Category Archives: News

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Got an Old Kindle? It Might Not Work Anymore

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It sounds like you can still load content over USB. Which is frankly the primary way I've used my (not so old that it's affected) Kindle, getting books from DRM-free stores or "otherwise" and shoving them on with calibre. With the crippling, it might be an opportunity to pick up some very old ones for cheap to torture with custom firmware or the like.
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It Is Time to Ban the Sale of Precise Geolocation

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yes. The details of _how_ we make it untenable to gather, retain, sell, or give access to that kind of data are legitimately complicated, but making it, at very least, such a liability risk no one is willing to do it would be a great move.
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Academic fraud may be the symptom of a more systemic problem

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This. I'm instructional faculty not research faculty in large part because the incentives around research careers are so gross.
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Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?

Source: NYT > Education

Article note: Looking at the current college cohort: Brainrot is Real. We're seeing a lot of formerly-unusual problems that look like executive function disorders. Students who don't know how to focus for long enough to do deep work - even college sophmore focus on a bench for a couple hours "deep." Occasionally even "sit and read this 3 page assignment" deep. Students who turn in lab reports with fever-dream mashups of labs from multiple weeks because they barely know what happened or when. It's visible as a third peak on some exams that are usually bimodal. It's justifiably freaking a bunch of my colleagues out. I'm not sure what exactly it is about the tasp of continuous dopamine hits from short-form content that leads to it, but something always makes me uncomfortable about even hearing that shit. I think there might be some conflating factors on the political apathy front, this generation grew up learning that a staggering fraction of supposed public servants are monsters who almost flauntingly won't be held accountable for anything, ever, and watching mass movements have essentially no effect (Remember OWS? Remember how absolutely nothing came of it?).

The lack of a thriving youth movement in opposition to Trump is a canary-in-the-coal-mine warning of the deterioration of American exceptionalism.

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I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Well, this is absurd and delightful.
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Author of Red Mars calls ‘bullshit’ on emigrating to the planet

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I love Kim Stanely Robinson's Mars books, especially for the amount of science and geopolitics he got plausible-to-right in them... but his later (2015) novel Aurora is basically to make the contrasting "extra-planetary colonization isn't going to work, we don't get a backup planet if we ruin this one" point, so it's very much not surprising that this is his current position. (also, it's ...just reality. Human biology is pretty picky about the conditions suitable for long-term habitation, and creating and sustaining them is hard.)
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Supreme Court rejects Sony’s attempt to kick music pirates off the Internet

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Great! For a whole bunch of reasons. Not cutting people off of utilities for incidental misuse. Not penalizing businesses for their users' behavior (and thus incentivizing them to spy on users). Unanimous. Applicable to other industries.

The Supreme Court today decided that Internet service providers cannot be held liable for their customers' copyright infringement unless they take specific steps that cause users to violate copyrights. The court ruled unanimously in favor of Internet provider Cox Communications, though two justices did not agree with the majority's reasoning.

The ruling effectively means that ISPs do not have to conduct mass terminations of Internet users accused of illegally downloading or uploading pirated files. If the court had ruled otherwise, ISPs could have been compelled to strictly police their networks for piracy in order to avoid billion-dollar court verdicts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The long-running case is Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. Cox was hit with a $1 billion verdict for music piracy in 2019. Although the damages award was overturned in 2024, a federal appeals court still found that Cox was liable for willful contributory infringement.

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Tracy Kidder, Author of ‘The Soul of a New Machine,’ Dies at 80

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Aw, Soul of a New Machine is such a good read. I never finished House but enjoyed the start, and have been meaning to at least take a shot at a couple of his others (Among Schoolchildren and Home Town especially).
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FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer Routers

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Are... are there any US produced routers? They're not entirely wrong, shitty router firmware is a huge problem, I more or less exclusively use OpenWRT devices to avoid the problem, but this doesn't feel thought out.
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The OpenBSD init system and boot process

Source: OSNews

Article note: I've always appreciated BSD style rc init, it's part of what drew me to Arch back in the day. Strikes a nice balance between the half-structured mess of scripts with fake service manager frontend (sysV, especially as the RH-likes mutated it) and "enterprise service management system" (launchd,smf,systemd). There _are_ things I appreciate about the regularity and instrumentation of systemd, but the "This is for enterprise manageability, not humans" perspective here is a nice way of addressing much of what makes me uncomfortable about it. I love the point about "You Can Just Do Things.' That principle is deeply lost in modern computing, especially with the iPad babies whose experience is mostly general purpose computers locked down pretending to be appliances, and it sucks a lot of the joy out. Also occurs to me that I strongly suspect the majority of Linux boxes in existence actually use some kind of traditional scripted init; busybox as PID1 with whatever some henious hacked-together-by-last-summer's-intern ash scripts, or openwrt's scripted sysv/bsd hybrid lookin' init, or whatnot, because they're embedded devices.

In recent weeks, systemd has both embraced slopcoding and laid the groundwork for age verification built right into systemd-based Linux distributions, there’s definitely been an uptick in people talking about alternative init systems. If you want to gain understanding in a rather classic init system, OpenBSD’s is a great place to start.

OpenBSD has a delightfully traditional init system, which makes it a great place to start learning about init systems. It’s simple and effective. There’s a bit of a counter movement in the IT and FOSS worlds rebelling against hyperscaler solutions pushing down into everyone’s practices. One of the rallying cries I’ve been seeing is to remind people that You Can Just Do Things™ on the computer. The BSD init system, and especially OpenBSD’s is something of a godparent to this movement. init(8) just runs a shell script to start the computer, and You Can Just Do Things™ in the script to get them to happen on boot.

↫ Overeducated-Redneck.net

My main laptop is currently in for warranty repairs, but once it returns, I intend to set it up with either OpenBSD or a Linux distribution without systemd (most likely Void) to see how many systems I can distance from systemd without giving myself too much of a headache (I’m guessing my gaming machine will remain on systemd-based Fedora). I’m not particularly keen on slopcoding and government-mandated age verification inside my operating systems, and I’m definitely feeling a bit of a slippery slope underneath my feet.

I have my limits.

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