Category Archives: News

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Amazon’s overcomplicated new product star ratings are no bright idea

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I noticed that annoying change the the other day, it's another clear effort to obfuscate anything that might obstruct the flow of landfill-ready cut cost products to unwitting consumers.
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Naomi Wu and the Silence That Speaks Volumes

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Again, more aggressively, and there was no press in the west?! The depersonalized identity politic token fawning juxtaposed with whining about depersonalized political tokenism in the article is ...weird... but the whole situation is extremely distressing.
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3D printer nightmare fuel: Bambu X1C and P1P started printing while owners were asleep

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Yeah, that's a big fuckup about something the community is skeptical of them about. I've played with an X1Cs, they're _superb_ printers with well-thought-out kinematics, the most reliable filament changer on the market by a considerable margin, some amazing feedback-driven harmonic management, are super fast ... and contain an unfortunate amount of proprietary parts/software and unwanted connectivity. I think I'd do a Voron Trident (kit) if I decided I needed a higher performance printer right now, it has similar kinematics (I'm weakly convinced CoreXY over Z bed is better than CoreXY on flying gantry) but is open source all the way down.
A black metal hollow box with a floating print head inside on rails, with colorful mosaic of plastic dots on its side panel
The Bambu P1P, with optional 3D-printed panels. | Image: Bambu

When owners of Bambu’s extremely well-regarded 3D printers woke up on August 15th, some found their printer had gone rogue.

Some woke up to failed prints. Some found a second copy of a previous print. And at least a few found their Bambu X1C or P1P had started smacking itself apart — damaging components — while trying to print a second copy atop the object they’d actually asked for.

Ok so this is a bit concerning, I have zero clue how their system is setup (yay proprietary closed source) but it looks like a disruption in Bambulab`s cloud service cause a whole bunch of peoples printers to just.....start printing last night. pic.twitter.com/Sqbk9zmc60

— NERO 3D (@3dpNero) August 15, 2023

These printers started printing unattended,...

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Embedded Linux, Ioctl, SPI-Dev, I2C-Dev and FPGA

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Cohesive accessible documentation about doing things across the PL-PS ("Programmable Logic-Processing System" Xilinx for FPGA-Hard Processor) boundary is hard to come by. This is a nice all-in-one example that at least covers all the shit involved in plumbing an IIC interface through Vivado and PetaLinux into user space on a Zynq.
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ISPs complain that listing every fee is too hard, urge FCC to scrap new rule

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: ... if you can calculate the charges, you've already got the process to document them. Telecom providers are, as always, just trying to hide the "Fuck you, because we can" fees and/or muddy that they're routinely over-charging for passed through fees, equipment rentals, etc.
Dollar signs superimposed on a photo of a person's hands typing on a laptop keyboard.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | anyaberkut)

The US broadband industry is united in opposition to a requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees. Five lobby groups representing cable companies, fiber and DSL providers, and mobile operators have repeatedly urged the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate the requirement before new broadband labeling rules take effect.

The trade associations petitioned the FCC in January to change the rules and renewed their call last week in a filing and in a meeting with FCC officials. The requirement that ISPs list all their monthly fees "would add unnecessary complexity and burdens to the label for consumers and providers and could result in some providers having to create many labels for any given plan," the groups said in the filing on Friday.

The trade groups said the FCC should instead "require providers to include an explanatory statement that such fees may apply and that they vary by jurisdiction, similar to the Commission's treatment of government-imposed taxes," or require "the display of the maximum level of government-imposed fees that might be passed through, so that consumers would not experience bill shock with respect to such fees."

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New RedHat Responsibilities

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The loss of maintainer on some redundant gnome multimedia apps is not ideal but not super weird. The loss of maintainer on a bunch of plumbing (fprintd for fingerprint sensors, iio-sensor-proxy for accelerometers, various XDG efforts, etc.) is a big problem for everyone. It is, very much, the "IBM is gonna fuck this up" folks were worried about.
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Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This. The public shouldn't lose rights because they're inconvenient for rent-seekers.
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CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

Source: Hacker News

Article note: A couple weeks ago I was saying almost exactly this (an "Enterprise Linux" coordination point that isn't IBM/RedHat) happening was likely, and might make RHEL-brand-RHEL irrelevant. Let's see how it shakes out.
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Colleges Spend Like There’s No Tomorrow.

Source: Slashdot

Article note: Oh look, several of the dumbest things UK has done recently are featured in a WSJ article about irresponsible college spending. Expensive Housing + Administrative Bloat + Diminished State Funding = Unreasonable College Costs.

The nation's best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. Then they passed the bill along to students. From a report: The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one of America's poorest states, paid an average $18,693 to attend in 2021-22. Pennsylvania State University spent so much money that it now has a budget crisis -- even though it's among the most expensive public universities in the U.S. The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program. The spending is inextricably tied to the nation's $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges have paid for their sprees in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects. It has long been clear to American families that the cost of college has gone up, even at public schools designed to be affordable for state residents. To get at the root cause, The Wall Street Journal examined financial statements since 2002 from 50 universities known as flagships, typically the oldest public school in each state, and adjusted for inflation. At the median flagship university, spending rose 38% between 2002 and 2022. Only one school in the Journal's analysis -- the University of Idaho -- spent less. The schools paid for it in part by pulling in tuition dollars. The median flagship received more than double the revenue from undergraduate and graduate tuition and fees it did 20 years prior. Even accounting for enrollment gains, that amounted to a 64% price increase for the average student, far outpacing the growth in most big household expenses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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“Downfall” bug affects years of Intel CPUs, can leak encryption keys and more

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: At this point the article might as well be a digest about "This month's speculative execution vulnerabilities for each of the major platforms."
An 8th-generation Intel Core desktop CPU, one of several CPU generations affected by the Downfall bug.

Enlarge / An 8th-generation Intel Core desktop CPU, one of several CPU generations affected by the Downfall bug. (credit: Mark Walton)

It's a big week for CPU security vulnerabilities. Yesterday, different security researchers published details on two different vulnerabilities, one affecting multiple generations of Intel processors and another affecting the newest AMD CPUs. "Downfall" and "Inception" (respectively) are different bugs, but both involve modern processors' extensive use of speculative execution (a la the original Meltdown and Spectre bugs), both are described as being of "medium" severity, and both can be patched either with OS-level microcode updates or firmware updates with fixes incorporated.

AMD and Intel have both already released OS-level microcode software updates to address both issues. Both companies have also said that they're not aware of any active in-the-wild exploits of either vulnerability. Consumer, workstation, and server CPUs are all affected, making patching particularly important for server administrators.

It will be up to your PC, server, or motherboard manufacturer to release firmware updates with the fixes after Intel and AMD make them available.

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