Author Archives: pappp

Article note: That "Maybe don't build culture to suck itself into a black hole when it's financially convenient." is an unusual idea is really distressing.

Article note: Neat. A Systems Concepts SC-40 running TOPS-20, online for all to poke.

Article note: A job with poor pay relative to the required qualifications, poor stability, where you will be villainized and/or harassed by a mixture of parents, politicians, administrators, and fuckin' randos, with an internal and external cultural situation that almost entirely excludes men? A job which recently became ridiculously more difficult due to the pandemic and its after-effects? It's such a mystery why the state is having a hard time filling teaching positions. We better have some of the same politicians largely responsible for many of those issues discuss it. /s

Article note: I understand that swaths of people are marginally more likely to fall for scams with side-loading, and other vendors of ecosystem-choke-point software will probably take advantage to get a bigger slice of the pie, but the "You _can't_ run software adversarial to the largest-incumbent manufacturer's interests on a device you bought" situation is not really OK. Largely because the web has become intolerable without serious ad-blocking.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Biden administration wants major changes to the Apple and Google mobile app models, saying the companies "act as gatekeepers over the apps that people and businesses rely on" and enforce policies that "have the potential to harm consumers by inflating prices and reducing innovation."

An analysis of the market and recommendations for lawmakers and regulators were issued today in a report by the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The report was required by President Biden's 2021 executive order on competition and touted by the White House today as being part of "new progress on his competition agenda."

The NTIA concluded that "consumers largely can't get apps outside of the app store model, controlled by Apple and Google," and that "Apple and Google create hurdles for developers to compete for consumers by imposing technical limits, such as restricting how apps can function or requiring developers to go through slow and opaque review processes."

Article note: An interesting exercise in just how difficult and costly it is to evade ubiquitous surveillance now. Lots of HN commenters missing the point that it was an exercise in documenting the difficulty of not being surveilled while engaging in normal activities, probably because it's easy to not notice you're complicit in something heinous when your paycheck depends on it.

Article note: I'm really excited for the due-process implications. It's been a "secret list so you can't have standing because you can't prove you are on the list" legal catch-22 since the early-2000s mass psychosis took over the US, now we can finally start picking the dumb apart.

Article note: ...That is some wild shit, and it's from 2004. I do and teach digital design, and I've now skimmed through the dissertation twice, and I'm only half sure I understand the generalities of how it works.

Article note: Ooh, that's a cool idea. A kernel module you can load to quietly take control of your device.

Article note: I always find the tension between "Reproducible builds and immutable systems are good for security" and "Heterogeneity is good for security" interesting. Both make whole classes of attack _dramatically_ harder, but the methods are often mutually exclusive.

Article note: Performance prediction/analysis on modern systems with dynamic behavior is wild shit. It's surprising how often "Don't do anything unexpected" is the best heuristic because of caching and branch prediction.