Author Archives: pappp

The Future of Big Iron: An Interview with IBM’s Christian Jacobi

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat read, the interviewer is Ian Cutress (wrote a bunch of the best architecture deep dive stuff for AnandTech; More than Moore is his own substack that he's been posting writing to) talking with the lead of the IBM Z (modern descents of the S/360, 370,390 mainframe line) about chip design and market trends. It's not a world I get much perspective on.
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FreeBSD: How Can We Make It More Attractive to New Users?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I tried FreeBSD 14 on a spare laptop the other day because I had a "Let's see what's going on in BSD Land" urge. Maybe refresh my perspective on the Linux stack. Two hours of fucking around later I determined that the QCA9565 wireless chip-set driver seems to be "half working" and intermittent, or their alarmingly-static-looking wireless configuration system has subtleties I couldn't figure out, as someone who is "pretty good at computers." Next I tried booting the installer on a coreboot'd ex-Chromebook just for sport, it couldn't handle the i2c input devices, so no. It runs OK in a VM but... not on any real hardware I have on hand, and not with any user-facing features that really distinguish it. I do still adore the simplicity of BSD-style rc init, and like the ifconfg extended for the modern era better than the command line soup that is the ip tool, and some other details in that vein, but the overall experiment was not wildly favorable. Also, their much-vaunted documentation is frankly not as comprehensive as the Arch wiki. The HN thread makes it sound like their power management/suspend situation is not really up to snuff for running on laptops right now anyway, though there are reports of a major effort to improve it.
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Archive.org, a repository storing the entire history of the Internet, has a data breach

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Well that's not good.

Archive.org, possibly one of the only entities to preserve the entire history of the Internet, was recently compromised in a hack that revealed data of roughly 31 million users.

A little after 2 PM California time, social media blew up with screenshots showing what the archive.org homepage displayed.

It read:

Read full article

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China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor

Source: Schneier on Security

Article note: Entirely predictable problem was entirely predictable. Backdoors for anyone work as backdoors for everyone who figures out (or steals) how they work. Don't make them or they will be abused.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994.

It’s a weird story. The first line of the article is: “A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers.” This implies that the attack wasn’t against the broadband providers directly, but against one of the intermediary companies that sit between the government CALEA requests and the broadband providers.

For years, the security community has pushed back against these backdoors, pointing out that the technical capability cannot differentiate between good guys and bad guys. And here is one more example of a backdoor access mechanism being targeted by the “wrong” eavesdroppers.

Other news stories.

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We need a real GNU/Linux (not Android) smartphone ecosystem

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Someone who wasn't around for the Maemo era discovers how far we've fallen.
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A Field Guide to the University of Kentucky Graduate School

Having now collected two graduate degrees myself, and been related many stories by friends and acquaintances doing grad school at UK, some advice for those behind me.

UK’s graduate school is the absolute archetype of the rule of thumb that, at UK, every individual you deal with will be nice and helpful, but as an organization they’re the most useless, obstructive motherfuckers you’ll ever have the displeasure of dealing with. You will never find an individual to punch in the face when something deserving happens, because responsibility has been diluted sufficiently that there isn’t usually an individual bad actor responsible for whatever bullshit is going on; the problem is that there are half a dozen overpaid people with inflated titles not dealing with the thing, and an assortment of folks in lower-titled, public-facing positions having to scramble to make things work around the administrative dysfunction.
The fact that UK just went into administrative bloat overdrive by dissolving the faculty senate with no concrete plans to replace their functions, then started hiring random assholes who don’t even have the context to know how things have to work to take over matters the senate used to handle has made it even worse this year than usual.

Detailed Notes Below

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No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There certainly are unhealthy things about social media, but I think a LOT of the finger-pointing is the traditional, horrible, "Pointing at the things young people do to escape/work around the actual problems in their life as though the workarounds are the problems." We've done a _really through_ job of excluding young people from most public spaces with explicit policy (You'd get CPS called on you if you let your kids have as much autonomy as used to be normal), over-scheduling to meet dubious competitive pressures, and car-centric (sub)urban design. They are facing broadly diminished prospects in careers and home ownership relative to earlier cohorts, climate change is kicking into high gear, they had developmental years in the pandemic... and now there's an increasing mixture of rent-seeking and policing in the online spaces they gather in as a workaround.
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No evidence social media time is correlated with teen mental health problems

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There certainly are unhealthy things about social media, but I think a LOT of the finger-pointing is the traditional, horrible, "Pointing at the things young people do to escape/work around the actual problems in their life as though the workarounds are the problems." We've done a _really through_ job of excluding young people from most public spaces with explicit policy (You'd get CPS called on you if you let your kids have as much autonomy as used to be normal), over-scheduling to meet dubious competitive pressures, and car-centric (sub)urban design. They are facing broadly diminished prospects in careers and home ownership relative to earlier cohorts, climate change is kicking into high gear, they had developmental years in the pandemic... and now there's an increasing mixture of rent-seeking and policing in the online spaces they gather in as a workaround.
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PhD Complete!

It took another round of “longer than expected” because, while I passed my defense at the end of July, I had some requests to make significant changes to the dissertation before submitting my final copy, and that didn’t get wrapped up until early September with my advisor paying meaningful attention to what I was doing for the first time in years.
I ended up having to include a lot of the modern academic hype-spewing, stake-claiming bullshit I’ve developed a deep distaste for, but even with that I’ll admit it’s a much better document overall after the rewrite. It looks less negative than the earlier drafts, because they were largely written before my last “I give up, I’ll try one more stupid thing” experiment finally turned up something reasonably compelling.

The copy of record of the dissertation is published, here are local PDF copies of the deck from my defense and my dissertation. More information below.

Then I had several weeks of catch-up for all the many things in my life I’ve been shorting time to get done, while I was having the apparently requisite back-and-forth with the graduate school about petty formatting matters, but it is done.

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Nobody knows what happened within the MMC Association in 1998

Source: OSNews

Article note: This is some deep, weird history.

In 1999, some members from the MMC Association decided to split and create SD Association. But nobody seems to exactly know why.

↫ sdomi’s webpage

I don’t even know how to summarise any of this research, because it’s not only a lot of information, it’s also deeply bureaucratic and boring – it takes a certain kind of person to enjoy this sort of stuff, and I happen to fit the bill. This is a great read.

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