Category Archives: News

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Statement on New York Times Article

Posted on 2021-02-13 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Between the Donald G. McNeil Jr ouster and subsequent gaslighting, and the whole slate-star codex saga, it's getting real hard make the case that one shouldn't assume everything coming out of the NYT is ideology-over-facts garbage. And it is _not_ a good time for nominally-respectable media outlets to be getting in the mud with the qtards.
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Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Posted on 2021-02-12 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: Shit, Bloomberg is doubling down on their claims about the whole Supermicro hardware implant thing.

Server maker says latest article is 'a mishmash of disparate allegations'

Following up on a disputed 2018 claim in its BusinessWeek publication that tiny spy chips were found on Supermicro server motherboards in 2015, Bloomberg on Friday doubled down by asserting that Supermicro's products were targeted by Chinese operatives for over a decade, that US intelligence officials have been aware of this, and that authorities kept this information quiet while crafting defenses in order to study the attack.…

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The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

Posted on 2021-02-11 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Didn't we _just_ see some feel-good pieces about doctors doing very similar things and being lauded? Like most anti-fraud measures that cost more than the fraud they try to prevent, our weird-assed, probably protestant derived, obsession with keeping things away from "the wrong people" is super fucked up. Especially when contrasted with our acceptance of much much more costly fraud by "the worthy" (tax evasion, crony contracts, regulatory capture, etc.) .
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Lalboard – A 3D-printed keyboard inspired by the DataHand

Posted on 2021-02-11 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat. I've been conceptually interested in datahands for years, but the prices have kept me from even considering. This looks like a not-too-insane project for some time when I have some extra time and the desire to build things.
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Border agents can search phones freely under new circuit court ruling

Posted on 2021-02-10 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Ah, shit. That had previously appeared to settle in a much better affirming basic civil liberties sort of way.
More than 1 million people traveled on planes in US on a single day ahead of Thanksgiving amid coronavirus pandemic
David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A US appeals court has ruled that Customs and Border Protection agents can conduct in-depth searches of phones and laptops, overturning an earlier legal victory for civil liberties groups. First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch declared that both basic and “advanced” searches, which include reviewing and copying data without a warrant, fall within “permissible constitutional grounds” at the American border.

Lynch ruled against a group of US citizens and residents objecting to invasive searches of their electronic devices. The group includes Sidd Bikkannavar, a NASA scientist who was detained and pressured to unlock a secure government-issued phone. Most of the incidents date to 2017, when then-President Donald Trump pushed for tighter border...

Continue reading…

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Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite ‘calamitous design choices’ in git

Posted on 2021-02-10 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: That looks about right. Git is obscenely over-complicated and ill-suited to the vast majority of things it is used for, and github's EEE workflow has made it even weirder -- but it's also by far the dominant species, and if you pretend the 10% of its surface area that is not a foot-cannon is the whole thing and entirely hide how it actually works, you can get network effects while still pretending to be using an appropriate tool. More generally, the tooling to do _anything_ has become so horrifically complicated and opaque that everyone is scurrying back mainframes^H^H the cloud, and that itself is a problem.

'I don't have the energy to be a server admin for something that's held together with scotch tape and prayers'

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) project is moving development to GitHub today despite what a core developer calls "calamitous design choices" in git, for the sake of familiarity and wide tool support.…

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Google could have killed Facebook

Posted on 2021-02-10 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Eesh. It's such a tale of the modern tech industry. Facebook's ad-tech panel, responsible for at least a quarter of their revenue, was a disaster of legacy Javascript being maintained by one engineer until someone looking for a ladder to climb noticed it was dependent on the deprecated WebSQL API (...and said API was deprecated because the other webhipsters were like "Nooo, SQLite backing isn't exciting enough, let's standardize on NoSQL instead") and re-wrote it with a newer generation of hipster tools.
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Interview with Bill Joy (1984)

Posted on 2021-02-10 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Huh. I knew about how much of vi was agglomerated via cross-pollination among academic UNIX folk, like almost everything in UNIX in the mid-to-late 70s, but didn't know how early they were looking at very-different editors (like Bravo) for inspiration, and how early they were aware that modality was a bad idea. Lot of _very_ forward-looking Also, looking from the present,"These editors tend to last too long - almost a decade for vi now. Ideas aren't advancing very quickly, are they?" in 1984 is absolutely hilarious, both for the obvious reasons about it still being around and everything in computing being stalled, and because of how much computing folk in that era under-estimated the value of consistency I'm one of the only editor-hoppers I know (right now mostly kate and micro), most people seem to learn one of the arcane ones and get stuck forever.
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Cops are playing music while citizens are filming to trigger copyright filters

Posted on 2021-02-09 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Our legal system is hilariously broken. Where our failure at police accountability and our regulatory-captured IP law collide, we get this.
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Recreating the Mac SE Logic Board

Posted on 2021-02-08 by pappp

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: That is _majestic_ work. Reversed board, found modern drop-in replacements for all but a few parts. Gonna rescue a bunch of battery-damaged SEs.

When [Kai Robinson] found himself faced with the difficult task of saving as many Mac SE’s as he possibly could, the logical but daunting answer was to recreate the Mac SE logic board for machines that would otherwise be scrapped. These machines are over 30 years old and the PRAM battery often leaks, destroying parts and traces. Given that the logic board is a simple through-hole two-layer board, how hard could it be?

The first step was to get some reference photos so [Kai] set to desoldering everything on the board. The list of components and the age of solder made this an arduous task. Then a composite image was produced by merging images together using a scanner and some Inkscape magic. Rather than simply putting the pins in the right place and re-routing all the netlists, [Kai] elected instead to do a copy, trace for trace of the original SE board. [Kai] and several others on the forum have been testing the boards and tracking down the last few bugs and kinks in the design. An unconnected pin here and an improperly impedance matched resistor there. Hopefully, soon they’ll have Gerbers and design files ready for anyone should they need a new logic board PCB.

It’s no secret that we love the Macintosh SE here at Hackaday. We’ve seen new custom cases for it and now new PCBs for it. It does cause the mind to ponder though and wonder, what’s next?

Thanks [Toru173] for sending this one in!

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