Author Archives: pappp

Microsoft Gave FBI Keys to Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw

Posted on 2026-01-23 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Mmmyep. Bitlocker with a Microsoft account is barely more than theater, it manages to keep most of the fragility and overhead of a sophisticated encryption system, but - having done the recovery flow for someone's machine that b0rked - even without the power of state threats, it's not that hard to shake the retained keys out of Microsoft. Fun that non-nerds are starting to learn about bullshit vendor-bypassable security that the cypherpunks have been screaming about for 35 years due to (this is a euphemism I find myself using uncomfortably often of late) "the geopolitical situation."
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Immigration Agencies Are Openly Defying Federal Courts

Posted on 2026-01-20 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I'm old enough to remember in the post-9/11 era when we were rushing into the existence of DHS (legislated in 2002, established in 2003 - it's not old) and the criticism from either wing warned about the creation of a giant, unaccountable, inevitably overreaching monster due to a poorly considered knee-jerk reaction to one incident. Oh look, an overreaching, unaccountable monster. Let's learn and fucking dismantle it.
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SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

Posted on 2026-01-14 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Several of the prominent hobbyist electronics folks appear to be vigorously crybullying each other. This is not fabulous.
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Logistics Is Dying; Or – Dude, Where’s My Mail?

Posted on 2026-01-08 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It certainly seems to be a "The capitalists are ripping apart working systems so the number keeps going up" situation. I think the most shocking bit is how uncorrelated with distance or difficulty it all is, I regularly have stuff get from China to a nearby sorting center faster than it gets from the sorting center to me, and see large fragile items like TVs that seem to be being sold for less than I'd expect shipping to cost... but also have letters take months, or packages disappear.
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Researcher Wipes White Supremacist Dating Sites, Leaks Data on okstupid.lol – Hackread – Cybersecurity News, Data Breaches, AI, and More

Posted on 2026-01-05 by pappp

Source: Published articles

Article note: Majestic.
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Dell is eating humble pie and bringing back the XPS brand

Posted on 2026-01-05 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: That went about as poorly as everyone expected.
Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16 laptops on a white tabletop.
Forget Premium, Pro, and Pro Max — Dell backtracked so hard its new laptops don’t even say Dell on top.

Nearly one year ago to the day, Dell killed off its long-standing XPS brand name in favor of milquetoast Premium, Plus, Pro, and Pro Max monikers - but it's back for CES 2026. The new XPS 14 and XPS 16 laptops look to win back fans of the "Extreme Performance System" with Dell's thinnest designs to date, a row of proper function keys, improved battery life, and Intel's new Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 processors. Dell even went as far as putting the XPS brand name on the lid, and finally marking the edges of its seamless haptic trackpad with subtle glass etching lines.

The XPS 14 and 16 are launching in select configurations on January …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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PicoPCMCIA leverages the Raspberry Pi RP2350 to emulate a PCMCIA card

Posted on 2026-01-05 by pappp

Source: adafruit industries blog

Article note: Oh man, that's _delightful_ for playing with old laptops. Modern Wifi, storage emulation including CD drives, all the things that are usually a hassle.

yyzkevin is launching an open source project to make a multifunction PCMCIA (later named PC) card for vintage computers. Details:

  • This is a Type II, 5V, 16-bit PC Card designed for use in compliant PCMCIA sockets and should work in most devices.
  • Built around the RP2350 and leveraging the ISA-like nature of the PCMCIA bus, this project benefits greatly from code interchangeability with other RP-based retro projects, most notably PicoGUS and PicoMEM.
  • The card has an onboard wireless module containing the Infineon CYW43439, same as found on the Raspberry Pi Pico W. This allows the card to attach to modern Wi-Fi networks (2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n WPA2). It can then emulate an NE2000 adapter and/or a dialup modem.
  • The card has an included Texas Instruments TLV320AIC3254 which calls itself a “Very Low-Power Stereo Audio CODEC with programmable miniDSP”.
  • Emulation of intelligent mode MPU-401 is possible thanks to implementation done by PicoGUS base on SoftMPU/HardMPU.
  • Sound Blaster emulation and the worlds first PCMCIA Gravis Ultrasound
  • Emulated Panasonic MKE CD-ROM
  • Storage Emulation
  • The USB port for the RP2354 is made available on the external connector

See the video below and more in the post here.

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ICE is using facial-recognition technology to quickly arrest people

Posted on 2026-01-05 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Years ago, I was arguing (with some CS/EE PhDs) that democracy can't survive without anonymity because mass surveillance implies mass coercion, even without any specific action. Now that it's actively happening, the one who was most arguing against the idea has admitted they no longer go to protests because there doesn't seem to be an upshot and they're afraid of being the subject of some "Radical Leftist UK Professors Seen At Anti-Government Protest" propaganda. I looked over my glasses at them but didn't say anything.
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Developing a BLAS Library for the AMD AI Engine [pdf]

Posted on 2026-01-03 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh look, an AMD accelerator architecture with no widely adopted programming system, several generations of false start abandoned tooling, and a programing model that is thesis-getting to figure out even narrowly (and apparently incompletely because there's nothing obvious about managing memory or execution latency, and the platform is full of it). Surely someday they'll have a product that doesn't describe.
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Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

Posted on 2026-01-03 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That's quite the trajectory. The "I demand an immediate personalized answer to my specific question, even if it's merely a mis-phrased version of a question answered correctly and authoritatively in an easy to find location" vs. "Trying to build a knowledge base of quality reference material" tension of ...the web... has always been interesting. It also hits the "LLMs trained on the predecessor platforms full of human experts, what do they do now that they've killed most of the platforms with human data" problem head on.
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