study has found that software projects adopting Agile practices are 268 percent more likely to fail than those that do not.”
Jun 7
How Online Privacy Is Like Fishing spectrum.ieee.org · “What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.”
Jun 6
Boeing's Starliner makes it into orbit at long last theregister.com · “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.”
Jun 6
Nvidia is now more valuable than Apple at $3.01 trillion theverge.com · “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.”
Jun 6
AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead research.google · “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.”
Jun 6
Major cyberattack sees NHS London hospitals declare critical incident with operations cancelled independent.co.uk · “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.”
Jun 5
Is One Company to Blame for Soaring Rental Prices in the U.S.? entrepreneur.com · “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”
Jun 5
Leaked Google database reveals its secret privacy and security failures engadget.com · “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”
Jun 5
Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools’ use of 365 Education suite techcrunch.com · “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.”
Jun 5
PSA: Bartender Mac App Under New Ownership, But Lack of Transparency Raises Concerns macrumors.com · “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.”
Jun 4
Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts pcworld.com · “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.”
Jun 4
Instagram confirms test of ‘unskippable’ ads techcrunch.com · “We’re always testing formats that can drive value for advertisers”
Jun 4
Things the guys who stole my phone have texted me to try to get me to unlock it gothamist.com · “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!”
Jun 4
Hacking Millions of Modems (and Investigating Who Hacked My Modem) samcurry.net · “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.”
Jun 3
Majority for chat control possible: Users who refuse scanning to be prevented from sharing photos and links patrick-breyer.de · “If a user refuses the scanning, they would be blocked from sending or receiving images, photos, videos and links (Article 10).”
Jun 3
Japanese Crypto Exchange DMM Bitcoin Suffers $305M Hack coindesk.com · “In a blog post on its website, DMM Bitcoin said 4,502.9 BTC “leaked” out of the exchange.”
Jun 3
Netflix Paid Out Over $1 Million via Bug Bounty Program securityweek.com · “Rewards were paid out for 845 vulnerabilities, more than a quarter of which were rated ‘critical severity’ or ‘high severity’.”
Jun 3
Internal messages show how the new head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel english.elpais.com · “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.”
Jun 2
Parable of the Sofa tbray.org · “The words “lifestyle business” are always, of course, uttered in a voice dripping with contempt.”
Jun 2
Getting to grips with an extra thumb cam.ac.uk · “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.”
Jun 2
Ticketmaster confirms data breach with a SEC filing stackdiary.com · “Likewise, at the time of this publication, Ticketmaster has not yet begun notifying its users of the data breach.”
Jun 1
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 simonwillison.net · “In practice, that audience’s needs are a very small (tiny, in fact) portion of Windows userbase”
Jun 1
Goldfish Memories chinamediaproject.org · “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).”
Jun 1
Space secrets leak disclosure huggingface.co · “As a first step of remediation, we have revoked a number of HF tokens present in those secrets.”
Jun 1

May 2024 123 posts

Engineering for Slow Internet brr.fyi · “It needed to load nearly 20 MB of Javascript, just to render the main screen!”
May 31
Google will roll out Chrome's new extension spec on June 3rd theverge.com · “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.”
May 31
Data breach exposes details of 25,000 current and former BBC employees theguardian.com · “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”.”
May 31
Intel's Anti-Upgrade Tricks Defeated With Kapton Tape hackaday.com · “Turns out, the difference in the socket is just a few pins here and there”
May 31
Why, after 6 years, I'm over GraphQL bessey.dev · “Compare this to the REST world where generally speaking you would authorise every endpoint, a far smaller task.”
May 30
Fitbit Ace LTE: Hands On With Google's First Smartwatch for Kids pcmag.com · “Without the subscription, the Ace LTE is limited to basic movement and step tracking.”
May 30
1-bit LLMs Could Solve AI's Energy Demands spectrum.ieee.org · “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.”
May 30
Starlink's disruption of the space industry thespacereview.com · “That would be a big step, to have more than zero in the ‘not bankrupt’ category”
May 30
Treasury Sanctions Creators of 911 S5 Proxy Botnet krebsonsecurity.com · “911 built its proxy network mainly by offering “free” virtual private networking (VPN) services.”
May 29
PayPal is building an ad network based on your Venmo data theverge.com · “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”
May 29
YouTube has now begun skipping videos altogether for users with ad blockers androidpolice.com · “YouTube users with ad blockers installed are reporting videos skipping straight to the end upon playback.”
May 29
AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once washington.edu · “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”
May 29
An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them sparktoro.com · “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”
May 28
How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet wired.com · “The RoboForm program unwisely tied the random passwords it generated to the date and time on the user’s computer”
May 28
Elon Musk's xAI raises $6 billion to fund its race against ChatGPT and all the rest theverge.com · “Musk denied that report at the time.”
May 28
Finally an alternative to Big Tech, your new open-source mobile ecosystem - Mobifree f-droid.org · “Both app stores were built on tracking users to sell their data, thereby giving Apple and Google power over how citizens receive services from their own governments.”
May 28
Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems arxiv.org · “Applying this technique over the course of a year, we learned the precise locations of over 2 billion BSSIDs around the world.”
May 27
Almost all citizens of city of Eindhoven have their personal data exposed bitdefender.com · “Two files containing the personal data of 221,511 inhabitants of Eindhoven were accessible to unauthorised parties for a period of time last year.”
May 27
Google fixes eighth actively exploited Chrome zero-day this year bleepingcomputer.com · “CVE-2024-5274 is the eighth actively exploited vulnerability that Google fixed in Chrome since the beginning of the year, and the third this month.”
May 27
Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4 blog.benjojo.co.uk · “These entities are now selling off (if they can) these blocks at prices 10,000+ USD per /24!”
May 27
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h robindev.substack.com · “It felt like extortion. Pay us $120k until tomorrow or we destroy your business.”
May 26
This is what the damaged Svalbard cable looked like when it came up from the depths nrk.no · “After an inital investigation, the police dropped the case due to lack of evidence, and inadequate legislation.”
May 26
How the Guinness Brewery Invented the Most Important Statistical Method in Science scientificamerican.com · “The self-taught statistician published his t-test under the pseudonym “Student” because Guinness didn’t want to tip off competitors to its research.”
May 26
Introducing adaptive audio in Google Meet: creating ad-hoc meeting spaces with multiple laptops workspaceupdates.googleblog.com · “This is a great benefit for organizations with not enough video conferencing rooms or without resources for dedicated conference room equipment.”
May 26
Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same bbc.com · “But Google controls the roads. If tomorrow they decide the roads won’t go to an entire town, that town dies.”
May 25
Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search theverge.com · “The messy rollout means Google is racing to manually disable AI Overviews for specific searches as various memes get posted”
May 25
Abusing Go's infrastructure reverse.put.as · “Malware can simply store payloads and retrieve them from the proxy when needed.”
May 25
JetBrains releases RustRover IDE for Rust development infoworld.com · “RustRover is available through a paid commercial license or a free non-commercial license, the latter for individuals using RustRover for non-commercial purposes.”
May 25
JAVS courtroom recording software backdoored in supply chain attack bleepingcomputer.com · “Attackers have backdoored the installer of widely used Justice AV Solutions (JAVS) courtroom video recording software”
May 24
Canada's London Drugs confirms ransomware attack after LockBit demands $25M theregister.com · “London Drugs is unwilling and unable to pay ransom to these cybercriminals.”
May 24
Bionic Eye Gets a New Lease on Life spectrum.ieee.org · “Pixium ran out of money last November before the final results of a larger, multiyear pivotal trial in Europe.”
May 24
400,000 Impacted by CentroMed Data Breach securityweek.com · “The personal information of 400,000 individuals was compromised in a data breach at El Centro Del Barrio (CentroMed).”
May 24
Cement recycling method could help solve one of the world's biggest climate challenges cam.ac.uk · “Eventually, this method could produce zero emission cement, if the EAF was powered by renewable energy.”
May 23
Microsoft outage affects Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT internet search bleepingcomputer.com · “Copilot is completely offline whether you use the website, app, or Copilot in Windows.”
May 23
How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years construction-physics.com · “In 1941 Boeing required more than 140,000 hours of labor to assemble a B-17.”
May 23
Making steel with electricity news.mit.edu · “The company has raised more than $370 million to date from organizations across Europe, Asia”
May 23
Windows Recall sounds like a privacy nightmare: here's why I'm worried techradar.com · “Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers.”
May 22
Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag krebsonsecurity.com · “Apple’s API will return the geolocations of up to 400 more BSSIDs that are nearby the one requested.”
May 22
Two students find security bug that could let millions do laundry for free theverge.com · “CSC never responded when Sherbrooke and Taranenko reported the vulnerability via emails and a phone call in January”
May 22
S3 Is Showing Its Age materializedview.io · “S3 is the only object store that doesn’t support preconditions.”
May 22
Sam Altman Is Showing Us Who He Really Is slate.com · “Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider.”
May 21
Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy techcrunch.com · “But, it turns out that if you don’t want Slack to use your data, you have to email the company to opt out.”
May 21
A Transport Protocol's View of Starlink ispcol.potaroo.net · “The worst case in this data set is a shift from 30ms to 80ms.”
May 21
The curious case of the missing period tjaart.substack.com · “This meant some customers received emails informing them their new premium was now $2700 instead of $27.00.”
May 21
Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe propublica.org · “Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic.”
May 20
CVE-2024-4367: Arbitrary JavaScript execution in PDF.js codeanlabs.com · “On Electron apps that do not properly sandbox JavaScript code, this vulnerability even leads to native code execution (!).”
May 20
When Online Content Disappears pewresearch.org · “Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.”
May 20
Migrating a Trillion Entries of Uber's Ledger Data from DynamoDB to LedgerStore uber.com · “At Uber’s scale, DynamoDB became expensive.”
May 20
The Lunacy of Artemis idlewords.com · “Each SLS booster is now projected to cost $266 million, or about twice the launch cost of a Falcon Heavy.”
May 19
Hertz Charging a Tesla Renter for Gas Was Not an Isolated Incident thedrive.com · “Le was then apparently billed $690.32, some of which was redundant billing for the rental they say they’d already paid for.”
May 19
Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead" eff.org · “Apple charges app vendors a whopping 30 percent commission on most transactions”
May 19
Tutorial: Transforming a QLC SSD into an SLC SSD: Dramatically increasing the drive's endurance! theoverclockingpage.com · “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.”
May 19
How Intel undercut a standards body to give us the PCI connector spectrum.ieee.org · “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.”
May 18
SWISS' Entire Boeing 777 Fleet Now Has Shark Skin Technology simpleflying.com · “Last year, the airline saved nearly 2,200 tonnes of kerosene despite its 777 fleet not being fully fitted at the time.”
May 18
Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates centauri-dreams.org · “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.”
May 18
Frozen Human Brain Tissue Was Successfully Revived For The First Time bgr.com · “They found that the thawed organoids closely resembled their unfrozen counterparts’ appearance, growth, and function, even after being frozen in MEDY for 18 months.”
May 18
ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can't vox.com · “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.”
May 17
CVE-2023-52424 WiFi Vulnerability: The SSID Confusion Attack top10vpn.com · “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.”
May 17
The Maker of Stable Diffusion Is Collapsing, Considering Sale futurism.com · “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.”
May 17
900k Impacted by Data Breach at Mississippi Healthcare Provider securityweek.com · “In January, SRHS informed the Maine Attorney General’s Office that 252,890 individuals were impacted by the incident.”
May 17
For self-driving cars, the free ride is over theverge.com · “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.”
May 16
The Forged Apple Employee Badge cabel.com · “eBay both times sent back a response that they had found that it didn’t violate any of eBay’s rules.”
May 16
Raspberry Pi is going public to expand its range of tiny computers theverge.com · “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”
May 16
Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count quantamagazine.org · “The new algorithm is astonishingly simple and easy to implement”
May 16
Ebury botnet malware infected 400,000 Linux servers since 2009 bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
May 15
Jepsen: Datomic Pro 1.0.7075 jepsen.io · “However, inside of a transaction Datomic behaves as if operations were evaluated concurrently.”
May 15
Oracle goes vegan: Dumps Terraform for OpenTofu thestack.technology · “In this release, we have switched from Terraform to OpenTofu due to forthcoming Terraform licensing changes”
May 15
Researchers identify fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50,000 years today.oregonstate.edu · “During the largest of the natural rises, carbon dioxide increased by about 14 parts per million in 55 years.”
May 15
See what's changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy blog.mozilla.org · “We understand that any new data collection might spark some questions.”
May 14
New gel breaks down alcohol in the body ethz.ch · “Thirty minutes after the single dose of alcohol, the prophylactic application of the gel reduced the alcohol level in the mice by 40 percent.”
May 14
$16k G1 humanoid rises up to smash nuts, twist and twirl newatlas.com · “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).”
May 14
The new APT 3.0 solver blog.jak-linux.org · “The most striking difference to the classic APT solver is that solver3 always keeps manually installed packages around, it never offers to remove them.”
May 14
Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes aws.amazon.com · “Amazon S3 will make a change so unauthorized requests that customers did not initiate are free of charge.”
May 13
Boeing refused to pay $200 million ransomware demand from LockBit gang bitdefender.com · “If the $200 million figure is accurate, it would be one of the very highest ransom demands ever made by cyber-extortionists.”
May 13
Apple and Google deliver support for unwanted tracking alerts in iOS and Android apple.com · “Bluetooth tag manufacturers including Chipolo, eufy, Jio, Motorola, and Pebblebee have committed that future tags will be compatible.”
May 13
Ohio Lottery data breach impacted over 538,000 individuals securityaffairs.com · “Attackers gained access to names or other personal identifiers in combination with Social Security Numbers of the impacted individuals.”
May 13
GPUs Go Brrr hazyresearch.stanford.edu · “This diagram cost us three weeks of life that we will not get back, hence the public shaming.”
May 12
16 years of CVE-2008-0166 - Debian OpenSSL Bug 16years.secvuln.info · “It appears that a sizeable number of companies configured DKIM TXT records in 2007 and never changed them.”
May 12
Nearly Half of All Masters Degrees Aren't Worth Getting reason.com · “Because ROI is negative for these programs, it’s unlikely that most of those loan dollars will be repaid.”
May 12
Did GitHub Copilot really increase my productivity? trace.yshui.dev · “That being said, the answer to my question above is a very definite “no, I am more productive without it”.”
May 12
She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all theguardian.com · “Someone had been crying deepfake.”
May 11
Thread - the tech we can't use or teach overengineer.dev · “Thread is very much neither free nor open.”
May 11
iOS 18: Apple finalizing deal to bring ChatGPT to iPhone 9to5mac.com · “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”
May 11
Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head github.com · “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.”
May 11
Dell warns of data breach, 49 million customers allegedly affected bleepingcomputer.com · “We believe there is not a significant risk to our customers given the type of information involved.”
May 10
Georgia education agency's MOVEit data theft impacted 800K theregister.com · “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.”
May 10
CME impact imminent, Two more earth-directed CMEs spaceweatherlive.com · “That means there are now six, yes six, coronal mass ejections that have a good chance to pass our planet in the days ahead.”
May 10
A Skeptic’s Take on Beaming Power to Earth from Space spectrum.ieee.org · “In that respect, beamed power from space is like nuclear fusion, except at least 25 years behind.”
May 10
Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ theguardian.com · “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.”
May 9
Google employees question execs over 'decline in morale' after blowout earnings cnbc.com · “Despite the company’s stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases”
May 9
It's always TCP_NODELAY. Every damn time. brooker.co.za · “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.”
May 9
Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial independent.co.uk · “Some 24 weeks after surgery, in February this year, tests in Cambridge showed Opal could also hear soft sounds such as a whisper.”
May 9
Why Your VPN May Not Be As Secure As It Claims krebsonsecurity.com · “In our testing, the VPN always continued to report as connected, and the kill switch was never engaged to drop our VPN connection.”
May 8
Tesla is being investigated for securities and wire fraud for self-driving claims theverge.com · “To our knowledge no government agency in any ongoing investigation has concluded that any wrongdoing occurred.”
May 8
Stack Overflow Upset Over Users Deleting Answers After OpenAI Partnership build5nines.com · “Posts that are potentially useful to others should not be removed except under extraordinary circumstances.”
May 8
UK confirms Ministry of Defence payroll data exposed in data breach bleepingcomputer.com · “It is estimated that 270,000 payroll records have been exposed.”
May 8
AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules blog.google · “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.”
May 8
Boeing faces new US investigation into 'missed' 787 inspections theguardian.com · “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”.”
May 7
Apple introduces M4 chip apple.com · “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.”
May 7
LPCAMM2 Is Finally Here, and It's a Big Deal ifixit.com · “Finally: modular, performant, power-efficient laptop memory for the masses.”
May 7
Introducing SecureDrop Protocol securedrop.org · “The server has access to minimal metadata, theoretically opening the door to deployment in adversarial environments.”
May 7
Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain restoreprivacy.com · “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.”
May 6
Dropbox says hackers stole customer data, auth secrets from eSignature service bleepingcomputer.com · “This configuration tool enabled the threat actor to execute applications and automated services with elevated privileges, allowing the attacker to access the customer database.”
May 6
A million Australian pubgoers wake up to find personal info listed on leak site theregister.com · “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.”
May 6
Your 14-Day Free Trial Ain't Gonna Cut It keygen.sh · “I gave them 14 days to get to that fork. But my p50 TTC is 41 days.”
May 6
Open Source Security (OpenSSF) and OpenJS Foundations Issue Alert for Social Engineering Takeovers of Open Source Projects openssf.org · “These social engineering attacks are exploiting the sense of duty that maintainers have with their project and community in order to manipulate them.”
May 5
Helldivers 2 Removed From Purchase On Steam In Over 150 Countries thegamer.com · “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.”
May 5
Multi-Drug Resistant Bacteria Found on ISS Mutating to Become Functionally Distinct nasa.gov · “The strains were able to viably persist in the ISS over time with a significant abundance.”
May 5
Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8,000 emulator-related DMCA takedowns engadget.com · “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."”
May 4
Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies? A lawsuit dared to ask theguardian.com · “By settling, the ADA manages to avoid the discovery process, and the potentially embarrassing revelations that might have come with it.”
May 4
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab construction-physics.com · “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).”
May 4
Vera Rubin's Primary Mirror Gets its First Reflective Coating universetoday.com · “Next came an incredibly thin layer of silver weighing only 64 grams spread over the 8.4-meter mirror.”
May 4
DNS traffic can leak outside the VPN tunnel on Android mullvad.net · “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.”
May 3
An Oil Price-Fixing Conspiracy Caused 27% of All Inflation Increases in 2021 thebignewsletter.com · “Even if oil gets to $200/barrel, the independent producers are going to be disciplined.”
May 3
Apple adds more carve-outs to its EU core tech fee after criticism from devs techcrunch.com · “Developers will need to certify their non-commercial status annually to Apple to keep qualifying for the fee exemption.”
May 3
Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production newatlas.com · “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.”
May 3
Google Paid Apple $20 Billion in 2022 to Be Default Safari Search Engine macrumors.com · “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.”
May 2
Microsoft bans US police departments from using enterprise AI tool for facial recognition techcrunch.com · “The new terms leave wiggle room for Microsoft.”
May 2
They thought they were joining an accelerator: instead they lost their startups techcrunch.com · “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.”
May 2
Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2024 backblaze.com · “At an average age of nine years, these drives continue to defy their age.”
May 2
At Microsoft, years of security debt come crashing down cybersecuritydive.com · “Currently, Microsoft directs the vast majority of their security investments in revenue generating roles instead of internal security roles.”
May 1
Millions of Malicious 'Imageless' Containers Planted on Docker Hub Over 5 Years thehackernews.com · “Over four million of the repositories in Docker Hub are imageless and have no content except for the repository documentation.”
May 1
Google defended the Play Store from 2.28 million malicious apps last year androidpolice.com · “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.”
May 1

April 2024 120 posts

Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team electrek.co · “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”
Apr 30
Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint theverge.com · “That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.”
Apr 30
Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conference techcrunch.com · “Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team”
Apr 30
Rabbit R1, a thing that should just be an app, actually is just an Android app androidauthority.com · “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.”
Apr 30
FCC Fines AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Nearly $200 Million for Illegally Sharing Access to Customers' Location Data docs.fcc.gov · “Yet, even after being made aware of this unauthorized access, all four carriers continued to operate their programs without putting in place reasonable safeguards”
Apr 29
The Czech illegals: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe theins.ru · “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”
Apr 29
Health insurance giant Kaiser will notify millions of a data breach after sharing patients' data with advertisers techcrunch.com · “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”
Apr 29
Atomic Nucleus Excited with Laser: A Breakthrough after Decades tuwien.at · “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.”
Apr 29
Williams-Sonoma fined $3.18 million for falsely labeling products as 'Made in USA' scrippsnews.com · “The federal body said in numerous instances, those products were actually ‘wholly imported’ from China.”
Apr 28
How TfL's simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales ianvisits.co.uk · “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.”
Apr 28
The Unstallable Plane That Stalled fearoflanding.com · “The pilot had no knowledge of the aircraft’s stall behaviour at all. His opinion was that the Cessna 185 simply didn’t stall.”
Apr 28
Rope & SumTree zed.dev · “Currently there are over 20 uses of the SumTree in Zed.”
Apr 28
A mountain of clothes appeared in Chile's desert. Then it went up in flames. grist.org · “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.”
Apr 27
Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation 9to5mac.com · “If you try to sign in with your original Apple ID password, you’ll be locked out of your account.”
Apr 27
The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down theverge.com · “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.”
Apr 27
The server chose violence cliffle.com · “On Hubris, if you break a system call’s preconditions, your task is immediately destroyed with no opportunity to do anything else.”
Apr 27
Passkeys: A Shattered Dream fy.blackhats.net.au · “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.”
Apr 26
The Not-So-Silent Type: Vulnerabilities Across Keyboard Apps Reveal Keystrokes to Network Eavesdroppers citizenlab.ca · “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.”
Apr 26
UK's Investigatory Powers Bill approved to become law theregister.com · “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.”
Apr 26
Cyber-attack leaves Leicester street lights permanently on bbc.co.uk · “It means we are currently not able to remotely identify faults in the street lighting system.”
Apr 26
Cost of developing new drugs may be far lower than industry claims, trial reveals theguardian.com · “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.”
Apr 25
Meta loses $200 billion in value as Zuckerberg focuses earnings call on all the ways company bleeds cash cnbc.com · “Reality Labs reported sales of $440 million for the first quarter and $3.85 billion in losses.”
Apr 25
Open Sourcing DOS 4 hanselman.com · “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”
Apr 25
TSMC unveils 1.6nm process technology with backside power delivery, rivals Intel's competing design tomshardware.com · “The production timeline for A16 indicates that volume production of A16 will commence in the second half of 2026.”
Apr 25
Airlines required to refund passengers for canceled, delayed flights abcnews.go.com · “Airlines can no longer issue refunds in forms of vouchers or credits when consumers are entitled to receive cash.”
Apr 24
IBM to Acquire HashiCorp, Inc. Creating a Comprehensive End-to-End Hybrid Cloud Platform newsroom.ibm.com · “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.”
Apr 24
UnitedHealth paid ransom to bad actors, says patient data was compromised in Change Healthcare cyberattack cnbc.com · “A ransom was paid as part of the company’s commitment to do all it could to protect patient data from disclosure.”
Apr 24
MITRE says state hackers breached its network via Ivanti zero-days bleepingcomputer.com · “No organization is immune from this type of cyber attack, not even one that strives to maintain the highest cybersecurity possible.”
Apr 24
U.S. bans noncompete agreements for nearly all jobs npr.org · “The FTC estimates about 30 million people, or one in five American workers, from minimum wage earners to CEOs, are bound by noncompetes.”
Apr 23
The Man Who Killed Google Search wheresyoured.at · “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.””
Apr 23
The little smart home platform that could theverge.com · “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.”
Apr 23
Apple's Risky Bet on CarPlay theturnsignalblog.com · “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.”
Apr 23
What We Learned Inside a North Korean Internet Server: How Well Do You Know Your Partners? 38north.org · “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.”
Apr 22
Akira Ransomware Made Over $42 Million in One Year: Agencies securityweek.com · “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).”
Apr 22
Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to ‘inject a sense of crisis’ theverge.com · “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.”
Apr 22
curl is just the hobby daniel.haxx.se · “I claim that every human being on the planet that is Internet-connected uses devices or services every day that run curl.”
Apr 22
Pharmaceutical giant Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’ to save $2.15 billion fortune.com · “We don’t have to be that good to beat the current system.”
Apr 21
Amazon Grows To Over 750,000 Robots As World's Second-Largest Private Employer Replaces Over 100,000 Humans finance.yahoo.com · “While Amazon is bringing on hundreds of thousands of robots per year, the company is slowly decreasing its employee numbers.”
Apr 21
Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director theregister.com · “If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago … [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies.”
Apr 21
Some Fritz!Box modems might have been hijacked crapts.org · “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.”
Apr 21
Volkswagen workers vote overwhelmingly to join the UAW, giving the union a groundbreaking win cnn.com · “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.”
Apr 20
Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event newatlas.com · “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.”
Apr 20
Adventures In Rust: Bringing Exchange Support To Thunderbird blog.thunderbird.net · “Furthermore, in the entire 20 year lifetime of the Thunderbird project, no one has added support for a new mail protocol before.”
Apr 20
Tesla recalls the Cybertruck for faulty accelerator pedals that can get stuck techcrunch.com · “An unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal.”
Apr 19
Nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, report finds theguardian.com · “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.”
Apr 19
I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting a $1.2 billion contract with Israel thehandbasket.co · “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”
Apr 19
Russian Sandworm hackers pose as hacktivists in water utility breaches bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Apr 19
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat theverge.com · “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.”
Apr 18
A single atom layer of gold – LiU researchers create goldene liu.se · “By chance, Lars Hultman found a method that has been used in Japanese forging art for over a hundred years.”
Apr 18
NASA confirms Dragonfly mission to Titan theregister.com · “The total lifecycle cost of the mission is currently $3.35 billion, approximately double the proposed cost.”
Apr 18
50 Years Later, This Apollo-Era Antenna Still Talks to Voyager 2 spectrum.ieee.org · “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.”
Apr 18
CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred for Deceiving Students and Hiding Loan Costs consumerfinance.gov · “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.”
Apr 17
AWS took 6 months to fix STS bug that made minions admin thestack.technology · “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”
Apr 17
FTC Fines Mental Health Startup Cerebral $7 Million for Major Privacy Violations thehackernews.com · “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”
Apr 17
Crickets from Chirp Systems in Smart Lock Key Leak krebsonsecurity.com · “Chirp Systems has not responded to requests to work with CISA to mitigate this vulnerability.”
Apr 17
Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made. vox.com · “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.”
Apr 16
A quick post on Chen’s algorithm blog.cryptographyengineering.com · “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.”
Apr 16
Redis is forked vickiboykis.com · “The old Redis was for developers. The new Redis is for enterprise sales, and for generative AI.”
Apr 16
California is Losing Tech Jobs apricitas.io · “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.”
Apr 16
PuTTY vulnerability vuln-p521-bias chiark.greenend.org.uk · “An attacker in possession of a few dozen signed messages and the public key has enough information to recover the private key”
Apr 15
T-Mobile Employees Across The Country Receive Cash Offers To Illegally Swap SIMs tmo.report · “The texts offer the employee $300 per SIM swap, and asks the worker to contact them on telegram.”
Apr 15
Palo Alto Networks Warns of Exploited Firewall Vulnerability securityweek.com · “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”
Apr 15
Roku says 576,000 user accounts hacked after second security incident techcrunch.com · “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.”
Apr 15
Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes statnews.com · “According to public tax records, Cedars Sinai in Beverly Hills had an income surplus of $750 million in 2022 and paid no federal taxes.”
Apr 14
The Guide to Stock Options conversations manager.dev · “In some companies, the initial job contracts are misleading, and mention a nominal price of $0.01.”
Apr 14
My Cat Alerted Me to a DDoS Attack dannyguo.com · “They generously offered to give us a “solution file” if we sent them $5,000 in Bitcoin.”
Apr 14
Sandboxing All The Things with Flatpak and BubbleBox ralfj.de · “Unfortunately, Flatpaks can come with extremely liberal default profiles that make the sandbox mostly pointless.”
Apr 14
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 pcgamer.com · “You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?”
Apr 13
Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu theverge.com · “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)”
Apr 13
Japanese Police Arrest 36-Year-Old Man on Suspicion of Tampering With Pokémon Violet Save Data ign.com · “Police in Japan have arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data to customers online”
Apr 13
I Continue To No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals ascii.textfiles.com · “I contacted a VCF administrator and was told it was all disposed of, and that they kept the bins.”
Apr 13
Why CISA is Warning CISOs About a Breach at Sisense krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Apr 12
Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets theverge.com · “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.”
Apr 12
96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers theregister.com · “And two thirds of hospital websites had some kind of data transfer to a third-party domain that we couldn’t even identify”
Apr 12
AI boom is boosting demand even for HDDs, raising prices by up to 20% since Q3 theregister.com · “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.”
Apr 12
Apple alerts users in 92 nations to mercenary spyware attacks techcrunch.com · “Apple previously described the attackers as “state-sponsored” but has replaced all such references with “mercenary spyware attacks.””
Apr 11
Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27bn fraud case theguardian.com · “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.”
Apr 11
End of the Line? Saudi Arabia ‘forced to scale back’ plans for desert megacity theguardian.com · “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.”
Apr 11
Alternative browsers report uplift after EU's DMA choice screen mandate techcrunch.com · “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.”
Apr 11
Twitter's Clumsy Pivot to X.com Is a Gift to Phishers krebsonsecurity.com · “On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead.”
Apr 10
Microsoft fixes two Windows zero-days exploited in malware attacks bleepingcomputer.com · “Microsoft did not indicate they were patching this vulnerability, so it was a (welcome) surprise when the patch went live.”
Apr 10
Fake Facebook MidJourney AI page promoted malware to 1.2 million people bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Apr 10
FCC looks to limit how domestic violence abusers use connected cars cyberscoop.com · “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”
Apr 10
After years of trying, the U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws npr.org · “Sales of table saws will decrease, resulting in unemployment, and the government could be creating a monopoly.”
Apr 9
Two Bay Area railway workers charged for building secret apartments inside train stations therealdeal.com · “For a mere $42,000, Navarro allegedly installed a kitchenette, shower, plumbing and security cameras, prosecutors said.”
Apr 9
How I Tripped Over the Debian Weak Keys Vulnerability hezmatt.org · “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.”
Apr 9
Big Tech passkey implementations are a trap proton.me · “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.”
Apr 9
Beeper is joining Automattic blog.beeper.com · “Our privacy policy and terms of service remain the same, though they may change in the future.”
Apr 9
Major data center power failure (again): Cloudflare Code Orange tested blog.cloudflare.com · “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.”
Apr 8
German State Ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice theregister.com · “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.”
Apr 8
Hoya's optics production and orders disrupted by cyberattack bleepingcomputer.com · “At this time, we do not have a full restoration timeline for when our systems will be back online”
Apr 8
Help us to take down the parasite website notepad-plus-plus.org · “It is riddled with malicious advertisements on every page.”
Apr 8
Command Injection and Backdoor Account in D-Link NAS Devices github.com · “The request includes parameters for a username (user=messagebus) and an empty password field (passwd=).”
Apr 7
Google Public DNS's approach to fight against cache poisoning attacks security.googleblog.com · “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.”
Apr 7
Groq CEO: 'We No Longer Sell Hardware' eetimes.com · “The U.S. government and its allies are the only ones we’d be willing to sell hardware to.”
Apr 7
The lifecycle of a code AI completion sourcegraph.com · “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”
Apr 7
ASUS refunds Zenfone buyer for failing to provide bootloader unlock tools as promised androidauthority.com · “In the settlement, Timothy received a full refund for the phone (£700) and the court filing fee (£70) for a total of £770 (~$973).”
Apr 6
Online porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom popsci.com · “Leading VPN provider Top10 VPN claims demand from VPN services jumped 275% on March 15, the same day Pornhub cut off access in Texas.”
Apr 6
v4.6.0: The end github.com · “Let me put it plain and simple: No! I don’t know you, I don’t trust you! Fork it and carry on!”
Apr 6
NIST Researchers Use Cellphone Compass to Measure Tiny Concentrations of Compounds Important for Human Health nist.gov · “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.”
Apr 6
Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse theguardian.com · “An electronic version of the book included an anonymous email address that can easily be traced to Sariel’s name and Google account.”
Apr 5
Google fixes two Pixel zero-day flaws exploited by forensics firms bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Apr 5
Apple Updates App Store Guidelines to Permit Game Emulators, Website Links in EU Music Apps macrumors.com · “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.”
Apr 5
Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage 404media.co · “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.”
Apr 5
Anatomy of a credit card rewards program bitsaboutmoney.com · “Credit card issuers explicitly and directly charge the rest of the economy for the work involved in recruiting the most desirable customers.”
Apr 4
HTTP/2 CONTINUATION Flood: Technical Details nowotarski.info · “During CONTINUATION Flood attack not a single request is made (no END_HEADERS flag)!”
Apr 4
Kobold letters lutrasecurity.com · “However, the moment the email appeared in your inbox, it changed.”
Apr 4
Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected aalto.fi · “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.”
Apr 4
'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza 972mag.com · “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day.”
Apr 3
Omni Hotels experiencing nationwide IT outage since Friday bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Apr 3
Amazon gives up on no-checkout shopping in its large grocery stores theverge.com · “Instead, it’s switching fully to ‘Dash Carts,’ where customers scan products as they toss them in their cart.”
Apr 3
New Seafloor Map Only 25% Done, with 6 Years to Go eos.org · “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.”
Apr 3
Timeline of the xz open source attack research.swtch.com · “It’s also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project.”
Apr 2
Canoo spent double its annual revenue on the CEO's private jet in 2023 techcrunch.com · “Under a deal reached in November 2020, Canoo reimburses Aquila Family Ventures, an entity owned by the CEO, for use of an aircraft.”
Apr 2
Google agrees to destroy browsing data collected in Incognito mode theverge.com · “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.’”
Apr 2
Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally following years-long criticism techcrunch.com · “The price reduction in the Enterprise Suites without Teams is only $2.25, yet the Standalone cost is $5.25.”
Apr 2
AT&T confirms data breach and resets millions of customer passcodes theverge.com · “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.”
Apr 1
Easy-to-use make-me-root exploit lands for recent Linux kernels. Get patching theregister.com · “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.”
Apr 1
Thread Hijacking: Phishes That Prey on Your Curiosity krebsonsecurity.com · “It works because you feel like you’re suddenly included in an important conversation.”
Apr 1
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining predr.ag · “Every time it rained, the rain collected on its leaves and branches and weighed them down.”
Apr 1

March 2024 119 posts

Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included news.ycombinator.com · “I’m unable to access reddit via browser when using VPN.”
Mar 31
Can GPT Optimize My Taxes? finedataproducts.com · “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.”
Mar 31
About the Tailscale.com outage on March 7, 2024 tailscale.com · “We did not realize (and the alerts didn’t specify) that the configuration would prevent automatic certificate renewal from completing.”
Mar 30
We are under DDoS attack and we do nothing tableplus.com · “In the last 5 days alone, they tried to download it more than 800K times - our setup file is approximately 200MB per download.”
Mar 30
There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison's Rejection Letters lareviewofbooks.org · “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.”
Mar 30
Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser simonwillison.net · “There is no server component here, and nothing is uploaded. Your images and documents never leave your computer or phone.”
Mar 30
backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise openwall.com · “The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.”
Mar 29
US offers $10M to help catch Change Healthcare hackers techcrunch.com · “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.”
Mar 29
The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL infisical.com · “With MongoDB, setting up transactions was not trivial because it required running MongoDB in cluster mode with various configuration overhead”
Mar 29
Philanthropist group buys up large tracts of land in Romania to create 'European Yellowstone' english.elpais.com · “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”
Mar 29
Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for FTX fraud theverge.com · “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.”
Mar 28
Suicide Mission prospect.org · “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.”
Mar 28
42.parquet: A Zip Bomb for the Big Data Age duckdb.org · “A 42 kB Parquet file can contain over 4 PB of data.”
Mar 28
Amazon fined in Poland for dark pattern design tricks techcrunch.com · “For Amazon, the conclusion of a sales contract only occurs once it has sent information about the actual shipment.”
Mar 28
Recent 'MFA Bombing' Attacks Targeting Apple Users krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Mar 27
Introducing DBRX: A New State-of-the-Art Open LLM databricks.com · “DBRX was trained on 3072 NVIDIA H100s connected by 3.2Tbps Infiniband.”
Mar 27
Attack on Software Supply Chains Using Fake Python Infrastructure checkmarx.com · “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.”
Mar 27
Germany warns of 17K vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers exposed online bleepingcomputer.com · “Overall, at least 37% of Exchange servers in Germany (and in many cases also the networks behind them) are severely vulnerable.”
Mar 27
Coast Guard: 6 workers presumed dead after Baltimore bridge collapse wbaltv.com · “There were no issues until June when Chilean authorities found deficiencies in propulsion and the auxiliary machinery.”
Mar 26
Facebook snooped on users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal techcrunch.com · “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.”
Mar 26
After Appalachian Hospitals Merged Into a Monopoly, Their ERs Slowed to a Crawl kffhealthnews.org · “In total, the council member was in the ER for about 30 hours, he said.”
Mar 26
As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot real estate theregister.com · “The facilities will reportedly consume as much as 13 percent of the plant’s output.”
Mar 26
On Tech Debt: My Rust Library is now a CDO lucumr.pocoo.org · “That’s because RUSTSEC is basically a rating agency and they decided that your debt is now junk.”
Mar 26
Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act ec.europa.eu · “In case of an infringement, the Commission can impose fines up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide turnover.”
Mar 25
ZenHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on AMD Zen-based Platforms comsec.ethz.ch · “This result proves that AMD systems are equally vulnerable to Rowhammer as Intel systems”
Mar 25
New 'Loop DoS' attack may impact up to 300,000 online systems bleepingcomputer.com · “Loop DoS relies on IP spoofing and can be triggered from a single host that sends one message to start the communication.”
Mar 25
Who killed the network switch? cliffle.com · “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”
Mar 25
Linux Crisis Tools brendangregg.com · “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.”
Mar 24
Why don't humans have tails? Scientists find answers in an unlikely place cnn.com · “It must have been something that thousands of other geneticists looked at”
Mar 24
How Quickly Do Large Language Models Learn Unexpected Skills? quantamagazine.org · “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.”
Mar 24
Stability AI Announcement stability.ai · “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.”
Mar 23
New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco tlacuilolli.com · “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”
Mar 23
Jasmin Paris Becomes First Woman to Finish World's Hardest Race run.outsideonline.com · “She stopped the clock in 59:58:21.”
Mar 23
Boom Announces Successful Flight of XB-1 Demonstrator Aircraft boomsupersonic.com · “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).”
Mar 22
Mozilla Drops Onerep After CEO Admits to Running People-Search Networks krebsonsecurity.com · “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”
Mar 22
Hackers earn $1,132,500 for 29 zero-days at Pwn2Own Vancouver bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Mar 22
Here's how Microsoft is providing a 'good outcome' for Inflection AI VCs, as Reid Hoffman promised techcrunch.com · “$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”
Mar 22
U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction sixcolors.com · “Things that are legal for regular companies to do become illegal when monopolies do them.”
Mar 21
Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3 Million Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds wired.com · “Wouters and Carroll say they were nonetheless told by Dormakaba that, as of this month, only 36 percent of installed Safloks have been updated.”
Mar 21
Say Hello to Biodegradable Microplastics today.ucsd.edu · “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.”
Mar 21
Redis Adopts Dual Source-Available Licensing redis.com · “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.”
Mar 20
Misconfigured Firebase instances leaked 19 million plaintext passwords bleepingcomputer.com · “For passwords, the problem gets worse because 98% of them, or 19,867,627 to be exact, are in plain text.”
Mar 20
Section 174 and its Impact on Tech Startups tanayj.com · “They now have to somehow find $57K in cash to pay the govt, despite not making a real profit.”
Mar 20
White House, EPA warn water sector of cybersecurity threats cyberscoop.com · “In the absence of the EPA rules, the water sector continues to have no binding cybersecurity rules.”
Mar 20
Inside the Massive Alleged AT&T Data Breach troyhunt.com · “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.”
Mar 19
Gaining kernel code execution on an MTE-enabled Pixel 8 github.blog · “So, by using the GPU to access physical addresses directly, I’m able to completely bypass the protection that MTE offers.”
Mar 19
A cargo ship's 'WindWing' sails saved it up to 12 tons of fuel per day popsci.com · “Pyxis Ocean reportedly saved an average of 3.3 tons of fuel each day.”
Mar 19
Introducing Garnet – an open-source, next-generation, faster cache-store for accelerating applications and services microsoft.com · “We use our own benchmarking tool, called Resp.benchmark, to generate all results.”
Mar 19
900 Sites, 125 million accounts, 1 vulnerability env.fail · “24% of Site owners fixed the misconfiguration”
Mar 18
How we're helping creators disclose altered or synthetic content blog.google · “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.”
Mar 18
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: 'We need bigger GPUs' cnbc.com · “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.”
Mar 18
Death Knell of the NVD? resilientcyber.substack.com · “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.”
Mar 18
The Return of the Frame Pointers brendangregg.com · “The overhead of adding frame pointers to everything (libc and Java) was usually less than 1%, with one exception of 10%.”
Mar 17
Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm simonwillison.net · “Searching Google Scholar for “certainly, here is” turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently written by ChatGPT”
Mar 17
Grok-1 github.com · “The implementation of the MoE layer in this repository is not efficient.”
Mar 17
Mars Has an Unexpected Influence on Earth's Oceans and Climate, Repeating Every 2.4 Million Years, Study Finds smithsonianmag.com · “There is only one way to explain them: They are linked to cycles in the interactions of Mars and Earth orbiting the sun.”
Mar 17
How web bloat impacts users with slow devices danluu.com · “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.”
Mar 16
Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown netcraft.com · “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.”
Mar 16
Retiring the Mozilla Location Service github.com · “In 2019, Skyhook Holdings, Inc contacted Mozilla and alleged that MLS infringed a number of its patents.”
Mar 16
Fuzzing Ladybird with tools from Google Project Zero awesomekling.substack.com · “Unsurprisingly, it took less than a second to find the first issue!”
Mar 16
Tech support firms Restoro, Reimage fined $26 million for scare tactics bleepingcomputer.com · “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.””
Mar 15
After AWS and Google, Microsoft says it's removing Azure 'egress' data transfer fees: but with caveats techcrunch.com · “There is no flexibility here to support the multi-cloud needs of modern businesses.”
Mar 15
Introducing Sunlight, a CT implementation built for scalability, ease of operation, and reduced cost letsencrypt.org · “We previously had a test log fail when we ran into a 16TiB limit in MySQL.”
Mar 15
Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data cellio.dreamwidth.org · “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.”
Mar 14
CEO of Data Privacy Company Onerep.com Founded Dozens of People-Search Firms krebsonsecurity.com · “A search in DomainTools for the email address [email protected] 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.”
Mar 14
FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric From 25Mbps to 100Mbps pcmag.com · “On Thursday, the commission voted 3-2 to raise its broadband metric from 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads.”
Mar 14
How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale figma.com · “Given our very aggressive growth rate, we had only months of runway remaining.”
Mar 14
Direct File officially opens in 12 pilot states following positive early reviews: eligible taxpayers can file online directly with the IRS for free irs.gov · “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.”
Mar 13
Giant 'sand battery' holds a week's heat for a whole town newatlas.com · “That, the companies claim, equates to a week’s worth of Pornainen’s heat demands in winter, or a month’s worth in summer.”
Mar 13
Stanford: Data of 27,000 people stolen in September ransomware attack bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Mar 13
JIT WireGuard fly.io · “We went from thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of stale WireGuard peers on a gateway to what rounds to none.”
Mar 13
TikTok shareholders who make any 'disparaging statement' about the company risk having their entire holdings seized finance.yahoo.com · “If shareholders are caught doing so, ‘all of the participant’s restricted share units will be immediately forfeited.’”
Mar 12
Apple Announces Ability to Download iPhone Apps From Websites in EU macrumors.com · “having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year”
Mar 12
Stealing Part of a Production Language Model arxiv.org · “For under $20 USD, our attack extracts the entire projection matrix of OpenAI’s Ada and Babbage language models.”
Mar 12
Building Meta's GenAI Infrastructure engineering.fb.com · “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.”
Mar 12
Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data scraping theverge.com · “someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on Saturday.”
Mar 12
Boeing whistleblower John Barnett found dead in US bbc.com · “It established that the location of at least 53 ’non-conforming’ parts in the factory was unknown, and that they were considered lost.”
Mar 11
Microsoft says Russian hackers stole source code after spying on its executives theverge.com · “Microsoft had configured a non-production test tenant account without two-factor authentication enabled, allowing Nobelium to gain access.”
Mar 11
Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras theverge.com · “Airbnb will no longer allow hosts to use indoor security cameras, regardless of where they’re placed or what they’re used for.”
Mar 11
Webb & Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate esa.int · “With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the Universe”
Mar 11
Activision QA Workers Vote to Form Largest US Video Game Worker Union to Date ign.com · “By recognizing our union, Microsoft is making good on its promise to respect our ability to decide for ourselves about union representation.”
Mar 10
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 techradar.com · “The Grayskull e75 and e150 DevKits are available for purchase now at $599 and $799, respectively.”
Mar 10
S3 is files, but not a filesystem calpaterson.com · “When your SQLite database is kept in S3, each write suddenly becomes a total overwrite of the entire database.”
Mar 10
Perf is not enough motherduck.com · “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.”
Mar 10
the Apple curl security incident 12604 daniel.haxx.se · “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.”
Mar 9
How We Bypassed Safari 17's Advanced Audio Fingerprinting Protection fingerprint.com · “Apple knows, and the company decided to fight the identification possibility in Safari 17, but their measures don’t fully work.”
Mar 9
AI-Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models scientificamerican.com · “The 10th model, prompted to write about historical English architecture, spews out gibberish about jackrabbits.”
Mar 9
Using LLMs to Generate Fuzz Generators verse.systems · “I found that Claude’s fuzzer is able to trigger the out-of-bounds read and write bugs only.”
Mar 9
Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, as internal dissent mounts cnbc.com · “This behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.”
Mar 8
Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account, clearing path for Epic Games Store on iPhone 9to5mac.com · “Apple has told us and committed to the European Commission that they will reinstate our developer account.”
Mar 8
FBI: U.S. lost record $12.5 billion to online crime in 2023 bleepingcomputer.com · “Investment fraud increased by 38% last year, causing confirmed losses of $4.57 billion.”
Mar 8
MiTM phishing attack can let attackers unlock and steal a Tesla bleepingcomputer.com · “The company replied by saying that its investigation determined that it was the intended behavior”
Mar 8
Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion news.mit.edu · “overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day”
Mar 8
You can not simply publicly access private secure links, can you? vin01.github.io · “A link submitted to urlscan.io as unlisted, was accessed 12 times within 1 hour of submission”
Mar 7
You can now train a 70b language model at home answer.ai · “We’re releasing an open source system, based on FSDP and QLoRA, that can train a 70b model on two 24GB GPUs.”
Mar 7
PFAS 'forever chemicals' to officially be removed from food packaging, FDA says livescience.com · “The FDA’s announcement marks the completion of a voluntary phase-out of the materials by U.S. food packaging manufacturers.”
Mar 7
To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol techcrunch.com · “Meta says that third-party providers will need to sign an agreement with Meta or WhatsApp before it will enable interoperability.”
Mar 7
BlackCat Ransomware Group Implodes After Apparent $22M Payment by Change Healthcare krebsonsecurity.com · “On March 1, a cryptocurrency address that security researchers had already mapped to BlackCat received a single transaction worth approximately $22 million.”
Mar 6
Boeing is withholding key details about door plug on Alaska 737 Max 9 jet, NTSB says npr.org · “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.”
Mar 6
Apple terminates Epic Games developer account calling it a 'threat' to the iOS ecosystem techcrunch.com · “More recently, you have described our DMA compliance as ‘hot garbage,’ a ‘horror show,’ and a ‘devious new instance of Malicious Compliance.’”
Mar 6
Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS aws.amazon.com · “If you are moving off AWS, you can contact AWS Support to ask for free DTO rates under this program for the additional data.”
Mar 6
Sergey Brin says Google 'definitely messed up' Gemini image launch cnbc.com · “I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”
Mar 5
Kagi + Wolfram blog.kagi.com · “To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content.”
Mar 5
Cracking Meta's Messenger Certificate Pinning on macOS texts.blog · “By modifying just 4 of the binary’s 97,477,728 bytes we can now intercept requests!”
Mar 5
Epic Games Hackers Say They Faked The Whole Thing thegamer.com · “In reality, we are not a ransomware-as-a-service, but professional fraudsters.”
Mar 5
Introducing the next generation of Claude anthropic.com · “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.”
Mar 4
Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software: previously the prohibition was only listed in the online EULA, now included in installed files [Updated] tomshardware.com · “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.”
Mar 4
Products on your perimeter considered harmful (until proven otherwise) ncsc.gov.uk · “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.”
Mar 4
A leaky database spilled 2FA codes for the world's tech giants techcrunch.com · “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.”
Mar 4
The hater’s guide to Kubernetes paulbutler.org · “A big key to this has been carving out a small chunk of Kubernetes’ features and pretending the rest don’t exist.”
Mar 3
The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 3.4s in nine solutions benhoyt.com · “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.”
Mar 3
CSS for printing to paper voussoir.net · “From what I gather by experimentation, Chrome only follows the @page rule if you have Margin set to Default.”
Mar 3
listening in on the neighborhood computer.rip · “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.”
Mar 2
K8s Service Meshes: The Bill Comes Due matduggan.com · “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.”
Mar 2
Mathematicians prove Pólya's conjecture for the eigenvalues of a disk, a 70-year-old math problem phys.org · “the researchers show that Pólya’s conjecture is true for the disk, a case considered particularly challenging.”
Mar 2
A most wanted man: Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy theins.press · “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.”
Mar 1
Popular video doorbells can be easily hijacked, researchers find techcrunch.com · “Despite these flaws and Consumer Reports warning online marketplaces about them, the doorbells remain available for sale on Amazon, Sears and Shein.”
Mar 1
How we applied advanced fuzzing techniques to cURL blog.trailofbits.com · “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”
Mar 1
Data Scientists Targeted by Malicious Hugging Face ML Models with Silent Backdoor jfrog.com · “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””
Mar 1

February 2024 116 posts

Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project macrumors.com · “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.”
Feb 29
Financial systems take a holiday bitsaboutmoney.com · “Nonetheless, many financial systems do have availability which is far closer to five twos.”
Feb 29
Money Bubble tbray.org · “I think I’m probably going to lose quite a lot of money in the next year or two.”
Feb 29
Bitcoin's so high, it crashed Coinbase today techcrunch.com · “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.”
Feb 29
After decades of memory-related software bugs, White House calls on industry to act therecord.media · “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.””
Feb 28
What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt? themarkup.org · “Seven months later it filed for bankruptcy and has agreed to sell the company.”
Feb 28
New Hugging Face Vulnerability Exposes AI Models to Supply Chain Attacks thehackernews.com · “An attacker could gain a foothold into the container running the service and compromise any model converted by the service.”
Feb 28
The mathematically perfect exoplanet system: a great place to search for alien tech space.com · “The search ultimately did not detect a technological signal”
Feb 28
Jensen Huang says kids shouldn't learn to code: they should leave it up to AI tomshardware.com · “It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program.”
Feb 27
How I turned my open-source project into a business blog.emailengine.app · “It turned out that smaller companies did not care about the license at all, and larger companies were not using it.”
Feb 27
Botanical gardens can cool city air by an average of 5 °C newatlas.com · “From a pool of more than 27,000 research papers, the researchers selected 202 for meta-analysis”
Feb 27
Testing of the F-35C Tailhook the-engi-nerd.github.io · “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.”
Feb 27
FTC to ban Avast from selling browsing data for advertising purposes bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Feb 26
FDA Approves First Medication to Help Reduce Allergic Reactions to Multiple Foods After Accidental Exposure fda.gov · “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).”
Feb 26
Google says Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018 cnbc.com · “The Justice Department said in its own newly unsealed filing that Microsoft has spent almost $100 billion on Bing over 20 years.”
Feb 26
Crooks stole $10 million from Axie Infinity co-founder securityaffairs.com · “On February 23, researchers at blockchain cybersecurity firm PeckShield alerted about a “whale wallet” compromise over the Ronin Bridge.”
Feb 26
Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history theweathernetwork.com · “It is the eighth month in a row that is the warmest on record for the respective time of the year.”
Feb 25
Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models arxiv.org · “In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs.”
Feb 25
Why you almost never see a clock at the mall thehustle.co · “After 23 minutes supermarket shoppers began using the emotional part of their brain rather than the cognitive part.”
Feb 25
Marginalia: 3 Years marginalia.nu · “The quest to reach 1B indexed documents is slowly ongoing.”
Feb 25
Generating Medical Errors: GenAI and Erroneous Medical References hai.stanford.edu · “Four out of five models hallucinate a significant proportion of sources by producing invalid URLs.”
Feb 24
Quality is a hard sell in big tech pcloadletter.dev · “Microsoft could announce they put ChatGPT in a toaster and their stock price would jump $5/share.”
Feb 24
Does Offering ChatGPT a Tip Cause it to Generate Better Text? An Analysis minimaxir.com · “World Peace is notably the winner here, with Heaven and Taylor Swift right behind.”
Feb 24
The cities stripping out concrete for earth and plants bbc.com · “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.”
Feb 24
Thanks FedEx, This is Why we Keep Getting Phished troyhunt.com · “It’s quite unbelievable what they’ve done with the link because it makes the SMS entirely unactionable.”
Feb 23
Hidden GitHub Commits and How to Reveal Them neodyme.io · “The events endpoint still lists all PushEvents even from the time it was private”
Feb 23
A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to 'Slackbot' and stayed undetected for months theverge.com · “The move camouflaged McKay’s active Slack account for months, letting his account evade deletion.”
Feb 23
Varda Space, Rocket Lab nail first-of-its-kind spacecraft landing in Utah techcrunch.com · “The U.S. Air Force, which operates the reentry site, also denied Varda’s application to land there.”
Feb 23
AT&T cellular service restored after daylong outage: cause still unknown cnbc.com · “AT&T, which put up a website for system updates, did not say how many customers were affected by Thursday’s outage.”
Feb 22
Unexpected responses from ChatGPT status.openai.com · “On February 20, 2024, an optimization to the user experience introduced a bug with how the model processes language.”
Feb 22
Nvidia posts revenue up 265% on booming AI business cnbc.com · “Over half the company’s data center sales went to large cloud providers.”
Feb 22
JavaScript Bloat in 2024 tonsky.me · “Google Mail is just (just!) 20 MB”
Feb 22
Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero saveflipper.ca · “This policy fails to recognize that these tools are not the enemy, rather, insecure products are.”
Feb 21
Recent Zero-Day Could Impact Up to 97,000 Microsoft Exchange Servers securityweek.com · “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.”
Feb 21
Seized ransomware network LockBit rewired to expose hackers to world theguardian.com · “Some of the data it discovered on LockBit’s systems belonged to victims who had paid the ransom.”
Feb 21
iMessage with PQ3: The new state of the art in quantum-secure messaging at scale security.apple.com · “PQ3 is the first messaging protocol to reach what we call Level 3 security”
Feb 21
Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames signal.org · “If you use Signal, your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone you chat with by default.”
Feb 20
SSDs Have Become Ridiculously Fast, Except in the Cloud databasearchitects.blogspot.com · “AWS EC2 was an early NVMe pioneer, launching the i3 instance with 8 physically-attached NVMe SSDs in early 2017.”
Feb 20
Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools schneier.com · “The only way Microsoft or OpenAI would know this would be to spy on chatbot sessions.”
Feb 20
ASML dethrones Applied Materials, becomes world's largest fab tool maker: analyst tomshardware.com · “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.”
Feb 20
How Google is killing independent sites like ours housefresh.com · “Better Homes & Gardens never mentioned conducting tests prior to the Google Product Review Update in July 2022.”
Feb 19
U.S. Internet Leaked Years of Internal, Customer Emails krebsonsecurity.com · “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.”
Feb 19
ExpressVPN User Data Exposed Due to Bug securityweek.com · “Normally, when a user is connected to ExpressVPN, their DNS requests are sent to the company’s servers.”
Feb 19
Community Alert: Ongoing Azure Attacks Utilizing Phishing and Cloud ATO proofpoint.com · “Attackers access and download sensitive files, including financial assets, internal security protocols, and user credentials.”
Feb 19
Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China nbcnews.com · “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."”
Feb 18
The Layoff xeiaso.net · “It’s not a layoff, it’s a re-evaluation of our staffing goals for Q2 2025.”
Feb 18
wddbfs – Mount a sqlite database as a filesystem adamobeng.com · “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.”
Feb 18
Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta arxiv.org · “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.”
Feb 17
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the U.S. ksut.org · “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.”
Feb 17
WJLX, WJBE and WERH, oh my radiodiscussions.com · “Based on this WJLX lost its tower sometime between October 2022 and March 2023.”
Feb 17
We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed zed.dev · “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.”
Feb 17
Air Canada ordered to pay customer who was misled by airline's chatbot theguardian.com · “Air Canada argued that despite the error, the chatbot was a "separate legal entity" and thus was responsible for its actions.”
Feb 16
German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation noyb.eu · “The company appears to be making millions of euros by selling people in Germany their own data.”
Feb 16
US military notifies 20,000 of data breach after cloud email leak techcrunch.com · “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.”
Feb 16
Ransomware attack forces 100 Romanian hospitals to go offline bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Feb 16
Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose techcrunch.com · “And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU”
Feb 15
uv: Python packaging in Rust astral.sh · “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”
Feb 15
Our next-generation model: Gemini 1.5 blog.google · “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.”
Feb 15
Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments theregister.com · “Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features – small payments and no user interaction – that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web.”
Feb 15
announcing freenginx.org mailman.nginx.org · “Unfortunately, some new non-technical management at F5 recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects.”
Feb 14
French Healthcare Payments Processor Breaches Affect Half of Population securityweek.com · “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.”
Feb 14
Bank of America warns customers of data breach after vendor hack bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Feb 14
Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo techcrunch.com · “Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing "trustworthy AI into Firefox."”
Feb 14
Is something bugging you? antithesis.com · “In the entire history of the company, I think we only ever had one or two bugs reported by a customer.”
Feb 13
Wi-Fi jamming to knock out cameras suspected in nine Minnesota burglaries -- smart security systems vulnerable as tech becomes cheaper and easier to acquire tomshardware.com · “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.”
Feb 13
The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it? blog.jgc.org · “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.”
Feb 13
Nokia Made Too Many Phones textquery.app · “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.”
Feb 13
Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial blog.cloudflare.com · “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.”
Feb 12
Juniper Support Portal Exposed Customer Device Info krebsonsecurity.com · “If you don’t have a support contract you don’t get updates, it’s as simple as that,”
Feb 12
Phishception - SendGrid is abused to host phishing attacks impersonating itself netcraft.com · “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.”
Feb 12
Stone age wall found at bottom of Baltic Sea 'may be Europe's oldest megastructure' theguardian.com · “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.”
Feb 12
No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper retractionwatch.com · “New Zealand’s data had been copied from the Netherlands, for example, and the United States’ data from the United Kingdom.”
Feb 11
What it was like working for GitLab yorickpeterse.com · “But if I had instead lived in the Bay Area, I would’ve earned at least twice that amount, possibly even more.”
Feb 11
Balancing cube willempennings.nl · “Even though the idea isn’t new, previous works are largely closed-source. I plan to change that.”
Feb 11
2024: announcing the year of the OpenStreetMap vector maps blog.openstreetmap.org · “They get updated incrementally and constantly, a minute after you edit”
Feb 11
How Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages cnbc.com · “It’s always tracking real-time employee sentiment, and it’s always tracking real-time toxicity,”
Feb 10
A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100? In NYC? The broker's fee is $15K. gothamist.com · “The rules are murky, and no laws explicitly cap broker’s fees or define the difference between reasonable costs and extortion”
Feb 10
Building the DirectX shader compiler better than Microsoft? devlog.hexops.com · “If your shaders are not signed/validated, then they cannot run on a Windows machine unless it is running in Developer Mode.”
Feb 10
Ransomware payments reached record $1.1 billion in 2023 bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Feb 9
Google saves your conversations with Gemini for years by default techcrunch.com · “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,”
Feb 9
Security flaw in a popular smart helmet allowed silent location tracking techcrunch.com · “That 6-digit group code simply isn’t random enough,”
Feb 9
(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup cep.dev · “Since the database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by no one.”
Feb 9
Exclusive: Mozilla names new CEO as it doubles down on data privacy fortune.com · “Mozilla generates revenue through search partnerships, a majority of which come from Google.”
Feb 8
Police intelligence services unlawfully spied on whole population groups nltimes.nl · “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.”
Feb 8
Federal action on combatting auto theft canada.ca · “such as the Flipper Zero, which would allow for the removal of those devices from the Canadian marketplace”
Feb 8
Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say sfgate.com · “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path,”
Feb 8
PAPERWALL: Chinese Websites Posing as Local News Outlets Target Global Audiences with Pro-Beijing Content citizenlab.ca · “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.”
Feb 7
Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake 'chief financial officer' cnn.com · “(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,”
Feb 7
Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark theprivacydad.com · “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.”
Feb 7
Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring' sfgate.com · “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.”
Feb 7
"Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto Real Estate Bubble: HSBC Bank Leaks thebureau.news · “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.”
Feb 6
TSMC to build second Japan chip factory, raising investment to $20 billion finance.yahoo.com · “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.”
Feb 6
Meta cuts off third-party access to Facebook Groups, leaving developers and customers in disarray techcrunch.com · “I will lose seven years of work and over 10,000 customers,”
Feb 6
Companies embracing SMS for account logins should be blamed for SIM-swap attacks keydiscussions.com · “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.”
Feb 6
Better Call GPT, Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers arxiv.org · “Cost wise, LLMs operate at a fraction of the price, offering a staggering 99.97 percent reduction in cost over traditional methods.”
Feb 6
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll! scrollprize.org · “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.”
Feb 5
Confirming Large-Scale Pegasus Surveillance of Jordan-based Civil Society citizenlab.ca · “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.”
Feb 5
Clorox Says Cyberattack Costs Exceed $49 Million securityweek.com · “The Company has not recognized any insurance proceeds in the three and six months ended December 31, 2023 related to the cyberattack.”
Feb 5
DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it. forum.defcon.org · “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.”
Feb 5
WA House bill would make it illegal for police to lie during interrogations seattletimes.com · “Sometimes, it’s an unfortunate reality, we have to lie to people to get them to tell the truth,”
Feb 5
Netflix: Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against and Growing Rapidly torrentfreak.com · “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,”
Feb 4
New Linux glibc flaw lets attackers get root on major distros bleepingcomputer.com · “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.”
Feb 4
Plastic bans work. Billions of plastic bags were avoided in the US alone zmescience.com · “Grocery stores, restaurants and retail shops should not be permitted to distribute plastic film bags of any thickness at checkout.”
Feb 4
Vision Pro Teardown: Why Those Fake Eyes Look So Weird ifixit.com · “In practice, the EyeSight display is so dim and low-resolution that reviewers say it’s hard to see much on it.”
Feb 4
Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice research.mozilla.org · “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.”
Feb 3
JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant prompts customer outcry theregister.com · “The problem with removing a bundled plugin is that it can break application signatures and cause problems with updates,”
Feb 3
Goodbye Non-KISS Appliances willbush.dev · “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.”
Feb 3
Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code theregister.com · “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.”
Feb 3
FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines cbsnews.com · “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.”
Feb 2
The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances npr.org · “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.”
Feb 2
Google has another secret browser matan-h.com · “A full untraceable browser inside the parental lock-down mode!”
Feb 2
Leaky Vessels: Docker and runc Container Breakout Vulnerabilities - January 2024 labs.snyk.io · “This could occur by running a malicious image or by building a container image using a malicious Dockerfile or upstream image”
Feb 2
Thanksgiving 2023 security incident blog.cloudflare.com · “Unfortunately, we failed to rotate one service token and three service accounts (out of thousands) of credentials that were leaked during the Okta compromise.”
Feb 1
A Startup Allegedly ‘Hacked the World.’ Then Came the Censorship, and Now the Backlash wired.com · “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.”
Feb 1
How paid editors squeeze you dry en.wikipedia.org · “We estimate that the proceeds of this scam in 2023 were at least $500,000, and perhaps well over $1,000,000.”
Feb 1
We ran an experiment to see how easy it is to cheat with ChatGPT in interviews interviewing.io · “As it turns out, not a single interviewer mentioned concerns about any of the candidates cheating!”
Feb 1

January 2024 113 posts

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission theregister.com · “Nothing seems to turn it off.”
Jan 31
Google Search Drops Cache Link From Search Results (How To See The Cache) seroundtable.com · “After a couple of months of testing, it seems Google has now removed the cache link from the search results page.”
Jan 31
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threat to supe, police reports missionlocal.org · “Threats to one’s life or safety have no place in political discourse.”
Jan 31
Starlink's Laser System Is Beaming 42 Million GB of Data Per Day pcmag.com · “SpaceX’s laser system for Starlink is delivering over 42 petabytes of data for customers per day, an engineer revealed today.”
Jan 31
How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech 12challenges.substack.com · “It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It matters if you have money, time, and willpower to go to court.”
Jan 30
Researchers Approach New Speed Limit for Seminal Problem quantamagazine.org · “It represents the first [major] improvement to ILP solvers in nearly 40 years.”
Jan 30
Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not theverge.com · “Basically, I keep asking if I prefer using a computer in there rather than out here.”
Jan 30
Scientists document first-ever transmitted Alzheimer's cases, tied to no-longer-used medical procedure statnews.com · “There was something odd about these Alzheimer’s cases.”
Jan 29
Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids under 16 abcnews.go.com · “Legislators in Florida are considering what could be the strictest regulation on social media and kids in the country.”
Jan 29
Helios: Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment. github.com · “Helios is a distribution of illumos powering the Oxide Rack.”
Jan 29
Eagle 7B : Soaring past Transformers with 1 Trillion Tokens Across 100+ Languages (RWKV-v5) blog.rwkv.com · “This release marks the release of the strongest linear transformer (in terms of eval benchmarks) to date.”
Jan 29
In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox tonsky.me · “Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition.”
Jan 28
I hacked a train toilet devever.net · “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.”
Jan 28
I looked through attacks in my access logs. Here's what I found nishtahir.com · “The lesson here seems to be to expose the absolute bare minimum to the public internet.”
Jan 28
Disney Unveils the HoloTile Floor, Inching Us Closer to a Real-Life Holodeck ign.com · “However, it’s important not to get too excited yet as Smoot notes ‘we don’t know yet where that will be used.’”
Jan 27
Proposed Top-Level Domain String for Private Use icann.org · “The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has made a provisional determination that “.INTERNAL” should be reserved for private-use and internal network applications.”
Jan 27
Brave Leo, the AI browser assistant, now features Mixtral for improved performance brave.com · “Mixtral is now the default LLM for all Leo users, for the free version and the Premium version ($15/month).”
Jan 27
Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]? danluu.com · “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.”
Jan 27
Rook to XSS: How I hacked chess.com with a rookie exploit skii.dev · “However, in this case, TinyMCE was up-to-date and had been configured correctly not to allow scripting tags and attributes.”
Jan 26
ArVid: how Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s jacobfilipp.com · “One VHS tape could store more information than an entire hard drive.”
Jan 26
The Rise of Batteries in Six Charts and Not Too Many Numbers rmi.org · “The unstoppable rise of batteries is leading to a domino effect that puts half of global fossil fuel demand at risk.”
Jan 26
Portable EPUBs willcrichton.net · “These pros and cons can be traced back to one key fact: the PDF representation of a document is fundamentally unstructured.”
Jan 26
Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union apple.com · “Inevitably, the new options for developers’ EU apps create new risks to Apple users and their devices.”
Jan 25
After Three Years on Mars, NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter Mission Ends nasa.gov · “The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield.”
Jan 25
Celebrating our first 20,000 members blog.kagi.com · “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?”
Jan 25
Zed is now open source zed.dev · “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.”
Jan 24
OpenAI Quietly Scrapped a Promise to Disclose Key Documents to the Public wired.com · “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.”
Jan 24
Breaking Free from DRM: The Story of Hacking My Air Purifier unethical.info · “I decided to investigate the nightmare DRM RFID chip that was stuck to the bottom of my filter.”
Jan 24
How we made an animated movie in 8kB ctrl-alt-test.fr · “Yes, 8 kilobytes, less than half of this post, for everything.”
Jan 24
FTC bans TurboTax from advertising 'free' services, calls it deceptive cnn.com · “Intuit cannot advertise or market any goods or services as free unless it’s free for all customers, the FTC ordered.”
Jan 23
Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has "Enormous Volume Of Defects" Bolts On MAX 9 Weren't Installed viewfromthewing.com · “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.”
Jan 23
Appeals Court: FBI's Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment reason.com · “The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when its agents rifled through the contents of more than 700 safe-deposit boxes”
Jan 23
Czech Republic sets IPv4 end date konecipv4.cz · “On the basis of this decision, the Czech state administration will stop providing its services over IPv4 on 6 June 2032.”
Jan 22
GPT-3.5 crashes when it thinks about useRalativeImagePath too much iter.ca · “You could try putting this phrase in documents, to throw off attempts to summarize it with GPT-3.5.”
Jan 22
My Toddler Still Loves Planes, So I Upgraded Her Radar jacobbartlett.substack.com · “In my excitement to get 2.0 into production, I was a little sloppy, placing the password in User Defaults.”
Jan 22
NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars phys.org · “NASA has lost contact with the helicopter before, including for an agonizing two months last year.”
Jan 21
Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL? blog.tidelift.com · “Vizio’s law firm makes about as much in a day as SFC makes from donations in a year.”
Jan 21
Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers bitbytebit.substack.com · “The more proxies you have between the developer and the customer, the less the product will meet customer needs.”
Jan 21
Google Is Tracking You Even In Incognito Mode, New Disclaimer Is Up news.abplive.com · “Google has finally admitted that it tracks your search history, activities, the websites you visit and the services they use even in Incognito mode.”
Jan 21
What's that touchscreen in my room? laplab.me · “Turns out, interface on the Android tablet is just a webview.”
Jan 20
Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections news.ycombinator.com · “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.”
Jan 20
Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead theguardian.com · “It is virtually impossible that there are any other retired teachers with my name and birth date who are dying year on year.”
Jan 20
Dave Mills has passed away elists.isoc.org · “He was such an iconic element of the early Internet.”
Jan 19
What Is Nightshade? nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu · “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.”
Jan 19
Thailand discovers nearly 15 million tonnes of lithium malaymail.com · “We are trying to find out how much can we use from the resources we found.”
Jan 19
Mourning Google tbray.org · “And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search.”
Jan 19
German law is making security research a risky business infosec.exchange · “But the court ruling says: yes, there was a password, so there is a protection mechanism which was circumvented, and that’s hacking.”
Jan 18
How we migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime gds.blog.gov.uk · “Our source database is about 400GB in size.”
Jan 18
The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams waxy.org · “Ello exists for the benefit of the creative community, and we will never serve ads or sell personal data.”
Jan 18
Hacking into a Toyota/Eicher Motors insurance company by exploiting their premium calculator website eaton-works.com · “If I were them, I would not want a random stranger having access to their corporate cloud for 5 months.”
Jan 17
AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry deepmind.google · “In a benchmarking test of 30 Olympiad geometry problems, AlphaGeometry solved 25 within the standard Olympiad time limit.”
Jan 17
FAQ on leaving Google social.clawhammer.net · “Google culture changed dramatically last year with its first major round of layoffs, and I saw the writing on the wall.”
Jan 17
How Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases read.engineerscodex.com · “Apple really does store billions of databases in their extreme multi-tenant architecture.”
Jan 17
U.S. Developers Can Now Offer Non-App Store Purchasing Option, But Apple Will Still Collect Commissions macrumors.com · “Developers are permitted to have a single plain link on one screen of an app.”
Jan 16
OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with the Pentagon semafor.com · “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.”
Jan 16
4,000 of My Closest Friends catandgirl.com · “Even that nominal opt-in option is gone. They just take it.”
Jan 16
Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99% bitsand.cloud · “Data transfer prices easily add up, and are an extremely high-margin source of profit for cloud providers”
Jan 15
High-speed 10Gbps full-mesh network based on USB4 for just $47.98 fangpenlin.com · “I tested the network speed, and it can hit 11Gbps.”
Jan 15
Release History Of SQLite sqlite.org · “All JSON functions are rewritten to use a new internal parse tree format called JSONB.”
Jan 15
Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed theregister.com · “These instructions are not for the faint of heart.”
Jan 14
We're building a better PostHog community by closing our public Slack posthog.com · “However, with over 5,000 members in the community, it’s become clear we’ve outgrown Slack as a platform.”
Jan 14
Wal2 Mode Notes sqlite.org · “In wal2 mode, the system uses two wal files instead of one.”
Jan 14
When Random Isn't orlp.net · “This RNG is, for the lack of a better word, shite.”
Jan 14
Your washing machine could be sending 3.7 GB of data a day tomshardware.com · “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.”
Jan 13
A decade long Steam issue, is everyone just too fast for Valve? blog.freudenjmp.com · “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.”
Jan 13
A Suprising Discovery Inside The Steam Deck's APU boilingsteam.com · “There’s a part that represents almost 15% of the surface that is completely undocumented.”
Jan 13
Playing with Fire – How We Executed a Critical Supply Chain Attack on PyTorch johnstawinski.com · “Security tends to lag behind adoption, and AI/ML is no exception.”
Jan 12
Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Horizon whistleblower bbc.co.uk · “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.”
Jan 12
Unity's Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC mfkl.github.io · “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies!”
Jan 12
Framework discloses data breach after accountant gets phished bleepingcomputer.com · “Customers are urged to contact the company’s support team about any suspicious emails they receive.”
Jan 12
Here's Some Bitcoin: Oh, and You've Been Served! krebsonsecurity.com · “The hard truth is that most victims will never see their stolen funds again.”
Jan 12
Outlook is Microsoft's new data collection service proton.me · “Americans, thanks to their government’s refusal to pass privacy legislation, are never even informed this is happening.”
Jan 11
The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit aftermath.site · “The once ubiquitous phrase “let me Google that for you” is now meaningless.”
Jan 11
Meta ignores the users' right to easily withdraw consent noyb.eu · “This is illegal, as the GDPR clearly states that withdrawing your consent must be ‘as easy as’ giving it.”
Jan 11
Cloud switching just got easier: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud cloud.google.com · “This applies to all customers globally.”
Jan 11
A huge battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant canarymedia.com · “Kapolei alone constitutes about 17% of Oahu’s peak capacity.”
Jan 10
Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC cointelegraph.com · “The SEC had consistently denied all spot Bitcoin ETF requests, citing concerns over potential market manipulation and fraud.”
Jan 10
Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for your email program mailgun.com · “Senders will have two days to implement unsubscribe requests.”
Jan 10
How I pwned half of America's fast food chains, simultaneously. mrbruh.com · “My hunch was that in the rush to push their new shiny product, someone would take a shortcut…”
Jan 9
Python 3.13 gets a JIT tonybaloney.github.io · “The initial benchmarks show something of a 2-9% performance improvement.”
Jan 9
www.google.com - The page is blank when accessed github.com · “This is entirely server-side UA sniffing going wrong.”
Jan 9
OpenWrt One - celebrating 20 years of OpenWrt lwn.net · “Let’s celebrate this anniversary by launching our own first and fully upstream supported hardware design.”
Jan 9
United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections theaircurrent.com · “United is the only other U.S. airline to fly the 737 Max 9 and is the largest operator with 79 in its fleet.”
Jan 8
Twilio CEO Lawson steps down after bruising activist battles cnbc.com · “The move comes as Twilio grapples with two activist investors who have been pushing for significant changes.”
Jan 8
Polars pola.rs · “Polars is written from the ground up with performance in mind.”
Jan 8
HTMX playground & examples lassebomh.github.io · “It will run a mock server that intercepts outgoing requests from HTMX.”
Jan 8
LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word eldritch.cafe · “Yep. Word can’t read files prior to 1994.”
Jan 7
PocketBase - Open Source backend in 1 file pocketbase.io · “Embedded performant database with schema builder, data validations, realtime subscriptions and easy to use REST api.”
Jan 7
What does the Cerebellum Do Anyway? sarahconstantin.substack.com · “Clearly, the cerebellum does something to control movement, and movement is impaired when it is damaged.”
Jan 7
FAA grounds more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s after section of Alaska Airlines plane blows out cnbc.com · “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.”
Jan 6
Chromium Money Tree Browser lyra.horse · “The bug bounty reward gets divided between files, eg if a fix to a $1000 bug changed 5 files, each file gets $200”
Jan 6
When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 socket.dev · “This package, true to its name, depends on every other public npm package, creating millions of transitive dependencies.”
Jan 6
Do we think of git commits as diffs, snapshots, and/or histories? jvns.ca · “But as a strategy for teaching Git, it hasn’t been as successful as I’d hoped!”
Jan 6
Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air seattletimes.com · “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.”
Jan 5
YouTube demonetizes public domain 'Steamboat Willie' video after copyright claim mashable.com · “Public domain works are considered public property.”
Jan 5
Fixing Macs Door to Door matduggan.com · “The back alley electronics repair guy is the dark secret of the Dispatch world.”
Jan 5
This holographic camera turns any window into an invisible camera digitalcameraworld.com · “Parking cameras that can be completely hidden.”
Jan 5
What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong commandcenter.blogspot.com · “Our original goal was not to create a new programming language, it was to create a better way to write software.”
Jan 4
Why Are Tech Reporters Sleeping On The Biggest App Store Story? infrequently.org · “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.”
Jan 4
iCloud Cleanup andykong.org · “Somehow, those 7GB of video took up way more space in the cloud than on my hard drive.”
Jan 4
QuantumScape's solid-state batteries pass latest test, could offer 500,000 km without range loss electrek.co · “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.”
Jan 4
The 3 budgets swizec.com · “Maintenance is always on the chopping block.”
Jan 3
The One Billion Row Challenge morling.dev · “All submissions will be evaluated by running the program on a Hetzner Cloud CCX33 instance (8 dedicated vCPU, 32 GB RAM).”
Jan 3
Possible Meissner effect near room temperature in copper-substituted lead apatite arxiv.org · “Our experiment suggests at room temperature the Meissner effect is possibly present in this material.”
Jan 3
Ants Recognise Infected Wounds and Treat Them uni-wuerzburg.de · “Its secretion contains 112 components, half of which have an antimicrobial or wound-healing effect.”
Jan 3
The I in LLM stands for intelligence daniel.haxx.se · “Every security report has to have a human spend time to look at it and assess what it means.”
Jan 2
LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024 antirez.com · “LLMs are like stupid savants who know a lot of things.”
Jan 2
Dillo Website dillo-browser.github.io · “The domain dillo.org is no longer under control of Dillo developers.”
Jan 2
Amazon's Silent Sacking justingarrison.com · “Amazon has a stock problem.”
Jan 2
All DMCA Notices Filed Against TorrentFreak in 2023 Were Bogus torrentfreak.com · “100% bogus, right across the board, and a complete waste of resources for everyone involved.”
Jan 1
Disney's earliest Mickey and Minnie Mouse enter public domain as US copyright expires bbc.com · “In fact, anyone can use those versions without permission or cost.”
Jan 1
OpenVoice: Versatile Instant Voice Cloning arxiv.org · “To foster further research in the field, we have made the source code and trained model publicly accessible.”
Jan 1
Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover standardebooks.org · “Standard Ebooks releases all of the work we put in to each ebook into the public domain too.”
Jan 1