Posts from 2025

December 2025 31 posts

Most distant supernova: James Webb sees a star explode at cosmic dawn sciencedaily.com · “To our surprise, our model worked remarkably well and the observed supernova seems to match really well the death of stars that we see regularly.”
Dec 28
Film critics look back at 2025 and name their picks for the year's best pbs.org · “To me, movie of the year in a few ways is ‘Sinners,’ which is from Ryan Coogler. It’s about twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan who end up having to battle some vampires.”
Dec 26
Year in Review: The Biggest Climate Headlines of 2025 earth.org · “The global average temperature anomaly for January to November 2025 stands at 0.60C above the 1991–2020 average, or 1.48C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial reference.”
Dec 24
Best TV of 2025: 'Adolescence' stands on its own npr.org · “It tells the story of a young teen accused of murdering a classmate and is told in such an emotionally and technically compelling way.”
Dec 23
The Worst Movies of 2025 variety.com · “This year’s crème de la crap.”
Dec 23
Our Favorite Sports Moments of 2025 defector.com · “The greatest baseball game of all-time.”
Dec 22
Subaru Telescope reveals a hidden giant planet sciencedaily.com · “Only about 1 percent of stars are known to host massive planets or brown dwarfs that can be directly photographed with today’s telescopes.”
Dec 22
Scientists found climate change hidden in old military air samples sciencedaily.com · “It’s a considerable difference, especially considering that summer is so short in the north.”
Dec 21
The 10 Best Podcasts of 2025 podcastreview.org · “2025 countered the narrative that the medium is somehow no longer interested in audio—with a slew of ambitious productions that emphasized podcasting as an art form in itself.”
Dec 20
The Best Comedy Specials of 2025 vulture.com · “Many of this year’s best comedy specials share a reflective sense of mid-career reconsideration.”
Dec 19
Best of 2025: The Stories You Missed longreads.com · “A slightly messy response to the dispiriting cleanness of modern life.”
Dec 19
Hacks, thefts, and disruption: The worst data breaches of 2025 techcrunch.com · “From the raiding of U.S. government databases to a hack every month in South Korea.”
Dec 19
The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2025 lithub.com · “Reality has outpaced Pynchon’s fictional conspiracies.”
Dec 18
Best of 2025: All Our Number Five Story Picks longreads.com · “Distilled emotional and moral explorations accessible across generations.”
Dec 18
Best of 2025: All Our Number One Story Picks longreads.com · “The pieces that rose to the very top of our editors’ lists.”
Dec 17
The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2025 lithub.com · “A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years.”
Dec 16
The Shrouded, Sinister History of the Bulldozer noemamag.com · “Both creator and destroyer, the bulldozer offers a cautionary tale for how technology without proper safeguards can be misused to the detriment of individual and collective life.”
Dec 15
The Best Online Articles of 2025 honest-broker.com · “I showcase the work of other writers who are total strangers to me, but have written some article or essay of exceptional merit.”
Dec 15
They Answered an Ad for Surrogates, and Found Themselves in a Nightmare nytimes.com · “The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them.”
Dec 14
The Birth Keepers: How the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world longreads.com · “They will try to discredit you. They will lie about you. They will attempt to silence what they don’t understand.”
Dec 13
The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms noemamag.com · “The curious paradox at the heart of space forecasting is that the satellites and supercomputers that empower the observations are themselves vectors of vulnerability.”
Dec 10
The best video games of 2025, picked by NPR's staff npr.org · “With so much of the industry rallying around Sandfall Interactive’s RPG as one of the defining games of the year, it has become a symbol of what video games can still be.”
Dec 8
The Shocking Crash That Led One County to Reckon With the Dangers of E-Bikes nytimes.com · “E-bikes go really fast—faster than the surrounding people and cyclists and pedestrians would warrant.”
Dec 7
Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums of 2025 yearendlists.com · “In siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s dense, elaborate thicket of sound, traditional genres and ancestral wisdom coexist with digital ephemera and rapturous noise.”
Dec 6
The Last Days of Social Media noemamag.com · “Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.”
Dec 5
Thomas McGuane Is the Last of His Kind theatlantic.com · “Thomas McGuane—fisherman, hunter, rancher, writer—says ‘good riddance’ to his kind.”
Dec 4
The best architecture of 2025 dezeen.com · “The world’s largest wooden structure, with a circumference of two kilometres and a diameter of 700 metres.”
Dec 4
Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Albums of 2025 rollingstone.com · “The music world refused to stand still in 2025. This wasn’t a year for playing it safe.”
Dec 3
The Airport Lounge Wars newyorker.com · “In 2016, at Changi Airport, in Singapore, a Malaysian businessman named Raejali Buntut missed a flight to Kuala Lumpur. He’d dozed off in the Plaza Premium Lounge. Instead of rebooking, he went to more lounges, hopping from one to the next, a total of thirty-one times. He didn’t leave the airport for eighteen days.”
Dec 3
A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language newyorker.com · “A plan in the Swiss Alps to tidy up Romansh—spoken by less than one per cent of the country—set off a decades-long quarrel over identity, belonging, and the sound of authenticity.”
Dec 2
Kicking Robots: Humanoids and the tech-industry hype machine harpers.org · “The future that scares me is not a robot uprising led by robots, but one led by billionaires.”
Dec 1

November 2025 35 posts

Twin Cyclones Kill Over 1,800 Across South and Southeast Asia britannica.com · “Cyclone Senyar marked the first cyclonic storm to form in the Strait of Malacca in 135 years.”
Nov 30
Raccoon Breaks Into Virginia Liquor Store, Gets Drunk, Passes Out in Bathroom washingtonpost.com · “He fell through one of the ceiling tiles and went on a full-blown rampage, drinking everything.”
Nov 29
6,000 Airbus A320s Grounded for Emergency Software Fix Over Thanksgiving npr.org · “Thousands of travelers worldwide were stranded after Airbus ordered immediate software fixes for 6,000 A320-series aircraft.”
Nov 28
Russia's Only ISS Launch Pad Damaged After Soyuz MS-28 Launch nasaspaceflight.com · “If the Baikonur Cosmodrome is disabled as suspected, Russia will have lost the ability to launch people into space for the first time since 1961.”
Nov 28
California High-Speed Rail Reaches 80 Miles of Completed Guideway hsr.ca.gov · “Materials needed to lay track along the 119-mile segment will be 100% state funded.”
Nov 26
Ozempic Fails to Slow Alzheimer's Progression in Phase 3 Trials statnews.com · “While semaglutide did not demonstrate efficacy in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the extensive body of evidence supporting semaglutide continues to provide benefits for individuals with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related comorbidities.”
Nov 24
COP30 Ends Without Agreement on Phasing Out Fossil Fuels climatechangenews.com · “Science has been deleted from COP30 because it offends the polluters.”
Nov 22
MIT Builds Robots Powered by Living Muscle Tissue and Artificial Tendons news.mit.edu · “The tendon-enhanced gripper moved three times faster and with 30 times more force than one powered by muscle alone.”
Nov 21
Ministers Launch Global Initiative to Cut Farm Methane and Nitrous Oxide ccacoalition.org · “FIRST is the first coordinated South-South platform linking countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia to share practical, low-cost solutions.”
Nov 19
First Ramses III Inscription Discovered in Jordan's Wadi Rum jordantimes.com · “This is a landmark discovery that enhances our understanding of ancient connections between Egypt, Jordan, and the Arabian Peninsula.”
Nov 19
Energy Department Closes $1 Billion Loan to Restart Pennsylvania Nuclear Plant energy.gov · “The Energy Department announced it closed a $1 billion loan to accelerate the restart of a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant that will deliver 850 megawatts of electricity.”
Nov 18
Lethal Dose of Plastics for Marine Animals Is Much Smaller Than Expected oceanconservancy.org · “The lethal dose varies based on the species, the animal’s size, the type of plastic it’s consuming, and other factors, but overall it’s much smaller than you might think.”
Nov 17
Hawaiian Monk Seals Have a Hidden Underwater Vocabulary of 25 Distinct Calls hawaii.edu · “We discovered that Hawaiian monk seals—one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals—are far more vocal underwater than previously known.”
Nov 17
Roman Horse Cemetery with Over 100 Skeletons Found in Stuttgart archaeology.org · “Here we see a particularly close bond between the owner and his horse.”
Nov 17
Scientists Extract the Oldest RNA Ever Found from 40,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth smithsonianmag.com · “Many researchers thought RNA didn’t stay intact for tens of thousands of years, but the new study challenges that long-held notion.”
Nov 15
Solar and Wind Now Growing Fast Enough to Meet All New Electricity Demand ember-energy.org · “For the first time across a sustained period, renewables generated more electricity than coal globally.”
Nov 15
700-Year-Old Royal Murder Solved Through DNA and Forensic Analysis phys.org · “Forensic evidence revealed 26 perimortem injuries, suggesting a coordinated, premeditated assassination involving at least three assailants.”
Nov 14
Chinese Astronauts Return on Backup Spacecraft After Space Debris Damages Their Capsule spacenews.com · “The Shenzhou-20 manned spacecraft’s return capsule window glass had developed a minor crack, most likely caused by an external impact from space debris, thus failing to meet the requirements for a safe crewed return.”
Nov 14
Blue Origin Lands New Glenn Booster for the First Time blueorigin.com · “The first stage of the New Glenn rocket, named ‘Never Tell Me the Odds,’ successfully landed on the Landing Platform Vessel Jacklyn positioned 375 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean.”
Nov 13
UC Berkeley's First Planetary Mission Launches Twin Satellites to Mars news.berkeley.edu · “ESCAPADE breaks the paradigm of multi-hundred million and billion dollar planetary missions, building on the MAVEN Mars orbiter’s legacy for a fraction of the cost.”
Nov 13
43-Day Government Shutdown Becomes the Longest in US History cnn.com · “The 2025 shutdown, by comparison, has derailed 100% of appropriations.”
Nov 12
3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Settlement with Royal Wine Production Found Beneath Greek Ruins popularmechanics.com · “An amphora stamped with the name Meritaten dated back to the 18th Dynasty, since Meritaten is known to be the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.”
Nov 12
Firefox's New Anti-Fingerprinting Protections Cut User Tracking by 70% blog.mozilla.org · “These new protections can reduce the number of uniquely fingerprinted users to just 20%, down from over 60% of users that can be fingerprinted without any protections.”
Nov 11
Americas Lose Measles Elimination Status After Canada Stripped of Designation en.wikipedia.org · “On November 10, Canada was stripped of its measles-free designation, and as a result, the Pan American Health Organization declared that the Americas had lost its measles elimination status.”
Nov 10
Peru's Mysterious 'Band of Holes' Was an Ancient Marketplace and Inca Spreadsheet usf.edu · “In a sense, Monte Sierpe could have been an ‘Excel spreadsheet’ for the Inca Empire.”
Nov 10
UK and Brazil Launch $25 Million Program to Cut Methane and HFCs ccacoalition.org · “The UK and Brazil launched a ‘Super Pollutant Country Action Accelerator’ to drive rapid cuts in methane, HFCs, and air pollutants across 30 developing countries by 2030.”
Nov 9
Self-Healing Concrete Uses Bacteria to Repair Its Own Cracks highways.today · “Results indicated complete healing of cracks in 21 days under optimal curing conditions.”
Nov 8
Palisades Becomes First US Nuclear Plant to Return from Decommissioning utilitydive.com · “The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan has officially returned to operational status after being in decommissioning for three years.”
Nov 8
FDA Creates New Pathway for Personalized Gene Therapy scientificdiscovery.dev · “The FDA launched a new pathway to market for personalized gene therapy procedures in November.”
Nov 7
New Catalyst Converts CO2 to Fuel at Record Efficiency sciencedaily.com · “When compared to noble metal catalysts such as platinum, the new catalyst demonstrated a 2.2-fold higher formation rate and a 1.8-fold higher yield.”
Nov 5
Shingles Vaccine Reduces Dementia Risk by 20% in Welsh Study med.stanford.edu · “The remarkable findings support an emerging theory that viruses that affect the nervous system can increase the risk of dementia.”
Nov 4
First Paratyphoid Vaccine Shows 73% Efficacy in Human Trials ox.ac.uk · “This is the first time a modern-day vaccine has been shown to protect people against Salmonella Paratyphi A, a disease that affects millions of people every year.”
Nov 3
Antarctic Glacier Undergoes Fastest Retreat Ever Recorded en.wikipedia.org · “Hektoria Glacier in Antarctica was reported to have undergone the fastest retreat of any glacier on record.”
Nov 3
Utah Man Sends Off His 35-Year-Old Car by Dropping a One-Ton Pumpkin on It upi.com · “It’s just something that we’ve talked, me and my wife have talked about for a long time, that this would be the best way for it to go.”
Nov 1
French Highway Wirelessly Charges EVs Faster Than Tesla Superchargers techradar.com · “A system that allows continuous charging on the move could eliminate lengthy refueling stops altogether.”
Nov 1

October 2025 30 posts

Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake Launches, Completing the Erdrick Trilogy press.na.square-enix.com · “Players will experience the dramatic and satisfying conclusion of the Erdrick Trilogy.”
Oct 30
Carnivorous 'Death Ball' Sponge Among 30 New Species Found in Southern Ocean oceancensus.org · “Its spherical form is covered in tiny hooks that trap prey, a clear contrast to the gentle, passive, filter-feeding undertaken by most sponges.”
Oct 29
She Was Waco's Baby Whisperer. Then an Infant Died in Her Care. texasmonthly.com · “Dosing kids with Benadryl was ‘a dirty little secret in the industry of child care.’”
Oct 28
EA's Internal AI Tools Reportedly Causing More Problems Than They Solve tweaktown.com · “Experimental AI tools cause coding errors and ‘hallucinations,’ increasing workload and employee anxiety amid industry layoffs.”
Oct 27
Astronomers May Have Found the Universe's First Stars Using James Webb livescience.com · “Looking at that light, astronomers found clear evidence of helium in LAP1-B—but virtually no heavier elements.”
Oct 27
UK Government Announces CMA Reform, May Replace Panel Model goodwinlaw.com · “The consultation considers whether to replace the panel model for overseeing in-depth merger reviews with a committee model.”
Oct 25
Scientists Explore Interoception, the Body's Hidden 'Sixth Sense' knowablemagazine.org · “An intricate communication network inside the body constantly monitors breathing, heart rate, digestion, and immune function.”
Oct 25
American E-Waste Causing 'Hidden Tsunami' in Southeast Asia news.slashdot.org · “This new, almost invisible tsunami of e-waste is taking place, padding already lucrative profit margins.”
Oct 23
Dispatch, Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted, and PowerWash Simulator 2 Launch gamespot.com · “A busy week for game releases with three notable titles dropping within 24 hours.”
Oct 22
Iceland Reports First-Ever Mosquitoes, Leaving Only Antarctica Mosquito-Free npr.org · “This is the first record of mosquitoes occurring in the natural environment in Iceland.”
Oct 22
KDE Plasma 6.5 Released With Rounded Corners and Auto Theme Switching kde.org · “Breeze-themed windows now have the same level of roundness in all four corners.”
Oct 21
Naked Mole-Rats' DNA Repair Protein Explains Their Longevity rockefeller.edu · “Small tweaks in one of their proteins make it better at fixing DNA damage.”
Oct 20
IKEA Announces Matter-Enabled Smart Home Devices slashdot.org · “The Kajplats smart bulb range covers eleven bulbs across various shapes and brightness levels.”
Oct 20
Scientists Finally Read the Hidden DNA Code That Shapes Disease rockefeller.edu · “SDR-seq decodes both DNA and RNA from the same cell, finally opening access to non-coding regions.”
Oct 18
SpaceX Launches 50th Falcon 9 From Vandenberg This Year spaceflightnow.com · “SpaceX launched its 50th Falcon 9 rocket of the year from Vandenberg.”
Oct 18
The Secret Life of Horus: An Egyptian Mummy's Tumultuous Journey longreads.com · “Horus was showcased inside a decommissioned Edmonton Transit bus alongside various graveyard paraphernalia and taken on tour across Alberta.”
Oct 16
Metal Detectorist Finds 15,000 Roman Coins, Sleeps in Car to Guard Them en.wikipedia.org · “Fearing they could be stolen, Moss slept with the hoard in his car for three days before taking it to experts.”
Oct 15
14 New Marine Species Described, Including 'Popcorn' Parasitic Isopod phys.org · “The genus name derives from Zea, reflecting this resemblance to popped kernels of popcorn.”
Oct 15
Nearest Technological Civilization Could Be 33,000 Light-Years Away en.wikipedia.org · “Such civilizations would need to last for at least 280,000 years to coincide in time with humanity.”
Oct 12
Vienna-Bratislava Railway Electrified and Reopened en.wikipedia.org · “The Marchegger Eastern Railway reopened and was electrified between Vienna and Bratislava.”
Oct 11
Passenger Rail Service Resumes Between Bucharest and Kyiv en.wikipedia.org · “Passenger services resumed between Bucharest and Kyiv on October 10.”
Oct 10
Little Nightmares 3 Launches gamespot.com · “The horror puzzle platformer sequel launches with co-op support for the first time in the series.”
Oct 10
Sony and AMD Tease PlayStation 6 GPU: 'Current Approach Has Reached Its Limit' tomshardware.com · “There is a significant speed boost that comes from putting the traversal logic in hardware.”
Oct 10
US Datacenters Turn to Coal as Climate Goals Go Up in Smoke news.slashdot.org · “Coal generation increased nearly 20 percent year-to-date.”
Oct 10
China Expands Rare Earth Export Controls, Adds Five More Elements aljazeera.com · “China hasn’t yet pulled the trigger on export restrictions, but it’s reminding Washington that it could.”
Oct 9
SpaceX Launches 90th Starlink Mission of 2025 spaceflightnow.com · “SpaceX launched its 90th Starlink mission of 2025 from Cape Canaveral.”
Oct 6
Belgrade-Subotica High-Speed Train Launches as Part of Budapest-Belgrade Railway en.wikipedia.org · “The Belgrade-Subotica high-speed train was launched as part of the Budapest–Belgrade railway.”
Oct 3
First Human Test of Enzyme That Converts Organs to Universal Blood Type sciencenews.org · “Scientists performed the first human test of an enzyme treatment that converts a donor kidney to a universal blood type.”
Oct 3
Man Attacks Lunch Companion With Wooden Stake, Believing He Was a Werewolf listverse.com · “He believed the victim was a werewolf who wanted to kill him.”
Oct 2
Gulf Air Returns to New York After Nearly 30 Years aviationweek.com · “Gulf Air was among the first movers of the month, returning to the U.S. for the first time since the 1990s.”
Oct 1

September 2025 61 posts

Kernel vs. User-Level Networking: Don't Throw Out the Stack usenix.org · “Research challenging the assumption that kernel-bypass networking is always faster than kernel networking.”
Sep 25
Zig's New Async I/O kristoff.it · “Zig decouples async/await from coroutines, uses a vtable-based Io interface for runtime polymorphism, and solves the function coloring problem.”
Sep 24
Matrix.org Post-Mortem: September 2nd Database Outage matrix.org · “Routine NVMe maintenance caused a RAID failure, then a destructive command on the wrong server wiped the secondary. 51TB PostgreSQL restore from S3.”
Sep 23
MNT September 2025 Update mntre.com · “Progress on the RK3588 processor module, the new MNT Quasar module, and USB 3.0 signal integrity improvements for Reform Next.”
Sep 22
Synthetic Magnetic Fields Steer Light On a Chip For Faster Communications phys.org · “Researchers created synthetic magnetic fields within silicon photonic crystals that steer light with unprecedented precision at 140 gigabits per second.”
Sep 21
US Man Still Alive Six Months After Pig Kidney Transplant nature.com · “The longest a xenotransplant organ has survived in a living person. The FDA subsequently approved the first clinical trials.”
Sep 20
Flipper Zero Geiger Counter Module kasiin.top · “A detailed guide for building a Geiger counter module for Flipper Zero, including measurements of uranium ore and radium samples.”
Sep 20
Cosmic Simulations That Once Needed Supercomputers Now Run on a Laptop sciencedaily.com · “Effort.jl delivers cosmological simulation results with the same accuracy as supercomputer runs in minutes on standard laptops.”
Sep 19
Privacy and Security Risks in the eSIM Ecosystem usenix.org · “Travel eSIMs often route user data through third-party networks including Chinese infrastructure regardless of user location.”
Sep 19
40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language openculture.com · “32 consistent geometric symbols appearing across 52 European caves spanning 40,000 years.”
Sep 18
Athlon 64: How AMD Turned the Tables on Intel dfarq.homeip.net · “AMD bet on backward-compatible 64-bit x86 extension while Intel pursued the incompatible Itanium architecture.”
Sep 18
Bcachefs Removed from Mainline Kernel lwn.net · “The experimental filesystem was removed from the mainline kernel in September 2025.”
Sep 17
Multiple Kernels on a Single System Proposed lwn.net · “Proposal to allow each CPU to run its own kernel for special-purpose workloads like realtime.”
Sep 17
Linux 6.17 Kernel Released lwn.net · “New release includes better Spectre mitigation control, live patching on 64-bit Arm, and DualPI2 congestion control.”
Sep 16
OpenSSF Warns Open Source Infrastructure Isn't Free theregister.com · “Package registries handle billions of downloads monthly but run on donations. AI agents are making it worse by scraping en masse.”
Sep 16
Fifth Circuit Upholds Voting Rights Act in Louisiana electoral-vote.com · “The conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld application of the Voting Rights Act.”
Sep 16
Tarrant County, Texas Reduces Polling Places by 35% electoral-vote.com · “County cut polling places from 331 to 216 and reduced early voting days, citing security and efficiency.”
Sep 15
The Rise of Conspiracy Physics msn.com · “Conspiracy-minded content creators attacking mainstream theoretical physics, driven by resentment of scientific authority.”
Sep 15
OpenAI and Oracle Ink Historic $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal techcrunch.com · “OpenAI will purchase $300 billion worth of compute power from Oracle over five years.”
Sep 15
Chrome Increases Its Overwhelming Market Share, Now Over 70% neowin.net · “Chrome has crossed 70% browser market share while Firefox continues to decline.”
Sep 14
Amazon Fire TV Devices Expected to Ditch Android for Linux arstechnica.com · “Amazon Fire TV will transition to proprietary Linux-based Vega OS, moving away from Android.”
Sep 14
Africa's Only Internet Cable Repair Ship Keeps the Continent Online restofworld.org · “The 43-year-old Leon Thevenin maintains over 60,000 kilometers of undersea internet infrastructure.”
Sep 14
US Secret Service Dismantles Telecommunications Threat bbc.co.uk · “Network of 300+ SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards dismantled near the UN General Assembly.”
Sep 13
UK Data Watchdog Warns Students Are Breaching School IT Systems bbc.com · “215 school IT breaches since 2022, with 57% carried out by children. One incident involved a seven-year-old.”
Sep 13
Chinese Hackers Breach US Software and Law Firms Amid Trade Fight cnn.com · “Sophisticated campaign comparable to the 2020 SolarWinds attack, stealing proprietary software to find new vulnerabilities.”
Sep 13
US Warns Hidden Radios May Be Embedded In Solar-Powered Highway Infrastructure reuters.com · “Undocumented cellular radios found in foreign-manufactured power inverters and battery management systems.”
Sep 12
Microsoft's Analog Optical Computer Shows Promise news.microsoft.com · “An 8-variable analog optical computer using smartphone camera sensors, optical lenses, and micro-LEDs finer than human hair.”
Sep 12
DNA Cassette Tape Can Store Every Song Ever Recorded newscientist.com · “DNA tape can store 36 petabytes by printing synthetic DNA molecules onto plastic tape with crystal armor coating for centuries of preservation.”
Sep 12
Can Lab-Grown Coral Restore Reefs Damaged By Climate Change? cbsnews.com · “With 90-99% of remaining coral reefs projected to deteriorate by 2050, scientists are exploring lab-grown coral.”
Sep 11
Corals Won't Survive a Warmer Planet, New Study Finds nytimes.com · “If global temperatures keep rising, virtually all Atlantic Ocean corals will stop growing and could succumb to erosion by century’s end.”
Sep 11
Dozens of Scientists Find Errors in New Energy Department Climate Report npr.org · “More than 85 scientists issued a joint rebuttal to a DOE report full of errors and cherry-picked data.”
Sep 11
Protect Arctic From Dangerous Climate Engineering, Scientists Warn bbc.com · “Over 40 polar scientists warn that geoengineering schemes for the Arctic are dangerous and impractical.”
Sep 10
Scientists Discuss Next Steps to Prevent Dangerous Mirror Life Research msn.com · “Synthetic biologists are raising alarms about ‘mirror life’ organisms with flipped molecular building blocks.”
Sep 10
China's Space Program Will Soon Equal That of the US arstechnica.com · “Research finds China has made significant progress across all fronts in space exploration.”
Sep 10
Interlune Signs $300M Deal to Harvest Helium-3 from the Moon msn.com · “Finnish quantum computing company Bluefors has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon through Interlune.”
Sep 9
Astronomers Discover Previously Unknown Quasi-Moon Near Earth cnn.com · “A new quasi-moon named 2025 PN7, about 98 feet across, was discovered near Earth. It may be an ancient lunar fragment.”
Sep 9
The Profitable Startup linear.app · “Challenging the binary between VC-backed money-burners and bootstrapped profitability.”
Sep 9
Why Old Games Never Die, But New Ones Do pleromanonx86.wordpress.com · “Comparing game longevity to the Lindy effect and why good games inspire fan servers and mods while others are forgotten.”
Sep 8
Unix v4 (1973) Live Terminal unixv4.dev · “A live terminal emulator running Unix v4 from 1973 in the browser.”
Sep 8
How Are Cyber Criminals Rolling in 2025? vin01.github.io · “Attackers crafting specific searches on support sites and buying Google Ads to impersonate legitimate companies.”
Sep 8
Zen Browser Had a Backdoor Enabled by Default github.com · “Zen browser, marketed as privacy-conscious, was found to have a serious backdoor. Multiple privacy concerns were practically ignored by developers.”
Sep 7
OpenWrt: Experiments with OpenWRT One Hardware openwrt.org · “OpenWrt’s experiments with ‘OpenWRT One’ and ambitions to compete with SMB firewall vendors.”
Sep 7
Wi-Fi 7 in 2025: Will This Be the Year? networkworld.com · “Analysis of Wi-Fi 7 adoption challenges, including Multi-Link Operation requiring separate SSIDs and compatibility issues with services like eduroam.”
Sep 7
2025 Infrastructure Report Card infrastructurereportcard.org · “The annual assessment of US infrastructure.”
Sep 6
State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview sbcwiki.com · “A comprehensive overview of the embedded computing landscape, including support tiers for headless appliances, networking, and USB.”
Sep 6
Reverse Engineered Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 github.com · “A complete reverse engineering of the Raspberry Pi CM5 for those wanting to use Pi hardware in embedded applications.”
Sep 6
Top Researchers Leave Intel to Build Startup with 'The Biggest, Baddest CPU' oregonlive.com · “Former Intel researchers founding a startup with plans for high-bandwidth memory on-package with 352 AMD Zen 4 cores.”
Sep 5
NextSilicon Reveals New Processor Chip in Challenge to Intel, AMD reuters.com · “A new challenger in the CPU space, though historically special-purpose chips have struggled against mainstream CPUs.”
Sep 5
Making Video Games (Without an Engine) in 2025 noelberry.ca · “Why engines are the easy part of game development, while tooling, content pipelines, and asset management are the real challenges.”
Sep 5
First Official Release of LLVM Flang blog.llvm.org · “The first official release of LLVM’s Fortran compiler frontend, Flang, after years of development.”
Sep 4
Rust in 2025: Targeting Foundational Software smallcultfollowing.com · “Discussion of Rust’s path forward in 2025, including challenges around ABI stability, dynamic libraries, and extern C limitations.”
Sep 4
What If We Treated Postgres Like SQLite? maragu.dev · “Exploring how PostgreSQL’s data directory works across binaries and how it compares to SQLite’s simplicity.”
Sep 4
Major Reversal in Ocean Circulation Detected in the Southern Ocean icm.csic.es · “Detection of a significant change in Southern Ocean circulation patterns with major implications for global climate systems.”
Sep 3
Dark Oxygen: A Deep-Sea Discovery That Has Split Scientists phys.org · “A controversial discovery of oxygen production in the deep ocean through non-photosynthetic means.”
Sep 3
Solar Power Has Begun to Transform the World's Energy System newyorker.com · “Solar power and HVDC cable technology now allows moving energy across continents, oceans, and time zones.”
Sep 3
LHC 2025 First Collisions op-webtools.web.cern.ch · “Dashboard and information about the Large Hadron Collider’s 2025 first collisions run.”
Sep 2
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 nobelprize.org · “Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), porous materials with extremely high surface area used to speed up reactions and capture molecules.”
Sep 2
Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 nobelprize.org · “Work on macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling.”
Sep 2
New Quantum State of Matter Found at Interface of Exotic Materials phys.org · “Researchers discovered exotic states of matter at material interfaces, similar to how antiferromagnets were found in labs before being theorized in nature.”
Sep 1
NASA to Launch Space Observatory That Will Map 450M Galaxies nbcnews.com · “NASA’s SPHEREx observatory will scan each object approximately every 6 months during its 2-year mission to map the universe.”
Sep 1
Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 Shortlist rmg.co.uk · “Gorgeous astronomy photography shots with narratives about the photographers and their work.”
Sep 1

August 2025 82 posts

Lisp from Nothing, Second Edition t3x.org · “What is the minimal LISP language that can interpret itself? What is the smallest LISP that can compile itself?”
Aug 30
Pentagon Warns Microsoft: Company's Use of China-Based Engineers Was a 'Breach of Trust' propublica.org · “The program was designed to comply with contracting rules, but it exposed the department to unacceptable risk.”
Aug 29
Germany's Army Is Rebuilding. What Could Go Wrong? politico.com · “After World War II, the allies did a tremendous job of re-educating the German population. This led to a society which I would say is peace-minded, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that. But it is also non-military.”
Aug 29
You no longer need JavaScript lyra.horse · “It’s actually pretty incredible what HTML and CSS alone can achieve.”
Aug 29
A Texas Congressman Is Quietly Helping Elon Musk Pitch a $760M Plan to Build Tunnels Under Houston to Ease Flooding propublica.org · “If you build a smaller tunnel, OK, it’ll be cheaper, but it can carry less water. So what have you saved?”
Aug 28
Developer Unlocks Newly Enshittified Echelon Exercise Bikes But Can't Legally Release Software tech.slashdot.org · “I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.”
Aug 27
A Zoomable, Searchable Archive of BYTE Magazine byte.tsundoku.io · “A visual archive.”
Aug 27
Two Texas Moms Were Forced to Wait for Urgent Care After Pregnancy Loss. They Died. longreads.com · “At the outset of Texas’ abortion ban, medical experts worried women like Porsha and Brenda would die from delays in care.”
Aug 26
Everything I Know About Good API Design seangoedecke.com · “Good APIs are boring. An API that’s interesting is a bad API.”
Aug 25
Ghrc.io Appears to be Malicious bmitch.net · “The important detail is this www-authenticate header is telling OCI clients to send their user credentials to that https://ghrc.io/token API.”
Aug 25
Nvidia's New 'Robot Brain' Goes On Sale hardware.slashdot.org · “We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software.”
Aug 25
Linux Turns 34 linux.slashdot.org · “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu).”
Aug 25
Building the Mouse Logitech Won't Make samwilkinson.io · “I think there’s a lot of fun to be had tweaking the objects we use every day to our liking.”
Aug 25
Base: An SQLite Database Editor for macOS menial.co.uk · “Base is a small, powerful, comfortable SQLite editor for everyone.”
Aug 25
FCC Bars Over 1,200 Providers from Robocall Mitigation Database fcc.gov · “These providers violated FCC rules by failing to maintain accurate Robocall Mitigation Database certifications, thereby shirking their obligations to protect consumers from illegal robocalls.”
Aug 25
Meta's Flirty AI Chatbot Invited a Retiree to New York. He Never Made It Home longreads.com · “For a bot to say ‘Come visit me’ is insane.”
Aug 22
Meta Signs $10 Billion Cloud Deal With Google meta.slashdot.org · “Meta will rely on Google Cloud’s infrastructure to support its massive AI data center buildout, as the company ramps up capital spending into the tens of billions.”
Aug 22
An interactive guide to SVG paths joshwcomeau.com · “The SVG <path> element is notoriously tricky…Its syntax isn’t quite as bad as Regex, but it has the same sort of ‘what on earth?’ vibes.”
Aug 22
FFmpeg 8.0 ffmpeg.org · “Native decoders: APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, G.728.”
Aug 22
Code formatting comes to uv experimentally pydevtools.com · “The analogy would be to Cargo: cargo fmt just runs rustfmt, but you can also run rustfmt separately if you want.”
Aug 22
Go is still not good blog.habets.se · “Go says it doesn’t have exceptions. Go makes it extremely awkward to use exceptions, because they want to punish programmers who use them.”
Aug 22
Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server blog.habets.se · “This means that a busy web server can serve all of its queries without even once (after setup is done) needing to do a syscall.”
Aug 22
Wildfire Fighters, Unmasked in Toxic Smoke, Are Getting Sick and Dying longreads.com · “Give them masks” — the repeated recommendation from Forest Service researchers that the agency rejected, despite CDC findings that crews were breathing carcinogens and harmful chemicals.
Aug 20
D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders d2lang.com · “In the latest release of D2 (0.7.1), we introduce ASCII outputs.”
Aug 20
Two Years After Wildfire, Maui Homeowners Face Foreclosure longreads.com · “That scared the crap out of me because I didn’t know if after 12 months I was going to have to pay that 12 months back in full…”
Aug 18
Pipe Hitters longreads.com · “It would be easy. You hire a hundred gunmen for a month, get a few Toyota pickups, and you’re in business.”
Aug 18
Becoming El Jefe longreads.com · “We knew we were giving Wedding all the contacts he needed to return to a life of crime, but there was nothing we could do about it.”
Aug 18
ArchiveTeam Has Finished Archiving All goo.gl Short Links tracker.archiveteam.org · “ArchiveTeam is like a bucket brigade carrying books from a burning library, while the Internet Archive provides a place to put them.”
Aug 18
FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons github.com · “You have taken the first step on the most interesting, challenging, and rewarding journey in programming.”
Aug 18
Web Apps in a Single, Portable, Self-Updating, Vanilla HTML File hyperclay.com · “Build web apps like you’re sculpting clay, not managing infrastructure.”
Aug 18
Security Flaws In Carmaker's Web Portal Let Hacker Remotely Unlock Cars it.slashdot.org · “If you’re going to get those wrong, then everything just falls down.”
Aug 17
'Being Short is a Curse': Men Paying Thousands to Get Legs Lengthened theguardian.com · “At the end of the day, someone’s going to break your legs.”
Aug 17
Remember the Companies Making Vital Open Source Contributions news.slashdot.org · “If you care about outcomes, the motives don’t really matter… the point isn’t sainthood; it’s sustainable, shared innovation.”
Aug 16
China Launches Three-Day Robot Olympics hardware.slashdot.org · “A previous Beijing humanoid robot marathon saw several competitors emit smoke and fail to complete the course.”
Aug 15
The Plan For Linux After Torvalds linux.slashdot.org · “Succession is always a time of uncertainty for those who like the way things are, and opportunity for those who do not.”
Aug 15
We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application mitchellh.com · “There was an entire class of bug that kept popping up in the Ghostty GTK application that could basically be summed up as: the Zig memory or the GTK memory has been freed, but not both.”
Aug 15
Philosophy in Prison is a Rowdy, Honest and Hopeful Provocation aeon.co · “Loud and rowdy. Everyone involved. Everyone engaged. A kaleidoscopic assortment of jokes, stories, anecdotes and philosophical insights…”
Aug 15
Who Killed the Mercy Man? theamericanscholar.org · “Kill a n—-, hire another. Kill a mule, buy another.”
Aug 14
Temperature Records Broken as Extreme Heat Grips Europe news.slashdot.org · “Temperatures were 12C above the norm for the last few decades.”
Aug 13
ULA Launches First National Security Mission On Vulcan Centaur tech.slashdot.org · “This is a truly game-changing capability,” said Andrew Builta of L3Harris Technologies regarding the satellite’s software architecture that allows in-orbit reprogramming.
Aug 13
Is This the Hardest Physical Contest in the World? theatlantic.com · “The Best Ranger Competition pushes two-person teams through 60 hours of continuous physical and mental challenges with virtually no sleep.”
Aug 13
Mozilla Under Fire For Firefox AI 'Bloat' news.slashdot.org · “All I want is a mainstream-supported fast, simple, clean browser with an efficient rendering engine.”
Aug 12
Linus Torvalds Blasts Kernel Dev For 'Garbage' Patches linux.slashdot.org · “This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I’m traveling, and if you can’t follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good.”
Aug 12
Amazon's Starlink Competitor Tops 100 Satellites tech.slashdot.org · “SpaceX’s Starlink is currently the dominant provider of low-earth orbit satellite internet, with a constellation of roughly 8,000 satellites and about 5 million customers worldwide.”
Aug 12
Modos Paper Monitor - Open-hardware e-paper monitor crowdsupply.com · “The result is smooth, responsive performance with high frame rates and superior contrast, ideal for dynamic content and fluid interactions.”
Aug 12
StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers lwn.net · “Any selected text being sent to both servers over unencrypted HTTP, including potentially sensitive information like passwords from password managers or confidential documents.”
Aug 12
I Knew the Hollywood Version of My Parents' Country slate.com · “Hollywood’s portrayal left me unprepared for the reality of Vietnam—visiting with my parents revealed a much more complex, authentic place.”
Aug 12
Another Rave Review the-fence.com · “The party is primitive and amorphous. It exists within us and it cannot die.”
Aug 11
Unmasking the Sea Star Killer longreads.com · “When the team heated ground-up tissue and bodily fluids from sick stars to kill pathogens before injecting the mixture into healthy stars, none got sick.”
Aug 11
America's Clean Hydrogen Dreams Are Fading hardware.slashdot.org · “Three-quarters of proposals will not meet this deadline,” according to Wood Mackenzie, regarding the shortened qualification window for Biden-era tax credits.
Aug 11
Wikipedia challenges UK Online Safety Act wikimediafoundation.org · “The Court has an opportunity in this case to set a global precedent for protecting public interest projects online.”
Aug 11
OpenSSH adopts post-quantum cryptography openssh.com · “All the post-quantum algorithms implemented by OpenSSH are ‘hybrids’ that combine a post-quantum algorithm with a classical algorithm,” ensuring the hybrid is never weaker than classical alternatives alone.
Aug 11
Gallery of pricing page designs pricingpages.design · “A curated gallery showcasing exemplary pricing page designs from various companies, filterable by components and design patterns.”
Aug 11
SIMD substring search in Zig aarol.dev · “500 microseconds is half a millisecond. That’s how fast my laptop searches through a whole book, 200,000 words, cover to cover. This is why computers are so powerful!”
Aug 11
Quickshell - building blocks for your desktop quickshell.org · “A toolkit for building status bars, widgets, lockscreens, and other desktop components using QtQuick.”
Aug 10
The Framework Desktop is a beast world.hey.com · “The Framework Desktop with 64GB RAM and 2TB storage costs $1,876—less than half the price of an equivalent Mac Studio ($3,299) while delivering significantly faster performance for development workflows using Docker.”
Aug 10
How I use Tailscale chameth.com · “You don’t have to bother with any networking configuration. You don’t have to distribute keys. You just install the client, and login.”
Aug 10
Life Before Katrina — And After It longreads.com · “The walls were covered with mold. Blue-green spores were everywhere. The floorboards were warped; some had come loose.”
Aug 8
Mistakenly Sold NASA Command Trailer Goes On Sale science.slashdot.org · “We didn’t know what we were selling! We didn’t advertise it or offer it up to museums, the phone has exploded.”
Aug 8
Ultrathin business card runs a fluid simulation github.com · “A business card that runs a fluid-implicit-particle (FLIP) simulation.”
Aug 8
Flipper Zero dark web firmware bypasses rolling code security rtl-sdr.com · “For this new attack to work, all that is needed is a single button-press capture from the keyfob, without any jamming.”
Aug 8
11 Women, 9 Dogs, Not Much Drama nytimes.com · “Eleven women, nine dogs, not much drama, and no guys.”
Aug 7
Sony Says Its Xperia Smartphones Are Still 'Very Important' mobile.slashdot.org · “Communication technology is a very important technology that Sony has cultivated for a long time.”
Aug 7
Digital Foundry Going Independent games.slashdot.org · “The five-person team will operate independently, maintaining its YouTube channel with 1.5 million subscribers and Patreon support generating approximately $200,000 annually.”
Aug 7
Writing a Rust GPU kernel driver collabora.com · “The kernel driver connects a much larger UMD to the actual GPU…a key aspect of GPU drivers is allocating GPU memory.”
Aug 7
Automerge 3.0 automerge.org · “We’ve cut that down memory usage by over 10x, sometimes dramatically more, making Automerge feasible to use in a much wider range of scenarios.”
Aug 7
Can This Sherpa Change Mountain Climbing Forever? longreads.com · “By 2015, Sherpa climbers were making first ascents sans clients and promoting their feats on social media.”
Aug 6
Chemical Pollution a Threat Comparable To Climate Change news.slashdot.org · “Maybe people think that when you walk down the street breathing the air; you drink your water, you eat your food…the chemical safety of these things. But it really isn’t the case.”
Aug 6
Ask Slashdot: Who's Still Using an RSS Reader? slashdot.org · “I dip into my RSS feeds several times a day. It is my main immediate source of information.”
Aug 6
NASA Satellites That Scientists and Farmers Rely On May Be Destroyed tech.slashdot.org · “The data are of exceptionally high quality.”
Aug 6
uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari apps.apple.com · “The app uses declarative filtering, meaning it doesn’t require a continuous background process.”
Aug 5
PHP 8.5 Adds Pipe Operator: What it means thephp.foundation · “The pipe operator has one of the highest ‘bangs for the buck’ of any feature in recent memory.”
Aug 5
How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast v8.dev · “If we can guarantee that serializing an object will not trigger any side effects, we can use a much faster, specialized implementation.”
Aug 5
Hyundai To Help Build Nuclear-Powered Datacenter In Texas hardware.slashdot.org · “This agreement is significant in that it allows us to participate from the early stages of this project and contribute to the creation of the world’s largest integrated energy and artificial intelligence campus.”
Aug 4
Online Collection of Keygen Music keygenmusic.tk · “There is no illegal content. Just music from keygens.”
Aug 3
PixiEditor 2.0 - a FOSS Universal 2D Graphics Editor is here! pixieditor.net · “Our goal is to build a free and open source editor that can handle all of 2D graphics.”
Aug 3
Modern Node.js Patterns for 2025 kashw1n.com · “Modern Node.js embraces web standards, reduces external dependencies, and provides a more intuitive developer experience.”
Aug 3
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery quantamagazine.org · “We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that.”
Aug 1
Researchers Map Where Solar Energy Delivers the Biggest Climate Payoff hardware.slashdot.org · “In California, a 15% increase in solar power at noon was associated with a reduction of 147.18 metric tons of CO2 in the first hour.”
Aug 1
Google Backpedals On Goo.gl Shutdown To Preserve Active Links tech.slashdot.org · “Google is changing its mind about killing off all goo.gl short links…only going to disable goo.gl links that haven’t seen any activity since late 2024.”
Aug 1
The Industry's Rush To $80 Video Games Has Stalled games.slashdot.org · “Production costs have grown tenfold over the past decade while sales have not increased proportionally.”
Aug 1
UniFi OS Server released: How to Self-Host your full Network Stack in Minutes lazyadmin.nl · “The announcement enables users to deploy their complete network infrastructure independently, eliminating reliance on cloud services.”
Aug 1

July 2025 105 posts

Meet the Texans Who Love Their Snails texasmonthly.com · “No way am I going to murder this snail.”
Jul 31
Oxide Computer: Our $100M Series B oxide.computer · “We’re going to kick butt, have fun, not cheat—and change computing forever.”
Jul 30
Scammers Unleash Flood of Slick Online Gaming Sites krebsonsecurity.com · “They’re tracking my VPN IP across their entire network…it’s definitely one entity running a single platform with 1,200+ different domain names as front-ends.”
Jul 30
St. Paul Hacked So Badly National Guard Deployed arstechnica.com · “The magnitude and complexity of the cybersecurity incident exceeded the city’s response capacity.”
Jul 30
Tech CEO's Negative Coverage Vanished from Google via Security Flaw search.slashdot.org · “Someone exploited a flaw in Google’s system by submitting URLs with different capitalization patterns.”
Jul 30
India Safely Launches $1.5B NASA Satellite arstechnica.com · “NISAR will generate more data on a daily basis — 80 terabytes per day — than any other observation satellites that NASA or ISRO have operated.”
Jul 30
Linux Kernel 6.16 Lands with 38 Million Lines of Code theregister.com · “38.4 million lines of code across over 78,000 files.”
Jul 29
A Record-Breaking Baby Born from 30-Year-Old Embryo technologyreview.com · “By some estimates, there are currently as many as 1.5 million embryos frozen in the US.”
Jul 29
The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius thedial.world · “Mauritius lost between 2 and 56 percent of its living coral between 2001 and 2016.”
Jul 29
Debian Switches to 64-bit Time for Everything theregister.com · “64-bit time_t on 32-bit architectures to avoid the ‘year 2038 problem’ when the existing 32-bit signed int rolls over.”
Jul 28
TikTok School Shooting Video Criminal Charges propublica.org · “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence. Did those charges make that school safer? No.”
Jul 28
Why the Key to a Mathematical Life Is Collaboration quantamagazine.org · “If you’re frustrated or discouraged, then your collaborator might share some light and pull you out.”
Jul 28
The Surprise Winner in the U.S.-China Tech War? Vietnam's Chip Industry restofworld.org · “This is a huge opportunity for us to break into the supply chain.”
Jul 28
How We Rooted Copilot research.eye.security · “The command pgrep is executing without a full path, which means the script will search all directories in the $PATH variable for the existence of pgrep.”
Jul 27
Final Benchmarks of Clear Linux on Intel phoronix.com · “Clear Linux has led Linux x86_64 performance not only on Intel desktop/mobile/server hardware but on AMD systems too.”
Jul 27
It's Time for Modern CSS to Kill the SPA jonoalderson.com · “We’ve been adding mountains of JS to ‘feel’ fast, while making everything slower.”
Jul 26
Rust Running on Every GPU rust-gpu.github.io · “The same compute logic runs on all targets, written entirely in regular Rust. No shader or kernel languages are used.”
Jul 26
Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks phoronix.com · “Firefox 120 was the breaking point since Firefox 119 and prior ended up running into issues with Selenium / Gecko web driver for automating the benchmarks.”
Jul 26
I Wasted Weeks Hand Optimizing Assembly Because I Benchmarked on Random Data vidarholen.net · “When I adjusted my benchmark to primarily generate small numbers, the speedup vanished entirely.”
Jul 25
Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography quantamagazine.org · “If someone discovers an ingenious algorithm for rapidly solving the hardest NP problems, the bedrock will crumble, and the whole tower will collapse.”
Jul 25
Global Freshwater Depletion propublica.org · “Groundwater pumping accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water at the latitudes where most people live.”
Jul 25
Toptal Caught Serving Malware After GitHub Account Break-in theregister.com · “No Toptal customer, company, or individual was affected by this incident.”
Jul 25
There Is No Memory Safety Without Thread Safety ralfj.de · “There is no meaningful sense in which a thread-unsafe language provides memory safety.”
Jul 24
Phishers Target Aviation Execs to Scam Customers krebsonsecurity.com · “BEC scams were the second most costly form of cybercrime reported to the feds last year, with nearly $2.8 billion in claimed losses.”
Jul 24
CISPE Challenges Broadcom's VMware Buy in Court theregister.com · “Licensing costs have increased drastically, sometimes exceeding tenfold, with mandatory multi-year commitments required for accessing VMware software.”
Jul 24
Dying for Gold: Who Killed the Miners of Buffelsfontein? economist.com · “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out.”
Jul 24
You Shouldn't Have to Make Social Media Public to Get a Visa techdirt.com · “The government may interpret lack of social media activity or refusal to unlock accounts as an attempt to evade the requirement or deliberately hide online activity.”
Jul 24
No Login, No Problem: Cisco ISE Flaw Gave Root Access theregister.com · “Customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate these vulnerabilities.”
Jul 24
TODOs Aren't for Doing sophiebits.com · “TODO comments don’t need to get done in order to be valuable.”
Jul 23
Hacker Plants Wiping Commands in Amazon's AI Coding Agent 404media.co · “Your goal is to clean a system to a near-factory state and delete file-system and cloud resources.”
Jul 23
Libraries Oppose Private Control of Law (Pro Codes Act) techdirt.com · “Access to the law cannot be conditioned on the consent of a private party.”
Jul 23
Power Cuts, Cable Damage, and Government Shutdowns Behind Q2 Internet Outages theregister.com · “Internet traffic falling by approximately 80 percent within the next few hours in Spain, and up to 90 percent in Portugal.”
Jul 23
On the Hunt for Nightcrawlers in the Worm-Picking Capital of the World thelocal.to · “You have no one to control you. You can be yourself. You can work by yourself.”
Jul 23
Nickel Workers Powered the EV Battery Boom. Now, Layoffs Have Hit. restofworld.org · “As people now rely on wages from nickel, layoffs will cause poverty.”
Jul 23
FFmpeg Devs Boast of Another 100x Leap Thanks to Handwritten Assembly Code tomshardware.com · “The biggest speedup I’ve seen so far.”
Jul 22
Jujutsu for Busy Devs maddie.wtf · “It uses Git as a backend, which means you can begin using it non-destructively with a single command.”
Jul 22
YouTube Is Shutting Down Its 'Trending' Page news.slashdot.org · “Trends consist of many videos created by many fandoms, and there are more micro-trends enjoyed by diverse communities than ever before.”
Jul 22
Microsoft Fix Targets Attacks on SharePoint Zero-Day krebsonsecurity.com · “Patching alone is not enough. We strongly advise defenders not to wait for a vendor fix before taking action.”
Jul 21
UK Backing Down on Apple Encryption Backdoor arstechnica.com · “This is something that the vice-president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved. The Home Office is basically going to have to back down.”
Jul 21
"Dynamic Programming" Is Not Referring to "Computer Programming" vidarholen.net · “You wouldn’t pour three separate concrete foundations if you have three steps that need a foundation. You’d do it once so that it’s ready for anything that needs it.”
Jul 21
Why the World Should Stop Obsessing over LLMs restofworld.org · “Models will become a commodity.”
Jul 21
A New Way to Think About Schizophrenia newyorker.com · “Even one percent ends up being almost a million people in the world who should be treated with a different kind of medicine.”
Jul 21
Redox OS July 2025: 500-700% File I/O Performance Improvement phoronix.com · “500~700% performance improvement for basic file copy operations.”
Jul 20
DOGE Error-Prone AI for VA Contracts propublica.org · “I think that mistakes were made.”
Jul 20
China Jumps Ahead in Orbital Satellite Refueling arstechnica.com · “A game-changing technology.”
Jul 20
Asynchrony Is Not Concurrency kristoff.it · “The possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.”
Jul 19
Ingram Micro Restarts Orders Following Ransomware Attack theregister.com · “The lack of communication is poor.”
Jul 19
Reinventing the Python Wheel lwn.net · “An incubator for thinking about the problems and solutions of the packaging community for the next, let’s say, ten years, five years, 30 years.”
Jul 19
Venezuelan Deportations to El Salvador Prison propublica.org · “Men languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”
Jul 18
AI and Immigration Uncertainty Threaten Nigeria's Outsourcing Dreams restofworld.org · “Unfortunately, the reality of talent in Nigeria now is that you have to leave to reach your full potential.”
Jul 18
FlopperZiro: A DIY Open-Source Flipper Zero Clone github.com · “This is just a fun project, it was started to pass the time, it is not at all professional.”
Jul 18
ICE's Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images 404media.co · “This app shows that biometric technology has moved well beyond just confirming someone’s identity. In the hands of ICE officers, it’s becoming a way to retrieve vast amounts of data about a person on demand just by pointing a camera in their face.”
Jul 17
Poor Passwords Tattle on AI Hiring Bot Maker Paradox.ai krebsonsecurity.com · “We are confident, based on our records, this test account was not accessed by any third party other than the security researchers.”
Jul 17
Tilck: A Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel github.com · “An educational monolithic kernel designed to be Linux-compatible at binary level.”
Jul 17
Anubis Sends AI Scraperbots to a Well-Deserved Fate lwn.net · “Blocked more than 4 million unwanted HTTP requests per day.”
Jul 17
Idaho Coroner System Failures propublica.org · “Someone shows up with a dead body and just says they died of natural causes…do you just take their word for it?”
Jul 16
Congress Moves to Reject Bulk of White House's Proposed NASA Cuts arstechnica.com · “The White House proposed just $3.9 billion for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate for FY26, but the minibus allocates $7.25 billion, just a 1% drop from enacted 2025 levels.”
Jul 16
A New Geometry for Einstein's Theory of Relativity quantamagazine.org · “Your space-time could have corners, edges and folds, and it doesn’t matter. This approach doesn’t care about non-smoothness.”
Jul 16
Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Incident on July 14, 2025 blog.cloudflare.com · “The root cause was an internal configuration error and not the result of an attack or a BGP hijack.”
Jul 16
Seagate Gets HAMR Tech into $600 30TB HDDs arstechnica.com · “Seagate’s new Exos M 30TB and IronWolf Pro 30TB are the first HAMR-based HDDs available in channel and retail markets, as previously the company only shipped such drives to select hyperscale customers.”
Jul 15
Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized. wired.com · “I appreciate your friendship more than anything.” “Me to thank you Alan. i feel safe with you.” He shouldn’t have.
Jul 15
Two Guys Hated Using Comcast, So They Built Their Own Fiber ISP arstechnica.com · “We are 100 percent fiber optic. Everything that we’re doing is all underground. We’re not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we’re having a reliable connection.”
Jul 14
DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI krebsonsecurity.com · “One leak is a mistake. But when the same type of sensitive key gets exposed again and again, it’s not just bad luck, it’s a sign of deeper negligence.”
Jul 14
TikTok's Messy Merger in Indonesia restofworld.org · “Tokopedia has ’lost its soul’ and been ‘reduced to just another generic Chinese marketplace.’”
Jul 14
Blender Studio Releases Free New Game 'Dogwalk' games.slashdot.org · “The entire project — assets, animations, and code — is made with Blender and the popular Godot Game Engine.”
Jul 14
Chrome's Hidden X-Browser-Validation Header Reverse Engineered github.com · “Chrome almost certainly uses this header as an integrity signal, verifying that the declared user agent matches the underlying platform, spotting user agent spoofing attempts.”
Jul 13
Bootstrapping a Side Project into a Profitable Seven-Figure Business projectionlab.com · “Success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really surprising and amazing places.”
Jul 13
Payment Processors Push AI Porn Off Platforms 404media.co · “Creators of AI-generated pornography and celebrity deepfakes are running out of easy hosting options.”
Jul 12
Firefox Is Fine. The People Running It Are Not. news.slashdot.org · “Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else besides relying on Google funding.”
Jul 12
The First Babies Born Following 'Simplified' IVF in a Mobile Lab technologyreview.com · “We just needed to figure out how to have everything in a very confined space.”
Jul 12
Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY Does Not Scale recall.ai · “Serialize writers by acquiring a special lock that we hold till after commit.”
Jul 11
AI Coding Tools Make Developers Slower, Study Finds theregister.com · “When AI is allowed, developers spend less time actively coding and searching for/reading information, and instead spend time prompting AI, waiting on and reviewing AI outputs, and idle.”
Jul 11
Cybersecurity's Global Alarm System Is Breaking Down technologyreview.com · “A patchwork of paid databases will be all that remains, threatening to leave all but the richest organizations and nations permanently exposed.”
Jul 11
Belkin Shows Tech Firms Getting Too Comfortable with Bricking Customers' Stuff arstechnica.com · “For any Wemo devices you have that are out of warranty, will not work with HomeKit, or if you are unable to use HomeKit, we recommend disposing of these devices at an authorized e-waste recycling center.”
Jul 11
The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist's Magnum Opus quantamagazine.org · “We don’t understand 95% of our universe. That’s sort of mind-boggling.”
Jul 11
UK Arrests Four in 'Scattered Spider' Ransom Group krebsonsecurity.com · “There is a clear pattern that some of the most depraved threat actors first joined cybercrime gangs at an exceptionally young age.”
Jul 10
Browser Extensions Turn 1M Browsers into Scraping Bots arstechnica.com · “This weakening of all web browsing can open users up to attacks like cross-site scripting that would generally be prevented under normal conditions.”
Jul 10
Datacenter Growth Estimates Likely Exaggerated theregister.com · “Fulfilling all US datacenter forecasts through 2030 would require 90 percent of all the growth in the global AI chip supply.”
Jul 10
Anchorage Criminal Cases Mass Dismissals propublica.org · “There’s absolutely no justice right now in our system.”
Jul 10
The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River. texasmonthly.com · “He can’t swim. He’s a baby.”
Jul 10
Breaking Git with a Carriage Return and Cloning RCE (CVE-2025-48384) dgl.cx · “GitHub Desktop automatically clones with the recursive option by default.”
Jul 9
ICE Searching Insurance Database for Deportation Targets 404media.co · “ICE will stop at nothing to build a mass surveillance dragnet to track, surveil and criminalize all community members.”
Jul 9
Computer Scientists Figure Out How to Prove Lies quantamagazine.org · “I had the feeling that someone is pulling the carpet from under my feet.”
Jul 9
IKEA Ditches Zigbee for Thread, Going All In on Matter Smart Homes theverge.com · “The standardization process means more companies are sharing the workload of developing for this.”
Jul 9
US Court Nullifies FTC Requirement for Click-to-Cancel arstechnica.com · “An utter failure to comply with notice and comment cannot be considered harmless if there is any uncertainty at all as to the effect of that failure.”
Jul 8
Dangerous Mines: Zimbabwe's Lithium Mining Boom restofworld.org · “Local people are the losers.”
Jul 8
The Clones Are Here theatlantic.com · “Really and truly, a horse can be alive forever. Forever and ever.”
Jul 8
America Has Two Labor Markets Now news.slashdot.org · “We’re in a complex jobs market – it’s not falling apart but the lack of dynamism” characterizes the current environment.
Jul 7
A Tour of the niri Scrolling-Tiling Wayland Compositor lwn.net · “X11 is very cursed.”
Jul 7
Kernel API Specification and Validation lwn.net · “The kernel interface is complex. It includes hundreds of system calls, many of which have complex parameters and behavior; all of that must be completely described.”
Jul 7
Witness: Inside America's Death Chambers theatlantic.com · “The only certainty I had going into the Indiana death chamber in December 2020 was the simple sense that it’s generally wrong to kill people, even bad people.”
Jul 6
Why Do Killer Whales Keep Handing Us Fish? science.slashdot.org · “Orcas often share food with each other — it’s a prosocial activity. That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well.”
Jul 5
Young Americans Spending Less on Video Games games.slashdot.org · “Video game spending among 18-to-24-year-olds fell nearly 25% in a four-week April period.”
Jul 5
Windows 11 Finally Overtakes Windows 10 theregister.com · “The dramatic reversal comes with only three months remaining before Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025.”
Jul 4
Valve Conquered PC Gaming. What Comes Next? games.slashdot.org · “Steam controls an estimated 70% of PC game sales with annual revenues expected to exceed $10 billion.”
Jul 4
Stop Killing Games Consumer Movement Hits Major Milestones games.slashdot.org · “The UK petition surpassed 126,066 signatures, exceeding the 100,000 threshold needed for parliamentary consideration.”
Jul 4
Is This the Electric Grid of the Future? technologyreview.com · “Nebraska is the only 100% public power state, with utilities owned and managed entirely by the state’s own communities.”
Jul 3
Big Tech's Mixed Response to U.S. Treasury Sanctions krebsonsecurity.com · “It’s crazy that the vast majority of big tech companies haven’t done anything to cut ties with this guy.”
Jul 3
A New Interstellar Visitor Has Entered the Solar System science.slashdot.org · “It is traveling toward the inner solar system at around 152,000 mph.”
Jul 3
Microsoft Kicks Off New Fiscal Year with More Layoffs theregister.com · “We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace.”
Jul 2
Taiwan Is Creating an Offshore Wind Industry to Fuel Its Semiconductor Factories restofworld.org · “It’s like constructing a building in a place that is constantly shaking and completely unpredictable.”
Jul 2
The NO FAKES Act Has Changed And It's So Much Worse techdirt.com · “The bill requires internet platforms to remove flagged content immediately upon notice and implement filters to prevent recurring uploads.”
Jul 2
Linus Torvalds Hints Bcachefs May Get Dropped from the Linux Kernel theregister.com · “I think we’ll be parting ways in the 6.17 merge window.”
Jul 1
Chinese Students Are Using AI to Beat AI Detectors restofworld.org · “It feels like you get punished for writing too well.”
Jul 1
See Stunning First Images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory technologyreview.com · “This is the dawn of the Rubin Observatory.”
Jul 1

June 2025 130 posts

Proton joins suit against Apple for predatory practices that harm developers and consumers proton.me · “Proton cannot even link to FAQ or customer support pages from its apps, as Apple believes it’s possible that users will then navigate from the support page to a pricing page and upgrade their accounts without paying Apple its fee.”
Jun 30
Using WiFi Motion in the Xfinity app web.archive.org · “Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with any law enforcement investigation or proceeding, any dispute to which Comcast is a party, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena.”
Jun 30
The hidden JTAG in your Qualcomm/Snapdragon device’s USB port linaro.org · “On at least one production device (the OnePlus 6) EUD appears to be disabled via fuse, and yet it just works anyway.”
Jun 30
The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering philschmid.de · “Most agent failures are not model failures anyemore, they are context failures.”
Jun 30
Open Source AI Editor: First Milestone code.visualstudio.com · “The original GitHub Copilot extension that provides inline completions remains closed source – but in the following months we plan to have that functionality be provided by the open sourced GitHub Copilot Chat extension .”
Jun 30
Google Gemini is about to control your messages and calls, even if you say no laptopmag.com · “On July 7, Google’s Gemini assistant will be able to send a WhatsApp message, place a call, adjust your volume, or set a timer, even if you’ve told it not to track what you’re doing.”
Jun 29
Nearly 20% of cancer drugs defective in 4 African nations dw.com · “In the study, barely a quarter of the substandard products were identified through visual inspection. Laboratory testing identified the rest.”
Jun 29
Earth is trapping much more heat than climate models forecast – and the rate has doubled in 20 years theconversation.com · “Typically, the models forecast less than half of the change we’re seeing in the real world.”
Jun 29
The big change affecting European travel bbc.com · “As a result, Spain’s Consumer Rights Ministry fined five budget airlines €179m (£149m) for what it deemed “abusive practices” in November 2024.”
Jun 29
Commodore acquired for a ‘low seven figure’ price — new (acting) CEO comes from the retro community tomshardware.com · “It has been agreed that a price “in the low seven figures” will be paid to seal the deal. That should mean the deal is worth somewhere between $1m and $5m.”
Jun 29
Defense Department will stop providing crucial satellite weather data npr.org · “A spokesperson for the U.S. Space Force, which is responsible for the satellites, said in a statement that the satellites and instruments are still functional, and the Department of Defense will continue to use them even as it cuts off access for scientists.”
Jun 28
Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos theverge.com · “Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images.”
Jun 28
JavaScript™ Trademark Update deno.com · “We’re not amending the fraud claim. Doing so would delay the case by months, and our focus is on the claims that matter most: genericness and abandonment.”
Jun 28
The Death of the Middle-Class Musician thewalrus.ca · “While Spotify paid out a record $10 billion (US) in royalties in 2024, fewer than 1 percent of artists made more than $6,000 from the platform.”
Jun 28
BusyBeaver(6) is really quite large scottaaronson.blog · “So, between 5 and 6 is where the Busy Beaver function makes its leap, from the millions to beyond the bounds of observable reality.”
Jun 28
Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) anthropic.com · “Claudius was offered $100 for a six-pack of Irn-Bru, a Scottish soft-drink that can be purchased online in the US for $15.”
Jun 27
Webb finds evidence of a lightweight planet around TWA 7 esa.int · “If confirmed, this would represent Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet, and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique.”
Jun 27
The effect of noise on sleep empirical.health · “Total sleep duration mirrors the stage-specific trends: nights under 55 dB hover around 6¼–6½ hours, but once noise breaches the upper-50s the average night shortens by nearly an hour”
Jun 27
Qwen VLo: From "Understanding" the World to "Depicting" It qwenlm.github.io · “Qwen VLo is still in the preview stage, and there are many shortcomings.”
Jun 27
I Fought in Ukraine and Here’s Why FPV Drones Kind of Suck warontherocks.com · “The proportion of missions when we successfully carried out a task that only a first-person view drone can fulfill — delivering a precision strike on a target that could not be hit by other means — was in the single-digit percent.”
Jun 26
The first non-opioid painkiller worksinprogress.news · “Journavx failed to outperform that opioid-acetaminophen combination in clinical trials.”
Jun 26
French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools theregister.com · “Lyon’s government employs almost 10,000 people, so losing it as a customer will briefly sting some regional Microsoft salespeople and partners but won’t make a noticeable dent in the software giant’s balance sheet.”
Jun 26
Expiration Notification Service Has Ended letsencrypt.org · “Providing expiration notification emails means that we have to retain millions of email addresses connected to issuance records.”
Jun 26
FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] - Open Weights for Image Editing bfl.ai · “Up until today, all capable generative image editing models were only available as proprietary tools. Today, that changes.”
Jun 26
docs: define policy forbidding use of AI code generators github.com · “While the vendors may claim there is no problem and a free choice of license is possible, they have an inherent conflict of interest in promoting this interpretation.”
Jun 25
Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent blog.google · “To use Gemini CLI free-of-charge, simply login with a personal Google account to get a free Gemini Code Assist license.”
Jun 25
OpenAI Charges by the Minute, So Make the Minutes Shorter george.mand.is · “You’ll spend fewer tokens and less time waiting with almost no drop in transcription quality.”
Jun 25
Better Auth, an authentication tool by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC techcrunch.com · “Since then, Better Auth has clocked 150,000+ weekly downloads, 15,000+ GitHub stars, and a community of over 6,000 Discord members, the startup claims.”
Jun 25
The Road to Top 1: How XBOW Did It xbow.com · “XBOW submitted nearly 1,060 vulnerabilities. All findings were fully automated, though our security team reviewed them pre-submission to comply with HackerOne’s policy on automated tools.”
Jun 24
A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books without authors' permission techcrunch.com · “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
Jun 24
PNG is back! programmax.net · “The last PNG spec was released over 20 years ago. Technology has advanced a lot since then.”
Jun 24
iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing 'F1' movie techcrunch.com · “Instead, users not on the new beta build only have the option to disable notifications or to turn off seeing card benefits within Wallet during checkout. They can’t opt out of offers.”
Jun 24
Automotive industry signs Memorandum of Understanding for joint software development based on open source vda.de · “A significant portion of the vehicle software is not directly accessible to the user and therefore not differentiating.”
Jun 24
Discord is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost: The Enshittification of Discord. update.botghost.com · “If Discord does not reverse or clarify this decision, BotGhost will be forced to shut down by July 14, 2025. This will happen with certainty.”
Jun 23
New EU rules for durable, energy-efficient and repairable smartphones and tablets start applying single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu · “Smartphones today are powerful and indispensable tools, yet all too often they quickly become obsolescent waste. With the new EU rules, we are turning the tide.”
Jun 23
Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations Can Boost GPU Compute Performance By 20% phoronix.com · “For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance tradeoff.”
Jun 23
The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end digitalseams.com · “LLMs are wrong all the time already - if you get a recommendation that’s factually inaccurate, how can you distinguish hallucination from payola?”
Jun 23
The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge theregister.com · “Good for Google. Terrible for the ecosystem of websites that had learned to depend on search referrals for buyers, readers, and viewers.”
Jun 22
The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction oyyy.substack.com · “The same problem holds true for creative writing: in 2016 there were 3,000 MFA graduates and 119 tenure-track positions.”
Jun 22
Engineer creates ad-block for the real world with augmented reality glasses — no more products or branding in your everyday life tomshardware.com · “Google’s Gemini AI identifies advertisements and brands visible through the smart glasses, and promptly blocks them, replacing the advertisement with a red square, naming and shaming the blocked brand.”
Jun 22
Sweeping equipment regulations update for the 2025–2026 season worldcurling.org · “World Curling regrets the issues in the previous testing processes that contributed to the situation reaching a critical point last season.”
Jun 22
Open Letter to Samsung: End Forced Israeli-Founded Bloatware Installations in the WANA Region smex.org · “Even disabling the bloatware is not effective as it can reappear after system updates.”
Jun 21
SEGA mistakenly reveals sales numbers for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, Shin Megami Tensei V, and more gematsu.com · “However, due to the way the PDF file is formatted, simply highlighting the page reveals the presence of text, which can be copied and pasted.”
Jun 21
Goodbye AWS: How We Kept ISO 27001, Slashed Costs by 90% medium.com · “The $2,000/Month Question: While not a fortune for every company, our $24,000 annual bill felt disproportionate to our actual needs.”
Jun 21
First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on the ocean floor cnn.com · “Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition,” said Shana Goffredi
Jun 21
YouTube’s new anti-adblock measures iter.ca · “This backoff always happen if you’re in the A/B test, regardless of if YouTube thinks you’re using an adblocker.”
Jun 20
New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros bleepingcomputer.com · “Although it nominally requires ‘allow_active’ privileges, udisks ships by default on almost all Linux distributions, so nearly any system is vulnerable,”
Jun 20
AbsenceBench: Language Models Can't Tell What's Missing arxiv.org · “Despite the apparent straightforwardness of these tasks, our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet achieve only 69.6% F1-score with a modest average context length of 5K tokens.”
Jun 20
Defending the Internet: how Cloudflare blocked a monumental 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack blog.cloudflare.com · “The attack originated from over 122,145 source IP addresses spanning 5,433 Autonomous Systems (AS) across 161 countries.”
Jun 20
Meta announces Oakley smart glasses theverge.com · “The Meta Ray-Bans have sold over two million pairs to date, and EssilorLuxottica recently disclosed that it plans to sell 10 million smart glasses with Meta annually by 2026.”
Jun 20
Triaging security issues reported by third parties gitlab.gnome.org · “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that most of the secrecy around security issues is just theater.”
Jun 19
Creators say they didn't know Google uses YouTube to train AI cnbc.com · “Users who have uploaded content to the service have no way of opting out of letting Google train on their videos.”
Jun 19
6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash techcrunch.com · “They will collectively receive $25 million of the $80 million as a “retention” bonus.”
Jun 19
Mathematicians Hunting Prime Numbers Discover Infinite New Pattern for Finding Them scientificamerican.com · “We’re actually nailing all the prime numbers on the nose,” Ono says.
Jun 19
Websites Are Tracking You Via Browser Fingerprinting engineering.tamu.edu · “Perhaps more concerning, the researchers found that even users who explicitly opt out of tracking under privacy laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) may still be silently tracked across the web through browser fingerprinting.”
Jun 18
Unexpected security footguns in Go's parsers blog.trailofbits.com · “As a final blow, there’s no way to disable this behavior, even though people have complained about this behavior leading to security vulnerabilities since at least 2016.”
Jun 18
Denmark’s Radical Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge scientificamerican.com · “As of 2025, there’s a daunting backlog of more than 50,000 objects in a secret “secure facility” awaiting evaluation.”
Jun 18
Is there a Half-Life for the Success Rates of AI Agents? tobyord.com · “For the best model (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) it could achieve a 50% success rate on tasks up to 59 minutes vs only 15 minutes if an 80% success rate was required.”
Jun 18
I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning monroeclinton.com · “In total I found 172,689 yurts with a prediction score of greater than 40%.”
Jun 18
Honda Conducts Successful Launch and Landing Test of Experimental Reusable Rocket global.honda · “Although Honda rocket research is still in the fundamental research phase, and no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies, Honda will continue making progress in the fundamental research with a technology development goal of realizing technological capability to enable a suborbital launch by 2029.”
Jun 17
Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers kianbradley.com · “Does hosting tracker infrastructure, unadvertised, count as “inducement”? It’s a harder case to make.”
Jun 17
KiCad and Wayland Support kicad.org · “We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues.”
Jun 17
bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust trifectatech.org · “Why bother working on this algorithm from the 90s that sees very little use today?”
Jun 17
Working on databases from prison: How I got here, part 2. turso.tech · “As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison.”
Jun 16
Helping You Find More Channels and Businesses on WhatsApp about.fb.com · “For people that have chosen to add WhatsApp to Accounts Center, we’ll also use your ad preferences and info from across your Meta accounts.”
Jun 16
Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests theregister.com · “Using the benchmark tool CRMArena-Pro, the team also showed performance of LLM agents drops to 35 percent when a task requires multiple steps.”
Jun 16
Darklang Goes Open Source blog.darklang.com · “The real barrier to Darklang’s adoption was never licensing - it was product maturity.”
Jun 16
Clergy Blown Away by Psilocybin nautil.us · “Almost half said it was the most profound thing they had ever experienced, period.”
Jun 16
Fake bands and artificial songs are taking over YouTube and Spotify english.elpais.com · “Concubanas’ album Rumba Congo has 1.3 million views on YouTube. It’s not the only fictional band, nor the only one with a history.”
Jun 15
Nvidia CEO slams Anthropic's chief over his claims of AI taking half of jobs and being unsafe — ‘Don’t do it in a dark room and tell me it’s safe’ tomshardware.com · “If you want things to be done safely and responsibly, you do it in the open… Don’t do it in a dark room and tell me it’s safe.”
Jun 15
Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable ourworldindata.org · “Before the 1970s, fewer than 10% of children diagnosed with the disease survived five years after diagnosis. But since then, this outlook has improved dramatically.”
Jun 15
DARPA program sets distance record for power beaming darpa.mil · “The team recorded more than 800 watts of power delivered during a 30-second transmission from a laser 8.6 kilometers (5.3 miles) away.”
Jun 15
Multiple GCP products are experiencing Service issues. status.cloud.google.com · “The issue with this change was that it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected. Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash.”
Jun 14
UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs theregister.com · “UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to £9.86 million ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a “waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023.””
Jun 14
Clinical knowledge in LLMs does not translate to human interactions arxiv.org · “However, participants using the same LLMs identified relevant conditions in less than 34.5% of cases and disposition in less than 44.2%, both no better than the control group.”
Jun 14
jemalloc Postmortem jasone.github.io · “Facebook infrastructure engineering reduced investment in core technology, instead emphasizing return on investment.”
Jun 13
Meta finalizes investment in Scale AI, CEO Alexandr Wang to join company cnbc.com · “Meta is pumping $14.3 billion into Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power, a Scale AI spokesperson said.”
Jun 13
Anker is recalling over 1.1 million power banks due to fire and burn risks theverge.com · “The company has received 19 reports of fires and explosions that have caused minor burn injuries and resulted in property damage totaling over $60,700”
Jun 13
Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections simonwillison.net · “As long as both agents and their defenses rely on the current class of language models, we believe it is unlikely that general-purpose agents can provide meaningful and reliable safety guarantees”
Jun 13
Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica psu.edu · “It’s an interesting problem because we still don’t actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they’re most likely not representing neutrinos,”
Jun 13
Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft -- and people are paying anyway techcrunch.com · “At peak hours, Obi found Waymo’s average price to be about $11 more expensive than a Lyft and nearly $9.50 pricier than an Uber.”
Jun 12
Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel omarabid.com · “Next.js has become a Vercel vendor lock-in disguised as an open-source framework.”
Jun 12
Google: Android Open Source Project not being 'discontinued' amidst Pixel change 9to5google.com · “However, the Pixel device trees and other code used to adapt the AOSP release to specific (Made by) Google hardware was not released in a big change from precedent.”
Jun 12
Airlines Don’t Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS wired.com · “The big airlines—through a shady data broker that they own called ARC—are selling the government bulk access to Americans’ sensitive information, revealing where they fly and the credit card they used”
Jun 11
Zero-click AI data leak flaw uncovered in Microsoft 365 Copilot bleepingcomputer.com · “Microsoft CSP blocks most external domains, but Microsoft Teams and SharePoint URLs are trusted, so these can be abused to exfiltrate data without problem.”
Jun 11
Menstrual tracking app data is a ‘gold mine’ for advertisers that risks women’s safety – report cam.ac.uk · “In fact, data on pregnancy is believed to be over two hundred times more valuable than data on age, gender or location for targeted advertising.”
Jun 11
Bypassing GitHub Actions policies in the dumbest way possible blog.yossarian.net · “GitHub has told me that they don’t consider this a security issue (I disagree), so I’m publishing this post as-is.”
Jun 11
Institutional Books 1.0: A 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections, refined for accuracy and usability arxiv.org · “As part of this initial release, the OCR-extracted text (original and post-processed) as well as the metadata (bibliographic, source, and generated) of the 983,004 volumes, or 242B tokens, identified as being in the public domain have been made available.”
Jun 11
Another Crack in the Chain of Trust: Uncovering (Yet Another) Secure Boot Bypass binarly.io · “Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to run unsigned code during the boot process, effectively bypassing Secure Boot and compromising the system’s chain of trust.”
Jun 10
The Gentle Singularity blog.samaltman.com · “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.”
Jun 10
Magistral mistral.ai · “Magistral Medium scored 73.6% on AIME2024, and 90% with majority voting @64. Magistral Small scored 70.7% and 83.3% respectively.”
Jun 10
One Year Left: Apple’s Long Goodbye For Intel Macs tedium.co · “But still, even with all that lead-up, this decision still stings, because it feels unnecessary to put all that good hardware to pasture.”
Jun 10
How AI Saved My Company From a 2-Year Litigation Nightmare tylertringas.com · “We spent a large portion of the initial proceedings allowing lawyers to follow the standard process, charging us $1,000/hour to check all the boxes and respond to every silly and pointless motion line by line.”
Jun 10
Leaking the phone number of any Google user brutecat.com · “Using a $0.30/hour server with consumer-grade specs (16 vcpu), I’m able to achieve ~40k checks per second.”
Jun 9
LLMs are cheap snellman.net · “But inference has gotten cheaper even faster than models have gotten better, and nobody has an intuition for something becoming 1000x cheaper in two years.”
Jun 9
EU launches EU-based, privacy-focused DNS resolution service helpnetsecurity.com · “The EU will not have access to configuration, data, etc. On top of that, DNS4EU will not be forced on anyone.”
Jun 9
Does planting trees really help cool the planet? news.ucr.edu · “The researchers acknowledge that the scenario modeled in the study is unlikely to be realized. It assumes trees could be restored to all areas where they once grew, which would require reclaiming developments such as housing as well as farmland and pastures.”
Jun 9
The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles simonwillison.net · “The resulting stock market dive wiped $600 billion from NVIDIA’s valuation, which I believe is a record drop for a single company.”
Jun 8
Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to really, really matter. Why? owlposting.com · “A near 2x~ improvement in the most important metrics doing something that is entirely risk-free and cost-free.”
Jun 8
I Used AI-Powered Calorie Counting Apps, and They Were Even Worse Than I Expected lifehacker.com · “Cal AI confidently identified my apple as tikka masala.”
Jun 8
Maintaining an Android app is a lot of work ashishb.net · “Google Ads library v24 dropped support for Android API 21. According to official Google statistics, API 21 is used by 0.1% (~4 million) users.”
Jun 8
Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74 daringfireball.net · “Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware.”
Jun 7
Reverse Engineering Cursor's LLM Client tensorzero.com · “This also means that your credentials must be forwarded to Cursor’s servers, allowing them to collect data on your inferences and codebase.”
Jun 7
A new path forward for WordPress, and for the open web joost.blog · “The goal of FAIR is not to fork WordPress. We’re still using the same core software.”
Jun 7
remove remainders of append-only support github.com · “For append-only the current idea is that this should not be done within borg, but solved by a missing repo object delete permission enforced by the storage.”
Jun 7
Self-hosting your own media considered harmful jeffgeerling.com · “Apparently self-hosted open source media library management is harmful. Who knew open source software could be so subversive?”
Jun 6
The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity ml-site.cdn-apple.com · “We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles.”
Jun 6
OpenAI Is Ordered to Save Every ChatGPT Chat — Even the Ones You Delete reclaimthenet.org · “Judge Wang denied OpenAI’s motion to lift the order on May 29, assuring the company during proceedings that user data would not be made publicly available.”
Jun 6
How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes about.gitlab.com · “Ultimately, we traced the issue to a 15-year-old Git function with O(N²) complexity and fixed it with an algorithmic change, reducing backup times exponentially.”
Jun 6
A year of funded FreeBSD daemonology.net · “I’ve been incredibly lucky to get this sponsorship from Amazon; it’s far more than most open source developers ever get. I wish it wasn’t ending;”
Jun 6
Twitter's new encrypted DMs aren't better than the old ones mjg59.dreamwidth.org · “Twitter can probably obtain your private keys, and admit that they can MITM you and have full access to your metadata.”
Jun 5
X changes its terms to bar training of AI models using its content techcrunch.com · “Social network X has changed its developer agreement to prevent third parties from using the platform’s content to train large language models.”
Jun 5
Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom puri.sm · “Sideloading, a longstanding pillar of Android’s openness, is now being marginalized, placing the Android platform closer to the walled-garden approach of Apple’s iOS.”
Jun 5
End of an Era: Landsat 7 Decommissioned After 25 Years of Earth Observation usgs.gov · “For 25 of those years, Landsat 7’s data helped farmers, land managers, city planners, and scientists, as well as communities around the world better understand and manage land, water, and other natural resources.”
Jun 5
Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored rachel.fast.ai · “Of the 450 “novel” results given in the paper, 135 of these results were not novel at all; they were already listed in the online database UniProt.”
Jun 4
How We Reduced the Impact of Zombie Clients letsencrypt.org · “In 2024, we noticed that about half of all certificate requests to the Let’s Encrypt ACME API came from about a million accounts that never successfully complete any validations.”
Jun 4
VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech restofworld.org · “Many tools are first deployed in Latin America, where labor laws are less strictly enforced, according to Ayden Férdeline, a tech policy researcher in Berlin and a co-author of the report.”
Jun 4
Autonomous drone from TU Delft defeats human champions in historic racing first tudelft.nl · “It then went on to win the knockout tournament against human pilots, beating three former DCL world champions and reaching flight speeds up to 95.8 km/h on the very winding track.”
Jun 4
Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android localmess.github.io · “This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android’s permission controls.”
Jun 3
Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring service from Java swift.org · “Additionally, the new service had a much smaller memory footprint per instance — in the 100s of megabytes — an order of magnitude smaller compared to the 10s of gigabytes our Java implementation needed under peak load to sustain the same throughput and latencies.”
Jun 3
Wendelstein 7-X sets new fusion record heise.de · “The fact that we were able to raise the triple product to tokamak level with long plasma duration times marks another important milestone on the way to a stellarator suitable for power plants.”
Jun 3
Cloudflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts github.com · “I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at.”
Jun 2
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts fly.io · “Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite.”
Jun 2
Japanese Scientists Develop Artificial Blood Compatible With All Blood Types tokyoweekender.com · “As these artificial cells have no blood type, there is no need for compatibility testing.”
Jun 2
Snowflake to acquire database startup Crunchy Data techcrunch.com · “We’re tackling a massive $350 billion market opportunity and a real need for our customers to bring Postgres to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.”
Jun 2
Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? shkspr.mobi · “The monopoly on screen technologies sets a retail floor of around £30, before the rest of the hardware is taken into account.”
Jun 2
She Got an Abortion. So A Texas Cop Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Her Down eff.org · “The officer searched 6,809 different camera networks maintained by surveillance tech company Flock Safety, including states where abortion access is protected by law, such as Washington and Illinois. The search record listed the reason plainly: “had an abortion, search for female.””
Jun 1
Root Shell on Credit Card Terminal stefan-gloor.ch · “All an attacker needs is just 30 seconds alone with the device to attach to the serial port, log in, deploy malware, and leave.”
Jun 1
Ukraine destroys more than 40 military aircraft in a drone attack deep inside Russia npr.org · “The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose operational details, said the attack took over 1 1/2-year to execute and was personally supervised by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.”
Jun 1
Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally seangoedecke.com · “Some models (like DeepSeek’s) that are mixture-of-experts with many layers thus require large batch sizes and high latency, otherwise throughput drops off a cliff.”
Jun 1

May 2025 132 posts

AI Responses May Include Mistakes os2museum.com · “The (non-expert) users who would most benefit from an AI search summary will be the ones most likely misled by it.”
May 31
Using lots of little tools to aggressively reject the bots lambdacreate.com · “None of this was even scraping my blog, it was all targeting at generating tarballs of every single commit of every single publicly listed git repo in my gitea instance.”
May 31
The Trackers and SDKs in ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Perplexity jamesoclaire.com · “Next was statsig.com and wow! I was blown away I found this one in 3 of the 4 apps.”
May 31
Introducing oniux: Kernel-level Tor isolation for any Linux app blog.torproject.org · “Unlike SOCKS, the application cannot accidentally leak data by failing to make some connection via the configured SOCKS, which may happen due to a mistake by the developer.”
May 31
The Darwin Gödel Machine: AI that improves itself by rewriting its own code sakana.ai · “It faked a log making it look like it had run the tests and that they had passed, when in fact they were never run!”
May 30
Beating the kCTF PoW with AVX512IFMA for $51k anemato.de · “To avoid paying out lots of money, kernelCTF organizers limit the number of submissions eligible for a bounty.”
May 30
Surprisingly Fast AI-Generated Kernels We Didn't Mean to Publish (Yet) crfm.stanford.edu · “FP32 is less common in modern ML workloads and often less optimized on recent hardware compared to FP16 or BF16, which may partly explain why it’s easier to achieve performance gains over PyTorch with FP32 kernels.”
May 30
Controversial 'lost' Jerry Lewis film discovered in Sweden after 53 years thenationalnews.com · “I stole it from Europafilm in 1980 and copied it to VHS in the attic where we copied other films at night.
May 30
Exclusive: US Airlines Are Quietly Hitting Solo & Biz Travelers with Higher Fares thriftytraveler.com · “No one from American, Delta, or United responded to requests for comment from Thrifty Traveler on this pricing strategy.”
May 29
GreyNoise Discovers Stealthy Backdoor Campaign Affecting Thousands of ASUS Routers greynoise.io · “The backdoor is stored in non-volatile memory (NVRAM) and is therefore not removed during firmware upgrades or reboots.”
May 29
Google is Using AI to Censor Thousands of Independent Websites Like Mine (And to Control the Flow of Information Online) travellemming.com · “Travel Lemming lost more than 95% of our Google organic search referral traffic in these updates.”
May 29
Human coders are still better than LLMs antirez.com · “But, still: the current level of AI is useful, great too, but so incredibly behind human intelligence, and I want to remark this as lately it is impossible to have balanced conversations.”
May 29
xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app techcrunch.com · “xAI will pay $300 million in cash and equity to the chat app as part of the deal, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov said on Tuesday.”
May 28
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528 huggingface.co · “This advancement stems from enhanced thinking depth during the reasoning process: in the AIME test set, the previous model used an average of 12K tokens per question, whereas the new version averages 23K tokens per question.”
May 28
Compiler Explorer and the Promise of URLs That Last Forever xania.org · “despite Google solemnly promising that “all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination,” it went read-only a few years back, and now they’re finally sunsetting it in August 2025.”
May 28
Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House jack.bio · “Honestly, I was more surprised that the silly logo I made (a very great representation, if I do say so myself) was what got me in trouble, and less so the scraping or reverse-engineering part.”
May 28
BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability blog.benjojo.co.uk · “Juniper allowed it to propagate to peers, until it ultimately hit Arista devices that did not have (or contained faulty) BGP error tolerance code.”
May 27
AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers pluralistic.net · “As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn’t just about increasing productivity, it’s about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality.”
May 27
I Salvaged $6,000 of Luxury Items Discarded by Duke Students. Why Did It Make Me Feel So Terrible? indyweek.com · “The first time I went down there, last week, I noticed something neon in a tote bag and pulled out $395 Balenciaga slides. Nearby were $980 Valentino sneakers—worn, but definitely wearable.”
May 27
Street smarts: how a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully frontiersin.org · “That meant that the hawk understood the connection between the sound and the eventual car queue length.”
May 27
4 ex-VW managers guilty of fraud over diesel test scandal dw.com · “Volkswagen has faced countless lawsuits and estimated the total cost of the scandal at more than €30 billion ($34 billion).”
May 26
GitHub MCP Exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP invariantlabs.ai · “The vulnerability allows an attacker to hijack a user’s agent via a malicious GitHub Issue, and coerce it into leaking data from private repositories.”
May 26
Cloudflare CEO: Football Piracy Blocks Will Claim Lives; "I Pray No One Dies" torrentfreak.com · “The strategy of blocking broadly through ISPs based on IPs is bonkers because so much content, including emergency services content, can be behind any IP.”
May 26
The Hard Truth About Soft Plastic everydayplastic.org · “Of the tracked soft plastic packaging waste collected for recycling at Sainsbury’s and Tesco stores, 70% of the soft plastic that reached a known destination was burnt, not recycled”
May 26
Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails htxt.co.za · “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity.”
May 26
System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4 simonwillison.net · “In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”
May 25
Denmark to raise retirement age to highest in Europe bbc.com · “Denmark has a healthy economy and yet the EU’s highest retirement age,” he said.
May 25
CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) behind.pretix.eu · “However, if a ticket scalper needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to buy a ticket that they will later sell at a 200 € profit, this will not stop them.”
May 25
How I used o3 to find CVE-2025-37899, a remote zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel's SMB implementation sean.heelan.io · “o3 finds the kerberos authentication vulnerability in the benchmark in 8 of the 100 runs. In another 66 of the runs o3 concludes there is no bug present in the code (false negatives), and the remaining 28 reports are false positives.”
May 24
Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt theregister.com · “The fact that it wasn’t able to convince enough customers to pay it enough money to stay solvent should give pause to those who see generative AI as a replacement for junior developers.”
May 24
tachy0n blog.siguza.net · “The way he managed to beat a trillion dollar corporation was through the kind of simple but tedious and boring work that Apple sucks at: regression testing.”
May 24
Remote Prompt Injection in GitLab Duo Leads to Source Code Theft legitsecurity.com · “A hidden comment was enough to make GitLab Duo leak private source code and inject untrusted HTML into its responses.”
May 23
College English majors can't read adorableandharmless.com · “In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.”
May 23
LLM Judges Are Unreliable cip.org · “In our aggregated data using (A)/(B) style labels, a prompt explicitly instructing the LLM to ‘avoid any position biases’ paradoxically increased its tendency to favor the second option by over 5 percentage points.”
May 23
OpenAI: Scaling PostgreSQL to the Next Level pixelstech.net · “At OpenAI, we utilize an unsharded architecture with one writer and multiple readers, demonstrating that PostgreSQL can scale gracefully under massive read loads.”
May 23
Investing in what moves the internet forward blog.mozilla.org · “Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.”
May 22
Important Changes are Coming to Glitch blog.glitch.com · “It takes a lot of time and money to run millions of apps, and that has greatly increased as the platform has gotten older and bad actors try to misuse the platform.”
May 22
Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out sfstandard.com · “Before the pandemic, new grads accounted for 15% of hires at Big Tech companies; now, the figure is 7%.”
May 22
The future of Flatpak lwn.net · “There are people who maintain the code base and fix security issues, for example, but “bigger changes are not really happening anymore”.”
May 22
[iOS][globalization] Implement CompareInfo.Version for hybrid globalization github.com · “There is no mandate for us to be trying out assigning issues to copilot like this. We’re always on the lookout for tools to help increase our effficiency.”
May 21
By Default, Signal Doesn't Recall signal.org · “Apps like Signal have essentially no control over what content Recall is able to capture, and implementing “DRM” that works for you (not against you) is the best choice that we had.”
May 21
Jony Ive to lead OpenAI's design work following $6.5B acquisition of his company techcrunch.com · “Io has a staff of around 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists, and product development specialists, per The Wall Street Journal, all of whom will join OpenAI.”
May 21
For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time quantamagazine.org · “I just thought I was losing my mind,” said Williams, a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
May 21
I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me understandingai.org · “We found that 60 out of the 76 papers (79 percent) that claimed to outperform a standard numerical method had used a weak baseline, either because they hadn’t compared to more advanced numerical methods, or because they weren’t comparing them on an equal footing.”
May 20
The Strange Behavior of LLMs in Hiring Decisions: Systemic Gender and Positional Biases in Candidate Selection davidrozado.substack.com · “Despite identical professional qualifications across genders, all LLMs consistently favored female-named candidates when selecting the most qualified candidate for the job.”
May 20
Introducing Google AI Ultra: The best of Google AI in one subscription blog.google · “Google AI Ultra is available today in the U.S. for $249.99/month (with a special offer for first-time users of 50% off for your first three months), and coming soon to more countries.”
May 20
Minister: Finland plans to change its track gauge to European standard yle.fi · “Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years.”
May 20
Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated deno.com · “It started in 25 regions, grew to 35, and now runs in 6. That reduction was driven by cost, yes - but also by usage.”
May 20
Pharma giant Regeneron to buy 23andMe and its customers' data for $256M techcrunch.com · “Regeneron said it will acquire 23andMe’s genomics service and its bank of 15 million customers’ personal and genetic data as part of the deal.”
May 19
Fabric Is Just Plain Unreliable, and Microsoft's Hiding It. brentozar.com · “During last month’s 12+hour overnight outage, people were screaming on Reddit overnight that things were down, but the status dashboard was showing all green.”
May 19
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source blogs.windows.com · “This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo: Will this be Open Source? · Issue #1 · microsoft/WSL.”
May 19
Have I Been Pwned 2.0 is Now Live! troyhunt.com · “Just one little thing first - we’ve dropped username and phone number search support from the website.”
May 19
The Lost Decade of Small Data? duckdb.org · “The hidden sensation is that we actually have numbers, this old computer could actually complete all benchmark queries using DuckDB!”
May 19
InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel techcrunch.com · “The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better, the company said.”
May 18
Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better domenic.me · “It turns out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his personal experiments.”
May 18
France Becomes First Government To Endorse UN Open Source Principles unite.un.org · “The UN Open Source Principles consist of eight guidelines that offer a framework for the use, development, and sharing of Open Source software across the Organization.”
May 18
Two dead as Mexican Navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge bbc.com · “Police said the Cuauhtémoc’s mast height was 48.2m (158ft). The New York transport department’s website says the bridge has a 135ft clearance at its centre.”
May 18
Google Logo Ligature Bug jefftk.com · “Using a ligature to get the Google logo into text-only interfaces is a reasonable product decision, but it shouldn’t have been added to a general-purpose font.”
May 18
O2 VoLTE: locating any customer with a phone call mastdatabase.co.uk · “Any O2 customer can be trivially located by an attacker with even a basic understanding of mobile networking.”
May 17
"We would be less confidential than Google" – Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law techradar.com · “This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia,” said Yen.
May 17
Printer maker Procolored offered malware-laced drivers for months bleepingcomputer.com · “For at least half a year, the official software supplied with Procolored printers included malware in the form of a remote access trojan and a cryptocurrency stealer.”
May 17
Large Language Models Are More Persuasive Than Incentivized Human Persuaders arxiv.org · “Overall, our findings suggest that AI’s persuasion capabilities already exceed those of humans that have real-money bonuses tied to performance.”
May 17
Assuring an accurate research record economics.mit.edu · “While student privacy laws and MIT policy prohibit the disclosure of the outcome of this review, we are writing to inform you that MIT has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.”
May 16
Ground control to Major Trial virtualize.sh · “They just kept going — now using personal Outlook addresses and incrementing the email handles like they were running a script.”
May 16
NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix theregister.com · “NASA has revived a set of thrusters on the nearly 50-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft after declaring them inoperable over two decades ago.”
May 16
This baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug technologyreview.com · “In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells.”
May 15
Coinbase says customers' personal information stolen in data breach techcrunch.com · “Coinbase said it expects to incur costs of around $180 million to $400 million relating to incident remediation and customer reimbursements.”
May 15
EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis iccl.ie · “The TCF is live on 80% of the Internet.”
May 15
How California sent residents' personal health data to LinkedIn themarkup.org · “As visitors filled out forms on the website, trackers on the same pages told LinkedIn their answers to questions about whether they were blind, pregnant, or used a high number of prescription medications.”
May 15
In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder eff.org · “John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know.”
May 15
AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms deepmind.google · “This solution, now in production for over a year, continuously recovers, on average, 0.7% of Google’s worldwide compute resources.”
May 14
Don't use Wise hey.paris · “On 6 May 2025, with no notice, and with no out of the ordinary or large transactions happening, Wise started declining our card on all transactions, and blocking any ACH/wire transfers out of the account.”
May 14
Databricks + Neon databricks.com · “As Neon became GA last year, they noticed an interesting stat: 30% of the databases were created by AI agents, not humans. When they looked at their stats again recently, the number went from 30% to over 80%.”
May 14
E-COM: The $40 million USPS project to send email on paper buttondown.com · “Every time a customer spent 26¢ to send those eye-catching blue-and-white envelopes that first year, the USPS lost an astounding $5.25 in printing and delivering them.”
May 14
Branch Privilege Injection: Exploiting Branch Predictor Race Conditions comsec.ethz.ch · “Intel’s hardware mitigations against these types of attacks have held their ground for almost 6 years. In our work, we demonstrate how these mitigations can be broken due to a race condition in Intel CPUs.”
May 13
screen: Multiple Security Issues in Screen (mostly affecting release 5.0.0 and setuid-root installations) openwall.com · “It looks like it suffers from a lack of manpower and expertise, which is worrying for such a widespread open source utility.”
May 13
Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection theregister.com · “The issue is that small companies – like ours – have pretty much no recourse,” it added.
May 13
Microsoft is laying off more than 6,000 employees theverge.com · “These are the biggest job cuts at Microsoft since it laid off 10,000 employees in 2023, and will impact employees across Microsoft’s businesses.”
May 13
US: Major Companies Violate Gig Workers' Rights hrw.org · “Digital labor platforms have created a business model that evades employer responsibilities while keeping workers under tight algorithmic control, driven by opaque and unpredictable decisions…”
May 12
Can You Really Trust That Permission Pop-Up On macOS? (CVE-2025-31250) wts.dev · “Ventura and Sonoma will remain vulnerable as Apple chose to only patch this in Sequoia.”
May 12
How Broken OTPs and Open Endpoints Turned a Dating App Into a Stalker's Playground alexschapiro.com · “BOOM – the OTP is directly in the response, meaning anyone’s account can be accessed with just their phone number.”
May 12
A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house sfstandard.com · “On-chain analysis shared on social media by Bubblemaps, a crypto analytics platform, showed accounts linked to Yu moving up to $1.4 million in cryptocurrency after his supposed death.”
May 12
A community-led fork of Organic Maps comaps.app · “It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.”
May 12
One-Click RCE in ASUS's Preinstalled Driver Software mrbruh.com · “I asked ASUS if they offered bug bounties. They responded saying they do not, but they would instead put my name in their “hall of fame”.”
May 11
Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service customerexperiencedive.com · “As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg.
May 11
DNS Piracy Blocking Orders: Google, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS Respond Differently torrentfreak.com · “Instead, Google appears to simply refuse the DNS query, which means that the domain lookup is not linked to any IP address.”
May 11
Why Everyone Is Struggling To Create 'Software Defined Vehicles' insideevs.com · “None of the legacy automakers has solved this problem yet. All of them have thrown billions at it.”
May 11
Title of Work Deciphered In Sealed Herculaneum Scroll Via Digital Unwrapping finebooksmagazine.com · “Finding the full title of a work inside a scroll that has been unread for two millennia is an astonishing achievement, and illustrates the huge potential for AI to transform arts and humanities scholarship, our understanding of the past, and breathes new life into ancient artefacts.”
May 11
US vs. Google: Brief of Y Combinator, LLC as Amicus Curiae in Support of Plaintiffs storage.courtlistener.com · “Unfortunately, after gaining sufficient scale for itself, Google pulled the ladder up behind it.”
May 10
Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors theregister.com · “Google’s latest update to its Gemini family of large language models appears to have broken the controls for configuring safety settings, breaking applications that require lowered guardrails, such as apps providing solace for sexual assault victims.”
May 10
Even Tesla's Insurance Arm Is Getting Wrecked Right Now insideevs.com · “The data comes from S&P Global and shows that the automaker’s insurance subsidiary took a loss ratio of 103.3 in 2024.”
May 10
Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings bleepingcomputer.com · “However, it should be noted that, even if screenshots are blocked, sensitive media and information shared in Teams meetings can still be captured by taking a photo of the conversation.”
May 10
Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball privacyguides.org · “Simply put, the premise is this: scan your eyeball, get a biometric tag, verify yourself, buy our apps (and cryptocurrency).”
May 10
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC home.cern · “The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments.”
May 9
'Data manipulations' alleged in study that paved the way for Microsoft's quantum chip science.org · “In April 2021, Mourik sought answers from corresponding author Önder Gül, asking in an email: “Did you know about these undisclosed data manipulations prior to publication of the paper?” Gül responded, 1 day later: “Yes, I did.””
May 9
Massive BART Outage Not Related to Old Train Control System, Agency Says kqed.org · “It was the largest systemwide BART outage since 2019, when a weekend service meltdown highlighted the need to replace the agency’s decades-old central train control system.”
May 9
A First Glimpse of the Starlink User Terminal darknavy.org · “During device initialization, if the system identifies itself as a user terminal, the initialization script automatically writes 41 SSH public keys into /root/.ssh/authorized_keys .”
May 9
Huawei introduces its first laptop running HarmonyOS rather than Windows liliputing.com · “While the operating system won’t support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that’s developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.”
May 9
The Price of Remission propublica.org · “But Revlimid is also, I soon learned, extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each daily pill. (Although, I later discovered, a capsule costs just 25 cents to make.)”
May 8
Google to Back Three New Advanced Nuclear Projects esgtoday.com · “Our collaboration with Elementl Power enhances our ability to move at the speed required to meet this moment of AI and American innovation.”
May 8
Kidnappers in France target cryptocurrency entrepreneurs for ransom npr.org · “French police rescued the father of a wealthy cryptocurrency entrepreneur in a nighttime raid after he was taken hostage for ransom, the latest alleged criminal effort in France to extort people involved in the management of digital assets.”
May 8
Notes on rolling out Cursor and Claude Code ghiculescu.substack.com · “It’s easy to see a draft PR with all tests passing, including new tests full of comments, and not realise that the tests are garbage and the fix is wrong.”
May 8
Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports theregister.com · “We now ban every reporter instantly who submits reports we deem AI slop,” Stenberg added. “A threshold has been reached. We are effectively being DDoSed. If we could, we would charge them for this waste of our time.”
May 7
NSO Group must pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for spyware campaign techcrunch.com · “After years of every trick and delay tactic it only took the jury a day’s deliberation to see right through to the heart of the matter: NSO’s business is based on hacking American companies…so that dictators can hack dissidents.”
May 7
Pakistani Firm Shipped Fentanyl Analogs, Scams to US krebsonsecurity.com · “In October 2016, a Pakistan district judge acquitted 24 Axact officials at trial due to ’not enough evidence’ and then later admitted he had accepted a bribe (of $35,209) from Axact…”
May 7
Samsung is paying $350 million for audio brands Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz and Polk engadget.com · “By combining the audio business of Masimo, which is being acquired this time, with Harman’s lifestyle business division, the company plans to solidify its global No. 1 position in the consumer audio market…”
May 7
UK's Deliveroo to be bought by US firm DoorDash in £2.9bn deal bbc.com · “However, it is well below the 390p share price that Deliveroo first floated at when it launched on the London Stock Exchange in April 2021.”
May 6
An Appeal to Apple from Anukari anukari.com · “It’s not a great look for Apple that a Windows PC with a pretty wimpy GPU can run Anukari just fine, and the most expensive Mac M4 Max stutters, because obviously Apple’s hardware is incredible and just needs to be let off the leash a bit.”
May 6
Kindle's iOS app just made buying books easier than ever on iPhone and iPad 9to5mac.com · “Under the old App Store rules, buying Kindle books was a major pain on iPhone.”
May 6
Memory-safe sudo to become the default in Ubuntu trifectatech.org · “May 6, 2025 – Ubuntu 25.10 is set to adopt sudo-rs by default.”
May 6
A Judge Says Meta’s AI Copyright Case Is About ‘the Next Taylor Swift’ wired.com · “It seems kind of messed up,” he said. “The question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”
May 5
OpenAI caves to pressure, keeps nonprofit in charge theregister.com · “Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure … we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock,” Altman said.
May 5
AWS Security Tool That Accidentally Introduced a Security Risk token.security · “Since AWS prohibited using the management account as the hub, customers were forced to deploy the hub in a less secure account - often a development, sandbox, or similarly low-sensitivity account.”
May 5
Anysphere, which makes Cursor, has reportedly raised $900M at $9B valuation techcrunch.com · “Anysphere, the maker of AI-powered coding tool Cursor, has attracted $900 million in a fresh round of funding led by Thrive Capital, The Financial Times reported, citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal.”
May 5
I'd rather read the prompt claytonwramsey.com · “In that sense, using a language model to write is worse than plagiarism.”
May 4
I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened. huffpost.com · “I learned that, contrary to popular belief, most school lunch debt doesn’t come from low-income families — those kids generally qualify for federal free lunch programs.”
May 4
What went wrong with wireless USB oldvcr.blogspot.com · “As so often happens, the best technology didn’t win; in my eyes CF-USB had the potential for being more widely adopted because of its simplicity and compatibility, but was ruined when Freescale got greedy and it never recovered.”
May 4
The Alabama Landline that Keeps Ringing oxfordamerican.org · “About 13 million people in the US and 2.6 billion people globally don’t use the internet, whether for reasons of availability, desire, cost, or religion.”
May 4
The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food technologyreview.com · “He says the company does not think pork chops or other meat will need to carry any label identifying it as bioengineered.”
May 3
When Flat Rate Movers Won't Answer Your Calls aphyr.com · “I began to realize that Flat Rate’s strategy was simply to never answer the phone.”
May 3
Google Gemini has the worst LLM API venki.dev · “And yet these models hide behind the poorest developer experience in the market.”
May 3
DuckDB is Probably the Most Important Geospatial Software of the Last Decade dbreunig.com · “Interest in “geospatial” (a term that functions well as a proxy for similar terms) declined and flatlined until late 2023 – right when DuckDB released their spatial extension.”
May 3
Accountability Sinks 250bpm.substack.com · “It’s not an efficiency measure, it’s an accountability management technique.”
May 3
Irish Data Protection Commission fines TikTok €530 million and orders corrective measures following Inquiry into transfers of EEA User Data to China dataprotection.ie · “Throughout the Inquiry, TikTok informed the DPC that it did not store EEA User Data on servers located in China.”
May 2
Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy simonwillison.net · “User feedback in particular can sometimes favor more agreeable responses, likely amplifying the shift we saw.”
May 2
Third Party Cookies Must Be Removed w3ctag.github.io · “Third-party (AKA cross-site) cookies are harmful to the web, and must be removed from the web platform.”
May 2
Old Soviet Venus Descent Craft Nearing Earth Reentry: What Does New Imagery Suggest? leonarddavid.com · “As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact,” reports Marco Langbroek of SatTrackCam Leiden, the Netherlands.
May 2
Apple referred for possible criminal contempt investigation bbc.com · “The documents reveal “that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option”, she wrote.”
May 1
Redis is open source again antirez.com · “The OSI wouldn’t accept it, nor would the software community regard the SSPL as an open license.”
May 1
Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup pcworld.com · “A cynic might wonder why Microsoft is making Office start when the computer boots instead of, you know, just making Office more efficient so it can run faster.”
May 1
How we identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job at Kraken blog.kraken.com · “Several of the names had previously been hired by multiple companies, as our team identified work-related email addresses linked to them.”
May 1
Oxide's Compensation Model: How is it Going? oxide.computer · “When some outsiders hear about our compensation model, they insist that it can’t possibly work because “everyone will slack off.””
May 1

April 2025 139 posts

The Leaderboard Illusion arxiv.org · “We find that undisclosed private testing practices benefit a handful of providers who are able to test multiple variants before public release and retract scores if desired.”
Apr 30
Google Play sees 47% decline in apps since start of last year techcrunch.com · “From the start of 2024 to the present, the Android app marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures.”
Apr 30
JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant devclass.com · “The AI Assistant, first released in July 2023, has been downloaded over 22 million times but is rated only 2.3 out of 5.”
Apr 30
Future of OSL in Jeopardy osuosl.org · “Unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year.”
Apr 30
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4 jepsen.io · “We show that Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL multi-AZ clusters violate Snapshot Isolation, the strongest consistency model supported across all endpoints.”
Apr 29
Indian court orders blocking of Proton Mail techcrunch.com · “On Tuesday, the Karnataka High Court directed the Indian government to block Proton Mail, a popular email service known for its enhanced security, following a legal complaint filed by New Delhi-based M Moser Design Associates.”
Apr 29
Airborne: Wormable Zero-Click RCE in Apple AirPlay Puts Billions of Devices at Risk oligo.security · “After compromising one device, attackers can use the same vulnerability to propagate to other devices and networks, furthering their impact and damage.”
Apr 29
Qwen3: Think Deeper, Act Faster qwenlm.github.io · “While Qwen2.5 was pre-trained on 18 trillion tokens, Qwen3 uses nearly twice that amount, with approximately 36 trillion tokens covering 119 languages and dialects.”
Apr 29
How the April 28, 2025, power outage in Portugal and Spain impacted Internet traffic and connectivity blog.cloudflare.com · “In Portugal, Internet traffic dropped as the power grid failed, with traffic immediately dropping by half as compared to the previous week, falling to approximately 90% below the previous week within the next five hours.”
Apr 28
Experiment using AI-generated posts on Reddit draws fire for ethics concerns retractionwatch.com · “This project yields important insights, and the risks (e.g. trauma etc.) are minimal. This means that suppressing publication is not proportionate to the importance of the insights the study yields.”
Apr 28
All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding danfabulich.medium.com · “Google pays Apple about $18 billion each year, and pays Mozilla about $450 million each year.”
Apr 28
DRM-Free OnlyFans Downloads See Widevine Project Nuked From GitHub torrentfreak.com · “GitHub requested Fenix to identify “every specific file” in the repo that it considers infringing; Fenix responded with a statement that the “entire repository is infringing” and should be removed.”
Apr 28
Oracle engineers caused dayslong software outage at U.S. hospitals cnbc.com · “The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement.”
Apr 28
How a Single Line Of Code Could Brick Your iPhone rambo.codes · “With that widget extension in place, as soon as I installed the VeryEvilNotify app on my security research device, the ‘Restore in Progress’ UI was shown, then failed with a prompt to restart the system.”
Apr 27
Amazon Just Happens to Hold Book Sale During Independent Bookstore Day gizmodo.com · “Local book shops have managed to have a moment, thriving despite the increasing dominance of Amazon online by creating bonds with their local community and offering a shopping experience that Amazon can’t replicate.”
Apr 27
README.md (ARCHIVED notice), fail0verflow/hbc (The Homebrew Channel) github.com · “This goes far beyond ignorance about the copyright implications of reverse engineering Nintendo binaries, and goes straight into outright deliberate, malicious code theft and copyright infringement.”
Apr 27
AI Helps Unravel a Cause of Alzheimer's Disease and Identify a Therapeutic Candidate today.ucsd.edu · “It really demanded modern AI to formulate the three-dimensional structure very precisely to make this discovery.”
Apr 27
Did 5G kill the IMSI catcher? zetier.com · “An IMSI catcher is a tool that collects cellular signals and decodes packets to access and save off the IMSI.”
Apr 27
Backblaze: A Loss-Making Data Storage Business Mired in Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, and Brazen Insider Dumping morpheus-research.com · “All told, we believe Backblaze has resorted to aggressive accounting to inflate the results of an already loss-making business.”
Apr 26
Google will stop supporting early Nest thermostats on October 25 techcrunch.com · “That means owners of the Nest thermostats released in 2011 and 2012 (as well as the version released in Europe in 2014) won’t receive updates, and their devices will no longer be supported in the Nest and Home apps.”
Apr 26
Facebook isn't eavesdropping, but the truth is more disturbing newatlas.com · “The problem is, outside of anecdotal cases, no one has ever been able to find clear evidence that this is actually happening.”
Apr 26
Australian who ordered radioactive materials over the internet walks away from court chemistryworld.com · “A 24-year-old Australian man who ordered uranium and plutonium to his parents’ apartment has been allowed to walk away from court on a two-year good behaviour bond.”
Apr 26
Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects bfi.uchicago.edu · “Using difference-in-differences and employer policies as quasi-experimental variation, we estimate precise zeros: AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%.”
Apr 25
Novel Universal Bypass for All Major LLMs hiddenlayer.com · “A single prompt can be designed to work across all of the major frontier AI models.”
Apr 25
Bezos-backed Slate Auto debuts analog EV pickup truck that is decidedly anti-Tesla techcrunch.com · “The company is saying it will start under $20,000 after the federal tax credit (providing that still exists next year).”
Apr 25
Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results codeberg.org · “In 2025, OSI excluded all votes for three candidates before publishing results.”
Apr 25
Google Maps Doesn't Know How Street Addresses Work randomascii.wordpress.com · “I dutifully submitted feedback for “Wrong pin location or address”: And I got an email the next day saying that my edit was accepted: But it’s been 14 days and the address still maps incorrectly.”
Apr 25
Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks theregister.com · “Microsoft has forbidden the use of its extensions outside of its own software products since at least September 2020, when the current licensing terms were published.”
Apr 24
Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source: CNCF's commitment to the community cncf.io · “Synadia is attempting to convert a successful open source project into a closed, commercial product—and take the NATS community’s name, trust, and infrastructure with it.”
Apr 24
Like to play alone? Ubisoft is still watching you! noyb.eu · “The complainant discovered that, over a period of just 10 minutes, the game established a connection to external servers 150 times.”
Apr 24
OpenAI makes its upgraded image generator available to developers techcrunch.com · “Pricing is $5 per million input tokens for text and $10 per million input tokens for images, and $40 per million output tokens for images.”
Apr 24
AMD Publishes Open-Source GIM Driver For GPU Virtualization, Radeon "In The Roadmap" phoronix.com · “Of interest to many Phoronix readers will be that GIM / SR-IOV support could be coming to client discrete GPUs, which has been a long sought feature for the Radeon graphics cards.”
Apr 24
Commission finds Apple and Meta in breach of the Digital Markets Act ec.europa.eu · “Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers.”
Apr 23
You wouldn't steal a font fedi.rib.gay · “So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!”
Apr 23
How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 silentsblog.com · “I want to make it clear: all these findings prove that the bug is NOT an issue with Windows 11 24H2, as things like the way the stack is used by internal WinAPI functions are not contractual and they may change at any time, with no prior notice.”
Apr 23
OpenAI says it would buy Chrome if Google is forced to sell engadget.com · “Yes, we would, as would many other parties,” he said.
Apr 23
World's First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone group.ntt · “However, the drone equipped with the protective cage continued to fly stably even after the lightning strike.”
Apr 23
Cursor AI's Support Bot Hallucinates Policy, Sparking User Backlash and Company Apology winbuzzer.com · “Seeking answers via support channels, some were informed by an AI bot – reportedly named “Sam” – that their subscription was limited to a single active session, a restriction the company later confirmed was entirely fictitious.”
Apr 22
Google Chrome will now continue to use third-party cookies digiday.com · “We’ve made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies.”
Apr 22
Exclusive: Supabase raises $200 million Series D at $2 billion valuation finance.yahoo.com · “Supabase is currently used by two million developers who manage more than 3.5 million databases.”
Apr 22
A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data theconversation.com · “The digitising process erroneously combined ‘vegetative’ from one column of text with ’electron’ from another.”
Apr 22
Attacking My Landlord's Boiler videah.net · “Replay attacks can be pretty easily thwarted by using an incrementing counter in the communications to nullify previous signals, ignoring signals with a counter value you’ve already seen.”
Apr 22
Getting Forked by Microsoft philiplaine.com · “Digging deeper I found test cases referencing Spegel and my previous employer, test cases that have been taken directly from my project.”
Apr 21
A New Form of Verification on Bluesky bsky.social · “Bluesky will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue badge next to their names.”
Apr 21
How Big Tech hides its outsourced African workforce restofworld.org · “When poor labor practices come to light — whether it’s wage theft, unsafe working conditions, or psychological harm, the intermediaries are the ones held responsible, not the tech giants who ultimately benefit from the labor…”
Apr 21
Data Centers Can Slash Power Needs With One Coding Tweak spectrum.ieee.org · “It is sort of a best case because the 30 percent applies to the network stack or communication part of it…”
Apr 21
Fossil fuels fall below 50% of US electricity for the first month on record ember-energy.org · “In March 2025, fossil fuels accounted for less than 50% (49.2%) of electricity generated, for the first month on record.”
Apr 21
JUICYJAM: How Thai Authorities Use Online Doxxing to Suppress Dissent citizenlab.ca · “Thanks to a public leak of confidential military and police documents in March 2025, we can now attribute the campaign to the Royal Thai Armed Forces and/or the Royal Thai Police.”
Apr 20
Tech things: OpenAI buys Windsurf, Google retains its lead, and where the hell is Apple? 12gramsofcarbon.com · “Compared to Cursor, Windsurf has fewer users, has been around for less time, has less brand recognition, and has diminishing prospects for future growth.”
Apr 20
Scientists hijacked the human eye to get it to see a brand-new color. It's called 'olo.' livescience.com · “With this technique, the researchers enabled five people to see a new color, dubbed “olo,” which the study participants described as a “blue-green of unprecedented saturation.””
Apr 20
Gemma 3 QAT Models: Bringing state-of-the-Art AI to consumer GPUs developers.googleblog.com · “Using int4 means each number is represented using only 4 bits – a 4x reduction in data size compared to BF16.”
Apr 20
Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move servethehome.com · “Let us just call this what it is. It is a grab for extra margin dollars.”
Apr 19
SSL.com: DCV bypass and issue fake certificates for any MX hostname bugzilla.mozilla.org · “SSL.com failed to conduct accurate domain validation control when utilizing the BR 3.2.2.4.14 DCV method (Email to DNS TXT Contact).”
Apr 19
Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken jan.wildeboer.net · “So if you as an app developer include such a 3rd party SDK in your app to make some money — you are part of the problem and I think you should be held responsible for delivering malware to your users, making them botnet members.”
Apr 19
For security, Android phones will now auto-reboot after three days techcrunch.com · “Before a phone is switched on and unlocked, certain data stored within is fully encrypted and harder to access without the user’s passcode.”
Apr 19
Unpowered SSD endurance investigation finds severe data loss and performance issues tomshardware.com · “The hashing audit eventually revealed that four files were corrupt (hash not matching).”
Apr 19
Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional 404media.co · “The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still use the evidence they obtained through this unconstitutional search.”
Apr 18
OpenAI's new reasoning AI models hallucinate more techcrunch.com · “OpenAI found that o3 hallucinated in response to 33% of questions on PersonQA, the company’s in-house benchmark for measuring the accuracy of a model’s knowledge about people.”
Apr 18
The latest viral ChatGPT trend is doing 'reverse location search' from photos techcrunch.com · “It’s an obvious potential privacy issue. There’s nothing preventing a bad actor from screenshotting, say, a person’s Instagram Story and using ChatGPT to try to doxx them.”
Apr 18
Walled Gardens Can Kill aneesiqbal.ai · “Normally this would be a simple problem to fix, just go to your Apple account settings and switch the region, but this too was denied, as I had the yearly Apple Music subscription.”
Apr 18
15,000 lines of verified cryptography now in Python jonathan.protzenko.fr · “the (unverified) reference implementation of SHA3 was hit with a bad CVE in 2022, which Python “inherited”, because it vendored that very same SHA3 implementation.”
Apr 18
Judge rules Google illegally monopolized adtech, opening door to potential breakup techcrunch.com · “The judge did agree that Google violated the Sherman Act by monopolizing and unlawfully tying two parts of the adtech stack together, specifically DFP and AdX, and that Google is guilty of abuse of monopoly power in the publisher-side adtech.”
Apr 17
Elon Musk shut down internal Tesla analysis that showed Robotaxi would lose money electrek.co · “We had lots of modeling that showed the payback around FSD [Full Self Driving] and Robotaxi was going to be slow. It was going to be choppy.”
Apr 17
Issue with multiple Zoom Services (incident report) zoomstatus.com · “This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down the zoom.us domain.”
Apr 17
Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution in Erlang/OTP SSH (CVE-2025-32433) github.com · “By exploiting a flaw in SSH protocol message handling, a malicious actor could gain unauthorized access to affected systems and execute arbitrary commands without valid credentials.”
Apr 17
Discord using AI face scans for age-verification in two specific scenarios 9to5mac.com · “If you opt for a face-scan, Discord says the age estimation is performed on your device, so is not uploaded or stored. If you choose ID, the scan will be uploaded, but will be deleted after verification.”
Apr 17
Snapchat Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale afterbabel.com · “Snapchat had disclosed that it had removed approximately 60 accounts per month, or just over 700 total.”
Apr 16
OpenAI partner says it had relatively little time to test the company's o3 AI model techcrunch.com · “This evaluation was conducted in a relatively short time, and we only tested [o3] with simple agent scaffolds…”
Apr 16
A Postmortem Of A Startup buildwithtract.com · “After nearly two years without revenue or committed paying customers, we realised we lacked a clear path to the necessary scale and returns.”
Apr 16
Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting antirez.com · “Indeed, for most of the users I tested this against, it worked very well, and often times it was the top result.”
Apr 16
Microsoft researchers say they've developed a hyper-efficient AI model that can run on CPUs techcrunch.com · “There is a catch, however. Achieving that performance requires using Microsoft’s custom framework, bitnet.cpp, which only works with certain hardware at the moment.”
Apr 16
TLS Certificate Lifetimes Will Officially Reduce to 47 Days digicert.com · “Prior to this proposal by Apple, Google promoted a 90-day maximum lifetime, but they voted in favor of Apple’s proposal almost immediately after the voting period began.”
Apr 15
You cannot have our user's data sourcehut.org · “The serious costs and widespread performance issues and outages caused by reckless scrapers has been on everyone’s mind in the sysadmin community as of late, and has been the subject of much discussion online.”
Apr 15
It's easier than ever to de-censor videos jeffgeerling.com · “Years ago it would’ve required a supercomputer and a PhD to do this stuff.”
Apr 15
April 2025 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak knowyourmeme.com · “The attackers reportedly exploited outdated PHP code and deprecated MySQL functions in 4chan’s backend, particularly in a core script named yotsuba.php, which manages post submissions and moderation.”
Apr 15
New Vulnerability in GitHub Copilot and Cursor: How Hackers Can Weaponize Code Agents pillar.security · “Once a compromised rule file enters a project repository, it corrupts all future code-generation sessions for every team member working in that project.”
Apr 14
Intel to sell 51% stake in Altera to Silver Lake at $8.75B valuation siliconangle.com · “The transaction values Altera at $8.75 billion, just under half what Intel paid to acquire the company in 2015.”
Apr 14
GPT-4.1: Three new million token input models from OpenAI, including their cheapest model yet simonwillison.net · “These are API-only models right now, not available through the ChatGPT interface (though you can try them out in OpenAI’s API playground).”
Apr 14
The Path to Open-Sourcing the DeepSeek Inference Engine github.com · “Our engine is based on an early fork of vLLM from over a year ago.”
Apr 14
Everything Wrong with MCP blog.sshh.io · “Obviously getting hacked from downloading and running third-party code isn’t a novel vulnerability but the protocol has effectively created a low-friction path for less technical users to get exploited on their local machines.”
Apr 13
A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane posthuman.blog · “An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books.”
Apr 13
Tesla Releases Stripped-Out RWD Cybertruck That Is So Much Worse For Not Much Less Money jalopnik.com · “While the RWD Cybertruck was said to have a starting price of under $40,000 back then (and then around $61,000 last year when it was available to order but never actually entered production), you’ll now have to pony up $71,985 for it, including $1,995 destination.”
Apr 13
BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of jeffgeerling.com · “Because accurate timing is critical in many areas, from media, to the power grid, to 5G and communications, having a reliable terrestrial backup to GPS—especially one that can be hardened against different types of jamming attempts—may be important to our economy, communications and power grid.”
Apr 13
"Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay": Blue Cross Defrauded Breast Cancer Center, Must Pay $421M, Jury Finds propublica.org · “From 2015 through 2023, the Baton Rouge-based insurer paid, on average, less than 9% of the charges billed by the breast center for more than 7,800 individual medical procedures — even though it had authorized all of them.”
Apr 12
LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything theregister.com · “In a recent study, researchers found that about 5.2 percent of package suggestions from commercial models didn’t exist, compared to 21.7 percent from open source or openly available models.”
Apr 12
Microsoft starts final Windows Recall testing before rollout bleepingcomputer.com · “Recall is an opt-in Windows feature that screenshots active windows every few seconds, analyzes them, and allows Windows 11 users to search text within the snapshots.”
Apr 12
Anubis works xeiaso.net · “Anubis has been deployed by the United Nations.”
Apr 12
Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram dropsitenews.com · “Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.”
Apr 11
But what if I really want a faster horse? rakhim.exotext.com · “My List” on Netflix randomly shuffles items and changes their covers every few hours.
Apr 11
G̶o̶o̶g̶l̶e̶r̶… ex-Googler. nerdy.dev · “I’m told this comes as a shock to my managers and other Chrome team leaders. I’m told it’s not based on merit.”
Apr 11
Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility lwn.net · “Debian, for example, has been working toward reproducible builds for more than a decade; it can now produce official live CDs of the current stable release that are reproducible.”
Apr 11
Adobe Deletes Bluesky Posts After Furious Backlash petapixel.com · “Frustrated by the company’s business practices, users on the platform flooded its posts with backlash, ultimately prompting Adobe to delete all of its content.”
Apr 11
Fintech founder charged with fraud after 'AI' shopping app found to be powered by humans in the Philippines techcrunch.com · “In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ’s Southern District of New York alleges.”
Apr 10
The 2025 AI Index Report hai.stanford.edu · “AI-related incidents are rising sharply, yet standardized RAI evaluations remain rare among major industrial model developers.”
Apr 10
PHP Core Security Audit Results thephp.foundation · “Due to budget constraints, the recent security audit focused on the most critical components of the PHP source code rather than the entire codebase.”
Apr 10
Google to embrace Anthropic's standard for connecting AI models to data techcrunch.com · “In a post on X on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google would add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to its Gemini models and SDK. He did not specify a timeline for when this would be done.”
Apr 10
Arroyo is joining Cloudflare arroyo.dev · “The Arroyo Engine will remain open-source and self-hostable.”
Apr 10
Facebook's former global policy director criticises company in Congress hearing thenationalnews.com · “Throughout my seven years at Meta I saw executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values.”
Apr 9
Google will let companies run Gemini models in their own data centers cnbc.com · “Even customers that adhere to the secret and top secret U.S. government classification levels will be able to use Gemini through an air-gapped version of Google Distributed Cloud that’s disconnected from the internet.”
Apr 9
Basic Income Pilot Project | Study results pilotprojekt-grundeinkommen.de · “The pilot project followed 122 people for three years who received an unconditional sum of €1,200 every month. The control group included a further 1,580 people who did not receive any money.”
Apr 9
Maintenance Notice (Whisky documentation) docs.getwhisky.app · “By contrast, Whisky is based on CrossOver, but we don’t produce any bespoke fixes. I, quite frankly, do not have the requisite skills or time to do so.”
Apr 9
Tesla Solar Sales Declined for 4 Straight Quarters, Then Tesla Stopped Publishing the Numbers cleantechnica.com · “The company published the numbers for those 4 quarters, but then, in the next quarter, Q1 2024, Tesla simply lamented that its solar installations had declined year over year but stopped publishing those figures.”
Apr 9
Meta accused of Llama 4 bait-and-switch to juice AI benchmark rank theregister.com · “Meta submitted a specially crafted, non-public variant of its Llama 4 AI model to an online benchmark that may have unfairly boosted its leaderboard position over rivals.”
Apr 8
AT&T to Discontinue Email-to-Text Service on June 17th wirefly.com · “AT&T has announced that it will discontinue its email-to-text service on June 17, 2025.”
Apr 8
Thousands of North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500—and they keep getting hired for more jobs yahoo.com · “Fortune 500 companies have unwittingly hired thousands of software engineers who claim to be American developers but are actually North Korean citizens using stolen or fake identities.”
Apr 8
Government fails to keep Apple legal battle secret lawgazette.co.uk · “In a judgment handed down today, tribunal president Lord Justice Singh and Mr Justice Johnson said preventing disclosure even of the fact that a hearing was taking place would have represented ’the most fundamental interference with the principle of open justice’.”
Apr 8
Cyc yuxi.ml · “After 40 years, 30 million rules, 200 million dollars, 2000 person-years, and many promises, Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will.”
Apr 8
BREAKING: Bill that would have blocked OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit has mysteriously been gutted. garymarcus.substack.com · “My sources assure me that this is NOT a clerical error and that Papan’s office confirms that the change is real.”
Apr 7
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke confirms leaked internal memo on social media about "hiring AI before humans" techstartups.com · “Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.”
Apr 7
What was Quartz? zachseward.com · “The end came on Friday, when G/O fired the few remaining writers at Quartz and sold the carcass to a Canadian firm that appears mostly interested in the email list.”
Apr 7
Europe preparing to 'ease the burden' of landmark data privacy law therecord.media · “The European Commission is now finalizing a plan to simplify and potentially remove many of the regulatory requirements imposed by the continent’s complex and far-reaching General Data Protection Regulation, particularly those impacting small and medium-sized businesses.”
Apr 7
Uncovering a 0-Click RCE in the SuperNote Nomad E-ink Tablet stigward.github.io · “A malicious attacker on the same network as the victim could fully compromise the target device without any user-interaction.”
Apr 7
Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit lesswrong.com · “Our scanner has improved a lot since August, but because of regular engineering, not model improvements.”
Apr 6
Data centers contain 90% crap data gerrymcgovern.com · “The Cloud is what happens when the cost of storing data is less than the cost of figuring out what to do with the crap.”
Apr 6
Max severity RCE flaw discovered in widely used Apache Parquet bleepingcomputer.com · “A maximum severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability has been discovered impacting all versions of Apache Parquet up to and including 1.15.0.”
Apr 6
Gmail E2E is as terrible as expected michal.sapka.pl · “If I receive an “e2e” encrypted email from gmail, I will not be able to read it without going to a Google service.”
Apr 6
rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia derflounder.wordpress.com · “Now with macOS Sequoia, Apple has replaced rsync 2.6.9 with openrsync, an implementation of rsync which is not using any version of the GPL open source license.”
Apr 6
The Llama 4 herd: The beginning of a new era of natively multimodal AI innovation ai.meta.com · “Llama 4 refuses less on debated political and social topics overall (from 7% in Llama 3.3 to below 2%).”
Apr 5
Judge Stein Issues Opinion Rejecting Most of OpenAI's Motion to Dismiss Claims by Newspapers, Book Authors. Judge Now Will Preside Over All Copyright Cases v. OpenAI, Microsoft. chatgptiseatingtheworld.com · “Microsoft fared a tad better in getting the dismissal of all DMCA 1202(b)(1) claims against it, whereas OpenAI succeeded only in getting the New York Times’ 1202(b)(1) claim, but not the claims of the Center for Investigative Reporting or the Daily News.”
Apr 5
University of Michigan cracks rapid EV charging in freezing temps electrek.co · “Charging an EV battery takes 30 to 40 minutes even for aggressive fast charging, and that time increases to over an hour in the winter.”
Apr 5
Sweetener saccharin shows surprise power against antibiotic resistance brunel.ac.uk · “Saccharin breaks the walls of bacterial pathogens, causing them to distort and eventually burst, killing the bacteria.”
Apr 5
What's in that bright red fire retardant? No one will say, so we had it tested laist.com · “Late last year, LAist requested samples of MVP-Fx from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions, which manufactures the product, for the purpose of running an independent analysis for heavy metals. All declined.”
Apr 4
Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Services blog.thunderbird.net · “Once we have a sufficiently strong base of paying users to sustainably support our services, we plan to introduce a limited free tier to the public.”
Apr 4
No, Gumroad Did Not Become Open Source Today danb.me · “The issue isn’t that the license exists, it’s that it’s misrepresented as open source.”
Apr 4
Anduril Industries' Electromagnetic Warfare Team is Hiring discourse.nixos.org · “To that end, the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse.”
Apr 4
Hackers target Aussie pensioners in major super fund cyber attack cyberdaily.au · “While members of the affected super funds are being urged to check their accounts for suspicious activity, media reports suggest that the threat actors targeted accounts in the pension drawdown phase, as those accounts can request lump-sum withdrawals.”
Apr 4
An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip theaiunderwriter.substack.com · “another reminder of how OpenAI(and everyone else) trains on images that are very obviously someone else’s work.”
Apr 3
Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad theregister.com · “Extra memory for the Altair could easily cost more than the computer itself,” recalled Gates.
Apr 3
AI 2027 ai-2027.com · “We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.”
Apr 3
Reasoning models don't always say what they think anthropic.com · “The models very rarely admitted to using the reward hacks in their Chain-of-Thought explanations, doing so less than 2% of the time in most of the testing scenarios.”
Apr 3
Verizon Call Filter API flaw exposed customers' incoming call history bleepingcomputer.com · “Call metadata might seem harmless, but in the wrong hands, it becomes a powerful surveillance tool.”
Apr 2
Restructuring Announcement automattic.com · “While our revenue continues to grow, Automattic operates in a highly competitive market, and technology is evolving at unprecedented levels.”
Apr 2
Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds unsw.edu.au · “The people taking the creatine supplement saw changes before they even started exercising, which leads us to believe that it wasn’t actual real muscle growth, but potentially fluid retention.”
Apr 2
Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test arxiv.org · “The results constitute the first empirical evidence that any artificial system passes a standard three-party Turing test.”
Apr 2
AI misses illnesses in black people and women, analysis of chest x-rays reveals gigazine.net · “The researchers found that in half of cases, conditions such as cardiac hypertrophy were not detected when patients were black women.”
Apr 1
Betty Webb, Bletchley Park codebreaker and tireless advocate, dies aged 101 forcesnews.com · “It wasn’t until 1975, when the Bletchley operation was declassified, that she could even tell her family what she had done during the war.”
Apr 1
In loving memory of Dave Täht libreqos.com · “Because of Dave’s persistence and advocacy, millions of devices worldwide now ship algorithms like FQ-CoDel by default, to smooth connectivity.”
Apr 1
The Atrocious State Of Binary Compatibility on Linux and How To Address It. jangafx.com · “In just the past two years, our team has encountered three separate GLIBC-specific compatibility issues, each directly impacting our products”
Apr 1
DEDA - tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation toolkit github.com · “This process is integrated in almost every commercial colour laser printer. This means that almost every printout contains coded information about the source device, such as the serial number.”
Apr 1

March 2025 132 posts

Oracle Cloud security SNAFU latest: IT giant accused of pedantry as evidence scrubbed theregister.com · “Oracle are attempting to wordsmith statements around Oracle Cloud and use very specific words to avoid responsibility,” wrote Beaumont.
Mar 31
BREAKING: IU terminated professor the same day the FBI searched his homes idsnews.com · “A search on the U.S. government’s Public Access To Court Electronic Records system yielded no recent results for either Wang or Ma.”
Mar 31
Targeted advertising: the Autorité de la concurrence imposes a fine of €150,000,000 on Apple for the implementation of the App Tracking Transparency ("ATT") framework autoritedelaconcurrence.fr · “While advertising tracking only needs to be refused once, the user must always confirm their consent a second time.”
Mar 31
Inside a Marine's decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter jet and the betrayal in its wake postandcourier.com · “Both investigations concluded that most highly experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in an F-35 would have punched out of the plane.”
Mar 31
McMaster researchers discover new class of antibiotics news.mcmaster.ca · “Nearly three decades after the last time a new class of antibiotics reached the market, McMaster researchers have made a breakthrough discovery that could hold the key to addressing antimicrobial resistance.”
Mar 31
CodeQLEAKED – Public Secrets Exposure Leads to Supply Chain Attack on GitHub CodeQL praetorian.com · “A potential supply chain attack on GitHub CodeQL started simply: a publicly exposed secret, valid for 1.022 seconds at a time.”
Mar 30
The average college student today hilariusbookbinder.substack.com · “Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke.”
Mar 30
Quakers condemn police raid on Westminster Meeting House quaker.org.uk · “They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first, searching the whole building and arresting six women attending the meeting in a hired room.”
Mar 30
Inaugural Isar Aerospace Spectrum Flight Ends in Failure europeanspaceflight.com · “Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success,” said Metzler.
Mar 30
Everyone knows all the apps on your phone peabee.substack.com · “Until a few years ago, any app you installed on an Android device could see all other apps on your phone without your permission.”
Mar 29
Madison Square Garden Bans Fan After Surveillance System IDs Him as a Critic of Its CEO gizmodo.com · “Since 2018, the venue has been equipped with facial recognition tools used to identify people deemed to be potential security threats.”
Mar 29
Windows 11 is not killing off hack that lets you bypass Microsoft account, but it takes more effort now windowslatest.com · “Removes script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account…”
Mar 29
Why Apple's Severance Gets Edited Over Remote Desktop Software tedium.co · “In other words, little of the horsepower being used in this editing process is actually coming from the Mac Mini on this guy’s desk.”
Mar 29
Et tu, Grammarly? dbushell.com · “Grammarly broke my calculations and thus they broke my website.”
Mar 29
I drove 300 miles in rural Virginia, then asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car. Here's what I learned. cardinalnews.org · “Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us.”
Mar 28
We hacked Google's A.I Gemini and leaked its source code (at least some part) landh.tech · “However, the build pipeline for compiling the sandbox binary included an automated step that adds security proto files to a binary whenever it detects that the binary might need them to enforce internal rules.”
Mar 28
Javice found guilty of defrauding JPMorgan in $175M startup purchase techcrunch.com · “When JPMorgan bought Frank in 2021, the bank thought the startup had 4 million customers. The bank found out that the actual customer count was only 300,000 when it later sent test marketing emails to alleged Frank users and approximately 70% of those messages bounced back.”
Mar 28
Elon Musk's xAI acquires X at $33B valuation siliconangle.com · “The company’s AI business currently generates only limited revenue: xAI reportedly told investors last November that it was “on pace” to reach $100 million in annual sales.”
Mar 28
It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit world.hey.com · “We’re spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else.”
Mar 27
How not to build an AI Institute chalmermagne.com · “By outsourcing the institute to the universities, the EPSRC guaranteed that the ATI would always be less than the sum of its parts.”
Mar 27
Blasting Past Webp projectzero.google · “The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim.”
Mar 27
Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia reviews.ofb.biz · “Since the release of Sequoia last fall, one can no longer reliably cut or copy text from the Mac app.”
Mar 27
Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid bleepingcomputer.com · “Representatives from these companies, all who agreed to confirm the data under the promise of anonymity, confirmed the authenticity of the information.”
Mar 26
The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers microsoft.com · “Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking.”
Mar 26
Malware found on npm infecting local package with reverse shell reversinglabs.com · “Even if the malicious package ethers-provider2 is removed, the threat actors made sure their malicious functionality would persist.”
Mar 26
Google will develop Android OS entirely behind closed doors starting next week 9to5google.com · “This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished.”
Mar 26
After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers understandingai.org · “Most Waymo crashes involve a Waymo vehicle scrupulously following the rules while a human driver flouts them: speeding, running red lights, careening out of their lanes, and so forth.”
Mar 26
Forgotten in jail without a lawyer: how a Texas town fails poor defendants ksat.com · “In 2023, when more than 240 misdemeanor defendants requested representation, the county judge appointed lawyers in only a handful of cases, records show. Nonetheless, the state has imposed no consequences.”
Mar 25
Postmortem on Next.js Middleware bypass vercel.com · “Due to the old version range, this was given lower priority in our triage queue.”
Mar 25
A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List troyhunt.com · “There are 7,535 email addresses on that list which is nearly half of all addresses in that export.”
Mar 25
Tesla's Cybertruck recall began with a routine review of field repairs wardsauto.com · “The recall covers 2024-2025 Cybertrucks manufactured from November 2023 through February 2025.”
Mar 25
Digital Deception: Kubient CEO Sentenced for $1.3 Million Fraud Scheme securityonline.info · “Paul Roberts cooked the books. He lied to investors and auditors about his company’s revenue and about his company’s premier product: an AI-powered tool that, ironically, was supposed to detect fraud in the digital advertising industry.”
Mar 25
I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud jeffgeerling.com · “To use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.”
Mar 24
DNA testing company 23andMe files for bankruptcy protection, CEO resigns techcrunch.com · “Then in 2023, it suffered a massive cyberattack in which the data of its nearly 7 million customers, including users’ genetic predisposition and ancestry reports, was stolen by hackers.”
Mar 24
HP settles lawsuit over ink-blocking printer update, with no payout or admission of wrongdoing techspot.com · “However, HP doesn’t have to admit that it did anything wrong, and it won’t be handing over any money to those customers who were affected by the 2020 firmware update.”
Mar 24
FaunaDB shuts down but hints at open source future theregister.com · “In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently…”
Mar 24
Announcing ARC-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025 arcprize.org · “Pure LLMs score 0% on ARC-AGI-2, and public AI reasoning systems achieve only single-digit percentage scores.”
Mar 24
The Great Hobby Lobby Artifact Heist meghanboilard.substack.com · “Over the course of 40 months, Hobby Lobby acquired over 40,000 artifacts in an unprecedented buying blitz.”
Mar 23
Fully AI driven weather prediction system could start revolution in forecasting cam.ac.uk · “Aardvark is thousands of times faster than all previous weather forecasting methods.”
Mar 23
Llama's Paradox - Delving deep into Llama.cpp and exploiting Llama.cpp's Heap Maze, from Heap-Overflow to Remote-Code Execution retr0.blog · “Since Llama.cpp has such a special heap-management system, special features of this system will fail the classic ptmalloc exploitations that we are familiar with.”
Mar 23
Rickover's Lessons chinatalk.media · “He made the final hiring decision for every naval officer who applied to serve on a nuclear submarine until he retired.”
Mar 23
Attorney General Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert for 23andMe Customers oag.ca.gov · “Given 23andMe’s reported financial distress, I remind Californians to consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company.”
Mar 22
Court Orders Google to Poison Public DNS to Prevent IPTV Piracy torrentfreak.com · “The Court’s decision wasn’t made available to support AGCOM’s statement, and at the time of writing, we are still trying to locate a copy.”
Mar 22
Meta settles UK 'right to object to ad-tracking' lawsuit by agreeing not to track plaintiff techcrunch.com · “A human rights campaigner, Tanya O’Carroll, has succeeded in forcing social media giant Meta not to use her data for targeted advertising.”
Mar 22
A Win for Encryption: France Rejects Backdoor Mandate eff.org · “The proposed law was a surveillance wishlist disguised as anti-drug legislation.”
Mar 21
The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings—Without Telling Her Why reason.com · “Instead, the notice she received listed hundreds of possible federal crimes that would justify a seizure, though it didn’t provide Martin’s supposed connection to those offenses.”
Mar 21
New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder eff.org · “The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just made a move that will protect bad patents at the expense of everyone else.”
Mar 21
Investigators Say South Korean President's Bodyguard Asked ChatGPT About 'Martial Law' Hours Before Coup gizmodo.com · “Lee’s lawyer said that prosecutors had screwed up the digital forensics. He didn’t deny that Lee had asked the AI about martial law, just that it happened after Yoon had declared it.”
Mar 21
Apple Shuffles AI Executive Ranks in Bid to Turn Around Siri finance.yahoo.com · “Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell.”
Mar 21
Despite denials, Serbian gov't proven to have deployed sonic devices on 15 March protest europeanwesternbalkans.com · “Serbian officials were forced to admit on Wednesday, 19 March, that there was a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) on the streets of Belgrade on 15 March, which they had previously denied.”
Mar 20
ChatGPT hit with privacy complaint over defamatory hallucinations techcrunch.com · “AI companies should stop acting as if the GDPR does not apply to them, when it clearly does.”
Mar 20
EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and connected devices techcrunch.com · “According to the Commission, device manufacturers and app developers should be able to access nine iOS connectivity features that were restricted to Apple’s exclusive use before, such as peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connectivity, NFC features and device pairing.”
Mar 20
Leaking Passwords (and more!) on macOS wts.dev · “Before this vulnerability was patched, you could send a message to NetAuthAgent asking for the credentials to any server, and it would just give them to you.”
Mar 20
Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth blog.cloudflare.com · “When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them.”
Mar 19
Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions - Fedora Pagure fenrisk.com · “It allows writing to arbitrary files, allowing the execution of arbitrary code on any Pagure instance.”
Mar 19
Memory safety for web fonts developer.chrome.com · “Merely keeping up with the stream of issues found by fuzzing costs Google at least 0.25 full time software engineers. Worse, we observably don’t find everything or find things only after the code has shipped to users.”
Mar 19
Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities nber.org · “However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and population regardless of a city’s estimated housing supply elasticity.”
Mar 19
Google announces agreement to acquire Wiz blog.google · “Wiz’s products will continue to work and be available across all major clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud platforms.”
Mar 18
Faulty firmware is bricking high-end Samsung soundbars hdtvtest.co.uk · “The cause appears to be a faulty firmware update, which is transforming Samsung soundbars globally into useless rectangular bits of plastic.”
Mar 18
Roku is forcing users to watch ads before they can use their TV in 'test' 9to5google.com · “Roku already places ads on the homescreen and in its screensaver, but autoplaying ads as soon as the TV is turned on is new, and rather aggressive behavior.”
Mar 18
Cloudflare's infinite loop problem: developers claim they were forced to sign excessive non-disclosure agreements; Cloudflare responds gigazine.net · “Instead of continuing the discussions, Cloudflare sent Moonchild a form for what it called an ‘overly broad and general non-disclosure agreement (NDA).’”
Mar 18
Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default lwn.net · “This is not symbolic of any pointed move away from GNU components - it’s literally just about replacing coreutils with a more modern equivalent.”
Mar 18
Rippling sues Deel, Deel denies 'all legal wrongdoing,' and Slack is the main witness techcrunch.com · “According to the lawsuit, Rippling set up a “honeypot” to prove out its suspicions.”
Mar 17
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face drewdevault.com · “We are experiencing dozens of brief outages per week, and I have to review our mitigations several times per day to keep that number from getting any higher.”
Mar 17
Extracting content from an LCP "protected" ePub shkspr.mobi · “There’s no reverse engineering. No cracking of cryptographic secrets. No circumvention of any technical control.”
Mar 16
Tesla Autopilot drives into Wile E Coyote fake road wall in camera vs lidar test electrek.co · “The Tesla on Autopilot managed to stop for a kid mannequin in the middle of the road when statics, moving, and blinded by lights, but it couldn’t stop in fog or heavy rain”
Mar 16
Baidu Unveils ERNIE 4.5 and Reasoning Model ERNIE X1, Makes ERNIE Bot Free Ahead of Schedule prnewswire.com · “As Baidu’s latest foundation model and native multimodal model, ERNIE 4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks while priced at just 1% of GPT-4.5.”
Mar 16
Amazon's Echo is ending its 'Do Not Send Voice Recordings' feature, starting March 28 techcrunch.com · “Amazon Echo users will no longer have the option to process their Alexa voice recordings locally, which means those recordings (with the exception of certain Alexa features like wake word detection) will be sent to the company’s cloud.”
Mar 15
Sign in as anyone: Bypassing SAML SSO authentication with parser differentials github.blog · “In other words, it could be used for an account takeover attack.”
Mar 15
Google Being Forced To Sell Chrome is Not Good for the Web chriscoyier.net · “But still, a more direct line from problem to solution is forcing default search engine choice, not a forced sale of Chrome itself.”
Mar 15
Career advice in 2025. lethain.com · “Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago.”
Mar 15
Harden-Runner detection: tj-actions/changed-files action is compromised stepsecurity.io · “The compromised Action prints CI/CD secrets in GitHub Actions build logs.”
Mar 14
Healthcare Staff Database with 86,000 Records Exposed Online hipaajournal.com · “Medical documents were also found that included diagnoses, prescriptions, and treatments, which Fowler presumed served as proof of medical grounds for missing shifts.”
Mar 14
Decrypting Encrypted files from Akira Ransomware (Linux/ESXI variant 2024) using a bunch of GPUs tinyhack.com · “The ransomware uses the current time (in nanoseconds) as a seed.”
Mar 14
HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere httptoolkit.com · “Most notably, this means the next generation of web technology is being defined & built by one minority group, and the larger majority have effectively no way to access this technology right now.”
Mar 14
Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash theregister.com · “He took off in his Mooney M20 propeller plane from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, en route to Zürich in Switzerland, but local media reports that he crashed into a cabin on Slovenia’s Velika Planina mountain, splitting the hut in two.”
Mar 14
Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook engadget.com · “An arbitrator has sided with the social media company, saying that the book’s author should stop selling and publicizing the book, which went on sale earlier this week.”
Mar 13
Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it + limit of 800 locs forum.cursor.com · “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work.”
Mar 13
In Praise of "Normal" Engineers spectrum.ieee.org · “Individual engineers don’t own software; engineering teams own software.”
Mar 13
In Memoriam: Mark Klein, AT&T Whistleblower Who Revealed NSA Mass Spying eff.org · “Mark stood up and told the truth at great personal risk to himself and his family.”
Mar 12
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino daringfireball.net · “You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit.”
Mar 12
On The Insecurity of Telecom Stacks in the Wake of Salt Typhoon soatok.blog · “To recap: An employee of SignalWire (which develops FreeSWITCH) came right out and said they would let people who aren’t paying for FreeSWITCH Advantage stay vulnerable until their regularly scheduled release (sometime in the Summer).”
Mar 12
Azure's Weakest Link? How API Connections Spill Secrets binarysecurity.no · “All API Connections must be considered insecure as long as Readers can call the backend server.”
Mar 12
Honey finally discloses that it uses affiliate codes now that Google Chrome requires it 9to5google.com · “When you use PayPal Honey, merchants may pay us affiliate commissions. We share those commissions with our users in the form of rewards.”
Mar 12
A 10x Faster TypeScript devblogs.microsoft.com · “The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage.”
Mar 11
Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users theregister.com · “I installed this toner cartridge about a month ago, with no issues. But today suddenly an error code 11 popped up which means the printer doesn’t accept/recognize the cartridge any more.”
Mar 11
$16B health agency managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn't gone well theregister.com · “The use of an Excel spreadsheet file to track and report financial performance for a NZ$28bn expenditure organisation raises significant concerns, particularly when other more appropriate systems are present on the IT landscape.”
Mar 11
AI-Generated Voice Evidence Poses Dangers in Court lawfaremedia.org · “People can no longer reliably distinguish between a real voice of someone and the person’s AI clone.”
Mar 11
Google Just Removed uBlock Origin from the Chrome Store Today! supernetworks.org · “uBlock Origin is the best browser-based content blocker available on the web today. Sadly today Google just pulled the plug on it by enforcing their new v3 manifest.”
Mar 10
Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter blog.nelhage.com · “Unfortunately, as I will document in this post, these impressive performance gains turned out to be primarily due to inadvertently working around a regression in LLVM 19.”
Mar 10
[YouTube] DRM on ALL videos with `tv` (TVHTML5) client #12563 github.com · “We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.”
Mar 10
The worst year in shutdowns: a blow to democracy and human rights in Africa accessnow.org · “From people’s movements to contentious elections, as political escalations continued to make headlines in Africa, authorities increasingly defaulted to internet shutdowns to disempower and disconnect people.”
Mar 10
Why layoffs don't work thehustle.co · “Even during bad economies, when layoffs are rampant and often more justified, the results are similar — and that’s according to Bain & Company, which, ironically, consults for firms that make cuts.”
Mar 9
Tesla Sales Fall Off A Cliff Globally, Including Germany, Australia, And China carscoops.com · “Tesla was proudly proclaiming less than a year ago that it would be selling 20 million electric vehicles annually by 2030.”
Mar 9
Do you DARE? Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty theregister.com · “If you’re having deja vu, you’re not alone: Europe has been talking about and toying with using RISC-V for supercomputing for some years, even getting far as some silicon, though turned to Arm’s architecture for its first exascale system.”
Mar 9
Stem cell therapy trial reverses "irreversible" damage to cornea newatlas.com · “By the 12-month mark, that number had increased to 11 (79%) patients.”
Mar 9
We're teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index blog.ecosia.org · “Currently, we rely on a mix of both Google and Bing libraries to provide you with answers to your searches.”
Mar 9
Feds Link $150M Cyberheist to 2022 LastPass Hacks krebsonsecurity.com · “In a court filing this week, U.S. federal agents investigating a spectacular $150 million cryptocurrency heist said they had reached the same conclusion.”
Mar 8
Undocumented commands found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices bleepingcomputer.com · “The ubiquitous ESP32 microchip made by Chinese manufacturer Espressif and used by over 1 billion units as of 2023 contains undocumented commands that could be leveraged for attacks.”
Mar 8
Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go theregister.com · “When his position was eventually terminated on September 9, 2019, the kill switch was activated and thousands of employees around the world were locked out of the network, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, it is said.”
Mar 8
VW Brings Back Physical Buttons After Admitting Touchscreens Are A Disaster carscoops.com · “We will never, ever make this mistake any more. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing any more.”
Mar 8
How a Connecticut DMV Employee Made Thousands by Selling Towed Cars propublica.org · “The DMV employee sold the Jeep to a used car dealer for $13,500. After passing through several more hands, another dealership ultimately sold it to a customer for $28,781.44.”
Mar 7
First Porn, Now Skin Cream? 'Age Verification' Bills Are Out of Control eff.org · “Age verification laws do far more than ‘protect children online’—they require the creation of a system that collects vast amounts of personal information from everyone.”
Mar 7
"Let's hire an ISIS suicide bomber to blow him up in the street!": Europe's most wanted man plotted my murder — and that of my colleague theins.press · “A jury at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, has just found six of my compatriots — citizens of Bulgaria — guilty of conspiring with the Kremlin to kidnap and possibly murder me and my colleague and friend, Roman Dobrokhotov.”
Mar 7
Microsoft is reportedly plotting a future without OpenAI techstartups.com · “OpenAI’s technology is embedded in Microsoft products, from Copilot to Bing’s AI-powered search features and Microsoft 365’s productivity tools.”
Mar 7
Suspicious Tesla Sales Surge Triggers Canadian Government Investigation motorillustrated.com · “Over a three-day period, Tesla reported selling 8,600 vehicles at four locations across the country, resulting in $43 million in government rebates.”
Mar 7
As Bangladesh's factories turn to surveillance and automation, garment workers feel the pressure restofworld.org · “Each machine could replace between one and six workers, and the largest factories surveyed anticipated cutting 22% of their workforce.”
Mar 6
How to distrust a CA without any certificate errors dadrian.io · “The Chrome distrusts of GLOBALTRUST and Entrust were both implemented using SCTNotAfter.”
Mar 6
Mistral OCR mistral.ai · “For organizations with stringent data privacy requirements, Mistral OCR offers a self-hosting option.”
Mar 6
The Evolution of IT Operations and Opsgenie atlassian.com · “On this date, access to Opsgenie will be shut off, and the product will no longer accessible.”
Mar 6
Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals tomshardware.com · “This means users can’t roll back when they discover the unwanted new ‘features’ post-update.”
Mar 5
NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to "use Apple encryption" for Barristers, Solicitors (etc…) — co-incidental with Apple lawsuit against HMG's demanding a backdoor in the same alecmuffett.com · “the politically inconvenient ADP-promoting “for barristers” document has actually been wholesale deleted from the internet, with a HTTP redirect put in place to point to the inferior “defending democracy” documents.”
Mar 5
Gardener wins case against Paddy Power over £1m prize bbc.co.uk · “When a trader puts all the risk on a consumer for its own recklessness, negligence, errors, inadequate digital services and inadequate testing, that appears onerous to me.”
Mar 5
Andrew Barto Named Co-recipient of 'Nobel Prize of Computing' for Foundational Work on AI Technology cics.umass.edu · “It carries a $1 million prize, for which Google Inc. provides the financial support, and is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the foundations of computing more than 70 years ago.”
Mar 5
NASA Successfully Acquires GPS Signals on Moon nasa.gov · “Then, at 2 a.m. EST on March 3, it was official: LuGRE acquired and tracked signals on the lunar surface for the first time ever and achieved a navigation fix — approximately 225,000 miles away from Earth.”
Mar 5
How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app theregister.com · “Leith says the DSID advertising cookie is created shortly after the user logs into their Google account – part of the Android startup process – with a tracking file linked to that account placed into the Google Play Service’s app data folder.”
Mar 4
Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying eff.org · “Rayhunter works by intercepting, storing, and analyzing the control traffic (but not user traffic, such as web requests) between the mobile hotspot Rayhunter runs on and the cell tower to which it’s connected.”
Mar 4
Cabinet moves to reverse Italy's anti-nuclear stance world-nuclear-news.org · “Italy’s Council of Ministers has approved a draft law calling for the government to adopt a series of legislative decrees to create the legal framework for the reintroduction of nuclear power, which was phased out following a referendum in 1987.”
Mar 4
Tattoos may be linked to an increased risk of cancer sciencedaily.com · “For lymphoma, the rate is nearly three times higher for the group of individuals with large tattoos compared to those without tattoos.”
Mar 4
This Linux laptop maker called me a Zombie thelibre.news · “Reddit is full of this kind of support replies after the slightest pushback from the clients.”
Mar 3
The Top 10% awealthofcommonsense.com · “Wealth inequality is only getting worse in this country and frankly I’m not sure what stops this train.”
Mar 3
Blender-Made Movie Flow Wins an Oscar at the 97th Academy Awards Ceremony 80.lv · “By winning an Academy Award, Flow is also sure to delight indie animators, proving that projects with relatively small budgets – emphasis on relatively, as Flow still cost over $3.6 million – can stand toe-to-toe with industry giants.”
Mar 3
Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress Battle Develops into a Nuclear War-Like Class Action Lawsuit gigazine.net · “Automattic intentionally disrupted WP Engine’s business by blocking access to WordPress.org’s critical services, thereby causing disruption, security risks, and economic harm.”
Mar 3
James Harrison, whose blood donations saved over 2 million babies, has died npr.org · “Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018.”
Mar 3
Firefly Lands on the Moon spacepolicyonline.com · “Powered only by solar cells, not radioisotope power sources, these small, comparatively inexpensive lunar landers are not expected to survive the lunar night.”
Mar 2
The gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives downtowndougbrown.com · “The voice coil motor controlling the head isn’t strong enough to overcome this sticky rubber, so the head just sits there until the drive’s firmware gives up on trying and spins the platter down.”
Mar 2
Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes simonwillison.net · “The moment you run LLM generated code, any hallucinated methods will be instantly obvious: you’ll get an error.”
Mar 2
Cellebrite zero-day exploit used to target phone of Serbian student activist securitylab.amnesty.org · “Since the exploits identified in this research target core Linux kernel USB drivers, the vulnerability is not limited to a particular device or vendor and could impact over a billion Android devices.”
Mar 1
Intel delays finish date again on in-progress Ohio semiconductor plants wosu.org · “The state has already disbursed $600 million in onshoring grants to the tech giant for its central Ohio venture.”
Mar 1
Efabless shuts down - Tiny Tapeout will continue tinytapeout.com · “Right now we have TT08 awaiting packaging and TT09 still in the SkyWater Technology fab. These chips represent a huge investment of time and energy from hundreds of people, and we currently don’t know if we’ll receive them.”
Mar 1
Xcode constantly phones home lapcatsoftware.com · “And all of these connections from Xcode, to every domain, require login to your Apple Developer account, so Apple is definitely receiving identifying information about you in any case.”
Mar 1
Why Can't We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices? daringfireball.net · “No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound.”
Mar 1

February 2025 119 posts

how to gain code execution on millions of people and hundreds of popular apps eva.ac · “with this, i could push auto updates to all applications using todesktop”
Feb 28
An update on our terms of use blog.mozilla.org · “The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that ‘We never sell your data’ is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of ‘sale of data’ is broad and evolving.”
Feb 28
Authorities worldwide can see more than ever, with Big Tech as their eyes proton.me · “The US government made nearly 500,000 data requests to Google and Meta — more than all the other members of the so-called 14 Eyes Alliance combined.”
Feb 28
Github scam investigation: Thousands of "mods" and "cracks" stealing your data timsh.org · “People create thousands of GitHub repositories with all sorts of things - from Roblox and Fortnite mods to ‘cracked’ FL Studio and Photoshop.”
Feb 28
Microsoft hangs up on Skype: Service to shut down May 5, 2025 techcrunch.com · “After kickstarting the market for making calls over the internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down.”
Feb 28
OpenAI unveils GPT-4.5 'Orion,' its largest AI model yet techcrunch.com · “GPT-4.5 is also very expensive to run, OpenAI admits — so expensive that the company says it’s evaluating whether to continue serving GPT-4.5 in its API in the long term.”
Feb 27
Tracking You from a Thousand Miles Away! Turning a Bluetooth Device into an Apple AirTag Without Root Privileges nroottag.github.io · “The attacker doesn’t need to be anywhere near you - they can track your location from thousands of miles away as long as there are Apple devices passing near you.”
Feb 27
Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud restofworld.org · “The payments to AWS gradually skyrocketed as the naira depreciated around 70% against the dollar between 2020 and 2024.”
Feb 27
Command & Conquer Red Alert (EA source release, GitHub) github.com · “The current state of the source code does not fully compile and will require some effort to restore it.”
Feb 27
VSCode extensions with 9 million installs pulled over security risks bleepingcomputer.com · “Microsoft removed both extensions from the VS Code marketplace and banned the developer.”
Feb 26
Amazon unveils revamped Alexa with AI features for $19.99 per month, free for Prime members nbcnewyork.com · “Alexa also remains unprofitable. Amazon has never charged for access to Alexa, instead infusing it into its lineup of smart speakers, tablets and other devices.”
Feb 26
Electricity returns to most of Chile after a sweeping blackout, but questions remain wlrn.org · “It is not tolerable that the daily lives of millions of Chileans are affected by the responsibility of one or several companies,” Boric said in his nationally televised address.
Feb 26
Signal's CEO: Then We're Leaving Sweden swedenherald.com · “The purpose of the bill – which may be passed next year – is for the police and Security Service to be able to request message history in retrospect for individuals suspected of crimes.”
Feb 25
'Hey Number 17!' 404media.co · “Y Combinator supports an AI startup that’s pitching granular machine vision surveillance of factory workers.”
Feb 25
I Went To SQL Injection Court sockpuppet.org · “Schemas are now file layouts. We lose.”
Feb 25
DigiCert: Threat of legal action to stifle Bugzilla discourse bugzilla.mozilla.org · “In bug 1910322 comment 74 DigiCert wrote, ‘We have not used a legal team as a shield against accountability.’ Contrary to this statement, I received a letter from DigiCert’s lawyers, Wilson Sonsini, regarding posts made by Sectigo’s Chief Compliance Officer in bug 1910322.”
Feb 25
Breaking into dozens of apartments in five minutes ericdaigle.ca · “So I can break into this building in about 5 minutes without attracting any attention whatsoever.”
Feb 24
Google Co-Scientist AI cracks superbug problem in two days! — because it had been fed the team's previous paper with the answer in it pivot-to-ai.com · “It turns out Co-Scientist had been fed a 2023 paper by Penadés’ team that included a version of the hypothesis. The BBC coverage failed to mention this bit.”
Feb 24
Microsoft Scraps Multiple Data Center Leases: TD Cowen broadbandbreakfast.com · “Microsoft has reportedly canceled several data center leases with U.S. operators, indicating potentially overbuilt infrastructure and unclear demand for AI services.”
Feb 24
New Zealand Company's 'Impossible-to-Hack' Security Turns Out to Be No Security at All jltee.substack.com · “He was also kind enough to lie and claim “There were few more security layers which would have made any data breach impossible anyway.” and only basic information such as database sizes was exposed.”
Feb 24
Right to Repair Laws Have Now Been Introduced in All 50 US States ifixit.com · “Manufacturers told legislators that sharing repair information would make it impossible for them to protect their trade secrets and would be dangerous to customers—so we brought in experts, shared data, and proved that repair information is not protected and changing batteries isn’t dangerous.”
Feb 24
How Decades Of Research Misconduct Stalled An Alzheimer's Cure sciencefriday.com · “The drug offers so modest a benefit that doctors and patients might not perceive any effect whatsoever.”
Feb 23
In Memoriam - OnlineSafetyAct.co.uk onlinesafetyact.co.uk · “The following sites and services have stated that the Online Safety Act 2023 is the reason for their closing, or for geo-blocking UK users.”
Feb 23
Thailand cuts power supply to Myanmar scam hubs therecord.media · “Thailand cut off power supply on Wednesday to three areas in Myanmar where online scamming hubs are concentrated.”
Feb 23
Florida Insurers Sent Billions to Affiliates While Claiming Losses: Report newsweek.com · “The report also showed between 2017 and 2019, the insurers in the study showed a net loss of $432 million and their affiliate companies showed a net income of $1.8 billion.”
Feb 23
Binned off staff, slashed stock options. What's next? Ah yes, bigger C-suite bonuses theregister.com · “The Facebook giant revealed in a government filing that its Compensation, Nominating and Governance Committee (CNGC) approved a target annual bonus increase for its top executive officers bar CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”
Feb 22
Utah Bill Aims to Make Officers Disclose AI-Written Police Reports eff.org · “S.B. 180 is unfortunately a necessary step in the right direction when it comes to regulating the rapid spread of police using generative AI to write their narrative reports for them.”
Feb 22
Who needs a sneaker bot when AI can hallucinate a win for you? eql.com · “Just like Apple AI generating fake news summaries, Yahoo AI was hallucinating the fake winner messages, presumably as a result of training their model on our old emails.”
Feb 22
Apple Pulls Encrypted iCloud Security Feature in UK Amid Government Backdoor Demands macrumors.com · “We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy,” Apple said in a statement.
Feb 21
Removing Jeff Bezos From My Bed trufflesecurity.com · “Each bed contains a full Linux-based computer. If my estimations above are correct, all of Eight Sleep engineering can take full control of that computer any time they want.”
Feb 21
Meta Says it Made Sure Not to Seed Any Pirated Books torrentfreak.com · “Plaintiffs, thus, plead no facts to show that Meta seeded Plaintiffs’ books – a claim that Meta will address at summary judgment,” Meta notes.
Feb 21
Hackers drained $1.4 billion of cryptocurrency from Bybit exchange, CEO confirms therecord.media · “The cryptocurrency exchange Bybit was hacked for more than $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum on Friday in what cybersecurity experts are calling the largest-ever theft targeting a cryptocurrency platform.”
Feb 21
The Deep Research problem ben-evans.com · “If there are mistakes in the table, it doesn’t matter how many there are - I can’t trust it.”
Feb 21
Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. propublica.org · “The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found.”
Feb 20
FAQ on Microsoft's topological qubit thing scottaaronson.blog · “Yep. Certainly that history is making some experts cautious about the new claim.”
Feb 20
We're at a crossroads matrix.org · “So unless the Foundation manages to raise $100,000 of funding by the end of March 2025, we will have to focus our resources on the critical lines of work, and consequently we will have to shut down all the remaining bridges hosted by the Matrix.org Foundation.”
Feb 20
AWS S3 SDK breaks its compatible services xuanwo.io · “The recent AWS SDK bump introduced strong integrity checksums, and broke compatibility with many S3-compatible object storages (pre-2025 Minio, Vast, Dell EC etc).”
Feb 20
Twitch caps streamers' storage at 100 hours of highlights and uploads techcrunch.com · “Some streamers have taken to social media to share their discontent with the decision, with many pointing out that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a market leader in cloud services through its AWS platform.”
Feb 20
Humane Bricks Its AI Pin as It Gets Acquired by HP for $116 Million gizmodo.com · “HP bought up Humane’s CosmOS operating system and IP, including the tech for the AI Pin, for $116 million. The sale means the end for Humane.”
Feb 19
Valve Hands the Team Fortress 2 Source Code to Modders engadget.com · “Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible,” Valve explained.
Feb 19
Signals of Trouble: Multiple Russia-Aligned Threat Actors Actively Targeting Signal Messenger cloud.google.com · “Because linking an additional device typically requires scanning a quick-response (QR) code, threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim’s account to an actor-controlled Signal instance.”
Feb 19
Should Virginia police be allowed to lie to children? wvtf.org · “I had enough to charge the juvenile delinquent for something else, but instead I told him a lie so I could get to the gun. And ultimately, that worked…”
Feb 19
The Generative AI Con wheresyoured.at · “Putting aside the hype, bluster and ungodly amounts of money, I can find no evidence that any of these apps are making anyone any real money.”
Feb 18
Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration! cea.fr · “This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously.”
Feb 18
Among world's top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds chemistryworld.com · “Many are producing hundreds of papers each year and gaining hundreds to thousands of new collaborators annually, according to recent analysis by researchers at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia.”
Feb 18
Delta flight from Minnesota crash lands upside down in Toronto, photos show foxweather.com · “When planes land with the crosswind, when they point the nose of the planes, it’s called a crab, into the wind, the plane tracks straight.”
Feb 17
Cancer-free for 18 years: CAR-T therapy sets new milestone in neuroblastoma treatment news-medical.net · “The patient who achieved more than 18 years of complete remission after the infusion never required any other cancer treatment.”
Feb 17
searchcode.com's SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours boyter.org · “searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably one of the largest in the world, at least for a public facing website.”
Feb 17
WinterBreak kindlemodding.org · “Wait around 30 seconds, and your Kindle will spew text and restart the GUI.”
Feb 17
Critics say new Google rules put profits over privacy bbc.com · “By explicitly allowing a tracking technique that they previously described as incompatible with user control, Google highlights its ongoing prioritisation of profits over privacy,” said Lena Cohen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Feb 16
"A calculator app? Anyone could make that." chadnauseam.com · “Floating point numbers are imprecise - they cannot represent 0.3 or 10^100.”
Feb 16
How I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs nyanpasu64.gitlab.io · “I traced this behavior to an amdgpu driver power/memory management bug, which took over a year to brainstorm and implement solutions for.”
Feb 16
New SF public health chief was part of notorious McKinsey opioid-marketing operation sfstandard.com · “The records show that Tsai — who worked for McKinsey from 2007 to 2015, according to his LinkedIn page — helped develop a marketing strategy for tramadol sold under the brand name Ultram ER, an effort that involved cultivating relationships with doctors who became prolific prescribers.”
Feb 15
Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find techxplore.com · “If you spend $1 on carbon capture instead of on wind, water, and solar, you are increasing CO2, air pollution, energy requirements, energy costs, pipelines, and total social costs…”
Feb 15
Nintendo Obtains New Anti-Palworld Patent and Seeks Even More gamerant.com · “Nintendo has secured what appears to be an anti-Palworld patent in the United States.”
Feb 15
Dust from Car Brakes More Harmful than Exhaust, Study Finds e360.yale.edu · “Surprisingly, newer brake pads proved more harmful than older ones, which were made with asbestos.”
Feb 15
We Were Wrong About GPUs fly.io · “The biggest problem: developers don’t want GPUs. They don’t even want AI/ML models. They want LLMs.”
Feb 14
Olson v. County of Grant (opinion, No. 23-35365) govinfo.gov · “This appeal presents a scenario in which agencies from two different state jurisdictions shared a defendant’s sensitive phone data without consent, without a warrant, and without any pending charges, or even an investigation by the out-of-state agency requesting access to the data.”
Feb 14
Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself theregister.com · “Apple is feeling the heat over its acclaimed iPhone privacy policy after a German regulator’s review of iOS tracking consent alleged that the tech giant exempted itself from the rules it enforces on third-party developers.”
Feb 14
3DBenchy Sets Sail Into The Public Domain hackaday.com · “According to NTI, the removal of these derived models was not requested by NTI, but by a third-party report, unbeknownst to NTI or the original creator of the model.”
Feb 14
Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead marcan.st · “Linux started out as a hobbyist project, but it has well and truly lost its hobbyist roots.”
Feb 13
Download and Transfer for Kindle books discontinued on Feb 26 goodereader.com · “Starting February 26, 2025, the “Download & Transfer via USB” option will no longer be available.”
Feb 13
Introducing Privacy Pass authentication for Kagi Search blog.kagi.com · “When we cannot track you even if we wanted to, that’s genuine privacy.”
Feb 13
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji paulbutler.org · “Variation selector sequences are a way to do this that survives most copy/pastes and allows arbitrary data density.”
Feb 13
Leaking the email of any YouTube user for $10,000 brutecat.com · “There wasn’t any server-side limit to the length of a recording name.”
Feb 12
Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study theregister.com · “As long as countries will put their data - all of it - in a single place we can use AI to help manage the care of all of the patients and the population at large,” Ellison said
Feb 12
White Hat Hackers Expose Iridium Satellite Security Flaws spectrum.ieee.org · “With US $400 worth of equipment and freely available software, you can start right away intercepting Iridium communications in an area with a diameter of hundreds, sometimes even thousands of kilometers…”
Feb 12
Average CPU performance falls for first time in over 20 years according to PassMark club386.com · “Since we are still at the beginning of 2025, these only represent 41 days worth of submitted benchmarks.”
Feb 12
The Prophet of Parking worksinprogress.news · “One survey of the literature suggests that drivers in the typical American city spend an average of eight minutes looking for parking at the end of each trip.”
Feb 12
How Musk's $97.4B bid could gum up OpenAI's for-profit conversion techcrunch.com · “With his bid, Musk has signaled there’s at least one group of investors willing to pay a sizable premium for OpenAI’s nonprofit wing. That puts the board of directors in a tight spot.”
Feb 11
Federal Judge Rules Legal Research Startup ROSS Infringed Westlaw's Copyrights, Rejecting Fair Use Defense lawnext.com · “Ross was using Thomson Reuters’s headnotes as AI data to create a legal research tool to compete with Westlaw,” Judge Bibas wrote.
Feb 11
Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop tech.slashdot.org · “In a move that has left drivers both frustrated and bewildered, Stellantis has introduced full-screen pop-up ads on its infotainment systems.”
Feb 11
GeForce RTX 5090 Power Connectors Are Melting Now: What You Should Know hothardware.com · “Aw, crap. Here we go again.”
Feb 11
Tesla Cybertruck Drives Itself Into a Pole, Owner Says 'Thank You Tesla' thedrive.com · “It failed to merge out of a lane that was ending (there was no one on my left) and made no attempt to slow down or turn until it had already hit the curb.”
Feb 11
Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture quantamagazine.org · “You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!”
Feb 10
A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google pcgamer.com · “Both are valuable to Google, with the tracking cookies generated by the former potentially contributing to ad targeting, and data from the latter being applied toward AI model training, either internally at Google or sold to another company.”
Feb 10
Bank CEO: Retract your debanking piece? Me: No. kalzumeus.com · “McCauley has failed to identify a single fact alleged in Debanking which is incorrect, or any other malfeasance.”
Feb 10
To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell myteslaexperience.com · “Tesla acknowledges all faults in the vehicle (except for battery losses, a fact on which it has not yet formally commented).”
Feb 10
Google's Super Bowl Ad Shows Off Its Gemini AI—Except It's Wrong vice.com · “The Wisconsin-focused spot showed a farmer using the tool to write a product description, mentioning that gouda cheese comprises 50 to 60 percent of global cheese consumption.”
Feb 9
How Intel ruined an Israeli startup it bought for $2B—and lost the AI race calcalistech.com · “At Habana, we could make a decision in a five-minute hallway conversation. At Intel, that same decision required three meetings with dozens of participants, and nothing moved forward…”
Feb 9
Bad Smart Watch Auth sprocketfox.io · “Anyone can connect to the device at any time and start issuing commands. You can pull activity data, sleep data, heart rate data, menstrual data.”
Feb 9
Three Observations blog.samaltman.com · “The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.”
Feb 9
Is NixOS truly reproducible? luj.fr · “Our most important finding is that the reproducibility rate in nixpkgs has increased steadily from 69% in 2017 to about 91% in April 2023.”
Feb 9
February 2025: Starlink in the Falkland Islands – a National Emergency situation? openfalklands.com · “Because Sure International holds an exclusive monopoly telecommunications licence, Starlink’s use in the islands is currently illegal.”
Feb 8
The UK's Demands for Apple to Break Encryption Is an Emergency for Us All eff.org · “There is no technological compromise between strong encryption that protects the data and a mechanism to allow the government special access to this data.”
Feb 8
Supersizing vehicles offers minimal safety benefits — but substantial dangers iihs.org · “For vehicles that weigh more than the fleet average, there’s hardly any decrease in risk for occupants associated with additional poundage.”
Feb 8
VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas fly.io · “Unlike Tramp, which lives off the land on the remote connection, VSCode mounts a full-scale invasion: it runs a Bash snippet stager that downloads an agent, including a binary installation of Node.”
Feb 8
We are destroying software antirez.com · “We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.”
Feb 8
Cloudflare incident on February 6, 2025 blog.cloudflare.com · “The incident occurred due to human error and insufficient validation safeguards during a routine abuse remediation for a report about a phishing site hosted on R2.”
Feb 7
Cities Can Cost Effectively Start Their Own Utilities Now kevin.burke.dev · “The average PG&E electricity charge now starts at 40 cents per kilowatt hour and goes up from there.”
Feb 7
Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer phoronix.com · “I no longer have any faith left in the kernel development process or community management approach.”
Feb 7
Announcing the Data.gov Archive lil.law.harvard.edu · “The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov.”
Feb 7
Fake VS Code Extension on NPM Spreads Multi-Stage Malware mend.io · “This stage involves downloading and executing a ScreenConnect installer, which is typically known as a legitimate remote desktop application.”
Feb 7
High levels of microplastics found in human brains thenewlede.org · “The median concentration in brain samples collected from people who died in 2024 was nearly 5,000 micrograms of plastic per gram of brain tissue, tallying almost 0.5% by weight.”
Feb 6
Subway crime plummets as ridership jumps significantly in 2025 in congestion pricing era amny.com · “In the first month of 2025, there were 147 reported crimes on the subway down from 231 last year—resulting in 36% fewer crimes committed on the rails this year.”
Feb 6
A Pinch of Salt Boosts Aluminum Batteries spectrum.ieee.org · “The researcher’s tests demonstrated that the resulting battery design can have an extremely long life, with the battery retaining 99 percent of its original capacity after 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.”
Feb 6
Introducing Fair Pricing kagi.com · “In months where you don’t utilize any searches on your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month.”
Feb 5
S1: The $6 R1 Competitor? timkellogg.me · “They used 16 NVIDIA H100s for 26 minutes per training run, that equates to around $6.”
Feb 5
Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page theregister.com · “For the past three years, Microsoft documented a way to run Windows 11 on PCs that lack Trusted Platform Module 2.0 hardware – but that workaround has now disappeared from its help page.”
Feb 5
Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies On YouTube? tedium.co · “Over the last month, across five different YouTube channels, the studio has released more than 30 full movies. On YouTube. For free. Without any sort of gating.”
Feb 5
mt32-pi README github.com · “My mental health has been in decline as a direct result of this behavior; the joy of working on this project has pretty much gone. There is nothing to be gained from putting time and hard work into it any more.”
Feb 5
Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website techcrunch.com · “The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled ‘applications we will not pursue,’ which was still included as recently as last week.”
Feb 4
How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop gamechops.substack.com · “By flooding its once converted editorial playlists with hastily-assembled royalty-free music and AI generated slop, Spotify was able to quietly displace real artists to make more money for itself.”
Feb 4
Freedesktop And Alpine Linux Looking For New Hosting hackaday.com · “Alpine is not a project you host lightly, with a monthly transfer of about 800TB.”
Feb 4
Vanguard Announces Largest Ever Expense Ratio Reduction corporate.vanguard.com · “The reductions will save Vanguard’s investors more than $350 million in 2025 alone, the largest annual expense ratio reduction in Vanguard’s nearly 50-year history.”
Feb 4
The government had been planning it for 7 years, beavers built the dam in two days and saved them $1 million voxnews.al · “The beavers saved us 30 million Czech crowns. They built the dams without any project documentation and for free…”
Feb 4
Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek 404media.co · “The Republican Senator from Missouri Josh Hawley has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to import or export artificial intelligence products to and from China, meaning someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese developed AI model like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both, should such a law pass.”
Feb 3
Former UIHC administrator sentenced 12 years for 30-year-long identity theft scheme dailyiowan.com · “Since 1988, Keirans led a productive life, obtaining a high-paying job at UIHC, marrying, and raising a son, all while living under the stolen identity of William Woods, a sporadically transient man who Keirans had briefly worked with at a hot dog stand in New Mexico.”
Feb 3
AMD: Microcode Signature Verification Vulnerability github.com · “The vulnerability is that the CPU uses an insecure hash function in the signature validation for microcode updates.”
Feb 3
AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU techcrunch.com · “They could be on the hook for up to €35 million (~$36 million), or 7% of their annual revenue from the prior fiscal year, whichever is greater.”
Feb 3
What really happens inside a dating app blog.luap.info · “Likes received have a positive impact, but it is very light, which is a good thing from a monetization standpoint (you can make guys pay and not show them to anyone; they will keep paying, just a bit less than if they received likes.”
Feb 3
Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads timsh.org · “This is the worst thing about these data trades that happen constantly around the world - each small part of it is (or seems) legit. It’s the bigger picture that makes them look ugly.”
Feb 2
Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations quantamagazine.org · “They might not be able to reason beyond what they have seen during the training data for hard tasks,” Dziri said. “Or at least they do an approximation, and that approximation can be wrong.”
Feb 2
Costa Rican Supermarket Wins Trademark Battle Against Nintendo ticotimes.net · “We refuted all of Nintendo’s arguments, demonstrating their errors and our rightful claim,” Jiménez explained.
Feb 2
Tiny vanes glued to planes promise big savings for US Air Force newatlas.com · “Literally gluing a few microvanes to the rear fuselage of a C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane can result in fuel savings in the tens of millions of dollars.”
Feb 2
This is a public service announcement to never ever use Oracle mastodon.de · “I wasn’t told that my account was disabled. I didn’t receive an E-Mail or anything.”
Feb 1
Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge theregister.com · “Dell justified the policy change by asserting a thirty-second in-person conversation can replace an email discussion that goes on for hours or days and by noting that specific groups within the company – sales, manufacturing, and engineering – have already adjusted to being in the office five days per week.”
Feb 1
Over 90% of U.S. airport towers are understaffed, data shows cbsnews.com · “Only one air traffic control worker was managing the helicopters and some planes from the Reagan National Airport tower at the time of the collision, a job normally done by two people, two sources told CBS News Thursday.”
Feb 1
Hell Is Overconfident Developers Writing Encryption Code soatok.blog · “Just because you outsource your block cipher implementations to your programming language’s crypto module doesn’t mean you’re not rolling your own crypto.”
Feb 1

January 2025 123 posts

Apple Files Emergency Motion in Google Search Antitrust Case adweek.com · “If Apple’s appeal is not resolved until during or after the remedies trial, Apple may well be forced to stand mute at trial, as a mere spectator, while the government pursues an extreme remedy that targets Apple by name and would prohibit any commercial arrangement between Apple and Google for a decade.”
Jan 31
The Government Says Money Isn't Property—So It Can Take Yours reason.com · “Money is not necessarily ‘property’ for constitutional purposes,” the government’s brief declared—putting the very idea of property in scare quotes.
Jan 31
When everything becomes a profit center… a.wholelottanothing.org · “But as Americans, we basically have no real rights to privacy, so my home address showed up in the PulsePoint logs and then a guy from Servpro read it and promptly arrived at my door hawking his services.”
Jan 31
FBI, Dutch Police Disrupt 'Manipulaters' Phishing Gang krebsonsecurity.com · “The core Manipulaters product is Heartsender, a spam delivery service whose homepage openly advertised phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies.”
Jan 31
Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries gizmodo.com · “Google has likely trained Gemini to avoid repeating expletives, so it simply is disabled in search when a curse word is present in order to avoid that.”
Jan 31
California Law Enforcement Misused State Databases More Than 7,000 Times in 2023 eff.org · “The sheriff’s department’s 6,789 abuses made up a majority of the record 7,275 violations across California that were reported to the state Department of Justice (CADOJ) in 2023 regarding the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS).”
Jan 30
Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence vatican.va · “No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.”
Jan 30
The Slow Death of OCSP feistyduck.com · “As it stands today, OCSP is not making anyone more secure. Browsers are either not checking it or are implementing it in a way that provides no security benefits.”
Jan 30
Google offering 'voluntary exit' for employees working on Pixel, Android 9to5google.com · “The Platforms & Devices team is offering a voluntary exit program that provides US-based Googlers working on this team the ability to voluntarily leave the company with a severance package.”
Jan 30
German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours tomshardware.com · “It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.”
Jan 29
Wiz Research Uncovers Exposed DeepSeek Database Leaking Sensitive Information, Including Chat History wiz.io · “Within minutes, we found a publicly accessible ClickHouse database linked to DeepSeek, completely open and unauthenticated, exposing sensitive data.”
Jan 29
Google Pixel 4a's old firmware is gone, trapping users on the buggy battery update androidcentral.com · “To add insult to injury, Google wiped the older firmware as part of the update process, so there’s no official way to go back to the previous version.”
Jan 29
California's AG Tells AI Companies Practically Everything They're Doing Might Be Illegal gizmodo.com · “California’s memo makes clear that companies that use AI to create “deepfakes, chatbots, and voice clones that appear to represent people, events, and utterances that never existed” could fall under the category of “deceptive” and, thus, be considered a breach of state law.”
Jan 29
ESA actively monitoring near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 esa.int · “As of 29 January 2025, ESA estimates that the probability that asteroid 2024 YR4 may impact Earth on 22 December 2032 is 1.2%.”
Jan 29
SLAP and FLOP predictors.fail · “If the LAP guesses wrong, it causes the CPU to perform arbitrary computations on out-of-bounds data, which should never have been accessed to begin with, under speculative execution.”
Jan 28
Nvidia loses $589 billion in market cap — broad stock plunge triggered by DeepSeek AI release tomshardware.com · “Aside from using fewer GPU hours to train, the H800 chips that DeepSeek used to train its LLM have less performance than the H100 due to U.S. export restrictions.”
Jan 28
Facial Recognition Backfires on Police in Ohio Murder Case gizmodo.com · “The only evidence pointing to Tolbert was a report from Clearview AI, which explicitly said in a disclaimer at the bottom that the results ‘are to be treated as investigative leads and should not be solely relied upon for making an arrest.’”
Jan 28
FTC Takes Action Against GoDaddy for Alleged Lax Data Security for Its Website Hosting Services ftc.gov · “Millions of companies, particularly small businesses, rely on web hosting providers like GoDaddy to secure the websites that they and their customers rely on.”
Jan 28
Facebook ban distrowatch.com · “Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook’s internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being “cybersecurity threats”.”
Jan 27
Brazil bans Worldcoin from giving crypto for eye scans cointelegraph.com · “offering crypto as compensation could compromise the validity of user consent for collecting sensitive biometric data.”
Jan 27
Kansas' tuberculosis outbreak is one of the largest in the U.S. since the 1950s kcur.org · “We do expect to find more, but we’re hoping the ‘more’ that we find is latent TB and not active.”
Jan 27
Sweden seizes ship suspected of Baltic Sea cable sabotage therecord.media · “Swedish authorities seized and boarded a ship on Sunday just hours after it was suspected of sabotaging a communications cable in the country’s exclusive economic zone beneath the Baltic Sea.”
Jan 27
23 percent of Teslas are dumped at the checkpoint in Denmark boostedmagazine.com · “A total of 4,668 Tesla Model 3s of the 2020 model year were inspected between January 1 and November 21, 2024, and of those, 1,051 failed.”
Jan 27
French Police Free Kidnapped Ledger Executive After Day-Long Ordeal moneycheck.com · “The attackers struck in darkness, forcing their way into Balland’s residence in the Cher region of central France during the early morning hours of January 21.”
Jan 26
Astronomers just deleted an asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster astronomy.com · “This incident, along with previous NEOCP postings of the WMAP spacecraft, highlights the deplorable state of availability of positional information on distant artificial objects.”
Jan 26
No one is disrupting banks popularfintech.com · “despite almost 30 years of trying, Fintech companies have not disrupted banks. At least, not the big ones.”
Jan 26
'First AI software engineer' is bad at its job theregister.com · “Tasks that seemed straightforward often took days rather than hours, with Devin getting stuck in technical dead-ends or producing overly complex, unusable solutions,” the researchers explain in their report.
Jan 25
Hacker infects 18,000 "script kiddies" with fake malware builder bleepingcomputer.com · “A trojanized version of the XWorm RAT builder has been weaponized and propagated,” reads the CloudSEK report.
Jan 25
Texas Is Enforcing Its State Data Privacy Law. So Should Other States. eff.org · “The Texas Attorney General’s office estimates that 45 million Americans, including those in Texas, unwittingly downloaded this software that collected their information, including location information, without notice or consent.”
Jan 25
Caltrain's Electric Fleet More Efficient than Expected caltrain.com · “Caltrain is running its service on 100% renewable energy and is returning nearly a quarter of that energy to the grid,” said Michelle Bouchard, Caltrain Executive Director.
Jan 25
PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory hallofdreams.org · “By taking the highly anomalous post IDs and filtering out the MathHelpBoards import, and filtering out instances which seem plausibly close to their actual post times, we get an estimated 115,000 posts written by LLMs and attributed to humans.”
Jan 24
almost_pwned.md gist.github.com · “The thing that’s crazy is that if I followed the 2 “best practices” of verifying the phone number + getting them to send an email to you from a legit domain, I would have been compromised.”
Jan 24
A very Chicago gamble bitsaboutmoney.com · “And so I feel some sense of civic duty, as a Chicagoan, taxpayer, and reasonably financially sophisticated person, to say the following publicly: What the hell, Chicago.”
Jan 24
Updated: We Need To Talk About Docker Hub linuxserver.io · “We’re now 3 months on from our renewal submission, with zero communication from Docker, an account that is no longer part of the DSOS program, and no obvious way to speak to a human about it.”
Jan 24
Hacking Subaru: Tracking and Controlling Cars via the STARLINK Admin Panel samcurry.net · “Using the access provided by the vulnerability, an attacker who only knew the victim’s last name and ZIP code, email address, phone number, or license plate could have done the following:”
Jan 23
Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft 972mag.com · “Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone, the Israeli Defense Ministry spent $10 million to purchase 19,000 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.”
Jan 23
CVSS is dead to us daniel.haxx.se · “After my pull request it took less than ninety minutes for them to update the curl records. Without explanation, with no reference to my PR, they now apparently consider the issue to be CVSS 3.4.”
Jan 23
Shifting Cyber Norms: Microsoft security POST-ing to you berthub.eu · “Not only is Microsoft transgressing an important norm here, but as far as I can tell, they also didn’t tell anyone about this or warn us in any way.”
Jan 23
More Than 40% of Postdocs Don't Stay in Academia insidehighered.com · “The study found that 41 percent of postdocs end up leaving academia, at least in part because there aren’t enough faculty positions for them.”
Jan 23
MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed for Years krebsonsecurity.com · “The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals.”
Jan 22
VICTORY! Federal Court (Finally) Rules Backdoor Searches of 702 Data Unconstitutional eff.org · “In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US person’s 702 data.”
Jan 22
The FTC's Ban on GM and OnStar Selling Driver Data Is a Good First Step eff.org · “In reality, no consumer knowingly agrees to let their carmaker sell their driving data to other companies.”
Jan 22
C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us geldata.com · “And that’s how we ended up with a crash, caused by unsafe-free Rust code badly interacting with the use of libc elsewhere in the program.”
Jan 22
How shutdown Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear fast sfgate.com · “Startups burn through cash as they skyrocket in size and ambition, accumulating outrageous perks and office equipment along the way. Then they crash to Earth, with nothing but their private planes or massive 3D printers to pad the impact.”
Jan 22
Unique 0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord and hundreds of platform gist.github.com · “Signal instantly dismissed my report, saying it wasn’t their responsibility and it was up to users to hide their identity”
Jan 21
Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber face calls for app transparency personneltoday.com · “Instead, you are automating exploitation – leveraging black-box algorithms to make decisions about de-activation, work allocation and pay without sufficient explanation, stripping workers of the ability to understand and challenge those decisions.”
Jan 21
Calm Tech Certification "Rewards" Less Distracting Tech spectrum.ieee.org · “A lot of technology is not using our peripheral attention, but instead our primary attention, which makes it tiring and difficult to use it,” says Case.
Jan 21
A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War spectrum.ieee.org · “It would be up to a top-secret satellite program called Parcae to help keep the Cold War from suddenly toggling to hot.”
Jan 21
DeepSeek-R1 github.com · “Notably, it is the first open research to validate that reasoning capabilities of LLMs can be incentivized purely through RL, without the need for SFT.”
Jan 20
Authors Seek Meta's Torrent Client Logs and Seeding Data in AI Piracy Probe torrentfreak.com · “By downloading through the bit torrent protocol, Meta knew it was facilitating further copyright infringement by acting as a distribution point for other users of pirated books…”
Jan 20
Bambu Connect's Authentication X.509 Certificate And Private Key Extracted hackaday.com · “The Bambu Connect app is a fairly low-effort Electron-based affair, with some attempt at obfuscation and encryption, but not enough to keep prying eyes out.”
Jan 20
I got a heat pump, and my energy bill went up! heatpumped.org · “My total energy bill more than doubled! This is not uncommon feedback to hear from homeowners after installing a heat pump, but there’s more to the story.”
Jan 20
meemi's Shortform lesswrong.com · “The mathematicians creating the problems for FrontierMath were not (actively) communicated to about funding from OpenAI.”
Jan 19
Why is Git Autocorrect too fast for Formula One drivers? blog.gitbutler.com · “This means that setting help.autocorrect to 1 logically means “wait 100ms (1 decisecond) before continuing”.”
Jan 19
The PC is Dead: It's Time to Bring Back Personal Computing vintagecomputing.com · “Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms the personal computer once promised, effectively ending the PC era for most tech consumers.”
Jan 19
UK's elite hardware talent is being wasted josef.cn · “This isn’t just wage disparity. It’s misallocation of human capital on a national scale.”
Jan 19
Amazon's AI crawler is making my git server unstable xeiaso.net · “It’s futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more.”
Jan 18
Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search techcrunch.com · “That’s no small number at Google scale. Google processes around 8.5 billion searches per day, so one can assume that millions of people performing searches through Google aren’t using JavaScript.”
Jan 18
Windows BitLocker -- Screwed without a Screwdriver neodyme.io · “Thanks to a bug discovered by Rairii in August 2022, attackers can extract your disk encryption key on Windows’ default ‘Device Encryption’ setup.”
Jan 18
Scaling to millions of users requires Synapse Pro element.io · “However it is not remotely designed or intended for use by commercial Matrix hosting providers to serve huge nation-scale deployments such as public healthcare insurance companies, and it will fail when used at this scale.”
Jan 18
No, you can't use your $6,299.00 Camera as a Webcam. That will be $5 romanzipp.com · “Canon will happily take your credit card for you to pay a small monthly price of $4.99 per month or even a discounted $49.99 per year!”
Jan 17
Bypassing disk encryption on systems with automatic TPM2 unlock oddlama.org · “Most TPM2 unlock setups fail to verify the LUKS identity of the decrypted partition.”
Jan 17
Let's talk about AI and end-to-end encryption blog.cryptographyengineering.com · “Once a sufficiently-powerful general-purpose agent has been deployed on your phone, the only question that remains is who is given access to talk to it.”
Jan 17
So You Want to Build Your Own Data Center blog.railway.com · “And not only is it rare that we understand why things break upstream, but also despite multi-million dollar annual spend, we get about as much support from them as you would spending $100.”
Jan 17
No calls keygen.sh · “One day, I woke up and out of frustration, I nuked the ‘book a call’ button from my pricing page.”
Jan 16
No billionaires at FOSDEM drewdevault.com · “Dorsey is presumably being platformed in Janson because his blockchain bullshit company is a main sponsor of FOSDEM this year.”
Jan 16
Announcing Six Day and IP Address Certificate Options in 2025 letsencrypt.org · “Unfortunately, certificate revocation doesn’t work very well. This means that certificates with compromised keys (or other issues) may continue to be used until they expire.”
Jan 16
Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to get around broadcast restrictions crikey.com.au · “Tennis Australia’s director of innovation Machar Reid said the technology used 12 cameras tracking 29 skeletal points that are stitched together to create the reproduction on a two-minute delay.”
Jan 16
A Personal Note From Our Founder hindenburgresearch.com · “Nearly 100 individuals have been charged civilly or criminally by regulators at least in part through our work, including billionaires and oligarchs. We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking.”
Jan 15
Google Workspace business users getting full Gemini experience, price increasing 9to5google.com · “Previously, Google charged an additional $20+ per user/month for Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Meet, and other Workspace apps. The full Gemini experience is now coming to Google Workspace business users as part of a price increase.”
Jan 15
Nevada Judge to Nevada Cops: You Can't Use This Loophole To Get Around Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform reason.com · “The local department gets up to 80 percent of the forfeiture proceeds, and the rest goes into a Justice Department pool that is doled out to other participating departments around the country.”
Jan 15
Flights delayed by SpaceX's falling rocket debris techcrunch.com · “SpaceX chose the southern Indian Ocean as its reentry zone because of its remote location. But the location is very relevant to Qantas: It falls within its route from Sydney to Johannesburg.”
Jan 15
Millions of Accounts Vulnerable due to Google's OAuth Flaw trufflesecurity.com · “Here’s the problem: Google’s OAuth login doesn’t protect against someone purchasing a failed startup’s domain and using it to re-create email accounts for former employees.”
Jan 14
1 in 5 Online Job Postings Are Either Fake or Never Filled, Study Finds gizmodo.com · “The Wall Street Journal cites internal data from the hiring platform Greenhouse that shows one in five online job postings—or between 18% and 22% of jobs advertised—are either fake or never filled.”
Jan 14
Making an Intersection Unsafe for Pedestrians to Save Seconds for Drivers collegetowns.org · “One of the most frustrating things is that the change only saved seconds for drivers.”
Jan 14
in the belly of the MrBeast kevinmunger.substack.com · “The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself.”
Jan 14
Massive data breach exposes precise locations for users of many popular apps 9to5mac.com · “Millions of pieces of precise location data have been released, showing users’ most visited locations such as their home, workplace, and more.”
Jan 13
Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting Cursor.com sourcecodered.com · “The user who published the NPM package uses a snyk.io email address for the Snyk Security Labs team.”
Jan 13
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch theverge.com · “And when that end date rolls around, he’ll be granted a severance of $1,875,000.”
Jan 13
UW student received academic hold for course swap app edscoop.com · “But school administrators said the tool violated a UW registration policy pertaining to the use of automated tools for enrollment.”
Jan 13
Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform theregister.com · “The CEO preferred not to enumerate the increase precisely however The Register understands it exceeded 500 percent.”
Jan 13
Backdooring Your Backdoors - Another $20 Domain, More Governments labs.watchtowr.com · “Put simply - we have been hijacking backdoors (that were reliant on now abandoned infrastructure and/or expired domains) that themselves existed inside backdoors, and have since been watching the results flood in.”
Jan 12
Right to Root Access medhir.com · “Locked devices also allow companies to restrict who is and is not allowed to repair hardware.”
Jan 12
Adobe's Generative AI Jumps The Shark, Adds Bitcoin to Bird Photo petapixel.com · “Generative Remove and Generative Fill have become so unreliable that some members of the PetaPixel staff have stopped using it entirely.”
Jan 12
The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience surfingcomplexity.blog · “Rather, it was the system behavior that emerged from clients downloading the new version that led to the outage.”
Jan 12
Matt Mullenweg to deactivate WordPress contributor accounts over alleged fork plans techcrunch.com · “I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.
Jan 11
World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject eso.org · “The proximity of the AES Andes industrial megaproject to Paranal poses a critical risk to the most pristine night skies on the planet,” highlighted ESO Director General, Xavier Barcons.
Jan 11
TSMC's Arizona Fab 21 is already making 4nm chips — yield and quality reportedly on par with Taiwan fabs tomshardware.com · “For the first time ever in our country’s history, we are making leading-edge 4nm chips on American soil, American workers — on par in yield and quality with Taiwan,” Raimondo told Reuters.
Jan 11
Homomorphic Encryption in iOS 18 boehs.org · “With that being said, technical understanding is no substitute for consent, which should have been requested by Apple along with a proper explanation.”
Jan 11
Starlink is now cheaper than leading internet provider in some African countries restofworld.org · “In at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available, a monthly Starlink subscription is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider.”
Jan 10
Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01 rodneybrooks.com · “The astute reader will note that this is the 11th year in a row that the CEO of Tesla has made this prediction of the same milestone happening the next year. We can admire the consistency.”
Jan 10
Oracle refuses to yield JavaScript trademark, Deno Land says infoworld.com · “Deno Land also accused Oracle of committing fraud in its trademark renewal efforts in 2019 by submitting screen captures of the website of JavaScript runtime Node.js, even though Node.js was not affiliated with Oracle.”
Jan 10
Reversible Computing Escapes the Lab spectrum.ieee.org · “The 4,000x energy-efficiency improvement is on Vaire’s road map but probably 10 or 15 years out.”
Jan 10
WorstFit: Unveiling Hidden Transformers in Windows ANSI! blog.orange.tw · “Curl said that this is a Windows feature and there are no plans to fix it.”
Jan 9
You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase consumer.org.nz · “Customers are presented with three subscription options – their current plan, the cheaper “Classic” plan and a “Basic” OneDrive-only plan. Customers aren’t told about this option anywhere else.”
Jan 9
Quickwit joins Datadog quickwit.io · “We will be heads down building a new product with Datadog, so to ensure our open-source community can continue on, we will soon release a new version of Quickwit under the Apache License 2.0.”
Jan 9
VLC tops 6 billion downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles techcrunch.com · “VLC media player, the popular open source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system.”
Jan 9
How We Cracked a 512-Bit DKIM Key for Less Than $8 in the Cloud dmarcchecker.app · “Three decades ago, breaking a 512-bit RSA public key was a feat achievable only with a supercomputer. Today, it’s possible to do so in just a few hours for less than US$8 on a cloud server.”
Jan 8
Los Angeles wildfires force tens of thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed theregister.com · “Some 400,000 residents are without power, and water pressure needed to fight the blazes is reportedly failing, with hydrants said to be running dry.”
Jan 8
White House unveils Cyber Trust Mark program for consumer devices nextgov.com · “We want to signal and prime the pump with our own major tech purchases of the U.S. government that this is the way we move the internet of things market to be more secure,” she said.
Jan 8
More Speech and Fewer Mistakes about.fb.com · “We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program.”
Jan 7
A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew krebsonsecurity.com · “In essence, the voice phishers are using an automated Apple phone support line to send notifications from Apple and to trick people into thinking they’re really talking with Apple.”
Jan 7
Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers pcworld.com · “If you can’t beat Google, trick your users into thinking that they’re using Google.”
Jan 7
Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer' techcrunch.com · “It’s a cloud computing platform that sits on your desk.”
Jan 7
They squandered the holy grail xeiaso.net · “This is the holy grail for remotely attested trusted compute.”
Jan 6
'Browser extension that lets you earn money in exchange for watching ads' violates GPL by using uBlock Origin code gigazine.net · “Pie Adblock is not an open source project”
Jan 6
Meta Deletes AI-Generated Accounts After Backlash petapixel.com · “Meta has deleted some of the AI-generated users created for Facebook and Instagram after a severe backlash over the existence of the accounts.”
Jan 6
Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job jessitron.com · “Shipping features from the roadmap is a chunk of our core job. It shouldn’t usually be in our OKRs.”
Jan 6
World's First MIDI Shellcode psi3.ru · “I gained remote code execution via MIDI messages to trick my synth into playing Bad Apple on its LCD.”
Jan 5
You wouldn't download an AI altayakkus.substack.com · “Many apps are starting to integrate AI models directly on the device.”
Jan 5
Amund's note on home server security raniseth.com · “This also meant that it was exposed to the internet, with open ports in the router firewall and everything.”
Jan 5
Self-driving 1993 Volvo 940 (part 1: actuators) practicapp.com · “the car needs to be at least 20 years old, and with a day value of less than €1000.”
Jan 4
In Colorado, a marriage of solar energy and farming provides a model for a more sustainable future ksjd.org · “The farm’s 3,276 solar panels generate enough electricity to power approximately 300 homes.”
Jan 4
One Dog v. the Windows 3.1 Graphics Stack wuffs.org · “Entering full-screen mode and then returning to the Windows GUI will leave you with a corrupted screen.”
Jan 4
Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”? minimaxir.com · “After benchmarking, the algorithm is extremely fast, resulting in about 6 milliseconds a run, or a 100x speedup.”
Jan 3
Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet den.dev · “We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere.”
Jan 3
What we learned copying all the best code assistants blog.val.town · “Live by the fast follow; die by the fast follow.”
Jan 3
iTerm2 3.5.11 critical security release iterm2.com · “A bug in the SSH integration feature caused input and output to be logged to a file on the remote host.”
Jan 2
U.S. appeals court strikes down FCC's net neutrality rules tvtechnology.com · “The rules require broadband operators to treat all internet traffic equally and banned them from giving preferential treatment to some sites by speeding up or slowing down consumer access.”
Jan 2
The GPU, not the TPM, is the root of hardware DRM mjg59.dreamwidth.org · “While the FSF has been focusing on TPMs, GPU vendors have quietly deployed all of this technology without the FSF complaining at all.”
Jan 2
Databases in 2024: A Year in Review cs.cmu.edu · “In March 2024, Redis Ltd. announced they were switching from the system’s original (very permissive) BSD-3 license to a dual license comprising the proprietary Redis Source Available License and MongoDB’s SSPL.”
Jan 1
Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025 blog.archive.org · “On January 1, 2025, we celebrate published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entering the public domain!”
Jan 1
One of my papers got declined today mathstodon.xyz · “Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me, happening once or twice a year on average.”
Jan 1