Category Archives: News

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I don’t like Docker or Podman

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Many of these annoyances are true, but are completely separate from the ones I hate on containers over. Containers indicate your software has been put together so sloppily that it is not deployable. Containers have weird failures in separation (permissions with docker is alarming). Containers (and also OP's preferred VMs which at least avoids the separation problem) are hauling around a whole fucking Linux distribution per binary, which is an absurd waste of space and bandwidth.
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Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is extremely cyberdeck, in the actual Idoru box with glasses and gloves (not that last part) sense that few things that use the term match up with.
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An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is the niftiest, most deeply technical esoterica I've seen in a while. Apple has an invalid instruction in the ROM of the Classic II (ca.1991), whose undocumented behavior on real hardware is necessary to compute an address during the boot process. Discovered because emulators that implement the documented instruction set crash, either on the invalid instruction or on the next instruction because the side-effect didn't happen.
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Data breach hitting PowerSchool looks very, very bad

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: ...Speaking of problems with data silos: One of the biggest ed-tech carpetbaggers got hacked and lost control of large amounts of personal data for tens of millions of people, many of them children. Good job.

Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are smarting from what could be the biggest data breach of 2025: an intrusion into the network of a cloud-based service storing detailed data of millions of pupils and school personnel.

The hack, which came to light earlier this month, hit PowerSchool, a Folsom, California, firm that provides cloud-based software to some 16,000 K–12 schools worldwide. The schools serve 60 million students and employ an unknown number of teachers. Besides providing software for administration, grades, and other functions, PowerSchool stores personal data for students and teachers, with much of that data including Social Security numbers, medical information, and home addresses.

On January 7, PowerSchool revealed that it had experienced a network intrusion two weeks earlier that resulted in the “unauthorized exportation of personal information” customers stored in PowerSchool’s Student Information System (SIS) through PowerSource, a customer support portal. Information stolen included individuals’ names, contact information, dates of birth, medical alert information, Social Security Numbers, and unspecified “other related information.”

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Brick Layer Post-Processor, Promising Stronger 3D Prints, Now Available

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: Neat! This looks like one of the more promising low-hanging strength improvements for printed parts that, like many things in 3D printing (and everywhere) is/was being held back by bullshit patents.

Back in November we first brought you word of a slicing technique by which the final strength of 3D printed parts could be considerably improved by adjusting the first layer height of each wall so that subsequent layers would interlock like bricks. It was relatively easy to implement, didn’t require anything special on the printer to accomplish, and testing showed it was effective enough to pursue further. Unfortunately, there was some patent concerns, and it seemed like nobody wanted to be the first to step up and actually implement the feature.

Well, as of today, [Roman Tenger] has decided to answer the call. As explained in the announcement video below, the company that currently holds the US patent for this tech hasn’t filed a European counterpart, so he feels he’s in a fairly safe spot compared to other creators in the community. We salute his bravery, and wish him nothing but the best of luck should any lawyer come knocking.

So how does it work? Right now the script supports PrusaSlicer and OrcaSlicer, and the installation is the same in both cases — just download the Python file, and go into your slicer’s settings under “Post-Processing Scripts” and enter in its path. As of right now you’ll have to provide the target layer height as an option to the script, but we’re willing to bet that’s going to be one of the first things that gets improved as the community starts sending in pull requests for the GPL v3 licensed script.

There was a lot of interest in this technique when we covered it last, and we’re very excited to see an open source implementation break cover. Now that it’s out in the wild, we’d love to hear about it in the comments if you try it out.

Thanks to [greg_bear] in the Hackaday Discord for the tip.

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Federal Court (Finally) Rules Backdoor Searches of Data Unconstitutional

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The general attitude by the US legal system that collecting and storing huge amounts of data doesn't raise any 4th amendment concerns, only the act of a human entering search terms into the already created and indexed database is one of the most blatant bits of legal bullshit that has managed to take root. This only very slightly reigns it in.
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Bambu Connect’s Authentication X.509 Certificate and Private Key Extracted

Source: Hacker News

Article note: As usual, telling your hacker filled customer base what they can and can't do with products they've already bought is a sure way to get your entire security model publicly dismembered in a matter of days.
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Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Of _course_ they did. The brainrot apps automatically propagating propaganda and acting as Trojan horses to mass-exfiltrate user data are absolutely a threat to society, but they're all the same threat, and we live in an emerging oligarchy so they're competing to capture the government. _So many_ problems would be solved if government institutions had made a real effort to reign in surveillance capitalism instead of supporting it.
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Donald Trump appears to have launched a meme coin

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: A twofer scam, fleecing some rubes on the side while laundering Rubles.
A picture of Donald Trump in black and white, wearing a ball cap and jacket with a colorful blue, yellow, and green background with large swirly lines.
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge

Donald Trump has launched a new meme coin, according to posts from his X and Truth Social accounts last night. The posts, which have come just days before Trump’s inauguration, were initially met with suspicion by many that his accounts had been hacked.

Skeptics highlighted by Decrypt last night pointed to several red flags, such as that the millions of dollars seeding the project came from Binance and Gate, which only serve overseas customers. The coin’s website credits the project to the same group behind Trump’s NFTs, as noted by Cointelegraph, which reports that sources close to Trump’s family confirmed the announcements’ legitimacy.

Both posts remain up as of this morning.

Screenshot of Trump’s announcement on X. Screenshot: X
Trump’s official X account announced a new meme coin on Friday.

The idea that Trump would debut a meme coin is no big surprise, given his multiple NFT collections and his introduction of a crypto platform last year. He has made cryptocurrency a big part of his new agenda and has assembled a crypto and AI-focused tech policy team led by “crypto czar” David Sacks. Trump also plans to issue an executive order naming crypto a “national imperative or priority” after he’s inaugurated next week, Bloomberg reported ahead of the weekend.

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NYT Opinion: How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms

Source: Published articles

Article note: That's a lot of words for "The Democrats started exerting social and regulatory pressure on the silicon valley investor class' scam-adjacent cash cows, so we turned on them." I'm never sure how many valleybros _actually believe_ there is real value in the Crypto and AI energy-wasting scam projects, and how much they just know it's a path to lucre and pretend for show. This whole interview is Andreessen acting like ramping up AI is the most pressing moral/technological/societal imperative, and that is grounds to justify going along with _anything_ else, and ... I can't tell if he believes it, or it's just an excuse to do whatever will give him and those like him the most money and power in the near term (and fuck everyone else).

Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.

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