Monthly Archives: October 2020

Article note: That's a bit of history I didn't know but am totally unsurprised by. This sounds like the usual tale of sociopaths responding to perverse incentives and winning out to ruin all that is good, beautiful, or valuable. Just a little bigger than usual in the computer world.

Article note: I'd bet that this is really a "The wrong grifters noticed they could submit bogus invoices and get them paid" scenario, or some manner of financial conduct cover-up.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Hackers have stolen $2.3 million from the Wisconsin Republican Party that was intended for use in the president's re-election campaign, officials told the Associated Press on Thursday. The state party says it noticed suspicious activity a week ago and contacted the FBI last Friday.

Andrew Hitt, the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, says the theft puts Trump at a disadvantage in the state. He told the AP the party planned to use the money for last-minute needs in the final days of the race.

The theft was accomplished by tampering with invoices submitted to the party from four vendors. The modified invoices directed the state GOP to send money to accounts controlled by the hackers. The hack apparently began as a phishing attempt, Hitt told the AP.

Article note: We really need to, at least, redefine the legal definition of "buy" so "revocable license" isn't included. ...or make larger structural changes to IP law to aim it back at the public interest, instead of a pure rent-seeking machine.

Article note: I still haven't found an alternative I like as well, nothing else has the "local content first-class mixed with streaming library" behavior that GPM had. YT music, especially on mobile, is a shitshow. At least they fixed the commingled history issue, but the UI is unusably sparse, everything is slow, getting basic "play album" "play artist" gets interrupted by random youtube bootleg trash...

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  Goodbye, Google Music. Flower emojis are welcome and may be placed in the comment section below. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Google Play Music died last week. We've known this was coming for some time, and nothing ever happens across the entire Google user base all at once, but many bereaved Google customers are reporting a total loss of life for Google Music. For me the store is gone, speakers no longer work, the app is dead, and the website is dead. It's all gone.

The shutdown wave seems to be rolling across the Google Music userbase as you read this, and even if you still personally have access to some parts of the service, you probably won't have much time left to say your goodbyes. Google Music, born May 10, 2011, will leave us after nine wonderful years.

The service will now join Reader, Google+, and countless other products in the great Google graveyard in the sky. Covering the Google news beat in this day and age basically means running a full-time funeral parlor, and just as we did for the death of Google Inbox, we're here to peacefully guide Google Music into the afterlife with a proper send-off. Thank you for being here today as we celebrate the life of Google's trailblazing music service.

Article note: Early on I was pretty excited about Wayland, but it's become clear that they "solved" the problems with X being largely supplanted by a morass of largely-incompatible extensions only semi-standardized by community agreement by designing a protocol that declares all kinds of necessary-but-difficult features "out of scope" and consigns them to ... a morass of largely-incompatible extensions that aren't even semi-standardized by community agreement, which are now full of non-portable bodges. Unless and until there is a strong agreement among major players (right now, specifically between Gnome, KDE, and the wlroots libraries) around a single protocol for screen capture (for capture, for color pickers, for screen sharing...), a single protocol for the desktop inter-op stuff that used to be covered by ICCM, a single protocol for remoting, a single protocol for input interception and injection, etc. Wayland is somewhere between "not ready" and "actively a problem".

Article note: That's an interesting offering. It's basically board-integration-as-a-service for anything built from SparkFun parts (including whole assemblies), for about $1k. They also offer a basic board foundry and population from their stocked components for your own design files starting at about $150. I'm not sure how big the market between "I can just do it and send it to a small run board house like OSHPark or PCBWay" and "I don't know what these words mean" is, but it's the only offering I know of in that space.

Article note: They really are. The grey scale M that shows up as a notification icon on android, replacing the envelope icon, is especially shit.

Article note: Didn't they fire everyone who wouldn't relocate to SF a couple years ago? I have mixed opinions about the location-based compensation issue. Of course top talent that can do their job remotely deserves the same pay regardless of where they happen to be working remotely from, and it's better for employees to have that market and mobility... but at the same time for work that dose require physical presence, you'd have to offer me pay with _extra digits_ to even consider relocating to one of the sprawling coastal metropolitan clusterfucks. Also, forcing hot-desking on people who _are_ primarily working in-person seems like the same class of trend as "open offices" - absolutely morale-and-productivity crushing misery for all because it's cheap and flexible for the employer.

Article note: Ooh, they're making a second generation in that formfactor.

Article note: I think the general idea that feedback-required, thoughtfulness-inducing friction is desirable much more often than generations of interface makers have been thinking. From "Eternal September" to Twitter's experiments with "Did you actually read this thing you're about to retweet" prompts, there is real evidence that UX has been optimizing for dumb things.