Author Archives: pappp

Source: Ars Technica

A messaging service used by former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has temporarily shut down while the company investigates an apparent hack. The messaging app is used to access and archive Signal messages but is not made by Signal itself.

404 Media reported yesterday that a hacker stole data "from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the US government to archive messages." 404 Media interviewed the hacker and reported that the data stolen "contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using [TeleMessage's] Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat."

TeleMessage is based in Israel and was acquired in February 2024 by Smarsh, a company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Smarsh provided a statement to Ars today saying it has temporarily shut down all TeleMessage services.

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Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: The Verge - All Posts

The de minimis exception, which has allowed businesses to import low-value goods without duties from China and Hong Kong, has expired as of 12:01AM ET today as part of President Trump’s executive order signed last month.

Many businesses in the US rely on the de minimis loophole. Any package valued under $800 — including electronics, toys, and clothing from companies like Shein — can come to the US duty-free under the exception, leaving the products supercheap for buyers. In 2024, about 1.4 billion packages entering the US claimed exemption from duties under de minimis. Retailers Shein and Temu have already raised prices to account for tariffs.

The Trump Administration’s new rules will add either a 30 percent fee to the value of every package shipped to the US, or $25 (with an increase to $50 starting June 1st) — a choice every postal carrier must make and apply to all parcels. The new fees are being implemented after Trump hit most Chinese goods with high tariffs last month, launching an escalating trade war that ended with a 145 percent import tax increase. In retaliation, China has added a 125 percent fee on US goods.

Source: NYT > U.S.

This is the first significant personnel overhaul of top White House aides, and the kind of shake-up President Trump has sought to avoid in his second term.

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Epic Games v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just ruled that, effective immediately, Apple is no longer allowed to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and blocks the company from restricting how developers can point users to where they can make purchases outside of apps. Apple says it will appeal the order.

The ruling was issued as part of Epic Games’ ongoing legal dispute against Apple, and it’s a major victory for Epic’s arguments. Gonzalez Rogers also says that Apple “willfully” chose not to comply with her previous injunction from her original 2021 ruling. “That [Apple] thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” Gonzalez Rogers says.

The judge also referred the case to the US attorney to review it for possible criminal contempt proceedings.

As part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot:

• Impose “any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app”
• Restrict developers’ style, formatting, or placement of links for purchases outside of an app
• Block or limit the “use of buttons or other calls to action”
• Interfere with consumers’ choice to leave an app with anything beyond “a neutral message apprising users that they are going to a third-party site”

Apple’s senior director of corporate communications, Olivia Dalton, sent a statement to The Verge that reads, “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.”

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says that, following this ruling, the company will bring Fortnite back to the US App Store “next week.” Sweeney is also offering a “peace proposal” from Epic: “If Apple extends the court’s friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we’ll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic.”

In many cases, Apple takes a 30 percent cut of purchases made in its apps, and Gonzalez Rogers’ 2021 ruling forced Apple to allow developers to point to alternative payment options. But Apple instituted a policy that demanded developers pay Apple a 27 percent commission on those purchases, which many companies, including Epic, were unhappy about.

“In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction,” Gonzalez Rogers says. She notes that, inside Apple, App Store chief Phil Schiller advocated for the company to comply with the injunction, but that CEO Tim Cook “chose poorly” by ignoring Schiller and letting CFO Luca Maestri “convince him otherwise.”

Update, April 30th: Added statement from Apple.

Source: Ars Technica

Getting the hang of through-hole soldering is tricky for those of us tinkering at home with our irons, spools, flux, and, sometimes, braids. It's almost reassuring, then, to learn that through-hole soldering was also a pain for a firm that has made more than 60 million products with it.

Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely.

The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step.

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Source: Hack a Day

Most of us learned to design circuits with schematics. But if you get to a certain level of complexity, schematics are a pain. Modern designers — especially for digital circuits — prefer to use some kind of hardware description language.

There are a few options to do similar things with PCB layout, including tscircuit. There’s a walk-through for using it to create an LED matrix and you can even try it out online, if you like. If you’re more of a visual learner, there’s also an introductory video you can watch below.

The example project imports a Pico microcontroller and some smart LEDs. They do appear graphically, but you don’t have to deal with them graphically. You write “code” to manage the connections. For example:

<trace from={".LED1 .GND"} to="net.GND" />

If that looks like HTML to you, you aren’t wrong. Once you have the schematic, you can do the same kind of thing to lay out the PCB using footprints. If you want to play with the actual design, you can load it in your browser and make changes. You’ll note that at the top right, there are buttons that let you view the schematic, the board, a 3D render of the board, a BOM, an assembly drawing, and several other types of output.

Will we use this? We don’t know. Years ago, designers resisted using HDLs for FPGAs, but the bigger FPGAs get, the fewer people want to deal with page after page of schematics. Maybe a better question is: Will you use this? Let us know in the comments.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. Time will tell which HDLs will survive and which will whither.