Monthly Archives: March 2024

Rooster Teeth Shut Down by Warner Bros. Discovery

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The little new-media (from the big landscape shift when video got democratized) studio is eventually consumed and dissolved by the gigantic incumbent old media conglomerate.
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VMware sandbox escape bugs are so critical, patches are released for end-of-life products

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Oh dip. For enterprise-ball-squeezer Broadcom to be that "generous" with patches, this must be bad enough they're worried about reputation damage and/or getting blamed for internet-scale problems.
VMware sandbox escape bugs are so critical, patches are released for end-of-life products

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

VMware is urging customers to patch critical vulnerabilities that make it possible for hackers to break out of sandbox and hypervisor protections in all versions, including out-of-support ones, of VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, and Cloud Foundation products.

A constellation of four vulnerabilities—two carrying severity ratings of 9.3 out of a possible 10—are serious because they undermine the fundamental purpose of the VMware products, which is to run sensitive operations inside a virtual machine that’s segmented from the host machine. VMware officials said that the prospect of a hypervisor escape warranted an immediate response under the company’s IT Infrastructure Library, a process usually abbreviated as ITIL.

“Emergency change”

“In ITIL terms, this situation qualifies as an emergency change, necessitating prompt action from your organization,” the officials wrote in a post. “However, the appropriate security response varies depending on specific circumstances.”

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Apple terminates Epic Games developer account calling it a ‘threat’ to iOS

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Holy shit Apple is going hard on this. The EU just handed them a $2B fine in the Spotify case, and to add to their already substantial malicious compliance on the DMA, they've suspended Epic's (who have been among the most aggressive in perusing access) developer account. Microsoft got away with a not-even-as-bold implementation of this kind of shit for a couple years in the 90s before getting smacked down, but either some executives have a staggering amount of hubris, or the calculus on how much the walled garden and associated anti-competitive practices are worth is just so much lucre it seems worth it not to give any ground.
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With Haley’s Departure, the Rematch Between Biden and Trump Is Now Set

Source: NYT > U.S.

Article note: I thought her whole strategy was to wait and hope she became the defacto Republican candidate because Trump was rendered ineligible due to a conviction in one of his various felony cases or a stroke or something.

The contest that many Americans had long hoped to avoid — the 2024 sequel of Biden vs. Trump — is an inescapable reality.

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Firefox has a facility to use native file pickers via xdg-portals, which most of the internet will tell you is set in a key in about:config called widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal. Quite some time ago, that was split into more granular keys so … Continue reading

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Why Rust is worse than C for programming low-level hw

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Not only do I agree that the APIs tend to be frustrating-at-best, this doesn't even get into the fact there will be at least two mutually-incompatible sets of crates offering platform code for any given platform. None of which will be feature complete. I want to like embedded rust, but it's just such a half-baked pain in the ass, and that's comparing to the current state of embedded full of vendored toolchain bullshit.
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European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Good.
man pushing red triangle warning car button

Enlarge / A car's hazard warning lights will need a physical control to get a five-star EuroNCAP score in 2026.

Some progress in the automotive industry is laudable. Cars are safer than ever and more efficient, too. But there are other changes we'd happily leave by the side of the road. That glossy "piano black" trim that's been overused the last few years, for starters. And the industry's overreliance on touchscreens for functions that used to be discrete controls. Well, the automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) feels the same way about that last one, and it says the controls ought to change in 2026.

"The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes," said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP's director of strategic development.

"New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving," he said.

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Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will utterly fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Shit. Not so much because of Yuzu specifically, but because it will embolden attacks on emulation.
The Nintendo logo in black and red
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Just over a week ago, Nintendo sued the developers of the leading Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, for “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” Now, it appears that Yuzu will give up without a fight — and give Nintendo everything it wanted.

According to a joint filing, Tropic Haze has not only agreed to pay $2,400,000 to Nintendo but also said that Yuzu was “primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games” and agrees to be permanently enjoined from working on Yuzu, hosting Yuzu, distributing Yuzu’s code or features, hosting websites and social media that promote Yuzu, or doing anything else that circumvents Nintendo’s copyright protection.

Oh, and it will surrender the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, agree to...

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Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

Source: Hacker News

Article note: From the people who brought you the legal/artificial "You can't use consumer GPUs in data-centers" license restriction, a legal/artificial "You can't port our stack to other hardware, or even inspect it's behavior." license restriction. Nvidia must be getting nervous about their moat shrinking as people move to higher level languages for most accelerator-driven code. As much as the solution is "Keep getting off of CUDA," it's still a dick move.
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Konilo: A personal computing system in Forth

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I love the little self-hosting, self-consistent systems designed for whole-stack comprehension, and the Forth ones (...which are not new, the Canon Cat was technically such a machine) are especially compelling even if I never quite get my head around Forth. I like the name too, Esperanto "Kon" (Know) + "Ilo" (Tool) = Tool For Knowing.
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