Daily Archives: 2021-02-10

Border agents can search phones freely under new circuit court ruling

Posted on 2021-02-10 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Ah, shit. That had previously appeared to settle in a much better affirming basic civil liberties sort of way.
More than 1 million people traveled on planes in US on a single day ahead of Thanksgiving amid coronavirus pandemic
David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A US appeals court has ruled that Customs and Border Protection agents can conduct in-depth searches of phones and laptops, overturning an earlier legal victory for civil liberties groups. First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch declared that both basic and “advanced” searches, which include reviewing and copying data without a warrant, fall within “permissible constitutional grounds” at the American border.

Lynch ruled against a group of US citizens and residents objecting to invasive searches of their electronic devices. The group includes Sidd Bikkannavar, a NASA scientist who was detained and pressured to unlock a secure government-issued phone. Most of the incidents date to 2017, when then-President Donald Trump pushed for tighter border...

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Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite ‘calamitous design choices’ in git

Posted on 2021-02-10 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: That looks about right. Git is obscenely over-complicated and ill-suited to the vast majority of things it is used for, and github's EEE workflow has made it even weirder -- but it's also by far the dominant species, and if you pretend the 10% of its surface area that is not a foot-cannon is the whole thing and entirely hide how it actually works, you can get network effects while still pretending to be using an appropriate tool. More generally, the tooling to do _anything_ has become so horrifically complicated and opaque that everyone is scurrying back mainframes^H^H the cloud, and that itself is a problem.

'I don't have the energy to be a server admin for something that's held together with scotch tape and prayers'

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) project is moving development to GitHub today despite what a core developer calls "calamitous design choices" in git, for the sake of familiarity and wide tool support.…

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Google could have killed Facebook

Posted on 2021-02-10 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Eesh. It's such a tale of the modern tech industry. Facebook's ad-tech panel, responsible for at least a quarter of their revenue, was a disaster of legacy Javascript being maintained by one engineer until someone looking for a ladder to climb noticed it was dependent on the deprecated WebSQL API (...and said API was deprecated because the other webhipsters were like "Nooo, SQLite backing isn't exciting enough, let's standardize on NoSQL instead") and re-wrote it with a newer generation of hipster tools.
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Interview with Bill Joy (1984)

Posted on 2021-02-10 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Huh. I knew about how much of vi was agglomerated via cross-pollination among academic UNIX folk, like almost everything in UNIX in the mid-to-late 70s, but didn't know how early they were looking at very-different editors (like Bravo) for inspiration, and how early they were aware that modality was a bad idea. Lot of _very_ forward-looking Also, looking from the present,"These editors tend to last too long - almost a decade for vi now. Ideas aren't advancing very quickly, are they?" in 1984 is absolutely hilarious, both for the obvious reasons about it still being around and everything in computing being stalled, and because of how much computing folk in that era under-estimated the value of consistency I'm one of the only editor-hoppers I know (right now mostly kate and micro), most people seem to learn one of the arcane ones and get stuck forever.
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