How new US tariffs are forcing Europe to rethink its entire tech stack
Comments ⌘ Read more

EU may “make an example of X” by issuing $1B fine
Comments ⌘ Read more

Tech companies are telling immigrant employees on visas not to leave the U.S.
Comments ⌘ Read more

France fines Apple €150M for “excessive” pop-ups that let users reject tracking
Comments ⌘ Read more

We hacked Google’s A.I Gemini and leaked its source code (at least some part)
Comments ⌘ Read more

DOGE staffer,‘Big Balls’, provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show
Comments ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu to replace classic coreutils and more with new Rust-based alternatives
After so much terrible tech politics news, let’s focus on some nice, easy-going Linux news that’s not going to be controversial at all: Ubuntu intends to replace numerous core Linux utilities with newer Rust replacements, starting with the ubiquitous GNU Coreutils. This package provides utilities which have become synonymous with Linux to many – the likes of ls, cp, and mv. In … ⌘ Read more

Tech execs are pushing Trump to build ‘Freedom Cities’ run by corporations
A new lobbying group, dubbed the Freedom Cities Coalition, wants to convince President Trump and Congress to authorize the creation of new special development zones within the U.S. These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldn’t involve a traditional bureaucracy. The new zone … ⌘ Read more

The fascist tech bro takeover is here
The future of the United States is no longer decided in Washington. That ship has sailed. It’s now dictated in the bunkers, private jets, and compounds of an ideological Silicon Valley, by billionaires and wealth extremists intent on treating democracy as a nuisance that must be swatted away. These men – raised on a rabid press that mythologized their existence in their lifetimes, called them Wunderkind and treated them as something above and beyond mere m … ⌘ Read more

EU-US rift triggers call for made-in-Europe tech
The utter chaos in the United States and the country’s antagonistic, erratic, and often downright hostile approach to what used to be its allies has not gone unnoticed, and it seems it’s finally creating some urgency in an area in which people have been fruitlessly advocating for urgency for years: digital independence from US tech giants. Efforts to make Europe more technologically “sovereign” have gone mainstream. The European Commi … ⌘ Read more

Google multibillionaire Brin demands employees work 60 hours a week on autocomplete tools
Over the past few years, the tech industry has gone from cushy landing pad for STEM grads to a cesspit of corporate greed, where grueling hours are commonplace, and layoffs could strike at any moment. Unfortunately for employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the squeeze is just getting started. ↫ Joe Wilkins at Futurism Sergey Brin, one of t … ⌘ Read more

I agree. finding good writings on architecture is hard to find. I used to read architecture reviews over on the high scalability blog. i suspect the reason why is that the arch is how the big tech companies can build moats around their bases. I know in AWS world it only goes as far as how to nickle and dime you to death.

I have the books but they don’t grow much more past interview level.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net I don’t know, I don’t see this happening all that often. Very rarely. The problem I encounter much more often is that tech folks are blindly adopting every new hype without thinking the slightest bit what the consequences might be.

But maybe that also means I’m one of these “told you so” guys. Not sure.

On my hit list of assholes tech giants that break the rules and are bad web citizens:

• Microsoft
  

• Google
  

• Alibaba
  

• Open AI

• more to come…

I am so, so, so fed up with the arrogance of people in tech. People think they know everything. Everything is easy and trivial. “Told you so!”, everywhere you look. And this bloody condescending tone, all the time. When I ask for an opinion, I don’t want to get a “well, duh, idiot”. For fuck’s sake.

It’s nothing new, it’s always been like that. Which makes it even worse.

This really makes me not want to work in this field anymore.

While the US politicians and tech billionaires are going full-on fascist mode, here is a reminder that there are European alternatives for many well known digital and online services: https://european-alternatives.eu

Google Begins Requiring JavaScript For Google Search
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely-used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. From a report: In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the over … ⌘ Read more

they’re not an all encompassing site but 404media.co do some great tech reporting, their RSS feed is here

I need an alternative news source… Something I can shove into feeds.twtxt.net that helps me keep up-to-date with Tech and other important news 🗞️ Hmmm 🤔 Suggestions? I can’t stand Slashdot anymore since they’ve decided to come down hard on ad-blockers 🤦‍♂️

@xuu@txt.sour.is ROFLMAO! 🤣 reading that, the Tech bro sounded in my mind like Cow from Cow and Chicken

Should Waymo Robotaxis Always Stop For Pedestrians In Crosswalks?
“My feet are already in the crosswalk,” says Geoffrey A. Fowler, a San Francisco-based tech columnist for the Washington Post. In a video he takes one step from the curb, then stops to see if Waymo robotaxis will stop for him. And they often didn’t.

Waymo’s position? Their cars consider “signals of pedestrian intent” including forward motion wh … ⌘ Read more

For some reason, I was using calc all this time. I mean, it’s good, but I need to do base conversions (dec, hex, bin) very often and you have to type base(2) or base(16) in calc to do that. That’s exhausting after a while.

So I now replaced calc with a little Python script which always prints the results in dec/hex/bin, grouped in bytes (if the result is an integer). That’s what I need. It’s basically just a loop around Python’s exec().

$ mcalc 
> 123
         123        0x[7b]    0b[01111011]

> 1234
        1234        0x[04 d2]    0b[00000100 11010010]

> 0x7C00 + 0x3F + 512
       32319        0x[7e 3f]    0b[01111110 00111111]

> a = 10; b = 0x2b; c = 0b1100101
          10        0x[0a]    0b[00001010]

> a + b + 3 * c
         356        0x[01 64]    0b[00000001 01100100]

> 2**32 - 1
  4294967295        0x[ff ff ff ff]    0b[11111111 11111111 11111111 11111111]

> 4 * atan(1)
3.141592653589793

> cos(pi)
-1.0

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i think what i love about “retro” (relative to me because i was born 2004) is that it has friction but in a different way than modern tech does. sure there’s friction with getting a video from your phone to a computer unless you’re a nerd like me with android and syncthing. but not only is that something that could be but isn’t easier, it’s just… it makes sense for a camcorder from ~2009 to have the kind of friction it does

@prologic@twtxt.net this is epic… you’ve made a great platform!!! screw big tech we got literal threads here. X, The Everything App, wishes it had literal yarn threads smh my head. also twtxt is so cool like i love that yarn is a frontend for it but also its own thing. all plaintext… coolest shit ever

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads.

From Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-pay-95m-delete-private-conversations-siri-recorded/

I’m not sure I’m convinced Apple is really that much better than the other big tech companies when it comes to this kind of thing. Their reputation is better and they do seem to be better about things like on-device encryption, but then stories like this come out.

vi Complete Key Binding List https://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/Tech/vi.html

“Plez give me all the compute, money, and copyright allowance and i give you shitty autocomplete for fee!” - Tech Bro.

Bluesky’s Open API Means Anyone Can Scrape Your Data for AI Training. It’s All Public
Bluesky says it will never train generative AI on its users’ data. But despite that, “one million public Bluesky posts — complete with identifying user information — were crawled and then uploaded to AI company Hugging Face,” reports Mashable (citing an article by 404 Media).

“Shortly after the article’s p … ⌘ Read more

Bluesky Passes Threads for Active Website Users, But Confronts ‘Scammers and Impersonators’
Bluesky now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, “Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky… Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger tha … ⌘ Read more

Australia To Ban Under-16s From Social Media After Passing Landmark Law
Australia will ban children under 16 from using social media after its senate approved what will become a world-first law. From a report: Children will be blocked from using platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, a move the Australian government argue is necessary to protect their mental health and wellbeing.
… ⌘ Read more

Totem’s Top 10 Cybersecurity Safeguards for Small Businesses (2022) https://www.totem.tech/totem-top-10-small-business-cybersecurity-safeguards-2022/

Jack Dorsey’s Block Scraps ‘Web5’ Project
Block will abandon development of its Web5 decentralized internet project and reduce investment in music streaming service Tidal to focus on bitcoin mining hardware and self-custody wallets, the payments company announced in its third-quarter letter to shareholders. The Jack Dorsey-led firm cited strong market demand for its bitcoin mining products and Bitkey wallet as key drivers behind the st … ⌘ Read more

The Fediverse Is Getting Its Own TikTok Competitor Called Loops
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Similar to how Mastodon offers an open source, distributed version of X, the fediverse is getting its own TikTok competitor. This week, an app called Loops began accepting signups on its new platform for sharing short, looping videos. Still in the early stages, Loops is not yet open sourced, nor … ⌘ Read more

Alas, I can’t get myself to resist. Interacting with tech and software makes me feel like a kid in a candy shop: “I wanna taste all of it! Find my favorite Lollipop and wonder about where it came from, who made it? How is it possible to turn any kind of mushy juicy fruit into a hard, forever lasting candy in a freaking stick!? Oh, Wait!! Is THAT chocolate over there!!?”

Installing Devuan 3.1 and Migrating to Ceres | https://starbreaker.org/blog/tech/installing-devuan-31-migrating-ceres/index.html

zmq seems like an interesting tool for building task queues and other types of messaging apps. the other option i’m looking at is rabbitmq which has some interesting features like mqtt bridges and federation, but as a result involves a broker. i would like to eventually have all of the ships systems (or at least on the inter-system boundary) communicate over a brokerless messaging protocol. off the shelf env devices and trackers all communicate over an mqtt bridge so some brokering is probably unavoidable without getting into fully custom tech, but that’ll blow the budget.

Apparently Drama is tech entities’ new Going Viral PR stunt. After the Wordpress vs. WPE mayhem, Godot starts it’s own, Who/what’s next?

See!? Even Meta/Facebook uses plain text, not just Twtxt! 🤣

Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text

Speaking of AI tech (sorry!); Just came across this really cool tool built by some engineers at Google™ (currently completely free to use without any signup) called NotebookLM 👌 Looks really good for summarizing and talking to document 📃

Is it really that fucking hard to use decentralized, Self-Hosted tech? 🤔 Or do people just not know how? 😢

Bluesky Adds 2 Million New Users After Brazil’s X Ban
In the days following Brazil’s shutdown of X, the decentralized social networking startup Bluesky added over 2 million new users, up from just half a million as of Friday. “This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were ‘Not Enough Resources’ to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable un … ⌘ Read more

Google’s James Manyika: ‘The Productivity Gains From AI Are Not Guaranteed’
Google executive James Manyika has warned that AI’s impact on productivity is not guaranteed [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled], despite predictions of trillion-dollar economic potential. From the report: “Right now, everyone from my old colleagues at McKinsey Global Institute to Goldman Sachs are putting out these extra … ⌘ Read more

FSU lost to freaking Georgia Tech in Ireland. forlorn noises

A ajouter aux favoris : Low-tech Lab https://wiki.lowtechlab.org/wiki/Accueil

Update on my Fibre to the Premise upgrade (FTTP). NBN installer came out last week to install the NTD and Utility box, after some umming and arring, we figured out the best place to install it. However this mean he wasn’t able to look it up to the Fibre in the pit, and required a 2nd team to come up and trench a new trench and conduit and use that to feed Fibre from the pit to the utility box.

I rang up my ISP to find out when this 2nd team was booked, only to discover to my horror and the horror of my ISP that this was booked a month out on the 2rd Feb 2024! 😱

After a nice small note from my provider to NBN, suddenly I get a phone call and message from an NBN team that do trenching to say it would be done on Saturday (today). That got completed today (despite the heavy rain).

Now all that’s left is a final NBN tech to come and hook the two fibre pieces together and “light it up”! 🥳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I have read the white papers for MLS before. I have put a lot of thought on how to do it with salty/ratchet. Its a very good tech for ensuring multiple devices can be joined to an encrypted chat. But it is bloody complicated to implement.

Microsoft Ending Support For Windows 10 Could Send 240 Million PCs To Landfills, Study Finds
According to Canalys Research, Microsoft’s plan to end support for Windows 10 could result in about 240 million computers being sent to landfills. “The electronic waste from these PCs could weigh an estimated 480 million kilograms, equivalent to 320,000 cars,” adds Reuters. From the report: W … ⌘ Read more

Interesting thing happening over on Xitter. Apparently some of the women in tech accounts are being exposed as being run by men that hire women to pose for images/videos. They would be invited to tech conferences but would always drop out last minute.

Makes me wonder if maybe there is need for a sort of verifiable web of trust is needed where influencers can be proven as authentic by others. This will only get worse as AI generative content gets pushed into our feeds.

How AI avatars of the deceased could transform the way we grieve
Companies are now offering chatbots that appear to come from beyond the veil. But psychologists say this “grief tech” may interfere with the patterns of brain activity through which we adapt to loss ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve had a Teracube phone for about 3 years now. Theirs comes with a guarantee of 4 years–if something that’s covered breaks, you send the phone to them and they fix it and send it back, or they send you a new one. I took advantage of that last year when the screen broke; their tech support even helped me figure out how to wipe the phone when the screen didn’t display anything. Pretty painless all around. Have to say I’ve been very happy with it. It doesn’t have the top-end features that new big company phones have, but I don’t want those features so that’s not an issue for me. I dunno if it’s available in Australia or if it’s just a US thing.