Category Archives: News

Article note: No surprises here, it's long been suspected that Phenylephrine was basically a placebo which was pushed on to the market because (politically) there needed to be an alternative to Pseudoephedrine, so that could be restricted/tracked/made inconvenient over concerns of it being used as an easy Methamphetamine precursor. Now we find out what the FDA will do now that it has been firmly established that was wishful thinking and/or a lie.

Article note: The long term plan for CUPS is also to drop specific printer driver support and rely on IPP or PAPPL (Printer Application Framework) software shims that make printers that need special handling to work like an IPP printer (and this was announced like 5 years ago). It's probably even more compelling on Windows because the vendor bullshit is more egregious.

Article note: Having an articulating arm with a decent camera is great. I don't know that their $3-400 unit adds much over the medicore $50ish arm I currently have.

Article note: They got caught lying about their "Free" offering being free, which is only a viable business because they've successfully lobbied to keep the tax code complicated and opaque enough to support their rentseeking. Taxes and Healthcare in the US both need a gigantic public interest knife to the middlemen.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Sasirin Pamai)

The Federal Trade Commission's chief administrative law judge ruled that Intuit violated US law with deceptive advertising and should be forced to stop promoting TurboTax as "free" unless all conditions imposed on the free offer are immediately and conspicuously displayed to consumers.

The initial decision by Administrative Law Judge D. Michael Chappell was released today and is subject to an automatic review by the full commission. The FTC commissioners will likely rule against Intuit, which issued a statement indicating that it will take the matter to federal court. The order would be in effect for 20 years if it survives appeal.

The response from Intuit noted that the administrative law judge is "an employee of the FTC" and "ruled in favor of the FTC in the agency's own lawsuit." The FTC filed an administrative complaint against Intuit in March 2022.

Article note: Rolling out a new tracking mechanism controlled by the largest advertising incumbent, planned to replace the (admittedly awful and invasive, but fairly easily user-controlled) current solution, in the browser they also control. In response to the other browser vendors giving users more control (and default-deny) on third party cookies, thus harming googles' cash cow advertising business. Hidden behind a misleading popup in an automatic upgrade. Definitely not shady. I am curious what subverting it will look like, since it's running on the local machine it should be easy enough to make it always return a blank list or a list of injection attack strings or something to fuck with advertisers.

Enlarge / Google's not looking as good as it used to. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Don't let Chrome's big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome's invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the "Privacy Sandbox," is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven't been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it's built directly into the Chrome browser. It's been in the news previously as "FLoC" and then the "Topics API," and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world's biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.

Google seemingly knows this won't be popular. Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page. The blog post says the ad platform is hitting "general availability" today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users. This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.

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  Chrome users will see this pop-up, telling them the ad platform has rolled out to them. [credit: Aurich Lawson ]

Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an "ad privacy" feature has been rolled out to them and enabled. The new pop-up has been hitting users all week. As you can see in the pop-up, all of Google's documentation about this feature feels like it was written on opposite day, with Google calling the browser-based advertising platform "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."

Article note: We really need some privacy regulations to deal with all the bad behavior technology has enabled. Just adding _enormous_ liability to mishandling siloed data to make it too expensive to collect and retain unless absolutely necessary would fix the problem.

Article note: Truth is an affirmative defense in a defamation suit, but a wealthy opponent can bankrupt you before you get to raise it. ...Especially if your opponent is a professional cheater, which is a big problem for exposing professional cheaters.

Article note: Oh that's fucked, they bought job matching software for teachers from some carpetbagger, and now 1. It is broken such that when someone is displaced as the top pick for a position they don't get put back in the pool for other positions, 2. The UX on both the teacher and admin end is sufficiently bad and confusing that it is frequently ingesting garbage, and 3. it isn't adequately human supported because the implementers believed it would magically just work. This happens all the time, but the education sector seems particularly succeptable.

Article note: I'm kind of hoping Wayland gets PipeWire'd (motivates infrastructure cleanup like PulseAudio did, then gets quickly leapfrogged by a more competent design once the lay of the land is clear). It would be about on schedule, it's coming up on 15 years of being the next thing. The plan to address basic functionality like input plumbing for shortcuts and virtual inputs, pixel peeking for screen shots/sharing, screen/input grabbing for full screen programs, etc. with a flotilla of uncoordinated extensions adopted (or not) by different compositors is, was, and always has been dumb, and having it fragment among compositors instead of anchoring to a first party (or at least blessed) reference library is making it worse, so now we have a bunch of software that runs exclusively under subsets of compositors. (And I realize the pacman systemd criticism and this complaint seem contraty, but this design got most of the worst features of a single integrated system and the worst parts of an ecosystem of interoperable interchangeable parts in one go because they tight coupled the wrong things... or along the wrong axis? I'm not even sure what to call it). MOST of the critical stuff is getting pretty hashed out, so maybe it'll settle and be the norm for a while before it collapses under the weight of questionable architecture choices. Some problems are being worked around elsewhere in the stack eg. keyd that intercepts all your HID activity at the kernel interfaces and emits events via virtual devices, which may or may not be a better allocation of trust than having the display server do it, but at least has a config format not developed by the accreted output of jibbering madmen like the XKB shit.

Article note: TWO stupid censorious internet laws, rife with terrible privacy/security implications, motivated by "Think of the children!1!" in stupid censorious western municipalities knocked down in one week.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The day before a Texas antiporn law that requires age verification to access adult websites was set to take effect, the state's attorney general, Angela Colmenero, has been at least temporarily blocked from enforcing the law.

US District Judge David Alan Ezra granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking enforcement after the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) joined adult performers and sites like Pornhub in a lawsuit opposing the law. Today, they convinced Ezra that Texas' law violates the First Amendment and would have "a chilling effect on legally-protected speech," FSC said in a press release.

“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” Alison Boden, FSC's executive director, said. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the court agreed with our view that [the law's] true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”