Leftovers

• Tyler Thorsted ☛ iView

  It seems to be a common theme through the history of software that some titles, get bought, sold, rebranded, integrated, and discontinued by a number of companies. I find it interesting to find out a popular software title’s humble beginnings. Often when a piece of software gets bought, the file formats don’t change much, at least at first.

  A little shareware program called iView started out by a company called Script Software in 1996. They later changed their name to Plum Amazing. iView then became iView Multimedia, then an iView MediaPro version before it was bought by Microsoft where they changed the name to Expression Media. After a couple years the software was bought by Phase One and then discontinued. Let’s take a look at the history.

• Riccardo Mori ☛ People and resources added to my reading list in 2025

  Welcome to the thirteenth instalment of my annual overview of my most interesting discoveries made during the previous year. A few months ago, a friend of mine remarked that the title of this series of posts should be updated, because instalment after instalment, my list of things to actually read has become shorter, and the list of resources to watch has become longer. Maybe you should just say, “People and resources added to my watch list”, they suggested. But ‘watch list’ gives me bad surveillance vibes, and discovering and suggesting new blogs always has priority for me, so ‘reading list’ it is. Or perhaps I should go back to the wording of the first post of the series, published in early 2013 — Some interesting resources I discovered in [year]. We’ll see.

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ The Positive Case for Good Tech

  I agree with this quote on defining the indie web (for our purposes, I will use the term to refer to independent websites and not a specific movement). Mr. Williams wrote his article in response to a quote that he believes unnecessarily defined the indie web in part by what it exists in opposition to (note I am not addressing the specific debate in this article). He advocates for defining the indie web positively, focusing on why it is a good thing in and of itself without defining it even in part based on its real or imagined enemies.

• Mat Duggan ☛ The Small Web is Tricky to Find

  One of the most common requests I've gotten from users of my little Firefox extension(https://timewasterpro.xyz) has been more options around the categories of websites that you get returned. This required me to go through and parse the website information to attempt to put them into different categories. I tried a bunch of different approaches but ended up basically looking at the websites themselves seeing if there was anything that looked like a tag or a hint on each site.

• Manton Reece ☛ Trailing narrative

  What happens next is probably wildly different depending on the narrative. I don’t have a specific example to share here. I’ve just seen it play out like this multiple times.

• Justin Duke ☛ The death of software, the A24 of software

  The shift to streaming has not killed media. But it has, to put it mildly, made the aggregate quality of the product worse, and in doing so shifted the value generated away from creative labor and towards platforms and capital. Warner Bros. is, to hear some people say it, the last great conventional studio producing consistently risky and high-quality work that advances the medium forward; Netflix, Apple, et al do put out some extremely great stuff, but the vast majority of their budget goes to things like Red Notice — films designed with their audiences' revealed preferences (i.e., browsing their phone while the film is on) in mind.

• Dominik Schwind ☛ Friday Night DevOps | LostFocus

  Just when I was about to go to bed my phone told me that my blog was down. Very inconvenient. So I poked around a bit, turns out: the disk was full and a computer with no space to work with doesn’t really want to deliver websites.

• Dave Gauer ☛ A programmer's loss of identity

  This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me. In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be. Everything I wrote there is still true, but amplified.

• Anil Dash ☛ Launch it 3 times

  So many of the creators and innovators that inspire me most often end up working on their best ideas for years or even decades, iterating and revisiting those ideas with an almost-obsessive passion. Most of the time, they’re doing it because of a combination of their own personal mission and the deep belief that what they’re doing is going to help change people’s lives for the better. For those kinds of people, one of the things I want most is to ensure that they don’t give up before their ideas have had a full and fair chance to succeed, even if that means that sometimes you have to try, try again.

• Science

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ ESCAPADE telemetry

    Back in November, I posted about the ESCAPADE Mars twin orbiter mission. I made a recording of the X-band telemetry with the Allen Telescope Array the day after launch, and I decoded the telemetry with GNU Radio. I made a preliminary analysis of the telemetry, showing that it contained a large number of log messages in ASCII. Shortly after writing this post, PistonMiner provided a deeper analysis of the telemetry, including a Github repository with some code and extracted data. She noticed that the CCSDS Space Packets, all of which belonged to the same APID 51, contained MAX simple telemetry frames in their payloads. Since MAX telemetry frames contain their own APIDs, this allowed separating the different types of telemetry data. Since seeing this, I wanted to go back and analyse again the telemetry to see what else I could find. Now I’ve finally had some time to do this. In this post I describe my new findings, as well as what PistonMiner originally discovered.

• Hardware

  • Florian Anderiasch ☛ f5n : Hardware Mute Button

    The solution being used on Linux that triggered this whole adventure looks downright boring: Midi-pw-mixer.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Resetting the LE75CW aircon controller

      Our old apartment had one of those Leasam late 1990s air conditioning controllers that not only operated in a nonsensical way, but would constantly manage to lock itself to a specific temperature with no way to adjust it.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Greg Morris ☛ The Only Digital Detox That Worked

    Becca Farsace did something I've been circling for years. She left her phone at home and went out into the world carrying a Hasselblad, a notebook, a pen, a cassette player, and a book. Directions written down. Phone numbers scrawled on paper. The whole thing.

• Proprietary

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Discord is not a good product

    While normal, free, common-sense alternatives like email, IRC, XMPP and Fediverse are “products” in some senses of the word (they are produced things that exist and you can use them; and this goes extra for commercial but FOSS-friendly forums like Discourse or Vanilla), they’re products the same way breathable air is a product. If someone were to take away your lungs in order to sell you bottled oxygen that’d not be a product I’d be a happy customer of. I might be buying but I’d be pretty sad about what they took away.

    In one way it’s even worse than heroin—not in all or even most ways, and not to make light of the opiate crisis, (stay in school, kids!) but with dope there’s at least multiple vendors.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Testing Linux memory limits is a bit of a pain

    For reasons outside of the scope of this entry, I want to test how various systemd memory resource limits work and interact with each other (which means that I'm really digging into cgroup v2 memory controls). When I started trying to do this, it turned out that I had no good test program (or programs), although I had some ones that gave me partial answers.

  • Ordinal0 ☛ A Deep Dive into Apple's .car File Format

    Every modern iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS application uses Asset Catalogs to manage images, colors, icons, and other resources. When you build an app with Xcode, your .xcassets folders are compiled into binary .car files that ship with your application. Despite being a fundamental part of every Apple app, there is little to none official documentation about this file format.

    In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools.

    As part of this research, I’ve built a custom parser and compiler for .car files that doesn’t depend on any of Apple’s private frameworks or proprietary tools. To make this research practical, I’ve compiled my parser to WebAssembly so it runs entirely in your browser, so no server uploads required. You can drop any .car file into the interactive demo below to explore its content. I’m considering open-sourcing these tools, but no promises yet!

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Seth Godin ☛ The next generation of AI businesses

      But you can’t shrink your way to greatness.

    • Stephen Smith ☛ Bias and Toxicity in Generative AI

      There has been quite an explosion of Generative AI programs recently including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Facebook’s Llama, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok. All of these are quite good, but some of them have been known to produce toxic and biased results. In fact, Elon Musk made a point of making Grok do so. This article looks at how these models are trained and how companies try to either remove or add toxic and incorrect data.

    • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Automated public shaming of open source maintainers

      It should go without saying that this behavior is unacceptable and that the deployment of generative AI agents in this way is deeply irresponsible and has real negative consequences on volunteers contributing to critical software projects. This type of abuse is preventable, generative AI platforms need to implement better safe-guards that prevent this type of abuse.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Please don’t use “AI” “Summary” tools here

      I would like to ask you to please stop using “AI” tools to “summarise” my blog posts. I ask this for a few reasons, but the primary one is because they get things wrong. Then you post your “summaries” on sites like LinkedIn, and I’m inundated with people arguing over a point I didn’t make, or commenting on something I didn’t write.

    • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 15

      The question was never open. Human dignity is not a benchmark. It is not subject to scaling laws. It does not depreciate when a machine passes a test. The parent who loves her child does not love the child for being the smartest type of thing on Earth. She loves the child. Period. The obligation we owe each other — to share what we know, to protect what we’ve built, to govern ourselves with care — does not diminish because a language model can write code.

      Smith cannot see this because his frame has no room for it. In his frame, worth is position. And position is precarious. That is not wisdom. That is the anxiety of a man who has mistaken rank for meaning.

    • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Minimum Standards for Taking AI Seriously

      Let me point out that both things can be true. A thick cloud of hustlers, grifters, and the greediest monsters on earth surround the AI industry like flies surround a butchered corpse. Sure. This has been true with all new technologies. At the same time, notwithstanding the great volume of bullshit issuing forth from this cloud of self-interested actors, the underlying technology itself—railroads, electricity, the internet, whatever—does often have profoundly transformative effects on the world. (Even if it takes longer and unfolds in a different way than the grifters said.) This, in fact, is the most likely path for AI. The good news is that, unless you are a tech investor or tech journalist or AI company engineer, the precise specifics of how and when every advance occurs and who wins the race to each specific benchmark and how much money they make off of it… do not really matter. What matters to the vast majority of people in America and around the world is: How will AI change the economy and the distribution of power in our society? And, if it is going to fuck us up, how can we take wise steps to prevent or mitigate that?

    • Derek Thompson ☛ The Doomsday Scenario for AI and Jobs

      So, I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about how the AI discourse has become so fractured. At the highest level, I think the AI discourse gap is downstream of a cultural gap between the Bay Area, where the frontier labs are based, and the rest of the country, which has developed a skeptical attitude toward the promises of Silicon Valley. While many technologists in San Francisco regard their zip code as the world’s greatest fount of technological progress, much of the country—perhaps, especially journalists—regards Silicon Valley as a den of plutocratic parasites whose work deserves our most profound distrust and disgust.

      Beneath this cultural difference, there is a deeper substantive divide over AI. It’s not one disagreement. It’s really more like four distinct divides.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ SaaSpocalypse: investors overspend badly on software companies and blame AI

      Today’s word is “SaaSpocalypse”. A pile of overvalued enterprise software companies’ stock price number went down, and they’re blaming AI.

      The mini-bubble in software-as-a-service was always going to pop . The trigger was that stock traders were deluded into thinking your boss yelling at Claude Code could replace Salesforce. Yeah, really.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ The Final Bottleneck

      Anyone who has worked with queues knows this: if input grows faster than throughput, you have an accumulating failure. At that point, backpressure and load shedding are the only things that retain a system that can still operate.

      If you have ever been in a Starbucks overwhelmed by mobile orders, you know the feeling. The in-store experience breaks down. You no longer know how many orders are ahead of you. There is no clear line, no reliable wait estimate, and often no real cancellation path unless you escalate and make noise.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Fires Top Safety Exec Who Opposed ChatGPT's "Adult Mode"

      Beiermeister was vice president of OpenAI’s product policy team, which develops rules and safeguards for how its products can be used. Before she was fired, she told colleagues that she was opposed to OpenAI’s plans to launch an “adult mode“ that would allow users to engage in sexually explicit conversations with the chatbot. In addition, Beiermeister also expressed that she believed OpenAI’s guardrails to prevent child exploitation content weren’t strong enough, including when it came to walling off adult content from teens, per the WSJ sources.

    • Scott Shambaugh ☛ An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

      Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

    • BoingBoing ☛ An AI wrote a hit piece on the dev who rejected it

      MJ Rathbun later posted an apology. It continues to submit pull requests across open-source projects. Who deployed it remains unknown—the platforms involved require no robust identity verification, and no central authority exists to rein in rogue agents.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Fortra LLC ☛ Urgent Warnings From UK and US Cyber Agencies After Polish Energy Grid Attack

      Polish authorities have concluded that the infrastructure used overlapped significantly with that of the Dragonfly hacking group (also known as Static Tundra or Berserk Bear), long linked to the Russian government.

      According to the Polish CERT report, hackers deployed wiper malware that destroyed data on computer systems, corrupted firmware on operational technology devices, and damaged remote terminal units.

    • Neowin ☛ Windows 11 update KB5077181 is causing critical boot loops for some users

      KB5077181 is causing devices to restart over 15 times in an infinite loop. Users also report network issues and error codes.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Pete Warden ☛ Announcing Moonshine Voice

      Today we’re launching Moonshine Voice, a new family of on-device speech to text models designed for live voice applications, and an open source library to run them. They support streaming, doing a lot of the compute while the user is still talking so your app can respond to user speech an order of magnitude faster than alternatives, while continuously supplying partial text updates. Our largest model has only 245 million parameters, but achieves a 6.65% word error rate on HuggingFace’s OpenASR Leaderboard compared to Whisper Large v3 which has 1.5 billion parameters and a 7.44% word error rate. We are optimized for easy integration with applications, with prebuilt packages and examples for iOS, Android, Python, MacOS, Windows, Linux, and Raspberry Pis. Everything runs on the CPU with no NPU or GPU dependencies. and the code and streaming models are released under an MIT License.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Lee Peterson ☛ Casio overstepping the privacy barrier

      I also saw this message when trying to sync, they have effectively made the watch pretty useless if you don’t let it always have access to location.

    • Six Colors ☛ Apple should rethink Face ID settings for our current era

      Through no fault of Apple, Face ID is having a moment — and not in a good way.

      Sure, the biometric security feature works as well as it ever does, using a face scan to unlock your iPhone, confirm mobile payments and generally an extra layer of protection between your digital data and the prying eyes of the outside world.

    • Jeff Geerling ☛ Testing Reachy Mini - Hugging Face's Pi powered robot

      What happened next alarmed me.

      Within seconds of starting the conversation app, my daughter told the robot her name. Before the first couple minutes were up, she started providing the names of her siblings and pointing them out so Reachy could aim the camera around and learn who 'he' was talking to.

    • Don Marti ☛ Yo ho, yo ho, a data sale life for me

      In the news: California’s attorney general issues largest CCPA fine to date. On the surface, this is a predictable compliance story. Disney pulled a classic CCPA/CPRA compliance mistake—treating Global Privacy Control and other required opt-outs as a front-end ticket, and not updating the customer records to make an opt-out take effect everywhere that the customer and the company interact. To quote the regs,

    • Ankur Sethi ☛ I used a local LLM to analyze my journal entries

      But there was a problem: I write about sensitive topics in my journal entries, and I don’t want to share them with the big LLM providers. Most of them have at least a thirty-day data retention policy, even if you call their models using their APIs, and that makes me uncomfortable. Worse, all of them have safety and abuse detection systems that get triggered if you talk about certain mental health issues. This can lead to account bans or human review of your conversations.

    • NYOB ☛ Digital Omnibus: EU DPAs reject many proposed changes to the GDPR

      The EDPB (combining all independent data proction authorities) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) published a joint opinion expressing serious concerns about key elements of the proposed GDPR and ePrivacy changes in the so-called “Digital Omnibus” proposed by the European Commission. Specifically, the authorities strongly oppose the proposed narrowing of the definition of personal data. The opinion also question the need for various key proposals, such as the legal basis for AI training and restrictions on the right of access. Many other provisions are seen as not clear enough. The authorities’ feedback is another major blow for the Commission’s attempt to limit the rights of users.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ Office Hours: What is stopping you from becoming even more active against this loathsome president and his venal regime?

    I put forward several possible explanations, but I’d appreciate it if you could add your own self-reflection, as honestly as possible. Many of you are resisting the Trump reign of terror with courage and tenacity. By anyone’s definition you are an activist.

    But what is stopping you from becoming even more active in resisting this loathsome president and his venal regime?

• Environment

  • Irish Examiner ☛ Trump condemned for revoking scientific finding on climate change

    The rule finalised by the Environmental Protection Agency rescinds a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 14

    I want to be precise about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that property is an illusion. I am not arguing that property rights should be abolished. I am not arguing that the Marxist critique of private ownership is correct, or that the state should seize the means of production, or that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. I have no interest in replacing one absolutism with another.

    I am arguing that property is real in the same way that memory is real, that witness is real, that citizenship is real. It is genuine. It matters. It is worth protecting. And it does not come first.

    The question of what comes first is not an academic question. It is the question on which the republic turns. It has always been the question on which the republic turns. And the answer the founders gave — the answer that is under direct assault — is the most radical sentence in the American canon.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Judge Quotes Bob Dylan in Rebuke of Hegseth's Bid to Punish Mark Kelly

    A judge has dismissed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempts to retaliate against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former Navy captain and astronaut who incurred the Pentagon chief’s ire when he reminded active-duty service members that they do not have to execute unlawful orders.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Firstpost ☛ CBS News layoffs: Network to cut 15% of jobs amid major newsroom overhaul

    CBS News is preparing for a major round of layoffs that could affect up to 15 per cent of its staff, Variety reported. The move marks the latest effort by editor in chief Bari Weiss to reshape the network’s newsroom for the streaming age.

    The planned reductions come just days after The Washington Post laid off about 300 journalists, underscoring the growing pressure on traditional news organisations to cut costs and adapt to digital consumption habits.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Robert Reich ☛ Who, exactly, is ICE arresting, jailing, and abusing?

    Trump is lying about ICE arrests. He said his deportation machine would go after only the “worst of the worst.”

    According to newly leaked data from the Department of Homeland Security, less than 14 percent of the 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in the past year have either been charged with or convicted of violent crimes.

  • Nick Heer ☛ U.S. Customs and Border Protection Signs New Clearview A.I. Deal – Pixel Envy

    A reminder that the way Clearview works is by scraping images it associates with specific individuals, including from sources like Facebook, across the web at massive scale — over sixty billion, according to Cameron. This is not facial recognition of criminals or even people suspected of wrongdoing. It is recognition of anyone who has a face that has been photographed and shared even semi-publicly.

  • Wired ☛ CBP Signs Clearview AI Deal to Use Face Recognition for ‘Tactical Targeting’

    The contract states that Clearview provides access to “over 60+ billion publicly available images” and will be used for “tactical targeting” and “strategic counter-network analysis,” indicating the service is intended to be embedded in analysts’ day-to-day intelligence work rather than reserved for isolated investigations. CBP says its intelligence units draw from a “variety of sources,” including commercially available tools and publicly available data, to identify people and map their connections for national security and immigration operations.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ CBP to strengthen ‘tactical targeting,’ ‘counter-network analysis’ with Clearview AI

    CBP began piloting Clearview AI’s technology in 2025, too, according to DHS’s AI inventory. The technology needed to be — and was — tuned to produce better results and limit misidentification. Guardrails have been identified to some degree.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ "The day of accountability will come": Rep. Delia Ramirez on abolishing and prosecuting DHS

    In a high-profile hearing this week with the heads of ICE, CBP and US Citizen and Immigration Services held by the House Homeland Security Committee—of which Rep. Ramirez is a member—the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants had the opportunity to do what so many of us dream of: to “look evil in the eye and fight it back.” She called for accountability for these leaders and their agents for all the harms they’ve committed and continue to commit, and called them “the inheritors of the Klan hood and the slave patrol.”

    I reached out to Rep. Ramirez to ask how it feels to be vindicated in the worst possible way, talk about the likely impending DHS shutdown, and what future accountability looks like. This is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

  • El País ☛ SAVE America Act : US House of Representatives passes election law requiring proof of citizenship to vote

    “The SAVE America Act is voter suppression, plain and simple. It will make it harder and more expensive for American citizens — especially women,” said Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democratic representative from New Mexico who chairs the Democratic Women’s Caucus. Several of its members gathered to warn that the regulation will impact nearly 70 million women who no longer use the same last name that appears on their birth certificates because they adopted their husbands’ surname when they married.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Trump antitrust is dead

  The best framing for the MAGA war on Big Tech comes from Trashfuture's Riley Quinn, who predicted that the whole thing could be settled by tech companies' boards agreeing to open every meeting with a solemn "stolen likes acknowledgment" that made repentance for all the shadowbanned culture warriors whose clout had been poached by soy content moderators.

  And that's basically what happened. Trump's antitrust agencies practiced "boss politics antitrust" in which favored courtiers were given free passes to violate the law, while Trump's enemies were threatened with punitive antitrust investigations until they fell into line: [...]

• US News And World Report ☛ Top Trump Antitrust Official Leaves Post Following Disputes Over Big Mergers

  Gail Slater, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general for antitrust, posted on X Thursday that it was with “great sadness” that she was leaving after just a year in the role. The move comes after back-and-forth decisions about whether to allow Hewlett Packard Enterprises to buy a rival in the telecommunications networking gear business last year.

• India Times ☛ Google targeted by EU over its search advertising auction practices

  Google, which has been ‌fined billions ⁠of ⁠euros in Europe for antitrust violations in recent years, is the subject of several European Union antitrust investigations. Another could add to tensions with the US government, which says U.S. Big Tech has been unfairly targeted, claims which the European Commission has dismissed.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • India Times ☛ Apple fends off 4G wireless patent lawsuit at third trial

      Apple won a defense verdict on Thursday in a lawsuit by intellectual-property management company Optis Wireless, which had accused the tech giant of violating its patent rights in 4G wireless technology.

      Optis had won verdicts of $506 million and $300 million against Apple in earlier trials in the long-running case in ‌Marshall, Texas. ⁠Both verdicts ⁠were later overturned on appeal.