Author Archives: pappp

Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Other than the "Avoiding sanctions for knowingly engaging in behavior that would cause them" and "Stereotype compliant" aspects, it's kind of a neat workaround for digital sovereignty concerns.
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Say it with me: Windows is the problem with Windows handhelds

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: After at least a decade of "yEAr Of ThE lInUx DeSkToP" and "But muh gaming" memes about Linux, this state of affairs is hilarious. Turns out the Windows APIs running on a Linux host are better than either :/

It's been nearly two weeks since Microsoft, a multi-trillion dollar company, shipped a $600 handheld "Xbox" that can't be relied on to sleep, wake, or hold a charge while asleep in my tests. Neither Microsoft nor Asus would admit there's a problem with the white Xbox Ally or offer a timeline to fix it after repeated requests by The Verge. (Asus tells me it needs more time to test.)

But if you want your white Asus handheld to start working reliably, you could do what I did: I installed the latest build of Bazzite, a SteamOS-like, Linux-based operating system that works properly with gamepad controls, and sleeps like a dream. I didn't need to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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The Apple Network Server Mac OS ROMs have resurfaced

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Wow, that burbled out of the deepest depths. ANSs are obscure on their own, and alternate ROMs were barely legend.
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Nisus Writer: Schrödinger’s Word Processor

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I've only played with it casually, but Nisus has had a 35-year run of being "A different take on wordprocessors," sad to hear it's effectively abandoned as everyone involved in maintaining it has basically aged out. Kind of the story of a lot of infrastructure right now. Also interesting: Clear demonstration of how bad the platform churn situation is. It's basically a continuous job to keep a piece of software working on current versions of the major platforms, which is a complete fucking failure of the tech industry.
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Front-Panel Booting an ATmega88 Microcontroller

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat! I had a student several years ago who really wanted to do exactly this, partly inspired by the same author's Craft demoscene production on the same part. Big fan of the principle of a minimum-magic computer, in this era of capricious magic mirrors.
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AWS outage reminds us why $2,449 Internet-dependent beds are a bad idea

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: So much "We didn't heed the Internet of Shit warnings" coming to the surface. So much complexity fetishism or at least unacknowledged/outsourced complexity being allowed to creep into things. And ever deeper into the Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. reality.

This week’s Amazon Web Services outage had some people waking up on the wrong side of the bed.

A Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem affected AWS cloud hosting, resulting in an outage that impacted more than 1,000 web-based products and services and millions of people.

Perhaps one of the most avoidable breakdowns came via people’s beds. The reliance on the Internet for smart bed products from Eight Sleep resulted in people being awoken by beds locked into inclined positions and sweltering temperatures.

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Microsoft breaks USB input in Windows Recovery Environment

Source: OSNews

Article note: If "Microsoft dogfoods their own AI tools, resulting in massive breakage of customer-facing code as AI slop poorly vetted by overworked engineers starts to pervade products" turns out to be true, my spite laugh might be so hard I risk suffocation. The tech industry is overdue for another decadence-related collapse, the leadership have been huffing their own farts for too long.

With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, let’s take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing.

Microsoft released the first Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835) for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version is now available for download for everyone, the company has already confirmed large-scale issues.

First up, Microsoft was forced to issue an emergency workaround as the update broke localhost auth and following that the company today has confirmed another problem where recovery can become impossible if you happen to use a USB keyboard or mouse.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

Yes. This is a real thing. This latest round of patches makes it entirely impossible to navigate the Windows Recovery Environment with USB keyboards and mice. Since it’s 2025, USB is probably the protocol through which most people connect their keyboard and mice (although to be fair, some laptops probably still default to internal PS/2 for their touchpads). This means that if you run into a problem with Windows 11 that requires you to access the Windows Recovery Environment – perhaps OneDrive did too many lines of cocaine again – you can’t actually do anything inside of it.

There’s no fix yet, so you either remove the offending patches, hope your PC still has a PS/2 port and you still have PS/2 peripherals, or hope Windows 11 won’t fall over and die until Microsoft releases a fix for the issue. Of course, people still using Windows 10, people who aren’t installing every single Windows 11 update as they become available, and people using real operating systems have nothing to worry about.

You can’t help but wonder, though – with Microsoft pushing “AI” so hard, how many of these recent faceplants are the result of Microsoft engineers frantically trying to meet code quotas using Copilot?

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Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Source: The Register

Article note: This seems like an appropriate take. The engineering org has become famously unpleasant, the best people left, the remaining employees are all stressed and overworked, and now we get to see what happens when the world's largest egg basket starts to become unstable. I suspect the answer will be "A lot of the cloud bullshit from the last decade slowly gets unwound." That will probably provide a lot of good work for a lot of decent sysadmins, and leave a lot of I-can-run-AWS-cookbooks "Devops" folks less employable, more or less as happens every few decades when the big central / small distributed pendulum reverses.

When your best engineers log off for good, don’t be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works

column  "It's always DNS" is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does.…

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Breach of F5 requires “emergency action” from BIG-IP users, feds warn

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: This feels less "unprecedented" and more, "Aw, here we go again." The big proprietary outsourced security companies really do not seem to have their shit together, or any major structural incentive to get it together.

Thousands of networks—many of them operated by the US government and Fortune 500 companies—face an “imminent threat” of being breached by a nation-state hacking group following the breach of a major maker of software, the federal government warned Wednesday.

F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.

Unprecedented

During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations. Wednesday’s disclosure went on to say the threat group downloaded proprietary BIG-IP source code information about vulnerabilities that had been privately discovered but not yet patched. The hackers also obtained configuration settings some customers used inside their networks.

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Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The Cat (and to a lesser degree the other Raskin designs like Swiyftcard or Archy) still stands as one of the most compelling "Alien artifact" separate evolutionary lines in computing. I do a lot of work out of a folder of text files with an editor and grep for the generality, and it's shockingly analogous to the cat model. In many ways the paradigm is a stronger take on "Everything is the same, searched and manipulated with a common set of tools" than Unix or even Plan9, but with the corresponding greater challenge at handling things that aren't suited to that model.
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