Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
Next week on Wednesday (May 11), the EU Commission will present an EU draft law on mandatory chat control to the public for the first time. Similar to Apple's highly controversial "SpyPhone" plans, the Commission wants to oblige all providers of email, chat and messaging services to search for susp
Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
If you have AirTags in the vicinity of your iPad it drains its battery for no reason. The past months I’ve been wondering why my iPad Pro always needed to be recharged when I used to use it without charging for weeks. I’m not the only one…
Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
My guiding principles after 20 years of programming (2020)
I’ve been programming since 1999. This year I’ve officially coded for 20+ years. I’ve started with Basic but soon jumped into Pascal and C…
Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco
Apparently, the first system breakdown of a driverless robot taxi fleet occurred. In San Francisco, at least a dozen autonomous Chevrolet Bolts from GM Cruise Automation were spotted blocking the i…
Why I left Pine64
None
Shaving is an example of how consumer products extract more money
Shaving is too expensive and is a demonstrative example of how most consumer products are designed to extract more money from you rather than to improve your life, or the world, or to be in any way remotely good.
Web3 is expensive P2P
Web3 claims to be the only way to save us from commercial entities defining what we can see and what not. Yet, it does exactly this: It results in commercialized entities defining what we can see and what not. More on the blockchain ecosystem in this overview and especially in the simple, hum
Time Till Open Source Alternative
Open Source Freelancer
The Follower: Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken
How does this work? I launched the project on 12 September 2022. The YouTube video was just created with results of 10 days. I will publish new results on my socials. Press:
Extremely Linear Git History
One of the things that I like to do in my projects, is to make the git history as linear as possible.
A project with a single 11,000-line code file
I was responsible for a critical software project written by non-programmers a decade ago.
Saying “sup” with `net send`
When I was in junior high, my friends and I discovered that a Command Prompt command called net send was enabled on our school network. AIM and similar services were blocked, but if we wanted to send messages to each other we could open up the Command Prompt and type something like: net send lab2126-24 test and get an…
Stripe is PayPal circa 2010
After integrating both Stripe and Paypal I've come to the realization that they are nearly the same, including all the evil.
$7M lost on Amazon inventory, then bankrupt
Our Amazon journey started in January 2018 when HyperVolt released the first massage gun on the market. We were so careful with this…
People don't work as much as they say
There is a persistent idea that people work 40 hours a week. They don't, and if you try to do this it will break you. Here are some more reasonable guidelines.
SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way
I’ve been an SELinux complexity apologist for years. Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.
Mendon, Missouri
Mendon, Missouri. Population 171. There’s really nothing here. The tiny town is located off Route 11, just south of Yellow Creek. You’re three hours west of Saint Louis, two hours […]
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear. Here's why that's dangerous.
Shortest URLs on the Internet
What’s the shortest URL for which content is served on the internet? There are quite a few single-letter second-level domains that are used in very short URLs, such as Google’s http://g.co or Facebook’s https://m.me. But we can go shorter than this: there’s nothing stopping TLD registry operators serving A records at…