Category Archives: News

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Anthropic Cracking Down on Video Game Rewrites

Source: Hacker News

Article note: "We copied everything from everyone, and now are going to ban you for doing things that offend the rentseeking class." Hopefully the constant watching what customers are doing and stealing/blocking it will help push the mass of users off hosted proprietary models.
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“My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii”

Source: OSNews

Article note: This is just neat.

The Nintendo Wii (and its related consoles) were already made to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT as well as Mac OS X, but now we can add another milestone to the list: classic Mac OS.

So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired the company, and the Wii’s Vegas (and its later revision Bollywood) and Wii U’s Latte are effectively straight successors) reached the desktop for the first time, most likely the first time since the CHRP clone era that someone outside of Apple brought up classic Mac OS on a new system to the desktop. Despite still being nowhere near ready for a public release, I want to talk about the challenges I faced with this project so far.

↫ Rairii at Virtuallyfun

Various versions of Mac OS boot to the desktop, including Mac OS 9.2.2, the last ever version, but there’s still a ton or work to be done before this is ready for release. Still, with Rairii amazing track record of porting all kinds of things to various PowerPC machines, including getting the PowerPC version of Windows NT to run on various PowerPC Macs, I have little doubt they’ll manager to get this to a releasable state.

I absolutely love this kind of work.

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Reddit is moving to “a logged-in-only experience,” CEO says

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Gonna be weird as reddit dies of enshittification. Especially since Discord is concurrently opening up to be less of a black hole where knowledge goes to die.

In the future, you won’t be able to use Reddit without logging in.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the impending change in a letter (PDF) to shareholders today about Q3 performance. He said that Reddit is shifting “to a logged-in-only experience," adding:

Moving to primarily logged-in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible, and can find the content and communities most relevant to them. It is better for our business because we will have more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally. It also allows us to protect access to Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data, and helps us better adapt to emerging regulations around the world.

Huffman also said that the login requirement will help Reddit better retain new users.

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Google admits AI search makes less money, but it’s fixing that with more ads

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: It's like the first dotcom boom "we loose money on every sale but make it up in volume" bullshit. It'll be _real bad_ when, inevitably, AI answers start getting invisibly tampered for advertisers.

Google parent Alphabet reported its Q3 financial results on Wednesday afternoon, showing a healthy rise in revenue for the months of July to September. But the company's stock price has taken a beating, marking one of the largest post-earnings drops in its history. It comes down to several troubling aspects of the new report, including an admission by the company that AI search isn't earning as much as organic search, and despite that, Google expects to spend even more on AI next year.

The company took in almost $128 billion in Q3 2026, earning more than $26 billion in net income. These may sound like good numbers, but financial markets are not impressed. While revenue is up 25 percent versus last year, net income is almost $9 billion lower. As of this story's publication, the stock price is down almost 12 percent, and it was down about 13 percent earlier in the day.

While revenue was up 25 percent year over year, analysts expected more. Google reported earnings per share of $2.12, but the consensus projection ahead of Wednesday was $3.02. Google's Cloud products actually beat expectations, crossing $30 billion in revenue. That's about a billion more than analyst guesses.

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Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware threatens most servers on planet Earth

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: It's not _the worst_, but UEFI has always been a mess, really accented by the fact that what is deployed is a million obsolescent-when-they-shipped vendored forks of one codebase.
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Unveiling The Grid: PCBs made in America, twice as fast as Shenzhen

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It doesn't look quite as good as the incumbents (quite restrictive options, order flow is not as nice, substantially more expensive) but the basic premise of "We built a big reconfigurable PCBA robot for hire" is super cool.
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Jailbreaking the Switch 2

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That didn't take very long. Some clever harness/automation/use of existing switch 1 attacks in the hunt. Seems like the AI-based-tools boost was significant but not determinative.
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The Internet goes on high alert after discovery of 8 compromised TLS certs

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Wow, literal https://xkcd.com/221/ , the private key on one of those was "4" Hard to defend PKI against that kind of active incompetence by the middlemen.

Security personnel around the world are on high alert Tuesday following the discovery of eight TLS certificates with private keys so weak they could allow anyone to mint trusted browser and app credentials for any site on the Internet.

As of late morning Tuesday, browser makers and some major apps and programming languages had blocked all eight of the intermediate certificates. There are no reports of certificate transparency logs, which track the issuance of all browser-trusted certificates, showing the compromised keys being used maliciously. The threat remains far from over, however, because it will be hard and time-consuming to update other key parts of the Internet, such as Linux distributions and embedded and Internet of Things devices.

One word: bonkers

The eight intermediate certificates belong to India-based certificate authority eMudhra Limited. An informal advisory published to emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com over on Tuesday posted the message “We have a problem here - Wayne.” The words were digitally signed using the private key of one of the eMudhra certificates. With proof that the reporting party had control of the key, defenders scrambled because the same key could be used to sign unauthorized certificates that would be trusted by millions of servers worldwide.

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BeBox is a Haiku application that emulates Be Inc.’s BeBox

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I love how Haiku folks keep looking at the ways things have been done and doing it better. On one hand, it's just an emulator for a couple moderately-obscure computers running on a moderately-obscure platform, but it's also very akin to the Apple Classic and Rosetta type things, but able to target all the premodern versions and architectures of the platform.
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Targeted ads delivered 0-click exploits to install mercenary malware

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Increment the list of reasons that target advertising is bad and should be blocked, stymied, and regulated.

Researchers say that mercenary hackers laced ads with zero-click exploits that installed sophisticated malware on the devices of targeted individuals when they did nothing other than load a website or open an installed app.

The finding, published Thursday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said the incident is likely to be the first confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads. The attacks, which worked on iOS and Android devices, are particularly pernicious because they work without requiring any interaction from the target and are invisible unless users run special forensic hardware or software. Citizen Lab said it confirmed that AdFection, as it named the campaign, infected 45 devices at international media organization Al Jazeera in 2024 and 2025.

A clear warning signal

“This investigation should … serve as a clear warning signal to news organizations around the world that they may be being actively targeted via this new threat,” Citizen Lab researchers wrote. “This targeting may happen both in newsrooms and to individual journalists, editors, and other staff members.” Their report went on to say: “The distribution of spyware via targeted ads represents a security risk not only for potential victims but also for states and civil society at large.”

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