Category Archives: News

Article note: Good. When someone gets caught actively exploiting a 0day against public targets, shut them down. I don't give a shit if it's a "friendly, democratic" nation-state actor, an "unfriendly" nation-state actor, a criminal organization, or some teenagers. They all look the same, and they all represent the same "Everyone watching now knows about this" secondary threat. There is nothing patriotic about colluding to hide attacks against the public. In the same way that crypto back-doors are bullshit that every bad actor will exploit against the public, magical tagging for "friendly" nation-state hackers is just an invitation for abuse and exploitation, and is the preamble for a stupid arms race legitimizing nation-state hackers fucking with the civilian populations of competing nations and selling backdoored shit into each others markets. Plus, we know the US intelligence community has long been operating without meaningful democratic oversight, so that's not an excuse either.

Article note: Reader is the best-case scenario of internet socialization; filter-feeding (with filters and a schedule you controlled!) on neat stuff people put on the internet, seeing neat stuff your pool of people with shared interests found interesting, and discussing it with them. It obviously had to go because it wasn't usable as a tool of exploitation the way modern social media is. I moved to self-hosted tt-rss, and it's lovely (though the recent move to "Absurd overkill container orchestration is the only supported configuration" is ... not my favorite), but the barrier to entry is much too high for the good network effects Google Reader could bring to bear.

Article note: Microsoft's modern strategy seems heavily based on MITMing tools communities use to organize, with Linkedin, Github, Discord, etc. Microsoft would not be the worst-case for this since they mostly take care of the platforms they buy to MITM areas, but it's still a bit of a distasteful "4 companies own everything" situation.

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Microsoft is reportedly in the late stages of $10 billion acquisition talks with Discord, a gaming-focused community chat platform, according to unnamed "people familiar with the matter" who spoke to Bloomberg.

Epic Games and Amazon were also involved in acquisition talks previously, according to Bloomberg's sources. VentureBeat also reported this week that Discord is exploring sale options with "multiple parties."

First launched in 2015, Discord lets individual users create public or private servers that allow members to chat with others in that server via text, images, voice, and video livestreaming. The service now reportedly has 6.7 million such servers, which serve as centralized communication hubs for everything from official news and discussion from game publishers and multiplayer match organization among small groups of friends to a chaotic gathering place for people betting on the stock market—and everything in between.

Article note: Neat! Nokia ended up with the old Plan9 IP when they absorbed Alcatel-Lucent, and are spinning a foundation to manage it and releasing pretty much everything under the MIT license, including the older versions that were never open. Plan9 is an artifact from an alternate universe, and it's good for your brain to play with.

Article note: I've been wondering where the DuPont name for Berg Mini-PV clones came from for years. Apparently it really is a _super_ tenuous connection that Berg was a subsidiary of DuPont at the time the clone market took off.

Article note: I'd never run into this before. On a quick skim, it's pleasingly readable, very broad, and highly pragmatic. I think it's going on the list of accessible primers on hard topics I suggest to students, (Things like Jorg Arndt's "Matters Computational" (aka fxtbook) for "That stuff you didn't learn how to apply in your algorithms or Numerical Methods classes" and Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics for "That stuff you didn't learn how to apply from your Circuits/Electronics courses."

Article note: Good. Stallman has been eventually proven right about so many things, so many times that he gets a lot of latitude for being weird and off-putting in my book. We, as tech-people, should do our damnedest to support the offbeat-but-useful, they visualized and built the world we inhabit.

Article note: Health-tech startup. Structured for maximum appeal (Noninvasive procedure, trendy health issue, charismatic woman at the front), and hooked in to the opaque-ass US medical billing system. Looks too good to be true. It's _always_ the Theranos scam being run.

Article note: Wait, what? They found instructions that will let you dynamically update microcode! It sounds like it requires a tricky setup, but dang.

Article note: Pursued by a horde of angry upper-middle-class white ladies, CEO whatever was quoted "NONONO NEVER MIND PLEASE DON'T EAT US, WE JUST WANTED TO GET RICH OFF OUR IPO!" Anyway, Cricut should not be rewarded for their history of rent-seeking behaviors, cloud-dependent IoT bullshit, and questionable build quality. If you're in the market for a die cutting machine, get a Silhouette (which is usable with local software and/or Free software, _and_ is a mechanically superior machine), or (a little up-market) a Graphtec or Roland.

Enlarge / A Cricut maker in its natural habitat: a carefully staged table full of miscellaneous crafting bits. (credit: Cricut)

Crafting device-maker Cricut has completely abandoned a plan to start requiring all device owners to pay a monthly subscription fee following a week of sustained public blowback.

Cricut makes cutting machines for precise detail work used by millions of home crafters. The machines work much like printers, but in the inverse: you put a pattern into the software, send it to the device, and the machine slices your design into paper, vinyl, fabric, or a hundred other materials. Users who owned the machines have always been able to import as many of their own designs into the software, Design Maker, as they wish.

Last week, however, Cricut announced it was imposing a $7.99 monthly subscription fee for anyone who wished to upload more than a handful of patterns into Design Maker in a given calendar month. The subscription would apply not only to new users, but also to the millions of consumers who already laid out hundreds of dollars for a Cricut device and all its attendant accessories.