Monthly Archives: February 2022

Article note: I really, really hate the use of Discord or Slack for project management/ community help. It's everything bad about IRC, everything bad about in-house forums, none of the good parts of either, _and_ adds some new problems: Not publicly indexed. Not practically searchable. Inside some third party's proprietary silo. Somehow simultaneously super noisy _and_ super spread out. Accessible through a client that consumes more RAM than a reasonable operating system (or a browser tab in a modern heavyweight browser that does the same).

Article note: Snowden being right. Over and over.

Enlarge (credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Two US senators have asked the Central Intelligence Agency to release the details of a secret bulk data collection program that has apparently ensnared Americans.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) wrote the director of national intelligence and the CIA (PDF), asking them to declassify a review of a CIA program known as “Deep Dive II,” the details of which were redacted from their letter. The letter was written in April 2021 but was classified until yesterday.

The secret CIA program is operated under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which former President Ronald Reagan issued in 1981. It has been used to justify bulk data collection of people in the US, including phone calls, SMS messages, and, until recently, email metadata. That practice was limited by a 2015 reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, which banned the bulk collection of phone and SMS metadata by the FBI.

Article note: I have a whole set of thoughts about this stuff: 1. Most games (and ...everything...) are situations where there are several similar creations around the same time, and which one gains traction is not easily predetermined. It's usually not the first or most sophisticated one. See Minecraft for example, there were a plague of blockworld games around that time, and it was not the first or fanciest. Likewise most Apple products. And, you know, transistors. 2. The 2048/Threes situation (FOSS, similar but not exact clone, made for fun/education, under a different name, distributed for free) and Wordle and appstore clone called Wordle (Trying to hustle a quick buck on someone elses' idea _and_ name recognition) are substantially different things. I don't really have a problem with making Free replacements for any thing where it is technically easy to do so. I played a ton of the https://www.fiveletters.xyz/ clone that isn't a one-a-day, and a little of the "I wrote Wordle in a tiny bash reading from the system spellchecker dictionary" stunt doing the rounds the other day. 3. I get yelled at for this one, but 2048 is a more satisfying idle game than Threes. The absolute regularity of 2048 makes it meditative. The powers-of-two thing tickles computer people. 4. The simultaneous, unavoidable rentseeking and gatekeeping by the large incumbent tech players is a menace to society.

Article note: 6.5_Exa_bytes of Flash memory ICs unusable due to contamination in a factory. That's hard to think about. At least it's not a single-supplier item.

Article note: Oohh. More Futurama with most of the original people. Yes please.

Article note: Oh hell yeah. OpenSCAD is a super handy tool, and it's really easy to make models that render it obnoxiously slow. This isn't general parallelism, but it gets a ton of other chokepoints _and_ removes barriers to parallel processing.

Article note: I have the better part of a terabyte of encrypted incremental backups rclone'd into my university institutional google drive as a remote, because it was advertised as "unlimited". I haven't heard anything, but I should probably expect to.

Article note: Excellent. An independent ARM is currently important for the industry.

Enlarge (credit: Arm)

SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.

The deal, the largest ever in the chip sector, would have given California-based Nvidia control of a company that makes technology at the heart of most of the world’s mobile devices. A handful of Big Tech companies that rely on Arm’s chip designs, including Qualcomm and Microsoft, had objected to the purchase.

SoftBank will receive a break-up fee of up to $1.25 billion and is seeking to unload Arm through an initial public offering before the end of the year, said one of the people.

Article note: I don't understand what kind of buys-security-products-they-saw-in-an-airport-ad useless middle-manager decision making lead to them getting involved with ID.me in the first place.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | imaginima)

The Internal Revenue Service is dropping a controversial facial recognition system that requires people to upload video selfies when creating new IRS online accounts.

"The IRS announced it will transition away from using a third-party service for facial recognition to help authenticate people creating new online accounts," the agency said today. "The transition will occur over the coming weeks in order to prevent larger disruptions to taxpayers during filing season. During the transition, the IRS will quickly develop and bring online an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition."

The IRS has been using the third-party system ID.me for facial recognition of taxpayers. Privacy and civil rights advocates and lawmakers from both major parties have objected to the system. The IRS wasn't demanding ID.me verification for filing tax returns but was requiring it for accessing related services, such as account information, applying for payment plans online, requesting transcripts, and the Child Tax Credit Update Portal.

Article note: I click-holed about the NEC V20/V30 8080-alike family a while ago. They really were shockingly impressive parts for how little attention they get. Some of their extensions were awesome and well-conceived, their BCD system is sort of unbelievably sophisticated, and the trapping in- and out- of compatibility mode trick is awesome.