Category Archives: News

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OpenRecall

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's cute but... isn't the major threat model that makes these things a bad idea that an attacker could technically or legally obtains access to the logs, which is still there if its all local and open source?
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Apple blocks PC emulator in iOS App Store and third-party app stores

Source: Hacker News

Article note: 1. Not unexpected, but if Apple can veto stuff in 3rd party app stores, they aren't meaningfully independent, and this really shouldn't count as complying with the DMA. 2. An iPad with a keyboard case that could run VMs would be a rather compelling device, computers-with-touch and/or stylus tend to be a little half baked, but iOS is too restrictive to be a competitor on its own.
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What is PID 0?

Source: OSNews

Article note: This is a way more interesting piece than I expected when I first saw it go by, it goes into the full history and explores where the common wrong answers came from, and the modern refinements to deal with computers being way more complicated and dynamic than they once were. I've actually refined my mental explanation after reading, I was close but it's now: "PID 0 is the null process that gets scheduled when nothing else is ready to run. When running, it tries to not be running by ceding to another process or turning off resources."

The very short version: Unix PIDs do start at 0! PID 0 just isn’t shown to userspace through traditional APIs. PID 0 starts the kernel, then retires to a quiet life of helping a bit with process scheduling and power management. Also the entire web is mostly wrong about PID 0, because of one sentence on Wikipedia from 16 years ago.

There’s a slightly longer short version right at the end, or you can stick with me for the extremely long middle bit!

But surely you could just google what PID 0 is, right? Why am I even publishing this?

↫ David Anderson

What a great read. Just great.

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The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Mmmyep. When the person whose research was one of the main reasons we could manage a global pandemic says "I got marginalized out of academia because I wasn't all-in on playing prestige games" the answer is not "How dare you! Those prestige games are super important!"
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AMD’s “Peano” – An LLVM Compiler for Ryzen AI NPUs

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I've been grumbling about how NPUs are basically dark silicon because the programming environment is so lacking, this is super encouraging.
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OpenSSH introduces options to penalize undesirable behavior

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Ooh! More ore less built in Fail2Ban with some sense of IP ranges. Not a magical security panacea, and with some attractive nuisance foot cannons, but given the fraction of automated attack traffic I see that comes from "specific providers and regions" you could get a _lot_ of mileage out of a pretty simple configuration, which is how all good tools work.
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Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

Source: OSNews

Article note: The last couple times I've set up a Windows install that I didn't want coupled to an online account I've used a sophisticated process called "disconnecting it from the network until the install is complete." which will be really hard to disable without making air-gapped Windows machines impossible. (...and this is usually for verifying new hardware that ships with Windows before blowing it away to install something more useful.)

Before PC users can enjoy everything Windows 11 has on tap, they must first enter an e-mail address that’s linked to a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, you’ll be asked to create one before you can start setting it up.

A frequently used trick to circumvent this block is a small but ingenious step. By entering a random e-mail address and password, which doesn’t exist and causes the link to fail, you end up directly with the creation of a local account and can thus avoid creating an official account with Microsoft.

↫ Laura Pippig at PCWorld

Microsoft has now “fixed” this trick, and it’s no longer possible to use it. The other popular method of circumventing the Microsoft account requirement, by opening the command prompt during installation and running OOBE\BYPASSNRO, still works, but one has to wonder how long it’s going to take before Microsoft plugs that method, too. It seems the company is hell-bent on getting every consumer onto the Microsoft Account train, come hell or high water, so I wouldn’t be surprised seeing local accounts eventually being positioned as a “pro” or even “enterprise” feature that will simply no longer be available on consumer PCs.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with offering an online account option, but the keyword here is option. You should always be able to set up any computer to run with a regular old local account, even if only because internet access isn’t always a given in many places around the world. Add the obvious privacy concerns to that – an issue amplified by Recall – and I doubt users’ desire to run a local account and jump through hoops to do so will fade any time soon.

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The US doesn’t make bicycles anymore — here’s how to change that

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: This actually sounds pretty reasonable and not likely to just make bikes more expensive and less accessible. Adjust the tariff structure to make it cheaper to import components than completes to onshore at least part of the process, up regulatory scrutiny on bike imports (good on its own to address sketchy ebikes).
Photo by Mu Yu / Xinhua via Getty Images

Good luck finding a bicycle — an especially an e-bike — made in the US.

It only took 30 years for the US to lose its entire bike manufacturing industry. China dominates global bike manufacturing, with imports accounting for 97 percent of bikes purchased in the US, according to one report. Indeed, China has captured some 86.3 percent of the US bike market. And now tariffs threaten that market.

Congressman Earl Blumenauer sees an opportunity. The 75-year-old Democrat from bike-friendly Portland, Oregon, is introducing a new bill that aims to re-shore domestic bike manufacturing by stealing it back from China while also helping protect electric bikes from high tariffs that could put them out of reach for many Americans.

Continue reading…

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PSA: If you’re a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Oh neat. I've always liked AVRs, and still use the ATmega32uN parts as USB interfaces pretty often, didn't know there were any new products in the family.
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Photoshop ToS grants Adobe access to user projects for ‘content moderation’

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This week on "Stallman was Right" - All the content you work on in your now exclusively available as a service professional graphics software is automatically licensed to the vendor.
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