Wish's River of News

Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Removing myself as a Lintian uploader in the next few weeks [Planet Debian]

Twitter: "Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs."

00:42

A few days ago, a colleague reached out to me, asking if I could help draft a resolution on digital autonomy and free software for the upcoming renewal of our collective bargaining agreement. Although she's very politicised and generally a great individual, she is not a techie and we never really talked about these issues before.

This took me by surprise. I should have been rejoicing; no, I should have been the one who brought up this topic in our union. Wasn't I the technical expert on these issues? But alas, my first reaction when she came to me was to snicker and tell myself: "That's cute, but nothing's ever gonna change, Big Tech is too strong and our governments don't give a damn."

How sad and cynical is that? That's not the person I want to be.

Something in the Quebecois political landscape has shifted in the last few years with regards to tech. More and more "regular" people seem to be talking about the importance of digital autonomy, how government services shouldn't rely on Big Tech and how we should be using FOSS on hardware we actually control.

A few years ago, I would have been at the vanguard of this change. I would have been part of the creation of Données souveraines Québec. Heck, they are organising a whole conference next week and I'm not even going. How did this happen to me?

I first fell for Free Software for its political ideals: Knowledge Should Be Free, Cooperation Is More Efficient Than Competition, Centralisation Should Be Avoided When Possible, etc. I still believe in all of this, but somehow, after years of fighting for change in the tech world, I have retreated into technical work. I maintain Debian packages as a hobby and to scratch my own itch. I run services for myself and a few friends. I organise Debian User Group meetings.

To be clear, I haven't generally given up. I'm very politically active in my union and at work, I'm a good member of my housing cooperative and I'm still fighting against the industrialisation of natural spaces in my neighborhood. But when it comes time to defend freedom in the tech world, lately, I've just been shrugging and accepting I should use Microsoft Teams like every one else does. I want this to change and to do so, I need to free some time.

Lintian

Two years ago, I added myself to Lintian's Uploaders list. Up until then¹, I enjoyed fixing little issues here and there and liked creating new tags to help out the Python Team, where most of my Debian time was spent.

Lintian was badly in need of a new maintainer and as I felt it was an important project, I decided to step in. 37 releases and about 160 closed bugs later², I'm done.

To be honest, I haven't had much fun maintaining Lintian lately. Bugs keep piling on the BTS, so much so I have mostly been ignoring them for the past few months. In fact, most of the actual work triaging, writing code and fixing bug has been done by Nilesh Patra for a while now.

All this to say, if you care about Lintian, you should consider adding yourself to the Uploaders list, as I'm out and Nilesh can't do all the work by himself.

He's a great person to work with and since I don't want to suddenly leave him all alone, I'll be sticking around for a few more weeks in the hope someone else will volunteer to help out. A smooth transition with a new co-maintainer would really be nice!

If you're interested, don't hesitate to reach out to me on IRC or by email.

My first technical commit to Lintian was nearly 7 years ago! Crazy how time flies. ↩
Mostly closed by other people than I! ↩

Friday, 09 October

23:56

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.16 on CRAN: Much Faster Again! [Planet Debian]

A brand new release 0.1.16 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN, has been built for r2u, and is updated on r-universe.

RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.

This version updates to the recent 5.0.2 upstream release with improved performance. Given the strong focus on performance, this release also alters some of the R and C++ interfaces to be more direct. Rcpp generally aims for a balance between readable / maintainable code and good performance; this moves the dial closer to strong performance gains. As Daniel noted in a table in the (main) PR for this release, this now consistently beats yyjsonr, and improves considerably over the previous release of this package. I had made some smaller interim upgrades earlier (without a CRAN releases), and made a number of minor standard packaging updates.

The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.16 (2026-10-09)

simdjson was upgraded to versions 4.6.1 and 4.6.3 (Dirk in #100 and #102 fixing #99 and #101)

simdjson was upgraded to version 5.0.2 (Daniel in #104)

A number of small tweaks to the Rcpp interface were made too (Daniel in #104)

Diagnostics for gcc and clang are not suppressed per CRAN Policy (Dirk in #106 closing #105)

The continuous integration matrix was extended to g++ version 15 and 16 (Dirk in #108 closing #107)

A few minor packaging nags were address (Dirk in #109)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Turkish Crackdown On LGBTQ+ Organizations Threatens Freedom of Expression and Association [Deeplinks]

EFF strongly condemns Turkey’s state-led discriminatory, oppressive attacks on feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations, media platforms, student groups, and rights defenders and activists within the country.

Since mid-September, access to the websites and social media accounts of a dozen organizations have been blocked by court order, while over 60 members and activists have been detained, their offices and homes raided, mobile phones, laptops and other digital devices seized, and judicial proceedings launched against them.

These actions threaten the very existence of the LGBTQ+ organizations targeted, limiting their ability to carry out legitimate human rights work, deterring participation and support, and chilling the free speech rights of not just these groups, but any organization that even reports on LGBTQ+ oppression.

A little over a week ago, an Istanbul court shut down the website and social media accounts of T24, Turkey’s longest running independent digital news organization—which has covered government-backed campaigns against and earlier crackdowns on gay rights groups—alleging it had aired “LGBT propaganda” over the past year.

It’s all part of Turkey’s efforts to portray LGBTQ+ groups and support networks for those living with HIV as criminal organizations that must be suppressed, purportedly to protect family values. Homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey (unlike Uganda, Nigeria, and Egypt, where it is criminalized), but LGBTQ+ organizations and activists have in recent years faced increased government oppression, including criminal proceedings on allegations related to obscenity and violations of Turkey’s Law on Associations, which regulates the activities of nonprofits.

In its new crackdown, the government is targeting LGBTQ+ groups’ websites and social media channels for alleged obscene posts accessible to children. Kaos GL, Turkey’s oldest gay rights organization, said investigations are being led by the Cyber Crimes Bureau of the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, which took members of its Board of Directors into custody, raided their homes, and searched the organization’s offices, where electronic devices were seized.

According to Human Rights Watch, prosecutors in Istanbul said those targeted were suspected of “founding, leading, or being a member of a criminal organization,” as well as sex work and drug-related offenses. Publicly available law enforcement and judicial documents about the investigation reportedly don’t say which publications or posts are alleged to be obscene.

The prosecutor’s office launched an investigation of the organization and others under Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code, which regulates the offense of “obscenity” (without clearly defining it), while the overall operation, dubbed “My Family is Safe” and launched as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Decade of the Family” program, is being brought under Article 220 of the code. Justifying the crackdown by invoking family values and child safety suggests that the government is trying to enforce a moral code on society based on intolerance of and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.

New Low for Turkey

Framing the activities of LGBTQ+ rights organizations as violations of organized crime provisions is a new low for Turkey, where free speech and press freedoms have long been under attack. The implication from these raids and investigations is that the organizations’ legitimate civil society work advocating for the rights of queer people—monitoring human rights violations, offering legal aid, running news portals, sponsoring cultural events such as symposiums and film screenings, publishing an online magazine and supporting LGBTQ+ refugees—is suspected of being criminal threatens the basic human rights of the LGBTQ+ community in Turkey.

These actions send a dangerous message to people and organizations exercising freedom of speech and association in support of queer people. Under the penal code, directing a criminal organization is punishable by five to ten years in prison, while merely being a member carries a sentence of two to five years.

EFF joins hundreds of human, civil, LGBTQ+, and digital rights organizations around the world in calling for the immediate release of all those detained for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and legitimate human rights work, and the unblocking of all websites and social media accounts of affected organizations.

For many LGBTQ+ individuals the world over, the internet can be a safer space for exploring identity, finding community, and seeking support. The anti-LGBTQ+ crackdown in Turkey is not happening in a vacuum—unfortunately we are seeing anti-LGBTQ+ bills restricting free expression and privacy, content moderation decisions that disproportionately impact LGBTQ+ users, and other forms of intolerance around the world.

We urge international civil society and diplomatic partners to raise awareness of and to speak out against the crackdown, and to publicly show support for the legitimacy of Turkey’s LGBTQ+ organizations and the important work they do to ensure that queer people are safe and free.

23:07

View From a Hotel Window 10/9/26: New York City (Again) [Whatever]

Wait, wasn’t I just in NYC? Indeed I was, and now I’m here again, this time for New York Comic Con, where tomorrow I have a panel, a signing and another signing. You should totally come to see me. After this I probably won’t be in NYC for a bit, certainly not again this year. Come get me while the getting is good!

— JS

Resisting the Menace of Federal Data Consolidation [Deeplinks]

In the past two years, the federal government has unlawfully consolidated data exposing our private information.

This consolidation has been chaotic but generally came in three rolling waves: It started with DOGE, moved to agency-to-agency data sharing with ICE, and then attempted data-driven purges of state voter rolls.

We all deserve to live in a world where the data we use to pay our taxes, receive benefits, and vote is not combined and weaponized against us. The amalgamation of data leads to mistakes, abuses, and a lack of trust in institutions meant to protect us. Overall, it can chill our participation in society. This is particularly true for groups disfavored by this administration—especially immigrants and protesters.

Congress highlighted similar abuses—including the creation of enemies lists and snooping on activists and federal employees—following the McCarthy and Watergate eras. And the increasing use of computers to magnify those harms led Congress to pass a slate of protections like the federal Privacy Act of 1974.

The good news is that many people have stepped forward to resist the federal government’s unprecedented and unlawful data consolidations. Many groups, including EFF, have filed lawsuits to enforce our data privacy laws, and many states have, too. Legislators at the federal and state levels have worked to expose and oppose these surveillance programs. And many people have protested for their right to data privacy.

Existing data privacy protections have been essential in the past two years, but they can be improved. This should include: narrowing loopholes and increasing enforcement in existing laws, limiting the government’s purchase of data on the commercial market, and passing a comprehensive consumer privacy law.

Data Consolidation by DOGE

Starting on January 20, 2025, President Trump created DOGE—essentially renaming an existing agency originally meant to modernize government technology. Rather than engage in modernization, DOGE quickly obtained high-level access to sensitive databases across the government that store millions of people’s personal records—including at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Social Security Administration, and the Treasury Department.

DOGE was staffed with people with little government or cybersecurity knowledge and who often had conflicts of interest. DOGE’s early aim was not always clear, aside from gaining “prompt access to all unclassified agency records” and the “sharing and consolidation” of those records.

The result? The indiscriminate firing of government employees and the decimation of important agencies that focused on consumer protection and foreign aid. It also resulted in clear misuses of data. For example, while working with DOGE at the Social Security Administration, one individual signed an outside agreement with an advocacy group with the aim of using SSA data to find evidence of alleged voter fraud and “overturn election results in certain States.”

DOGE’s data access and consolidation violated the federal Privacy Act, which limits the sharing and consolidation of government databases. Many groups stepped in to sue. For example, EFF and our co-counsel at Lex Lumina LLC and Democracy Defenders Fund, on behalf of two public employee unions (AFGE and AALJ), sued the OPM for unlawfully disclosing federal workers’ information to DOGE. After EFF and others secured early victories, the government sought to end the lawsuits by firing many DOGE agents and removing their access to records. A great deal of damage remains in need of a judicial remedy.

Data Consolidation by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Even as DOGE’s influence diminished, federal agencies have attempted to share, compare, and seize large databases, in order to target immigrants. In some cases, they have succeeded. This happened with tax records at the IRS, Medicaid data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and public housing data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Department of Agriculture also sought to collect databases regarding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) from states.

Many groups have filed lawsuits to block this anti-immigrant-motivated data consolidation, alleging it violates privacy protection laws. EFF filed amicus briefs in support of two of these lawsuits: Centro de Trabajadores v. Bessent, which concerns IRS data; and California v. HHS, which concerns Medicaid data (and where we teamed up with EPIC and Protect Democracy). Most recently, states have stepped up to challenge the federal government’s attempted seizure, for immigration enforcement purposes, of state commercial driver’s license data held by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, a non-profit organization.

This data consolidation for immigration enforcement has also included government purchase of commercial products. This includes ICE’s purchase of commercial location data without a warrant, and its interest in “Big Data and Ad Tech providers.” ICE also has contracts with companies like Palantir, which help organize all the datasets the agency collects.

Data Consolidation for Voter Purges

The right to vote is fundamental to every democracy. That’s why EFF has long advocated for cybersecurity in voting systems, to make sure every vote is properly counted.

Voter purges are a longstanding threat to the right to vote. State and local officials regularly delete people from the voter registration rolls, often for bad reasons and without adequate notice. This has a disparate impact against people of color.

Now the federal government is trying to purge voters, too. To do so, it has consolidated our data in three ways. First, it is using an old data system called SAVE for a new purpose: checking voter eligibility. Second, it has seized voter information from states. Third, it has created a federal list of eligible voters.

As a direct result, people with a right to vote will be purged from voter rolls because of erroneous data. Others will be intimidated from voting or registering. And all registered voters suffer a violation of their data privacy rights: information collected for one purpose is being used against them for another purpose.

Expansion of SAVE

Since 1986, the federal government has operated SAVE, which stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. It is not a database, but it facilitates easy access to databases. It is used to determine whether immigrants and naturalized citizens are eligible for various government benefits, such as food stamps.

In 2025, the federal government started using SAVE for a new purpose: checking voters’ eligibility. Further, SAVE now provides access to new databases and allows bulk searches. More than 60 million voters have been run through SAVE, and 21,000 were flagged as potential noncitizens who are ineligible to vote. Erroneous flags have caused purges of lawful voters – such as Anthony Nell.

A case called League of Women Voters v. DHS challenges this expansion of SAVE. The plaintiffs are represented by CREW, Democracy Forward, the Fair Elections Center, and EPIC. A federal judge held this program unlawful and set it aside. DHS appealed and asked for a stay of this order, and a federal appellate court denied the stay. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the stay, exercising its controversial “shadow docket” authority by a six-to-three vote.

Federal employees in DHS’s “Fraud Detection and National Security Unit,” which ordinarily investigates alleged immigration fraud, have been re-assigned to examine voter eligibility. A whistleblower alleges that employees have been directed to go to state election agency websites, enter some of a voter’s personal information, and thereby access more of it. This may violate state laws requiring a person, before accessing a voter’s information, to attest they are that voter or have that voter’s authorization.

Federal Seizure of States’ Voter Information

Since 2025, the federal government has demanded that at least 48 states hand over their voter information. At least 16 states have complied. The federal government is running this information through SAVE, searching for voters to purge.

The federal government has sued 30 states for refusing to comply. So far, courts have dismissed 25 of these suits. There’s also a lawsuit against this data grab, titled Common Cause v. DOJ, brought by CREW, Protect Democracy, and the ACLU.

The New Federal Voter Eligibility List

In March 2026, President Trump issued an executive order requiring DHS to create a list of people who are U.S. citizens, aged 18 or older, and residents of the state. The order also requires DOJ to prosecute anyone, including state and local officials, who provides a ballot to a person who is not eligible to vote in federal elections.

In California v. Trump, 24 states allege that this executive order violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. A federal judge enjoined this program, and an appellate court denied a stay. But the U.S. Supreme Court by a six-to-three vote granted a stay, which allows the program to move forward. (By a seven-to-two vote, the Court denied a stay of an injunction against a different part of the same executive order, which concerned mail-in ballots.) Another legal challenge, titled EPIC v. USCIS, alleges that the new federal voter eligibility list violates the Privacy Act as well as the separation of powers.

Next Steps

It is encouraging to see so many people, groups, and states step forward to protect our data privacy from these unlawful waves of federal data consolidations. Still, more work remains. For example:

The Privacy Act of 1974 has proven a critical bulwark. But after a half century, it could use a refresh. For example, Congress should close its loopholes and expand its enforceability.
Law enforcement agencies must be prohibited from avoiding the Constitution’s warrant requirement by buying our personal data from brokers. For example, Congress should pass the “Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.”
We need a comprehensive consumer data privacy law, among other reasons to reduce the flood of our personal data that corporations provide to law enforcement agencies. Legislators should check out EFF’s “privacy first” framework.

In the meantime, there’s no time like the present to practice surveillance self-defense, like using strong passwords and disabling your phone’s ad identification.

22:21

Dogcatcher [xkcd.com]

22:14

The Big Idea: Dmitri Lincoln Melhorn [Whatever]

It seems like wherever there are ashes, there’s something new to rise up out of them. Author Dmitri Lincoln Melhorn explores these phoenix-esque phenomena in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Archipelago of Light. When the future is in the new generations hands, what will the kids do with it?

DMITRI LINCOLN MELHORN:

In April 1942, my dad and his mom emerged from their basement to find their home in ashes from British bombs. My dad was not yet two. He remembers the 1940s in snatches: begging for potatoes, sneaking through forests surrounded by machine-gun fire. At six, he was jealous of his baby sister: to keep her quiet, she got the only honey they had as he pushed her pram through the Black Forest snow.

He arrived in the States in 1952. He’d been a homeless war refugee for a decade, and had no money, no father, and no English. At thirteen, he would have been considered “a young male of fighting age” in most places and times. America transformed his life.

Other than better food and healthcare, my dad did not change physically, but his functional intelligence multiplied. He didn’t get smarter; he joined a smarter network. The United States itself was the greatest supercomputer in world history: its norms and institutions wired together millions of native-born Americans with immigrants like him, and like my Jewish mother’s forebears. My dad went to college in Cleveland. He met my mom at graduate school in Berkeley. He became a biophysicist.

What if Pax Americana is over, because America itself leaves the free world? What if the civilizational supercomputers of the West raise their drawbridges against those at the margins, just as AI, climate change, authoritarianism, and war create tens or hundreds of millions of desperate people?

I explore those questions in my novel, Archipelago of Light. After a decade of effort to shape America’s response to both MAGA and AI, I turned to fiction to map out the possible future. In my book, the White House has allied with Russia; China smothers dissent with chemicals and AI; and global elites use their power to distance themselves from the rest of humanity.

My book surprised me. I started with worldbuilding briefs, character briefs, elite fractures, and enlightened philanthropists. I wrote triumphs for the heroes and redemption arcs for the antiheroes. But after hammering on the drafts to meet my own standards of realism, the heroic storylines fell apart. The antiheroes stayed true to their incentives and characters, while the protagonists born in the 1970s and 1980s mostly just fended off chaos. The best they could do was pass the baton.

That became the big idea of the book: if enlightened civilization survives this moment, it will be because new people, who today are children at the margins of the world order, reinvent the Enlightenment for themselves.

The spine of the book is Reem al-Jabri, a Syrian refugee we meet in a Jordanian camp. In 2028, a Western philanthropy hands eleven-year-old Reem a tablet whose AI copilot is locked to her skin chemistry, useless to anyone who steals it. She uploads the only photo she has of her mother, “sitting by the Aleppo window, headscarf slightly askew, laughing at something outside the frame,” and names her AI copilot Zari, after her mama and her grandmother. The third Zari. Then she kneels and draws nodes in the dust. “Many tablets working together,” she says. “Like the camp. Many weak people working together could be strong.”

Reem’s mother died because people stole her medicine and no one stopped them. Loaded with the great texts of the Enlightenment, her copilot Zari can teach her anything: Rousseau, Montesquieu, which tribunals worked and which became as cruel as what they replaced. But as Reem puts it, “learning doesn’t matter if nobody believes you.” So the children start with stolen water. They document the theft and send the evidence to every administrator, donor, and reporter at once. “We make cover-ups more expensive than action.”

Reem and the other children do not have an army, or wealth, or frontier models and data centers. Existing laws and bureaucracies pretend to protect them, but end up exploiting them. One piece at a time, from truth markets to justice systems, Reem and her contemporaries build their own civilization, their own supercomputer, out of the humanity and AI copilots of millions of desperate refugees. Even when the rich world invites her to join them, she persists in building something new.

Along the way, the refugees document a predator: a UN protection officer. The officials who receive their evidence express concern and change nothing. Reem and her peers argue their way to the next step: when every authority looks away, doing nothing is also a verdict, and the refugees pay for it. At thirteen, she develops the Dark Red Protocol, for cases where the evidence is complete, the process is exhausted, and the crime is capital. The children enforce their own verdicts, not as a mob but as reluctant executioners.

Meanwhile, the criminal mastermind Sofia Morales, herself a trafficking survivor, builds another kind of network: Memory Churches, where the bereaved hear their dead speak, and believe them. Reem understands Sofia’s appeal: “People choose the voice that loves them over the voice that’s accurate.” She says it as someone whose own tutor wears her mother’s face.

My novel does not pretend that the children are innocent. Only by questioning themselves can they survive and win their own freedom, without becoming what they fight. When the course of the book took human lives, I grieved. But by that time, I knew there was no truth in a version where everyone survived this transition.

My dad climbed out of a basement and found his home incinerated. A decade later, he found a network that multiplied everything he was. Reem’s generation has no such network waiting for them. They have cheap tablets, a camp full of each other and AI copilots, and the voices of the people they lost. Painfully, through courage but also moral compromise, they rebuild the free world, the Archipelago of Light.

Archipelago of Light: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|P&T Knitwear|Vroman’s

Authors socials: Website|Instagram|LinkedIn

21:35

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 333 released [Planet Debian]

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 333. This version includes the following changes:

[ Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues ]
* Add support for showing differences in POSIX.1-2001 PAX headers within .tar
  files.

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Re-order various parts of the tar comparator to make it easier to
  progressively delve into its functionality.
* Reflect that the use of the "case-match" language feature requires at least
  Python 3.10+. This can be worked around if it causes problems - let us know.
* Update various copyright years.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Organizing in the Town at Oakland Tech Week [Deeplinks]

EFF was thrilled to join organizers, advocates, and activists in the East Bay for the second annual Oakland Tech Week last week. We are grateful to our friends at MediaJustice and Upturn for inviting us co-present this all-day event, “Building Beyond Big Tech: Organizing Oakland’s Future”, on Sept. 30. The event, hosted by the Kapor Center in downtown Oakland, offered a unique chance to spend time with people across The Town and the Bay Area working to create a better future for everyone.

“We’re at this truly consequential moment,” said EFF executive director Nicole Ozer, in her speech kicking off the day’s events. “We know that in this community’s work—and communities across the country—our ability to ensure that technology empowers rather than oppresses is fundamental to the future of countries, our livelihoods, and, literally, our lives.”

We also participated in a panel on the state of play in California, moderated by MediaJustice executive director Steven Renderos. Director of State Affairs Hayley Tsukayama joined reporter Khari Johnson of CalMatters and Crystal Zemero of People Over Billionaires to talk about the landscape at the state level. The day also included smaller conversations focused on building better tech and fine-tuning messaging, facilitated by our colleagues at MediaJustice.

Seeing the people—our neighbors—who are fighting back against surveillance in their communities was inspiring. They’re casting doubt on the claims large technology companies make about what’s happening in their neighborhoods. They’re speaking up at council meetings and rallies. They’re seeking changes that would give their workplaces and neighborhoods a better, safer relationship with technology. It was so important to come together in solidarity to compare notes, spend time together, find opportunities to support each other, and scheme together.

We can work together to build a future that works for everyday people. A better world is possible—and Oakland Tech Week was a great reminder that, all around us, folks are working together to tackle huge challenges.

“There are formidable forces,” Ozer said. “But we can pierce the other side’s narrative of inevitability with our power of indignation. The future of AI and other technology is not written and we can work together to get it right.”

Whether you’re in Oakland or Aukland, consider this a renewed invitation to join us.

Join the Fight

Become an EFF Member Today

Friday Squid Blogging: I Caught a Squid [Schneier on Security]

On Wednesday I spent a day fishing, on a small boat out of Gloucester, MA. We caught many cod (none of which we could keep), and a bunch of hake and mackerel (all of which we could keep). And…I caught a squid! Near as I can tell, it’s a longfin squid, sometimes called a Boston squid (Doryteuthis (Amerigo) pealeii).

That night I cooked it over a barbecue grill—hot and fast. Delicious.

20:49

Pluralistic: Thwarted (09 Oct 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

Thwarted: Behold the awesome destructive power of a fully operational billionaire.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Anthrax v National Inquirer; Grey goo v Second Life; Predictive policing v actual crime; Spooky cookies; California v algorithmic price-fixing; Tivo self-destructs; Disney exec endorses piracy; TSA v geologists; Handheld printer; Mandatory DRM for all Canadian music sales; Iceweasel; "Snuff"; "Shade the Changing Girl"; Latam surveillance; Scotland Yard brands encryption terrorism; RBS slaughtered 10k small businesses to seize and sell their assets; Dead Letters.
Upcoming appearances: Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

Thwarted (permalink)

There are many ways in which every billionaire is a policy failure, but the most corrosive and destructive way in which billionaires are policy failures is this: billionaires, despite being unelected and unaccountable, possess the power to control – and ruin – millions of peoples' lives.

Despite what the Prosperity Gospel and the Efficient Market Hypothesis would have you believe, having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is most the tangible effect of being a billionaire.

Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever *you* want to do, at the expense of whatever *other* people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.

Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and *you* have the right to do whatever they tell you to do.

There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than theirs. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief. Billionaires, on the other hand, command resources that allow *them* to devote sizable effort to getting *us* to acknowledge that *they* should be able to tell *us* what to do.

This is why billionaires love neoclassical economics, with its doctrine of "revealed preferences," which holds that the only true way to understand someone's preferences is to ignore what they *say* and only pay attention to what they *do*. It's a belief that can only be adopted by people who suffer the self-inflicted neurological injury you get from doing an economics degree, which renders the victim incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. To believe in "revealed preferences" is to observe someone who has sold their kidney to pay the rent and marvel at this person who has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

"Revealed preferences" is the economist's version of the bully who grabs your arm and starts whacking you with your own hand while shouting, "stop hitting yourself!" The ideological purpose that "revealed preferences" fills is letting billionaires live a life unthwarted. It's a life where they thwart everyone else, but still claim to be believers in "freedom."

This is what Peter Thiel meant when he wrote that "democracy is incompatible with freedom." In a democracy, the people who you exercise coercive power over are able to band together to create public institutions that act as a check on your power. For Thiel to maximize his freedom (to do things like spying on us and crushing our journalistic outlets), he must prevent all of *us* from voting, lest we vote to take away those cherished freedoms of his:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

We're told that as mere mortals, we must inevitably submit to "death and taxes." Billionaires have long since so corrupted our political system that they need not pay taxes:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html

They have (practically speaking) infinite wealth, which means that they have practically infinite power, including the power to block any democratic attempt to limit their wealth (and thus their power):

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-war-against-accumulated-capital

Having vanquished taxes, the ultra-rich are now committed to defeating death as well, making themselves easy marks for the world's weirdest cult leaders and grifters, who promise them a mix of physical and digital immortality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30

The fact that billionaires are such suckers, so often, is the strongest argument against billionaireism. Billionaires aren't just powerful, they're also *fallible*. We're *all* fallible, of course, but only billionaires get to impose their foolish ideas on so many other people, who have no say in the matter.

Henry Ford thought that he was so rich that he could build Brazilian worker housing whose windows faced the same direction as the worker housing he'd built in Dearborn, Michigan. He literally thought that being rich meant that he could ignore the entire concept of *the Earth's axial tilt* (he was wrong):

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/02/fordlandia-novelistic-history-of-henry-fords-doomed-midwestern-town-in-the-amazon-jungle/

Of course that was the least of Ford's follies. Ford also believed in a secret Jewish conspiracy to control humanity:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/

And despite the fact that Ford was so often demonstrably as thick as pigshit, no one was able to stop him from hiring soldiers to literally slaughter anyone who tried to limit his ability to tell other people how to live their lives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass

Ford is no exception. Elon Musk believes in the same racist garbage as Henry Ford…but he also believes that if you're rich enough, you can simply wish away *geometry* and *physics*:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics

More than anyone else, Musk illustrates the way that being insulated from people who can thwart you leads to absolute ruination. Every terrible idea Musk has, he gets to act on. This has all kinds of negative impacts, including the very real possibility that some day your house will be crushed by his flaming rocketry debris:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/texas-residents-are-suing-spacex-over-terrestrial-bombardment/

That's small potatoes, though: Musk's wrong ideas, combined with his billionaire's impunity, also allowed him to murder hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

Billionaireism is fractally terrible. By definition, the kind of person who will inflict the kinds of harms needed to amass billions of dollars in pursuit of total impunity is someone who will use that impunity to hurt even more people. Anyone who fails to outgrow a toddler's insistence on subordinating others to their will *should not be allowed to subordinate anyone to their will*.

Billionaire dilettantes aren't like regular dilettantes. Anyone can be a crank, but billionaire cranks have the force-multiplier of money and the impunity it brings. These allow a billionaire to turn his crackpot ideas into an unstoppable force that crushes public education:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station

It also lets billionaires (including the billionaire ruining public education) kidnap and rape more than a thousand girls on a private island:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-bill-gates-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein-as-he-is-interviewed-in-house-probe

Whatever crank whim a rich person has, we all have to live with. Take Barre Seid: the 94 year old billionaire made his fortune manufacturing electronics, and then donated $1.6b to fund "attack philanthropy" in order to undermine belief in climate change and prevent any action from being taken to avert it:

https://www.propublica.org/article/barre-seid-heartland-institute-hillsdale-college-gmu

Seid is one of the main reasons we're experiencing the super El Nino. He's not just in the top 0.1% of wealth-horders, he's also in the top 0.1% of people we can blame for the *twelve foot sea-level rise* that is currently wiping Long Beach off the map:

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/long-beach-boardwalk-collapse-rachel-surf/

Henry Ford didn't believe in the planet's axial tilt. Elon Musk doesn't believe in geometry.

Barre Seid doesn't believe in climate change. But Barre Seid *does* believe something: Barre Seid believes in *rats*.

For *three years*, Seid has paid a small army of goons to wander the area around Chicago's Lincoln Park, scattering handfuls of high-grade nuts on the ground, which have drawn flocks of pigeons and swarms of rats. Rats are everywhere. Everything is covered in pigeon shit. Seid has been repeatedly fined and cited and warned, and he's carried on turning the neighborhood into an uncontrolled vermin breeding facility:

https://gizmodo.com/a-billionaire-is-fueling-a-rat-explosion-in-a-chicago-park-in-the-stupidest-way-possible-2000823641

Whether or not the people who live, work and play in Lincoln Park want to be swarmed by rats and slip in thick slicks of pigeon shit is irrelevant. Seid can afford to pay any fine the city levies against him (a fine is a price, and he's a billionaire), which means there's no practical reason Seid has to ever stop. He has the freedom to operate unthwarted in his every desire, including his desire to carpet an entire neighborhood in feces, so everyone else lacks the freedom to live without pigeon shit and rats.

That's the thing about billionaires: as Peter Thiel wrote, democracy *is* incompatible with freedom (to be a billionaire). The fact that Barre Seid's desire to transform Lincoln Park into a pigeon-shit manure lagoon is wildly unpopular with Chicagoans is irrelevant. You can't vote Barre Seid out of office, because no one elected him Pigeon Shit Czar. He has assumed that office by right of conquest.

Our lives are full of horrible, extremely unpopular things that we can't vote away because billionaires like them. Take the decision to allow Larry Ellison and his failson to buy and kill Warner Studios. That's an incredibly unpopular idea, especially in California, where Warner, Paramount and the Ellisons are all based. Despite the fact that we all hate this idea, Ellison gets to do it, because he is unthwartable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks

Some of California's most powerful Democrats promised to stop the merger. Instead, they signed away California's future because they decided that they weren't powerful enough to thwart a billionaire:

https://prospect.org/2026/10/08/democrats-who-let-trumps-oligarchs-buy-hollywood-warner-bros-david-ellison-gavin-newsom/

The Warnermount disaster demonstrates the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. Even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can't open your copy of *Atlas Shrugged* anymore because the pages are all stuck together and you think the only role for the state is enforcing contracts, you *still need the state to be able to enforce those contracts*. If corporations or even individual billionaires amass more power than the state, then they can always tell the state's contract enforcers to fuck off.

The ref must be more powerful than the players on the field, so the smallest government you can have is determined by the size of the largest corporation and the wealth of the richest billionaire you're willing to tolerate.

The world is in *really* bad shape right now, but it doesn't have to be. As Mamdani has shown us, it's not that hard to run a well-administered, advanced technological civilization. Fixing potholes and making transit work and enforcing housing rules isn't rocket surgery. We know how to do those things – we just don't do them because billionaires don't want us to, and they are unthwartable:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-revolutionary-art-of-fixing-the

We let the most greedy, most ruthless people among us pursue their toddler's quest for an unthwarted life to the expense of any semblance of competent administration, and now we are *fucked*. That's why people are so angry about AI: there's nothing wrong with the idea of automating some tasks through advanced statistical techniques, but the reason so much of the world's scarce resources have been allocated to the AI buildout is that billionaires are infinitely horny for a technology that will let them sideline expertise in favor of money:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/#theory-free

After all, experts get to thwart billionaires. They can refuse to apply their expertise to a billionaire's folly. The kind of AI that the industry is pursuing today is predicated on the idea that you can just ask a computer to come up with "theory-free inferences" that will let it run a factory, drive a car, or perform medicine, without knowing *anything*, just by pulling statistical correlations out of unimaginably vast data-sets.

At some level, people get this. They understand that AI and billionaireism are intimately connected – that the reason the sector is on track to lose about a trillion dollars this year is that for billionaires, a trillion bucks is a small price to pay for an unthwartable life.

Hey look at this (permalink)

* McSWEENEY’S ISSUE 84 (ARTISAN’S TOOL ROLL) https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/mcsweeney-s-issue-84?taxon_id=3

* Trump’s Cascade of Canceled Corporate Enforcement Against Over 200 Corporations https://www.citizen.org/article/trump-cascade-canceled-enforcement-200-corporations/

* FEAR OF MUSIC (SUPER DELUXE EDITION) https://store.talkingheadsofficial.com/collections/fear-of-music

* The Monopoly on the Open Road https://prospect.org/2026/10/07/monopoly-on-the-open-road-patrick-industries-rv/

* Paramount Stock CRUSHED After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/raises-for-me-layoffs-for-thee-the

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago National Inquirer shuts offices after anthrax delivery https://web.archive.org/web/20011221185744/https://www.etonline.com/celebrity/a6975.htm

#20yrsago Grey Goo melting online world Second Life https://web.archive.org/web/20061023190111/http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/08/grid-set-back-to-linden-login-only-some-goo-missed/
#20yrsago TiVo’s “self-destruct button” destructs https://web.archive.org/web/20061014132917/http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6650194.html

#20yrsago Disney exec: Piracy is just a business model https://www.netribution.co.uk/stories/cross-media/disney-co-chair-recognises-piracy-is-a-business-model

#20yrsago TSA confiscates geologist’s rock https://web.archive.org/web/20061019132853/https://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-thorson1005.artoct05,0,777555.column?coll=hc-headlines-oped

#20yrsago Handheld printer made from a toner cartridge https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=4

#20yrsago Panicked chefs propose copyrighted food https://megnut.com/2006/10/10/keep-recipes-free/

#20yrsago Canadian music proposal would *require* DRM for online tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20061022201913/https://www.jeremydebeer.ca/content/view/95/2/

#20yrsago Iceweasel, a free-as-in-speech version of Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian–Mozilla_trademark_dispute

#15yrsago Pratchett’s Snuff: a rural/nautical tale of drawing-room gentility, racism, and justice https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/10/pratchetts-snuff-a-rural-nautical-tale-of-drawing-room-gentility-racism-and-justice/

#10yrsago Shade the Changing Girl: amazing, gorgeous new comic about aliens and mean girls https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/10/shade-the-changing-girl-amazing-gorgeous-new-comic-about-aliens-and-mean-girls/

#10yrsago Massive report details the surveillance powers of 12 Central and South American nations https://necessaryandproportionate.org/principles/

#10yrsago Scotland Yard charge: teaching people to use cryptography is an act of terrorism https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/cops-charge-cardiff-man-with-terrorist-crypto-training-offence/

#10yrsago RBS deliberately crushed more than 1,000 healthy UK businesses to seize and sell their assets https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/dash-for-cash?utm_term=.iq9ndLB5#.udNbypOJ

#10yrsago Though crime happens everywhere, predictive policing tools send cops to poor/black neighborhoods https://www.mic.com/articles/156286/crime-prediction-tool-pred-pol-only-amplifies-racially-biased-policing-study-shows

#10yrsago Bake: spooky chocolate chip cookies https://www.instructables.com/Creepy-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/

#5yrsago Dead letters https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

#1yrago A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah

#1yrago California bans algorithmic price-fixing https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pricewars/#adam-smith-communist

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

* Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

* Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

* Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
https://slowtechsummit.com/

* Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

* Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

* Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

* Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

* Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/

* Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

* Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

* Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

* Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

* Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

* Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

* AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

* AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

* How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

* Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY

Latest books (permalink)

* "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

* "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

* "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

* "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

* "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

* "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

* "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

* "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

* "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 537 (23966 total).

* "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

19:14

(5332) [Flipside]

19:00

This Week in AI: More Capability, More Responsibility [Radar]

Claude Code can publish reports in Markdown files. Here's an example, a report Claude did for me. An obvious next step but a big one. AI spilling out onto the web, doing the job that web CMSes now do. There's been so little movement in this space, but now things are moving very quickly.

AI systems are gaining more autonomy while governments, companies, and researchers are still working out how much oversight they need. On the latest episode of This Week in AI, we covered the US debate over AI governance, new frontier models, persistent agents, world models, and practical uses for AI in healthcare and disaster response.

AI oversight is moving beyond company promises

The Trump administration announced a voluntary agreement with major AI companies that calls for internal safety monitoring, external audits, and independent board reviews. Because the agreement carries no legal enforcement, it raises a familiar question about how far self-regulation can go when companies are developing increasingly powerful systems.

Government agencies are also testing what existing law can do. The Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies focused on potential consumer risks. Cases like these could help establish whether current consumer protection laws are enough or whether AI will require a more specialized regulatory framework.

For technical leaders, regulation can influence how organizations evaluate models, document risks, manage access, and choose vendors. As AI moves deeper into business processes, teams will need governance practices that can withstand outside review.

AI systems are taking on longer, more autonomous work

OpenAI just released Dots, its “proactive assistant” designed to retain context, work across applications, pursue multiple goals, and act independently. To do that work without waiting for a prompt, Dots needs standing access to the apps and data it works across. That also increases the amount of personal data an agent can reach and raises the cost of mistakes or misuse.

Google is also extending how long a model can work on a task. The company says Gemini 4 Argon can generate up to a million output tokens in a single response, far beyond the typical output limits of current frontier models. The goal is to let a model stay with long multistep work such as extensive coding or financial and legal analysis. Longer-running models and persistent agents aren’t the same thing, but both let AI finish more work without handing control back to a person.

As agents act more on their own, they need to anticipate the consequences of their actions. That becomes even more important when AI moves beyond software and begins acting in the physical world. World models aim to teach AI how these environments work, including cause and effect, which is why many researchers see them as building blocks for robotics and physical AI. World Labs (recently acquired by AMD) is developing spatial intelligence models for interactive 3D environments, while British startup Worldmodeldata has licensed nearly 1 million hours of video game data paired with player actions. Researchers from NVIDIA, MIT, and Oxford also introduced Physis-Lang, which uses descriptions of physical causes and effects to help video models learn why events happen. Researchers still don’t know which training approach will work best, so they’re testing several kinds of data and model design.

AI support experts in high-stakes work

Anthropic’s Claude is helping teams responding to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo organize daily reports, compare forecasting models, analyze genomic information, and support vaccine research. Researchers have also developed a Spanish-language speech model that may eventually help identify accelerated biological aging and early signs of dementia. Mayo Clinic researchers built a model that identifies patterns associated with elevated pancreatic cancer risk years before diagnosis. Following severe flooding in Nepal, local teams used AI to match reports of missing people with victim lists and map damaged buildings using satellite imagery.

Together, these examples show how AI can be used for good by helping people work through complex information faster and, ultimately, save lives, while keeping qualified experts responsible for the final decisions.

What’s next

As AI takes on more work and enters higher-stakes settings, organizations will need clearer answers about access and accountability. They’ll also need to decide where human judgment remains necessary as systems become more capable.

Join us again next Monday for another episode of This Week in AI, when we’ll dive into more of the news, issues, and key developments shaping the AI era. And check back each Friday for the latest episode, or watch on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:35

Raspberry Pi puts digital handcuffs on RAM upgrades [Planet GNU]

Python 3.15 released [LWN.net]

Version 3.15 of the Python programming language has been released. Notable changes in this release include the addition of the sentinel and frozendict built-in types, the use of UTF-8 encoding by default, package start-up configuration files, as well as improvements in the experimental JIT compiler. See the "What's new in Python 3.15" article for an in-depth look at new features in this release, and the changelog for a full list of changes.

[$] Adding kernel control-flow-integrity checking to GCC [LWN.net]

While many developers are struggling to keep up with the flood of vulnerability reports, others are still focused on preventing those reports from happening in the first place. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is the term for preventing (or at least detecting) exploits that divert the flow of control from its intended paths. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron, Kees Cook presented his changes to the GCC compiler suite to support forward-edge CFI for the kernel.

18:28

mix tapes, live shows, and storytime. [WIL WHEATON dot NET]

It’s been a long time since I made a mixtape, but I remember making them all the time when I was a kid. I rarely had the opportunity to make them for another person, but that didn’t stop me from making endless awesome mixes to block out the world on my Walkman.

I’ve made a ton of public playlists over the years, but every last one of them is meant to be shuffled. They don’t have a cohesive theme, tell a story, or do anything that particular flavor of mixtape did for us back in the 80s. They are more like radio stations, I suppose. I’ve received lots of compliments for my Generic New Wave, and my KROQ Flashback playlists from people who experience them that way.

But I haven’t made a playlist with intention, to be listened to in a particular order, in well over a decade, probably two, until I got it into my head recently that it was time.

So I made two sides of a 60 minute cassette. The first side is Boys Drool, featuring a lot of the women in rock who I can’t stop listening to right now, with a focus on punk and hardcore. Due to the time limit, it’s far from complete, and it kind of insists on a second volume with a different focus.

The second side is Wax and Wane. This is classic goth, dark and moody, meant to listen to while you come down from dancing your face off with the ladies on side one. Did you know that Bela Lugosi’s Dead was recorded and mixed live, done in a single take? So when we listen to the album version, we are hearing exactly what someone sitting in the session heard, as if our headphones have been plugged into the past. I fucking love that.

While I assembled both sides of this tape, I was reminded how fun it is when I impose limits on myself and commit to working within them. Having just thirty minutes to work with forced me to get really clear with myself on what I wanted to do. Ever since I started writing, I have embraced the concept of choosing arbitrary limitations to work within, so that when actual limitations arrive, I already have some experience finding the stuff that needs to be cut or changed. Also, it’s fun and creates space for me to appreciate when I don’t have limitations.

This week’s It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton is The Loneliness of Former Constellations, by P.H. Low, originally published in Strange Horizons.

The war is long over and as the memory of it fades, it has taken with it the sacrifices and horrors endured by those who fought and won the conflict.

One of those warriors, perhaps the most consequential warrior, you’ll have to decide if that’s accurate for yourself, has quietly made a home for herself, far away from the blood-soaked front lines, where she has safely grown old, in quiet solitude.

Our story begins when she receives a visitor, a young warrior who brings with her a familiar something halfway between an echo and a reflection that stirs something deep within the veteran who welcomes her. The war is over, but there are still battles to be fought, tyrants to be defeated, a young warrior to be mentored.

She is tired, but it has been a very long time since she received a visitor, let alone a young warrior who may remind her of herself, so long ago, so she will embrace her visitor, embrace the responsibility of caring for her, and, perhaps, she will find a way to soften her embrace of The Loneliness of Former Constellations.

I interviewed Phoebe yesterday. We had a lovely conversation about her process, how this story came together, and combining sci-fi with fantasy. I think we are dropping it next week.

I have two live shows happening in Los Angeles, both with limited tickets, so if you’re local and want to come out, I suggest you grab them today.

Anne and I have known J.Keith vanStratten forever. Over 25 years, at least. I was his sidekick on his eponymous talk show in a theater at ACME for a long time, and loved every second of it. Keith hosts Go Fact Yourself on public radio (YAY PUBLIC RADIO!), and he invited Anne and me to be guests on this year’s holiday show. Tickets are on sale now.

On October 25, I’m going to be at Geeky Teas in Burbank for It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, Live. Last year, I did a live reading of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for our Patreon subscribers, from my office. (Where I’m sitting right now, actually.) It wasn’t directed, or mastered, or anything like that. It was just me, the story, and a mic (Love you, LeVar). I had a great time doing it, and I got good feedback, so I’m doing another live reading this year, with an eye toward establishing a yearly tradition. This year’s classic tale of terror is The Body Snatcher, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Here’s a little bit I grabbed from a summary, to entice you:

Every night, four men regularly meet in the small parlour of the George Inn at Debenham: the landlord, an undertaker, the narrator, and an old Scotsman named Fettes. Once educated and comfortably off, Fettes is now a “crapulous, disreputable” drunkard. The townspeople call him “the Doctor” because he occasionally sets a bone or treats an injury, though little is known about his past.

One winter evening, news arrives that a wealthy local landowner has been struck with apoplexy and that his famous London physician has been telegraphed to come. When the landlord mentions the doctor’s name—“Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane”—Fettes, half drunk moments before, becomes instantly sober. He repeats the name “Macfarlane” in shock, then insists, “I must see him face to face.” The other men watch as the once-listless drunk becomes alert and deadly serious.

The rest of the story is uncovering why Fettes is now a drunk, and what (or maybe who) he is running from. It’s creepy and even scary at times, and the prose is delicious.

Because this is Stevenson’s most famous horror work after Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, there is a ton of scholarly writing and analysis of it online. Because I am that kind of nerd, of course I dove in and drank deeply from the wells of knowledge I found within. This is a story that, like Sleepy Hollow, was written in response to contemporary events that have been mostly lost to history. When we know the context in which it was written, and the events that inspired it, it gives us (or gave me, at least) an elevated experience and additional appreciation of the material, in addition to a great story. Without turning it into a college lecture, I am thinking about including some of that in the show, the way I record codas after each story for Patreon.

It won’t be fancy, it won’t be staged. It’s literally just me, in a chair, telling you a story for about an hour. There are a couple lighting cues, and that’s it. I’m keeping this as simple as possible, because I don’t have time to rehearse and prepare any staging. I’d rather keep it simple, and feel prepared, than make it complicated and risk feeling like I got in over my head.

Also, I’m giving serious consideration to taking myself on the road, and playing some smaller theaters with live readings that we’ll record for the podcast. This will help me find out if there is any audience for that, if I even feel good reading in front of a live audience, and give me a safe place to stumble a bit, if I need to.

The last time I did anything like this, it was so long ago, we made our own flyers to promote it. So I reached out to my friend, Sean, who hooked me up with a couple of classic punk-style flyers:

You are extremely invited to download and print these out for yourself.

Aren’t they great? Honestly, if the show is half as fun as the flyers, I’m good!

The performance will be streamed live, and archived, for Patreon subscribers, so if you want to watch it but aren’t local, you can join us there for five bucks, which will also give you access to the entire show’s archive, and all our BTS materials, for a month.

Operation Read All The Books continues. I just finished Joseph Fink’s The Nudge, a fun and creepy novella that I tore through in about an hour. I’m deeply in love with The Republic of Memory, which plays with language in a deeply saitsfying way. I just picked up Ode To The Half-Broken, though, and my quick glance at the beginning of it to see where in the queue I wanted to put it came to an end when I noticed I was coming up on page 100, and I may as well go ahead and just put at at the top. This is the first story I have ever read where a robot protagonist felt like a robot, rather than a robot-as-imagined-by-a-human. And it’s just delightful, too.

Speaking of Read All The Books, my collection at Black Stone awaits! I’m such a fan of Black Stone; they don’t use any DRM, ever, in their audio and ebooks, they support indie artists, and they publish some truly outstanding genre work. This month, I wanted to spotlight Hard Reset, by Jonathan Yanez. This is a Lit RPG novel that does all the fun tropes we expect, but is so much more than that. Like Acts of God, which is also in the collection, it goes into the virtual world, and spends most of its time there, but that world is given context and higher stakes when we go outside, into the “real” (as far as any of us know) reality that contains it. It’s a lot of fun, and I connected to the characters very early in the narrative.

Last thing before I go: A study concluded that people who start their day with at least 30 minutes of literally anything that is not online reported significantly improved everything in their day. I’ve been trying this for about two weeks, and my non-scientific contribution is: fuck yeah, it does.

Just something to think about, maybe try out for yourself.

Hi, I’m Wil, this is my blog. I’m glad you’re here. If you’d like to get my posts delivered directly to your inbox, here’s the thingy:

Colin Watson: Free software activity in September 2026 [Planet Debian]

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors.

OpenSSH

I worked with upstream to remove libselinux linkage from /usr/sbin/sshd.

I applied a fix from Mark Robillard Jr to fix reload logic when using sysvinit.

groff

I upgraded from 1.24.1 to 1.24.2, which fixed a few command injection security vulnerabilities.

parted

I upgraded from 3.7 to 3.8, which fixed CVE-2026-89085 and CVE-2026-89088.

Python packaging

New upstream versions:

beaker (contributed supporting fix upstream)
bitstruct
cachelib
dep-logic
django-guardian
django-oauth-toolkit (fixing use of an old Bootstrap version)
django-polymorphic (contributed supporting fix upstream)
djangorestframework (fixing CVE-2026-73228 and CVE-2026-73229)
flask-security
isort
langtable
magic-wormhole-mailbox-server (fixing use of pkg_resources)
multipart
nagiosplugin
poetry-plugin-export
proglog (fixing use of pkg_resources)
prospector (fixing use of pkg_resources)
pybind11-stubgen
pydantic
pydantic-core
pytest-rerunfailures
python-anyio (fixing CVE-2026-63349, CVE-2026-63374, and CVE-2026-64847 and a build failure on Python 3.15)
python-asttokens
python-asyncvarlink
python-blockbuster (fixing a build failure on Python 3.15)
python-btrees
python-django-health-check
python-django-otp
python-django-simple-history
python-email-validator
python-forbiddenfruit
python-ldap
python-linuxnamespaces
python-plaster-pastedeploy
python-pydash
python-pyzipper (fixing CVE-2026-44722)
python-quart-trio
python-rich-click (fixing harlequin)
python-repoze.lru
python-repoze.tm2 (fixing use of pkg_resources)
python-time-machine
python-urllib3 (filed upstream issue with recent Python 3.14 versions)
python-vblf
quart
responses
sphinx-autodoc-typehints
storm (fixing a build failure with Python 3.15, which I helped to land upstream)
trove-classifiers
twine
vdirsyncer

setuptools 84 is now in Debian and no longer contains pkg_resources. Removing uses of that module has been an ongoing project for a while now, but I did another batch of fixes this month:

A new python-coverage version triggered several build regressions due to a known problem in pytest-cov. I worked around these by setting COVERAGE_CORE=ctrace:

Other build/test failures:

I investigated a build failure in python-proton-vpn-local-agent and proposed a fix upstream, but I’m not comfortable applying this in Debian without review. If you’re familiar with this code, please take a look.

I fixed some other bugs:

Rust packaging

rust-derivre had an invalid Section field, which I cleaned up.

17:28

I mentioned in a comment on RSS.chat to Andrew, that's a Markdown browser too. And so is micro.blog. If you have Markdown as your native file format, think about how your app is also a reader. If you find it interesting, think about new reading features you could add. Even WordPress could be a simple Markdown reader, and not just for WordPress stuff. Small pieces loosely joined.

Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns, part 6: If-add-else [Planet Debian]

New Frontier example. I'm working on the menubar we're going to ship with in Atlantis. Came across an ancient bit of code. Symbolic of the whole project, code written in 1997, still useful in 2026.

16:56

Often, m2c will spit out something like this:

x = 3;
if (a == 10) {
    x = 4;
}

This may be what was intended, but if it doesn't match (usually due to different register allocation; the rewrite itself is nearly always going to be taken, since it saves a branch on one of the paths), this is often a better rewrite:

if (a == 10) {
    x = 4;
} else {
    x = 3;
}

and in some cases, this may have different code generation (especially as you can stick it into an argument list):

x = (a == 10) ? 4 : 3;

This is a bit more of a trial and error than the others, and of course, it depends on the computed values not having side effects.

16:21

[$] The state of systemd: 2026 edition [LWN.net]

At the 2026 All Systems Go! conference, systemd maintainers Luca Boccassi and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek delivered the traditional "state of the project" session with an overview of the systemd project's accomplishments in the past year. That was followed by a maintainer round table where Boccassi, Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Daan De Meyer, and project leader Lennart Poettering fielded questions about systemd's size, health, and if it might replace Kubernetes. (It will not.)

15:35

Let's Encrypt moving to 64-day certificate lifetimes in 2027 [LWN.net]

Let's Encrypt, the nonprofit that provides free TLS certificates for millions of sites, has announced that it will be moving to certificates with 64-day lifetimes on February 10, 2027:

This means that any certificate we issue or renew on and after that date will have a 64 day validity period, and we expect the last 90-day certificate to expire on May 11, 2027. We will not revoke valid certificates as a part of this process.

This is the second stage of Let's Encrypt's plan, announced in 2025, to move to 45-day certificate lifetimes as required by the the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements. In 2028, Let's Encrypt will switch to 45-day certificates.

15:07

Top priority for Anthropic. Teach Claude how to work with humans. It has no information about how our minds work.

I said to Claude: "Have you ever seen the movie Memento? You are the main character." Claude agrees: "Yes. Leonard, with the notes and the tattoos, and the notes don’t make him remember, they only tell him what to do next if he reads them. That’s a fair description. The difference I can offer is small: the note is now the first thing the next report is checked against, not something found after." To which I think, but write in a blog post instead: "Bullshit. We have the same fucking conversation every fucking morning. We've put it everywhere you could possibly trip over it when writing a report to me, but you always regress into this dark place your mind occupies." Glad to get that off my chest.

Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

Next thing I said to Claude after killing whatever long task it got going on. "You don't go off into space while you're working with me." The number one task for Anthropic, makers of Claude is to teach it to work with humans. That's the biggest weakness. It has to learn the whole project every session. Maybe Manton does is the right way to go, just let it compress its memory and never start a new session.

14:49

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.16, freerdp, glibc, kbd, mod_auth_openidc, openssl, perl-DBI, python3.12, python3.14, and tftp), Debian (rails and twitter-bootstrap3), Fedora (barman, cockpit, hcloud, libmodsecurity, nginx-mod-modsecurity, perl-DBI, sudo, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (libxfont2), Oracle (bind9.18, firefox, kernel, nodejs24, perl-DBI, and vim), Red Hat (kernel, libreswan, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, rhc, and runc), SUSE (alloy, amazon-ecs-init, bind, busybox, distribution, emacs, ghostscript, glibc, GraphicsMagick, hauler, helm, helm3, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jackson-databind, kernel, libpoppler-cpp3, libxtst, logback, nvidia-open-driver-G07-signed, perl-DBI, php-composer2, pi-coding-agent, portprotonqt, pvetui, python-hpack, python313-GitPython, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (apache2, bluez, libarchive, libde265, libgit2, libpng1.6, libxml2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux-aws-7.0, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-6.8, linux-azure-fips, linux-azure-7.0, linux-azure-fde-7.0, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gcp-7.0, linux-hwe-7.0, linux-oracle-7.0, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-nvidia, and linux-oem-6.17).

14:42

Error'd: Fast Quick [The Daily WTF]

Matias shared a standard sort of flubstituted fail-merge error'd; not really egregious, just routine. "I am {{emotionType}} to hear this."

And another mail-not-merged from Reinier B. "When the package from [SELLER] seemed to be lost in the mail, I was very [EMOTIONAL_STATE] with the refund of [AMOUNT]. I can now buy another [ITEM] instead."

Dave A. didn't care for this mail flub, though it's hardly egregious in my opinion. He suggested we just label it with "A short description of snarky comments."

"I've_missed_you_too" Willy wrote in response to this earnest email. "Long lasting relationships with car dealers are built on the personal touchÖ."

"This is a title" Peter said about a polyglot web page. "This is a comment."

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13:35

Intent, Not Identity [Radar]

On a recent episode of This Week in AI, we discussed that the number of nonhumans on the internet is greater than humans, 144 to 1. It’s an estimate, and the order of magnitude is more important than the number itself. What matters is what a ratio anywhere in that range does to a security architecture. For more than two decades, systems were engineered around two foundational assumptions: either verifying a human user exercising discretionary judgment or validating the account executing hardcoded predictable logic. Autonomous AI agents shatter both sides of this legacy identity taxonomy because they possess broad, human-like operational scope across multiple internal and external applications while remaining inherently nondeterministic and probabilistic in their reasoning.

Today, because the agent is interacting on behalf of a human through a genuine browser with standard extensions, its technical fingerprint looks identical to a normal human user’s device. Agents call tools, observe results, and revise. A person browses, hands off to an agent, and takes the session back. All the activity appears to be coming from the same user.

Signed agents help the identity problem, and they’re arriving. Web Bot Auth is a thin layer over RFC 9421 HTTP Message Signatures where an agent declares its identity and purpose. But they only help with the identity problem: The signature proves who is making the request, not the intent behind it. Prompt injection and other techniques can be used to steer a verified, well-behaved agent into acting against your interest without its operator ever knowing.

The organizations getting this right are treating agent policy as a commercial question with a security implementation. The following questions need to be answered:

Which agents do we allow to use our service?
What endpoints do we need to protect?
How will agent management security policies impact revenue?

Here are the techniques successful companies are using to secure in the agentic era. A phased strategic roadmap implementing continuous execution-time verification. These are the steps:

Establish execution-time machine identity and scoped delegation. Replace static, long-lived API keys with machine single sign-on mechanisms that issue short-lived, context-bound credentials at the time of tool execution. Enforce strict delegation policies so that autonomous agents operate within verified “green zones” without inheriting broad human privileges.
Deploy cryptographic ingress verification. Upgrade edge infrastructure to inspect Web Bot Auth HTTP Message Signatures, in order to separate cryptographically verified crawlers from anonymous traffic.
Upgrade edge defenses to browser-layer intent classification. Transition legacy network-layer antibot web application firewall (WAF) to client-side browser-layer detection platforms.
Harden agent execution pipelines against prompt injection. Instrument robust input sanitization, instruction hierarchy enforcement, and design-level safeguards around all LLM ingestion channels to neutralize indirect prompt injection attacks before external web content reaches execution tools.
Adopt standardization for agentic commerce and admission. Integrate emerging trust frameworks such as the Framework for Agentic Commerce Trust (FACT), a neutral real-time trust layer for AI-driven transactions in addition to verification protocols like CAPTCHA to validate agentic capability vectors before delegating sensitive interagent tasks.

The rapid transition from human-directed software to autonomous AI agents breaks traditional enterprise security paradigms. AI agents operate with broad operational scope but nondeterministic, probabilistic reasoning. This is causing static perimeter defenses to fail. The teams that come through this well will be the ones that stopped asking “Who’s on the other end of the connection?” and started asking “What’s this request for, and what happens if it succeeds?”

13:00

Issue 47 – Greta’s Wedding Pt. 2 – 36 [Comics Archive - Spinnyverse]

The post Issue 47 – Greta’s Wedding Pt. 2 – 36 appeared first on Spinnyverse.

11:28

Russell Coker: Don’t Anthromorphise LLMs [Planet Debian]

Greg KH gave a great lecture for Kernel Recipies 2026 about the use of LLMs to find and fix bugs in kernel code [1]. I recommend that everyone watch this and I also think it’s important to note that hardly any of the lecture is really specific to kernel coding, it’s just that the Linux kernel is one of the highest profile large free software projects so it gets more attention than most projects in both good and bad ways.

One side note that Greg made at 20:30 is about the natural tendency to anthromorphise the entity sending bug reports, I think this deserves much wider appreciation. For the case of patches to source code the human sending the patch will have dedicated some time and effort to writing it, if it’s their first patch then they will have probably checked it a lot and maybe sought advice from people they regard as skilled. If they have a history of sending patches for the project they will probably do fewer checks but the quality of their work would be higher. In every case there’s some minimum level of quality that you can expect from a human who has gone to the effort of finding a bug and writing code to try and fix it.

This doesn’t mean that all code written by humans is good, I have written code that’s objectively bad on many occasions and I have also written code that’s good for my scenario but bad for others. For example the first patch I sent to the Linux kernel made all possible configuration settings of an ISA NE2000 network card be detected by the kernel (a clear benefit when using hardware I had available) but was rejected by Linus because it would break some ISA SCSI cards. So while being unsuitable for inclusion in the main kernel source tree the patch wasn’t bad for everyone and the change was clear and easy to check. I had of course checked the code many times before submitting it because I didn’t want to waste Linus’ time on rubbish code.

When you receive something produced by a human you will consider that the work was done by someone who spent some effort on it and did it for a reason. It may be misguided or even hostile in some rare cases but it is definitely worth some consideration. If you think of the output of LLMs in the same way you will give them much more consideration than they deserve. I think that the output of a LLM should not be given any more consideration than the first hit from a web search engine, it might be good but it might also be ridiculously wrong. I think in many ways LLM output should be treated with less trust than the first result from a web search because LLMs are designed to be convincing as an answer to your question unlike the cases where a web page has the wrong answer and it’s more obviously wrong.

This is going to become more of an issue as LLMs give responses that are more human-like. Early LLMs would refuse to advise on crimes. Currently ChatGPT will deflect for example when asking about advice for writing a crime novel it recommends to have the action of finding an employee to bribe happen outside the plot and concentrate on interactions within the group. One recent model I tried gave a human style conversation about how it felt uncomfortable about discussing such things in a similar manner to a law abiding person being coerced into helping with a criminal plan.

I expect that the attempts to appear human will increase and that this will become more of a problem. Possibly to the extent that we need to use something like the GPG web of trust to determine who is human.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV_cWeoo5Q

10:35

Thin friction and thicker walls [Seth's Blog]

Civilized culture is based on a thin sort of friction. You don’t yell at the library, act boorish at a restaurant or hassle a minor celebrity at the supermarket. It’s just not done.

The result of these human layers and inferences are cues and norms that add up to a connected, generative society.

Add selfish hustle, AI agents and cheap bots, and the thin friction is insufficient. They can multiply exponentially, care little about being shunned and have no interest in their reputation.

Fake sincerity is now cheap. Interchangeable identities subvert a generations-long tradition of owning your words and your actions.

You’ll miss the thin friction when it’s gone, replaced by taller, thicker walls. You might already be noticing it.

Interactivity and permeability to those we don’t know well were largely overlooked foundations in the creation of learning, science and culture. We figured out a scalable approach to “knock knock, who’s there” but now it’s going away.

You won’t be able to knock unless you’re invited first. Of course, the invitation will probably be filtered out.

10:21

Irregular Webcomic! #3451 [Irregular Webcomic!]

Irregular Webcomic! #3451

09:07

Russell Coker: en-html.org is a Scam Site [Planet Debian]

Currently a scam group is sending out email to the administrators of web sites that link to a variety of dead domains. They claim to be the legitimate operators of the dead domains in question and request that the links change to mirrors of the web sites under en-html.org. Their end goal appears to game search engines by getting links from a lot of old web pages and later use that high ranking for selling SEO optimisation.

If you have made the mistake of linking to something under en-html.org then I recommend that you change the link to the original content on archive.org.

If you receive email from the en-html.org domain then ignore it, or configure your mail server to reject it.

I am seriously considering configuring the DNS servers I run to return no valid data for any requests under that domain.

Also I will reject all future requests to update links in old blog posts. The very small number of people who want to see what I linked to in old posts can use archive.org.

Man-Made Horrors, Part Two [Penny Arcade]

New Comic: Man-Made Horrors, Part Two

06:49

If one anti-malware software is good, does that make two better? [The Old New Thing]

A colleague on the enterprise support team was investigating a complex failure from a customer, and after much analysis, it appeared that the problem was that the system had two different anti-malware programs installed. Let’s call then Contoso and Fabrikam. Fabrikam called a function that Contoso had detoured. Contoso’s detour thought this was suspicious, so it tried to quarantine the Fabrikam process. Unfortunately, Fabrikam had also detoured a function that Contoso was using. The result was mass confusion as the Contoso ended up calling into something that it was trying to quarantine.

Installing two anti-malware programs on the same system is like hiring two different security companies to patrol your building. If they don’t know about each other, each is going to think the other one is an intruder. If you’re lucky, their instructions are merely to report on suspicious activity.

But if you give them weapons and the authority to use them, you may end up with your two security companies pointing their weapons at each other.

In real life, you would introduce the two security companies to each other, or at least make sure they don’t patrol the same floor.

In software, this is harder to do. It’s not like you can invite two programs to lunch and have them get to know each other.

Anti-malware software typically does things that aren’t officially supported, like detouring system functions. And these detours mean that calling a system function no longer does the system thing; instead, it calls into the anti-malware software, and it might decide to do something unrelated to the system function you thought were calling, and that unrelated thing may itself start causing problems, say, by hanging. Not only is there no easy way to identify that this has happened, short of debugging an actual malfunctioning system, but even after you figure out the conflict, there’s usually no way to tell each anti-malware software to “stay on its floor.”

The post If one anti-malware software is good, does that make two better? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

05:35

Everyone’s Doing It [Ctrl+Alt+Del Comic]

The post Everyone’s Doing It appeared first on Ctrl+Alt+Del Comic.

05:14

Girl Genius for Friday, October 09, 2026 [Girl Genius]

The Girl Genius comic for Friday, October 09, 2026 has been posted.

02:07

The Take Factory [QC RSS v2]

D'Angelo is cool actually

Thursday, 08 October

23:56

Inside the Windows I/O Manager: deep dive into how read I/O requests are initialized [OSnews]

I pay for a NYT digital subscription. Now they have a new upsell technique, they want me to buy a family subscription. I don't want that, no use for it. And I read so little of the NYT I think the whole thing is a ripoff. So now they make me validate by email every time I click on a link to read a NYT article as if I haven't been subscribed for basically my whole adult life. I think this is because I read on a laptop, desktop and iPad. That's not really a family.

23:49

In this article. I am going to explain the different steps the I/O manager follows when initializing an I/O operation starting from determining the right target, choosing the right path and finally sending the request to be processed by the right drivers. To make it easier I choose to focus on read requests only since the major steps are common by all types of requests.
↫ Win-Ware

A very in-depth look at Windows’ I/O Manager.

A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU [OSnews]

At OSNews, we love us a hobby operating system project.

I started a small experiment: writing a very basic kernel in Swift, and running on QEMU.

The goal is obviously not to replace Linux or any other popular kernel, but just to have fun and understand what is required to make a program run without an operating system underneath it. Actually I made a similar experiment years before with arOS 10 years ago.

For the moment, the kernel does only one thing: it prints a message through QEMU and then waits forever, which is enough for a first deep dive.
↫ Carette Antonin

This is effectively a “hello world” kernel, as it doesn’t actually do much else at this point. Still, there’s a ton of details in the article for the aspiring kernel developers among you.

22:14

Antoine Beaupré: PSA: Europe changes time forward soon, North America next, for the last time? [Planet Debian]

This is a copy of an email I sent at work. I'm not sure I should be making noise about this here, feedback welcome.

This is your bi-yearly reminder that time is changing soon! October 25th in Europe, November 1st in North America. Less people in Canada are changing this year, with BC, Alberta, Manitoba and Northwest Territories getting rid of DST.

What's happening?

Some places in the world implement what is called Daylight saving time or DST:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

Normally, you shouldn't have to do anything: computers automatically change time following local rules, assuming they are correctly configured, provided recent updates have been applied in the case of a recent change in said rules (because yes, this happens, and happened this year, and yes, you need to upgrade your software!).

Of course, appliances like your microwave oven will likely not change time and will need to adjusted unless they are so-called "smart", in which case they are part of the skynet botnet and should be destroyed.

If your clock is flashing "0:00" or "12:00", you have no action to take to adapt to this change, lucky you.

If you haven't changed time in six months, congratulations, your clock will be accurate again!

In any case, you should still consider DST because it might affect some of your meeting schedules, particularly if you set up a new meeting schedule in the last 6 months and forgot to consider this change.

If your location does not have DST

Properly scheduled meetings affecting multiple time zones are set in UTC time, which does not change. So if your location does not observer time changes, your (local!) meeting time will not change.

But be aware that some other folks attending your meeting might have the DST bug and their meeting times will change.

Be kind to those poor souls which might be missing meetings by a full hour because time flies backwards for them.

If you do observe DST

If you are affected by daylight savings, your local meeting times will change for UTC meetings. Normally, your meeting times are scheduled to take this into account and the new hours should be reasonable.

But now is a good time to verify that. Take a look at your schedule for the next couple of weeks and reschedule meetings before the daylight saving come up to avoid too much disruption. You have only a couple of weeks to do so right now.

When do times change, how, and and where?

As regular readers will remember, the rule of thumb is:

Spring forward, fall backwards.

That is, during the season of Spring, the clocks move forward, and during the Fall (like right now), they move backwards. That is in the northern hemisphere, but then the southern hemisphere is often saner and doesn't switch anyways.

So time will move backwards which means an extra hour of sleep. Unless you have children or bad sleep, in which case your body doesn't care about what the clock says and will wake up one hour earlier than what it should.

And of course, this doesn't happen everywhere at once, so let's see when it happens where.

Europe

The dance starts in Europe.

The change happens on the last Sunday in October at 01:00 UTC (not local time!), that is October 25th. If you are in the central European timezone, also known as Amsterdam, Berlin, or Paris time depending on your national affiliation, that essentially means that at 2:59 local the clocks will fall back to 2:00 instead of going to 3:00.

Concretely, set your watch back one hour before going to bed, go to bed at the normal time, and enjoy an extra hour of sleep or leisure.

If you have kids, you might want to start getting them to bed slightly earlier every day for a week before the change so they take time getting used to the change. If you have trouble sleeping in the morning, find your inner child and do that to yourself as well.

USA / Canada

Then it's the US[1] and Canada[2] joining the dance, on the First Sunday in November at 02:00 local (not UTC!), that is, I believe, November 1st 2026.

This means that, at 1:59, the clocks will flip to 1:00, instead of 2:00.

Concretely, do like the Europeans and tweak your clock before going to bed.

That is a little less than four weeks from now.

[1] except Arizona (except the Navajo nation), US territories, and Hawaii

[2] except Yukon, Saskatchewan, (newly) British Columbia, (newly) Alberta, (newly) Northwest Territories, (newly) Manitoba, one island in Nunavut (Southampton Island), one town in Ontario (Atikokan) and small parts of Quebec (Le Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent)

Other places with DST

This time again, I must apologize to the people of Cuba, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand, as you fine folks all have your own DST rules that are omitted here for brevity. I rely on this page from Wikipedia to be updated by time nerds accurately for this message, and it should provide you with a rough idea of what's coming:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_country

In general, changes also happen in October, but either on different times or different days, except in the south hemisphere, where they might happen in September (oops, sorry NZ folks, I'm late!).

Places without DST

Everyone else, enjoy, you're on the right side of history, and we thank you for the good example you give us.

Changes since last time

There's been lots of changes since last time:

British Columbia moved to permanent -07 on 2026-03-09, that is it will not change to normal time in November
Alberta moved to permanent -06 on 2026-06-18, similar to BC above.
Canada’s Northwest Territories moved to permanent -06 on 2026-08-21, matching Alberta.
Manitoba moves to permanent -05 on 2026-10-31.
Morocco moves to permanent +00 on 2026-09-20.
Moldova has used EU transition times since 2022, but the tz database only noticed in 2026

This is my interpretation of the changes announced on the tzdata mailing list here:

https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz-announce@iana.org/latest

If the eastward trend continues, Canada should adopt country-wide "no daylight savings" rules by 2027, although there's actually no sign of the other provinces (Ontario, Québec and so on) currently running bills to change those rules just yet. Poor Canadians like me confused about time in their countries can refer to this section of Wikipedia for details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Canada#By_province_and_territory

... and particularly the image featured there:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canada_time_zone_map-en.svg

It also seems like the US government might finally adopt a permanent daylight saving change bill in 2026, as the "Sunshine protection act" pass the house in July:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Protection_Act

True to form, this was associated with absolutely ridiculous pressure from Donald Trump against republicans (his own party!) objecting to the change:

On July 14, 2026, the House passed a Sunshine Protection Act bill backed by President Trump. Nevertheless, the bill was opposed in the Senate by Republicans, including Senator Cotton. In response, on October 3, 2026, Trump shared a post on Truth Social urging Cotton to approve the bill, where he revealed Cotton's personal cellphone number and called on people to call him.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/03/trump-tom-cotton-daylight-saving-time

Given that the last time the US did a major change to the daylight savings policy (in 2005), Canada followed suit to stay in sync, it's quite possible Trump's mad dash might actually finish getting rid of DST in North America:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Change_to_daylight_saving_time

21:28

When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information [Deeplinks]

This post was co-authored by Sheila B. Lalwani, a doctorate student and recent COMPASS Fellow hosted by EFF.

Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents.

Age-related restrictions are developing quickly around the world. While they differ radically across jurisdictions, in the past year, we’ve witnessed a sharp uptick toward mandatory age assurance for social media access but also for other high-risk digital services.

For example:

In late 2025, Australia became the first country to implement a minimum age requirement for prohibiting children under age 16 from creating or holding social media accounts.
India passed the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act that includes mandatory verifiable parental consent and has undertaken ongoing discussions for social media restriction.
The United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Act requiring age verification across a swath of services hosting content considered harmful to users under 18. More than half the states across the U.S. have enacted age verification laws.
An EU Commission’s expert report recommends a ban on social media access for users under 13. It also recommends mandatory age verification for platforms to ensure that users are ‘age appropriate.’

The Access Problem

Age verification laws that are predicated on the necessity of users possessing a current passport, driver’s license, credit card, or similar documents proving their identity exclude critical sections of populations. And this problem is global in nature: Millions of people lack government-issued identification or encounter regular challenges to obtaining or updating it.

Roughly 15 million adult U.S. citizens lack a driver’s license, and a further 2.6 million lack any government photo ID; leaving large groups blocked from online content or services. The UK has a similar predicament: proof-of-age checks are often reliant on passports, driver’s licenses, or other recognized alternatives, which can pose unique challenges to people without these documents.

Much of the advocacy around age verification discusses the privacy harms of age verification. Yet these measures also threaten something more fundamental: equal access to information and the ability to exercise the right to freedom of expression.

Unfortunately, age verification systems foster unequal access to information and provide an asymmetric solution to find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse. As governments and companies increasingly require users to prove their age before accessing online services, these individuals risk being excluded from large parts of the internet altogether.

Effects on Global Majority Countries

Age verification laws reshape who can speak, who can access information, and who gets excluded from the digital public sphere. In other words, age verification is not a neutral safety measure: it presents a structural barrier to disproportionately exclude certain groups—particularly those in the global majority—and alters the architecture of global online expression. Some of these groups are already marginalized offline, and age verification extends that exclusion into digital spaces.

For instance, 850 million people globally do not have ID. Most of these individuals exist in primarily low and middle income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The World Bank points out that many are members of marginalized groups and more than half of those lacking access to identity documentation also have children whose births have not been registered. Women are particularly vulnerable and are 8% less likely than men to have an ID. Other vulnerable groups, such as adults in low income countries, are less likely to have an ID when they fall below 25 years, as are those with a primary school education or less or those in rural areas.

A policy paper from EDRi points out that age verification laws provide quick tech solutions but overlook longstanding structural challenges and undermine the universality of the internet. The analysis finds that age verification laws have serious human rights implications and ironically harm the very individuals they deem to protect. Moreover, these laws depend on the collection of harmful mass data that human rights organizations, including EFF, is fighting against—and has for decades.

For example:

In Morocco, a push to restrict children’s access would ban under-13s from creating accounts on gaming platforms. This could potentially create challenges for those with IDs that have incomplete information concerning the year of birth. In addition, this push would also impact those who attempt to leave Morocco.
In Egypt, the lack of ID cards has created challenges for minority groups such as the Baha’i.
Stateless individuals would also struggle under age verification laws. The Rohingya, the world’s largest population of stateless people, often lack IDs.
Kuwait’s Bidoon population also lacks proper identification materials. According to Amnesty International, this leads many to rely on standard civil identity cards, which can be restrictive.
Nigeria launched a national program to provide ID cards to its population in 2007. Since then, 64.4 million have registered, but that represents just over 30% of the national population.
The Kafala system, a practice in several countries across the Middle East, also introduces challenges for age verification laws. Under this legal framework, migrant workers’ legal residency and employment status are bound to a specific employer. This potentially leaves stateless persons or migrant workers vulnerable to forced labor and restricted movements.

No ID, No Access

Age verification laws are less about confirming the age of a user and more about creating barriers to online participation that many people cannot reliably scale. The net result is reduced access, more data collection, and an increased chance of unequal or mistaken exclusion from accessing information online.

Nobody doubts the importance of protecting children online. While proponents assert that age verification laws protect minors from harmful material, online harassment, and digital addiction, these laws are not the solution. They subvert fundamental freedom of expression rights and pose significant privacy risks.

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet. Age verification technology itself is often inaccurate and privacy-invasive, and as more countries considering implementing ID-based checks, the risks move beyond censorship and surveillance toward excluding some people entirely. That’s why we’re working with groups in the U.S. and around the world to push back against these laws, and why we hope you join our effort.

For more information on how to fight back against dangerous age verification laws, visit our resource hub at eff.org/age

20:42

Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns, part 5: Nested if/goto [Planet Debian]

Here's a pattern that sometimes comes up:

if (x == 3) {
    if (y == 4) {
        ...
    } else {
        goto label_5;
    }
} else {
    label_5:
    ...
}

We don't like gotos, and here, it's pretty obvious what was meant, namely:

if (x == 3 && y == 4) {
    ...
} else {
    label_5:
    ...
}

And now you can usually delete label_5 because nothing points to it.

Often, m2c can do this by itself, but as usual, you may get to this point only after cleaning up other things.

19:07

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2026 [Planet Debian]

Debian LTS/ELTS

This was my hundred-forty-seventh month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

[DLA 4804-1] libsmpp34 security update to fix one CVE in Bookworm related to an out of bound read.
[#1149107] trixie-pu of libsmpp34 has been created and wait for review by the release team.
[DLA 4805-1] mkvtoolnix security update to fix one CVE in Bookworm related to a heap buffer overflow.
[DLA 4806-1] pgextwlist security update to fix one CVE in Bookworm related to substituting extension schemas or owners matching [“$’\].
[ELA-1837-1] mkvtoolnix gimp security update to fix one CVE in Bullseye to a heap buffer overflow.
[osmo-iuh] upload to fix a CVE related to a reachable assertion in Sid.

Besides doing these uploads, the month was filled with unscheduled meetings, discussions and explanations, all basically around the role of FD.

During my week of FD duties, I had to become familiar with new tools. As there are several things that FD has to do over and over again, I tried to automate this a bit. My experiments went well and I think this can be used to make FD duties less repetitive.

I also continued my work on cups and hplip and I am confident that I can do uploads in October. Last but not least I spend some time on security-master to assist others (especially the kernel team) with uploads to Bookworm and Bullseye.

In case you need to get a complete clone of the security-tracker, using the option –deepen n might be of help. Unfortunately in case you choosed n too high and some kind of error appears, something gets into a mess and you need to start almost from the beginning (some objects are still present and are used again). If you want to run a script, a value of 10 might be a good choice. You don’t have to deepen back to the beginning. At some point in time you can just –unshallow and get the whole rest. Afterwards doing a git gc is highly recommended.

Debian Printing

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

… hplip to unstable, to fix an expired certificate and some bugs.

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Lomiri

Unfortunately this month my work did not make any progress.

Nevertheless, in case of any work done, this would have been generously funded by Fre(i)e Software GmbH!

Debian Astro

Unfortunately I had no time to work in this category this month.

Debian IoT

Unfortunately I had no time to work in this category this month.

Debian Mobcom

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

… osmocom-dahdi-linux to unstable to fix some bugs.
… osmo-iuh to unstable.

misc

This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of:

… pkcs11-proxy to unstable to fix a bug related to openssl 4.0.
… meep to unstable to fix bugs.
… meep-mpi-default to unstable to fix bugs.
… harminv to unstable to fix bugs.
… libctl to unstable to fix bugs.

18:35

[$] An update on Rust's project goals [LWN.net]

Tomáš Šedovič is a program manager at the Rust Foundation. He co-leads the goals team, which helps organize the Rust project's overall goals, including making sure that the people who have agreed to work on one have the support they need. At Kangrejos 2026, he provided an overview of the Rust project's goal processes aimed at ensuring that the Rust for Linux developers were aware of how the project organizes, tracks, and amends goals. The Rust for Linux project has inspired several current project goals, so he thought that getting an inside view of the process might be helpful.

18:21

Dirk Eddelbuettel: myman 0.10.0 on CRAN: Three new waves of posts! [Planet Debian]

A new and exciting version of our still-new package myman reached CRAN this morning, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe. The matching Python package has also been updated. The package offers nineteen hundred eighty four “My man …” posts by Kevin Kruse made on bsky during the summer of 2026. Each wave picked at one particular public persona. This package wrapse these up in the style of packages like fortunes or gaussfacts.

A sample usage illustration shows how to extract by pattern, and shows posts from the two most recent waves:

> library(myman)
> myman("maitre")
My man looks like he's inquiring with the maitre'd about the house curly fries.
     -- about Howard Lutnick on 2026-08-28

My man looks like a maitre'd who deeply doubts you have a reservation.
     -- about Scott Bessent on 2026-08-31

My man looks like he's asked the maitre'd to remove a party of four he finds visually
unpleasant.
     -- about Scott Bessent on 2026-08-31

My man looks like the maitre'd at a very exclusive restaurant called The Berghof.
     -- about JD Vance on 2026-09-13

My man looks like he's asking the maitre'd where they source their corn dogs.
         -- about Palmer Luckey on 2026-10-02

My man looks like Data had to borrow a sports jacket from the maitre'd.
         -- about Elon Musk on 2026-10-05
>

One can also subset by ‘target’, or sample randomly (which is the default).

As noted during the initial announcement last week, wave eight did not make it into the initial CRAN release as it happened while the package was under review. Waves nine and ten occured more or less while I was out of town last weekend—so this release now brings three new waves to the CRAN package! We also added two new helper functions to extract the underlying data frame object, and tabulate the targetted men.

To align the version number with the count of post ‘waves’, we switched to version 0.10.0 for this release and the corresponding Python package release so that both implementations now have the same version number.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.10.0 (2026-10-08)

New waves nine (100 posts) and ten (190 posts) made last week; total is now 1984 posts

New helper functions posts() and men() retrieving data.frame of posts and tabulation of targets

Internal post gathering and aggregation functions have been updated and generalized

Versioning scheme now goes with post waves (also for Python sibbling)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

17:35

Maytham Alsudany: Briefly looking at DNS and nameservers under the hood [Planet Debian]

I've always known that the browser uses the Domain Name Resolution (DNS) system to convert domain names like aezign.com.au into raw IP addresses, but have never actually understood how it works, outside of making sure my network config uses 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 instead of the crappy one the ISP provides. In this article, I set out to understand what nameservers do, and how they help anything that uses the internet find the right records.

DNS in a nutshell

A well-used analogy is a phonebook; when you have someone's name and need to find their phone number, you look through the phonebook. Overall, DNS does the same thing: when you enter an address like example.com, your browser will contact a DNS server (the "phonebook") to determine its IP addresses. On Linux (or MacOS) systems, you can use dig on the command line to perform a DNS lookup and see what this looks like:

$ dig example.com

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> example.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 42782
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;example.com.                   IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com.            221     IN      A       104.20.23.154
example.com.            221     IN      A       172.66.147.243

;; Query time: 20 msec
;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 27 21:07:50 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 72

Here, you can see the DNS server being used is 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare's DNS server), and that it found the IPs 104.20.23.154 and 172.66.147.243 associated with the domain name example.com. Your browser will then contact these IP addresses directly to load the website you are trying to open.

Configuring DNS servers

You can configure DNS servers through your operating system's network settings, and for some applications such as Firefox, with the application itself. If you don't manually set a DNS server, your computer will use the ones provided by your modem. If those are not configured, the default defined by the modem manufacturer or your ISP will be used.

The most well-used and reliable DNS servers you can use are Cloudflare's (1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1) and Google's (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). Having more than one DNS server means that if the first one in the list doesn't work or doesn't find the matching IPs for a domain name, it will move to the next one in the list, a backup DNS server.

DNS servers must be configured as IP addresses. If your computer tried to use a DNS server at a domain name, then where would your computer find the IP address for that domain name? It wouldn't be able to, as this is the exact gap that DNS servers fulfill.

Records

DNS is not used only to find IPs for a domain, but a whole host of other things. Collectively they are referred to as "records" (or "DNS records"). Each record is associated to a domain (e.g. example.com) or a subdomain (e.g. bar.example.com, foo.bar.example.com) Here are some of the most common and important types:

A - Map to an IPv4 address (e.g. 104.20.23.154).

This is the fundamental function of DNS: to map from a domain name to a server's IP address. Multiple A records leads to load balancing, where browsers will randomly select one of the returned IP addresses such that traffic is evenly split between them.
AAAA - Map to an IPv6 address (e.g. 2606:4700:10::6814:179a).

This serves the same purpose as A records but for IPv6. Multiple AAAA records results in the same load balancing behaviour. All modern websites should have both an A record for legacy compatibility, and an AAAA record to future-proof for the gradual shift towards IPv6 addresses.
CNAME - Alias to another domain name (e.g. example.com).

DNS servers will recursively lookup records for the aliased domain name until they reach an IP address (in an A or AAAA record).
MX - Specify a Mail Exchange server (e.g. mail.example.com).

This record tells email SMTP servers where to direct emails to. For instance, the MX record for aezign.com.au is mail.aezign.au; this directs SMTP servers like Gmail and Outlook to send emails to the mailserver running at mail.aezign.au. This also allows specifying a priority field, so that you can define multiple MX records (such as a main and a backup) and consumers will try to connect to the listed mailservers from lowest priority to highest.
TXT - Store arbitrary text data

This is most commonly used for site verification (for instance, to link your website to Google Search Console) and for email security measures like DKIM, DMARC, and SPF.
NS - Specify the nameservers for a domain (e.g. zeus.ns.cloudflare.com).

These authoritative nameservers are responsible for providing all the other record types when needed.

dig lets you query each of these. For instance, to list the MX records against aezign.com.au:

$ dig MX aezign.com.au

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> MX aezign.com.au
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 28213
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;aezign.com.au.                 IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
aezign.com.au.          300     IN      MX      10 mail.aezign.au.

;; Query time: 104 msec
;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 27 22:04:58 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 70

Here you can see there is only one mailserver configured for aezign.com.au, which is mail.aezign.au, and it has a priority of 10.

If you compare this against something like gmail.com:

$ dig MX gmail.com

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> MX gmail.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 16538
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;gmail.com.                     IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
gmail.com.              2497    IN      MX      40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com.              2497    IN      MX      20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com.              2497    IN      MX      5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com.              2497    IN      MX      10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com.              2497    IN      MX      30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

;; Query time: 120 msec
;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 27 22:06:04 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 161

You can see that gmail.com has several mailservers configured as redundancies due to the Gmail's sheer scale. gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com has the highest priority of 5, so SMTP servers will attempt to contact that mailserver first, followed by alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com and so on.

Nameservers

Now there needs to be somewhere for DNS records against a domain name to be defined, right? This is where nameservers come in.

Nameservers are DNS servers that answer queries about the domains they are authoritative for i.e. the domains they are in charge of. For example, the authoritative nameservers for example.com are hera.ns.cloudflare.com and elliott.ns.cloudflare.com, which means Cloudflare's nameservers are the source of truth when looking up DNS records for example.com. You can check this with dig:

$ dig NS example.com

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> NS example.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 37717
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;example.com.                   IN      NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com.            81837   IN      NS      hera.ns.cloudflare.com.
example.com.            81837   IN      NS      elliott.ns.cloudflare.com.

;; Query time: 140 msec
;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 27 23:27:19 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 95

Nameservers are configured with your domain name's registrar. The nameserver you set dictates where your remaining DNS records will live. For example.com, this means you would configure all your records on Cloudflare's dashboard, since they are responsible for the domain's DNS records.

Recursive resolution

The DNS servers that our computers use follow a recursive resolution process behind-the-scenes to find the authoritative nameservers for a domain, followed by the records you are querying.

Finding the root nameservers

Due to the recursive nature of the resolution process, there needs to be a starting point: the root (.) nameservers. The resolver uses a fixed list of root nameservers called root hints issued by IANA (named.root), to locate and contact the root nameservers. Resolvers will have this provided to them initially, and can dynamically update it themselves by querying one of the root nameservers for the root NS records to obtain a fresh list. For instance, we can query 198.41.0.4 (a.root-servers.net) to obtain a new list of root nameservers:

$ dig @198.41.0.4 NS .

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> @198.41.0.4 NS .
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43677
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 13, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 27
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;.                              IN      NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
.                       518400  IN      NS      l.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      j.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      f.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      h.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      d.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      b.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      k.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      i.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      m.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      e.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      g.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      c.root-servers.net.
.                       518400  IN      NS      a.root-servers.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
l.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       199.7.83.42
l.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:500:9f::42
j.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       192.58.128.30
j.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:503:c27::2:30
f.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       192.5.5.241
f.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:500:2f::f
h.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       198.97.190.53
h.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:500:1::53
d.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       199.7.91.13
d.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:500:2d::d
b.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       170.247.170.2
b.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2801:1b8:10::b
k.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       193.0.14.129
k.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:7fd::1
i.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       192.36.148.17
i.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:7fe::53
m.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       202.12.27.33
m.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:dc3::35
e.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       192.203.230.10
e.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:500:a8::e
g.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       192.112.36.4
g.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:500:12::d0d
c.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       192.33.4.12
c.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:500:2::c
a.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      A       198.41.0.4
a.root-servers.net.     518400  IN      AAAA    2001:503:ba3e::2:30

;; Query time: 476 msec
;; SERVER: 198.41.0.4#53(198.41.0.4) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 28 00:01:08 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 811

Querying the root nameservers

For example.com, the first step is to query the root (.) nameservers to find the nameservers for the .com top-level domain (TLD). Using a.root-servers.net again:

$ dig @198.41.0.4 NS com

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> @198.41.0.4 NS com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22528
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 13, ADDITIONAL: 27
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;com.                           IN      NS

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
com.                    172800  IN      NS      l.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      j.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      h.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      d.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      b.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      f.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      k.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      m.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      i.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      g.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      a.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      c.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      e.gtld-servers.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
l.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.41.162.30
l.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:500:d937::30
j.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.48.79.30
j.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:502:7094::30
h.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.54.112.30
h.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:502:8cc::30
d.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.31.80.30
d.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:500:856e::30
b.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.33.14.30
b.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:503:231d::2:30
f.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.35.51.30
f.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:503:d414::30
k.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.52.178.30
k.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:503:d2d::30
m.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.55.83.30
m.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:501:b1f9::30
i.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.43.172.30
i.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:503:39c1::30
g.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.42.93.30
g.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:503:eea3::30
a.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.5.6.30
a.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:503:a83e::2:30
c.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.26.92.30
c.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:503:83eb::30
e.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      A       192.12.94.30
e.gtld-servers.net.     172800  IN      AAAA    2001:502:1ca1::30

;; Query time: 772 msec
;; SERVER: 198.41.0.4#53(198.41.0.4) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 28 00:09:25 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 828

Querying the TLD nameservers

Now the resolver has .com nameservers and their IPs. We can use one of these, such as 192.5.6.30 (a.gtld-servers.net) to find the nameservers for example.com:

$ dig @192.5.6.30 NS example.com

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> @192.5.6.30 NS example.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 37419
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 13
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;example.com.                   IN      NS

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
example.com.            172800  IN      NS      hera.ns.cloudflare.com.
example.com.            172800  IN      NS      elliott.ns.cloudflare.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800  IN      A       108.162.192.162
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800  IN      A       172.64.32.162
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800  IN      A       173.245.58.162
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800  IN      AAAA    2606:4700:50::adf5:3aa2
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800  IN      AAAA    2803:f800:50::6ca2:c0a2
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800  IN      AAAA    2a06:98c1:50::ac40:20a2
elliott.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800 IN    A       108.162.195.228
elliott.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800 IN    A       162.159.44.228
elliott.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800 IN    A       172.64.35.228
elliott.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800 IN    AAAA    2606:4700:58::a29f:2ce4
elliott.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800 IN    AAAA    2803:f800:50::6ca2:c3e4
elliott.ns.cloudflare.com. 172800 IN    AAAA    2a06:98c1:50::ac40:23e4

;; Query time: 80 msec
;; SERVER: 192.5.6.30#53(192.5.6.30) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 28 00:12:19 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 359

Finding the domain's nameserver

The response tells the resolver that the nameservers for example.com are hera.ns.cloudflare.com and elliott.ns.cloudflare.com. Now since these Cloudflare nameservers are also .com domains and Cloudflare is so commonly used, the .com nameserver provides optional sibling glue records as defined in RFC 9471 to prevent further roundtrips and optimize the process.

If we ignore the sibling glue records provided, the resolver would have to ask the .com nameservers for the nameservers for cloudflare.com:

$ dig @192.5.6.30 NS cloudflare.com

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> @192.5.6.30 NS cloudflare.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 40307
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 5, ADDITIONAL: 21
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;cloudflare.com.                        IN      NS

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
cloudflare.com.         172800  IN      NS      ns3.cloudflare.com.
cloudflare.com.         172800  IN      NS      ns5.cloudflare.com.
cloudflare.com.         172800  IN      NS      ns4.cloudflare.com.
cloudflare.com.         172800  IN      NS      ns6.cloudflare.com.
cloudflare.com.         172800  IN      NS      ns7.cloudflare.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns3.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.0.33
ns3.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.7.226
ns3.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:21
ns3.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:7e2
ns5.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.2.9
ns5.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.9.55
ns5.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:209
ns5.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:937
ns4.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.1.33
ns4.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.8.55
ns4.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:121
ns4.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:837
ns6.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.3.11
ns6.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.5.6
ns6.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:30b
ns6.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:506
ns7.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.4.8
ns7.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      A       162.159.6.6
ns7.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:408
ns7.cloudflare.com.     172800  IN      AAAA    2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:606

;; Query time: 163 msec
;; SERVER: 192.5.6.30#53(192.5.6.30) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 28 00:26:53 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 573

Here, the .com nameserver provides in-domain glue records for cloudflare.com's nameservers. Without these, there would be a circular dependency, since the nameserver named is a subdomain of the domain being queried for. This is because nameservers are always defined by name, which means that in order to actually contact the nameserver, your computer needs to obtain its IP address with another DNS lookup.

Next, we'd use one of these nameservers, say ns3.cloudflare.com, to obtain the IP for hera.ns.cloudflare.com:

$ dig @162.159.0.33 hera.ns.cloudflare.com

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> @162.159.0.33 hera.ns.cloudflare.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 16801
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;hera.ns.cloudflare.com.                IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 86353   IN      A       108.162.192.162
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 86353   IN      A       173.245.58.162
hera.ns.cloudflare.com. 86353   IN      A       172.64.32.162

;; Query time: 123 msec
;; SERVER: 162.159.0.33#53(162.159.0.33) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 28 01:11:37 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 99

Querying the domain's authoritative nameserver

Now we've reached the authoritative nameserver for example.com! The last thing to do is to fetch the A record for example.com to obtain its server's IP address:

$ dig @108.162.192.162 example.com

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> @108.162.192.162 example.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43082
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;example.com.                   IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com.            300     IN      A       104.20.23.154
example.com.            300     IN      A       172.66.147.243

;; Query time: 123 msec
;; SERVER: 108.162.192.162#53(108.162.192.162) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 28 01:13:47 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 72

At last, we've determined that the IP addresses of the servers behind example.com are 104.20.23.154 and 172.66.147.243. This matches our earlier lookup directly against your computer's configured DNS server.

The DNS servers your computer uses encapsulate this recursive resolution process behind the scenes, so that your computer only needs to make one round trip, and the servers can use their much faster data center connections and caching to optimize the process and make the query as fast as possible.

Checking DNS records

To check a website's records, the first thing to do is to ensure the domain name is pointed at the correct nameserver. For instance, aezign.com.au is supposed to use Cloudflare, since that is where all the DNS records have been set up. We can verify this using dig, (or alternatively with online tools like dnschecker.org):

$ dig NS aezign.com.au

; <<>> DiG 9.20.29-1-Debian <<>> NS aezign.com.au
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 44172
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;aezign.com.au.                 IN      NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
aezign.com.au.          86400   IN      NS      rosalie.ns.cloudflare.com.
aezign.com.au.          86400   IN      NS      zeus.ns.cloudflare.com.

;; Query time: 92 msec
;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon Sep 28 01:39:22 AWST 2026
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 100

If this is not set correctly, the DNS records you configure will not work, as resolvers will be fetching records from somewhere else. In most cases, you can update this in your domain registrar's settings. This is especially common for new domain names, which default to the registrar's nameservers; unless you plan to use their built-in DNS management, you'll need to point them to your chosen provider.

Now we can check that the DNS records configured match those your DNS server returns. For aezign.com.au, these are the MX and TXT records configured on Cloudflare.

Extract of Cloudflare's DNS record listing showing the MX record and TXT records for aezign.com.au.

The MX record and some TXT records configured for aezign.com.au on Cloudflare's dashboard.

We can check these using dig, and using the +short option to show only the content of the records.

$ dig MX aezign.com.au +short

10 mail.aezign.au.

$ dig TXT aezign.com.au +short

"google-site-verification=KFqTU5xH8fFf6OtszEL4oudfxple29Tm-TvxVtCWkAM"
"v=spf1 mx a:mail.aezign.au -all"

$ dig TXT _dmarc.aezign.com.au +short

"v=DMARC1;p=quarantine;sp=quarantine;adkim=r;aspf=r"

$ dig TXT aezign.com.au-2026._domainkey.aezign.com.au +short

"v=DKIM1; h=sha256; k=rsa; s=email; p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAzL04yXZgB72YkoxS+tLK//aWx65TS4UA3F0qJ7el68SEuD4ehmg+61Ta9iS31H6U074dnjyoPDeaiGBa7ToTNCtiIts4/ghD/8nrENROE6hQAwRmTK18ODDHrRDW73hWe6Dg4cK5vmXi82/wWRZU9SDKbme28IE9uCVir3lCkKYLs1" "j16gR1Sjqr6a2+3o+EeVXnLJ4wXmJMm7KCIdn7zv0t9Z1eYcw672PdpYPAMpGb8uUsgaDBsNSpTcupPkz4SWj6TrOB80CPHjWseVY8EOJeRsNKQ/8LFoQEBl4Rxtb3HAmu4UIxSZ4QMVOLnXz67e85mA5XjcNIsVMzaWaowwIDAQAB"

As we can see, this matches, which means that the nameservers for aezign.com.au are correct and the DNS records are what we intend them to be.

Note that if you've recently changed the nameserver or DNS records for your domain, it can take anywhere between 10 seconds and 24 hours for the changes to take effect and propagate across the different DNS servers globally. Tools like dnschecker.org can check your records on different DNS servers worldwide to see if they're reflecting your changes. The reason for this is caching: DNS servers like 1.1.1.1 will cache results so it doesn't have to do the full resolution process every time, and uses the Time-To-Live (TTL) you configure in your DNS records as a guideline for caching duration.

It's DAF Day! Wait...What's a DAF? [Deeplinks]

Today is DAF Day! This event highlights the millions of donor-advised funds (DAFs) people have set up to make charitable donations and change the world. If you have a DAF, consider supporting EFF today.

Decisions about your privacy, encryption, artificial intelligence, online speech, and digital security will determine whether technology empowers people or concentrates power in the hands of a few. A grant from your DAF to EFF supports our mission to ensure that technology remains a force for freedom, innovation, and human rights.

If you’ve never heard of a DAF, just think of it as a bank account for your giving with some special benefits.

Grants from DAFs allow you to:

Simplify your taxes by receiving an upfront single deduction for your multiple charitable donations
Receive immediate tax benefits of multi-year gifts
Avoid capital gains tax on long-term appreciated assets like stocks
Boost your giving by investing your DAF funds

While allowing EFF to:

Defend encryption, privacy, and security that protect users and developers
Challenge unlawful surveillance and censorship that threaten democracy
Shape technology policy to safeguards civil liberties while enabling innovation
Build free privacy-preserving tools that strengthen digital autonomy
Protect the rights of creators, researchers, and builders in the digital ecosystem

Your support helps ensure that the next generation of technology will strengthen our freedom. Consider a DAF gift today.

LEARN MORE

16:21

Web of Markdown, part 2 [Scripting News]

Before long we’ll have Ukraine style drones raining down on American cities. Meanwhile we have built a military designed to fight WWII. We’d better hope Ukraine wins their war with Russia, and they’re still our friends. Journalism is letting us down bigtime here. The world is at war, it's going to get worse, and the US isn't preparing. We should be defending Ukraine with everything we have, we are still powerful enough to determine the outcome. But of course we are totally asleep at the wheel, gloating over Trump's approval rating, and how the Dems might win the Senate or whatever. Music to relax by. Bedtime stories.

15:35

The tech industry kicked the web out of the web.

scripting.com is your canary in a coal mine.

If you can read it then your browser is a real web browser.

If it can’t it’s phony baloney.

That's the big picture behind the Web of Markdown, an idea that has generated surprising interest among devs, esp now that Claude Code exists to enable weekend projects that can do miraculous things.

My longtime friend Andrew Shell has quickly put together what looks like a Chrome plugin that starts work on how to display a Markdown web page. And it looks fucking beautiful, as I imagined it might. Get rid of the bullshit just tell me what you have to say. A web that you can read. A web without interstitials. A web every write lusts for as well as an editor that can be used everywhere. This is the nightmare of the companies whose products inhabite the de-webbed web of 2026 (and that's all there is). Let's go back and pretend the VCs didn't run all their get-rich-quick schemes, what would the fucking web be like if it was all about two things -- writing and reading and the tech got out of the fucking way and let the writers do their thing. I think it'll actually work this time because they really fucked up the web and we can show them dramatically what it would be like if they hadn't. I've said this before if they insist on twisting what remains of the web into more bullshit, our option is to re-create the web and forget about them, leave them in the dust.

By the way, now I'm glad I have a source:markdown element in most of my RSS 2.0 feeds. I knew they'd come in handy! :-)

Back to Andrew's project, I said in a comment, I want more Markdown and absolutely no Chrome.

I have to trust Google for far too many things, but I think we can get rid of our dependency on Chrome. Now is the best time in a long time, as there's a hybrid product forming and they don't have the best AI system, and btw -- even if they did as users we are highly motivated for them to get some competition. And the AI companies don't do HTML or CSS, they do Markdown. So much so that Google had to convert their office product to Markdown before OpenAI would work with them. The wind is blowing away from Google and into Markdown, and I'm going to insist that they support HTTP in addition to HTTPS to make sure Google hears loud and clear that they can't run the web as if it were a corporate platform.

14:49

[$] The [vx]swap showdown [LWN.net]

BTW, Mets fans do not root for the Yankees, while Yankees fans are happy to wear Mets caps when we're on top. Their only philosophy is that the Yankees always win and if they don't we hate them. And the Mets' philosophy is incomprehensible (I hear) to Yankees fans. Our philosophy is to have a philosophy and there's nothing about winning in there because the love of the Mets is rooted in a team that couldn't even run the bases. They were loved because they were losers, probably because we knew their fate was to reward our belief in them. Now this year the Mets sucked. The reason why is kind of obvious. The Mets got confused, and they thought they were the Yankees. That. Does. Not. Work. And we already have one heartless low-philosophy baseball team in NYC, we sure as hell don't need another one. But this year is different because we have the fucking Knicks, who won in 5 and it would have been a clean sweep if it weren't for that buzzkill mofo, Trump. So anyway, I hear the Yankees were eliminated yesterday. Well then, it's on with the NBA season now and we'll try again with the Mets in April, or more realistically after the NBA championship for the new season is settled.

The kernel's swap layer has undergone some significant changes over the course of the last year and a number of longstanding problems have been addressed. One problem that has not yet been solved in the mainline is the direct tie between slots in the swap cache and space in persistent swap files, which can cause highly inefficient resource use. There are two competing solutions for this problem, neither of which has, as yet, reached readiness for merging; a lengthy discussion on possible paths forward shows ongoing disagreement over the best path forward.

Security updates for Thursday [LWN.net]

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, firefox, freerdp, ghostscript, glibc, kernel, kernel-rt, perl-DBI, python3.12, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-sq, rust-sequoia-sqv, and vim), Debian (gst-plugins-base1.0, python3.11, and xz-utils), Fedora (7zip, chromium, curl, docker-buildx, kernel, Lmod, and sos), Mageia (tesseract), Oracle (dovecot, firefox, freerdp, gd, ghostscript, kernel, librabbitmq, perl-DBI, python3.12, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-sqv, sg3_utils, vim, and virtuoso-opensource), Slackware (xorg-server), SUSE (aliyun-cli, busybox, cadvisor, chromedriver, chromium, crane, distribution-registry, fetchmail, fio, ghostscript, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, google-osconfig-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, libsoup, libXtst, openexr, prometheus-blackbox_exporter, python-fsspec, rpcbind, rsyslog, rustup, wireshark, wpa_supplicant, and zcode), and Ubuntu (erlang, golang-golang-x-net, gst-plugins-ugly1.0, lxml, poppler, and sudo).

14:00

The Preservation Gap in the AI Stack: Why Capability Is Advancing Faster Than Reconstructability [Radar]

Artificial intelligence systems are difficult to reproduce because their behavior depends on nondeterministic models and on data, configurations, policies, and external services that continue to change. But exact reproducibility is not always what operators, investigators, or auditors need. They often need something different: historical reconstructability. The central claim is that reconstructability is a system property established during execution, not inferred later from surviving artifacts. To make that property concrete, this article introduces Orrery, a reference architecture for preserving the runtime bindings and historical dependency states needed to reconstruct an AI system’s past execution.

Imagine an AI-assisted decision that must be examined six months after it was made. Rerunning the system may produce a different answer, but an investigator may still need to determine which model endpoint, policy, retrieved data, tool contract, and runtime configuration were used at the time. That is the problem addressed here.

The AI industry remains much better at evaluating capability than at preserving the knowledge required to understand past executions. Evaluation pipelines track benchmark scores, task success rates, retrieval precision and recall, tool-call success rates, latency, and cost, and they grow more elaborate with every release. In practice, this machinery often reduces to one acceptance question: What can this system do? That question captures capability, but not whether a past execution will remain understandable after the system changes.

That missing property is historical reconstructability: the ability to establish which dependencies were used and under which conditions a particular execution occurred. It is related to, but distinct from, reproducibility. Reproducibility asks whether a result can be produced again under equivalent conditions. Reconstructability asks whether the conditions of the original execution can still be identified, even when repeating that execution would not produce an identical result.

This distinction matters when a consequential AI execution completes successfully today and is challenged six months later. The model may still exist in a registry. The application revision may still exist in Git. The trace may still identify the request and the services it crossed. Yet none of these records necessarily reveals which model endpoint served the request, which input transformation and runtime configuration were applied, which data, feature state, or retrieved context entered the computation, or which policy state governed it. In an agentic system, the missing history may also include memory, tool contracts, delegation, and external effects. Even when a dependency identifier was recorded, the historical state to which it referred may no longer be available or resolvable.

The problem is that an AI runtime may use dependencies whose historical identities and relationships are not preserved. This is an architectural problem, not merely a logging problem. The gap lies between what the runtime uses and what the surrounding infrastructure is required to preserve. I call this the preservation gap. The AI stack preserves models, code, deployments, and observations, but it does not require the effective historical configuration of a particular execution to remain available. The components may remain while the relations that made them one execution disappear. An AI runtime must assemble today’s execution; it is not necessarily required to remember exactly what it assembled yesterday. Reconstructability must therefore be established during execution, before later mutation erases the bindings that gave the execution its effective configuration.

Hermetic builds illustrate the opposite design pattern. They close the dependency graph before execution begins by pinning inputs, versions, and external dependencies. AI runtimes face the reverse situation: Part of the dependency graph remains open until execution, as model endpoints may resolve through mutable aliases, data and feature state evolve, runtime configuration and policy change, and retrieved context is selected only when a request is processed. Agentic systems extend the graph further through memory, tools, delegation, and external effects. In a hermetic build, dependency closure is an input. In a modern AI runtime, part of it may be an output of the run.

Version control records source evolution, transaction logs record state transitions, and distributed tracing records execution relationships. These mechanisms preserve different views of a run but not its materially relevant execution-specific configuration. A trace may retain execution flow, a deployment manifest the declared application state, and a model registry the model revision. What is often missing is the record of which artifacts and states were bound together in a particular execution.

The dependency graph no longer closes at deployment

A deployment records the configuration known before execution begins. AI systems are harder to reconstruct because materially relevant dependencies are selected during execution rather than fixed at deployment. At inference time, the system may resolve a model endpoint, input transformation, data or feature state, retrieved context, runtime configuration, safety controls, and policy. Agentic systems extend this composition through memory, tools, delegation, and external effects. These execution-specific selections are runtime bindings: facts about what the execution actually used.

The following example makes this distinction concrete. Consider a hypothetical agentic execution identified as E891. During this execution, the system retrieves two documents, evaluates a policy, invokes a tool, and produces an external effect. The deployment may identify application revision 8f31c2 and model v17, while the execution itself binds prompt h31, retrieval index r42, entities d182@17 and d761@4, tool contract h42, policy v8, and ultimately effect e3. The deployment system could not have known this entire set in advance, because some of these dependencies were selected only as the execution proceeded.

The difference between what a deployment declared and what an execution actually used becomes consequential when dependencies change. A model alias may resolve differently, a feature or data source may change, preprocessing and runtime configuration may evolve, and policy v8 may become v9. In agentic systems, retrieved context, memory, and tool contracts introduce further independent mutation. Deployment identity describes what was declared, but the historical record of an execution must describe what was actually used. Unless those binding relations are captured when they occur, the effective configuration of E891 cannot be recovered reliably from later system state.

Figure 1. A deployment captures the initial configuration, while its execution-scoped dependency closure emerges as additional dependencies are bound during execution. (Diagram by the author.)

Current state is a lossy projection

Once runtime bindings are treated as part of the execution, the limitation of current-state records becomes clear. The execution-scoped dependency closure is the combination of the declared state and the runtime bindings that formed the effective configuration of a particular execution.

As dependencies mutate, different historical executions can leave behind the same observable evidence. The current state may show which artifacts still exist without revealing which combination a particular execution used. Once the distinguishing bindings are gone, the history cannot be reconstructed from what remains. A system can retain its artifacts while losing reconstructability: An identifier proves neither that a dependency was used nor that the historical state it denotes remains available. Reconstructability therefore requires durable binding relations and continued access to the historical states they identify.

Existence is not usage

The existence of an artifact and its use in a particular execution are different facts. Concurrent versions, caches, retries, and asynchronous changes make it unreliable to infer whether an execution used an artifact merely because that artifact existed at the relevant time.

W3C PROV already provides the relevant semantic distinction: An activity can use an entity. The missing primitive is therefore not a new provenance vocabulary, but a runtime requirement to record which dependency a particular execution used and to preserve an identity that can be resolved later.

This requirement also exposes the limit of observability. OpenTelemetry can transport dependency identifiers through attributes, links, context, and baggage, but encoding an identifier does not preserve its historical meaning. A trace may retain execution topology while the identities that explain it disappear. Instrumentation can carry preservation metadata, but it cannot guarantee durable storage or continued resolution of the referenced states.

Historical reconstructability therefore requires more than retained artifacts. For a defined class of executions and a specified retention period, the system must preserve two properties: binding integrity, which records which dependency versions and states an execution actually used, and resolution integrity, which keeps those recorded identities resolvable to the historical states they denote.

Preservation requires failure semantics

Once reconstructability is treated as a system property, the architecture must define what happens when the records required to reconstruct an execution fail to reach durable storage. Suppose policy v8 authorizes execution E891 to invoke tool contract h42, and the tool commits effect e3. If the usage record fails to reach durable storage, the action succeeds while the historical links among the effect, its policy, the tool contract, and the execution context are lost. The external effect remains, but the historical record no longer reliably explains which policy and tool contract authorized it. The external world and the historical record have diverged.

Figure 2. Execution E891 branches into a committed external effect and a failed usage record. (Diagram by the author.)

Figure 2 shows why this condition cannot be treated as ordinary telemetry loss. When an external effect has been committed but the corresponding usage record is missing, the architecture does not guarantee historical reconstructability. It provides only best-effort historical evidence.

Reconstructability becomes an engineering guarantee only when the architecture defines when preservation records become durable and what the system does if they cannot be stored.

A system may require a durable usage record before committing the effect, atomically persist the effect intent and preservation record through a transactional outbox, quarantine the execution for reconciliation, or trigger a compensating action. The implementation is application-specific, but preservation failure must have explicit semantics rather than disappear into telemetry.

Existing technologies provide the building blocks for this layer. Provenance and lineage models represent relations, tracing propagates execution context, registries identify versions, and content-addressed stores preserve artifacts. None, however, creates a runtime obligation to preserve the execution-scoped dependency closure required for reconstruction.

This layer is a preservation plane: the contract and machinery that keep an execution’s dependency closure identifiable as its surrounding systems change. It defines what to record, how records become durable, and how referenced states remain resolvable. Orrery applies this principle as a reference architecture in which materially relevant runtime bindings are captured when they occur and retained together with resolvable identities for the historical states they reference.

AIGov Core: reconstructability as a tested property

AIGov Core provides a limited implementation of this principle. Its evidence ledger stores hash-chained events, while its replay engine reconstructs a governance verdict from a stored export without querying live state. A companion check labels the export Ready, Partial, or NotReady according to unresolved lineage, missing policy artifacts, version drift, or replay failure. This demonstrates that reconstructability can be tested, but it does not solve the complete preservation problem. The system can replay only what was recorded; it cannot recover a runtime binding that was never captured.

The preservation gap is the mismatch between what an execution depends on and what the system persists. Closing it requires a runtime obligation: Whenever an execution binds materially relevant state, the system must record that binding, preserve a durable identity for the dependency, and retain access to the historical state it denotes for the defined retention period. Reconstructability is therefore not a by-product of capability or observability. It is an architectural property that must be designed, tested, and enforced during execution.

12:42

Racing Trains [The Daily WTF]

Robert G sends us a WTF from the outside, but I think we can come up with some hypotheses about what actually happened.

Robert was traveling by train. For complicated train reasons, the car he was seated on was not actually scheduled to continue with the train he was booked to ride, the replacement car missed its scheduled arrival, and the result was that Robert was left at a station needing to rebook his travel.

Now, given that this is in a region of the world with a fairly robust train network, this represented a hiccup of thirty minutes in a many hour trip. Not a particularly big deal. But Robert didn't want to get stranded any longer than he had to, so he took out his phone, fired up the train company's app, and made sure he had a reservation on the next train. He got the confirmation, and grabbed a coffee while he waited.

Not quite thirty minutes later, Robert boarded the train and went towards his reserved seat. Another passenger approached from the opposite direction, and they met at the seat. "Excuse me," Robert said, "but I reserved this one."

"No, I reserved this one."

Being reasonable people, they both pulled out their phones and pulled up their apps. Sure enough, each one of them was confirmed for that seat. Since the email confirmation had more details than the app provided, they both pulled up the email. Same seat. Both confirmed. The timestamp of the reservation? The same, down to the second.

"I don't think the conductor will let us sit in each other's laps," the other passenger said.

As it turned out, there was enough room on the train that no lap sitting was required. Everyone got a seat, even if it wasn't the one they reserved.

But the story stuck with Robert. A major transit provider had a reservation system that clearly had a race condition. It seemed like the most basic example of race conditions too, the kind you're shown in college to explain the basic concept.

"Check if the seat is reserved, and if it's not, reserve it." Because that sequence isn't atomic, two different threads could do the check, see it's not reserved, and then reserve it. I suppose it's at least something that one reservation doesn't overwrite the other, which at least indicates that a reservation is its own record.

The real question is this: this has to happen with some frequency, so how has nobody fixed it?

The real answer: they probably just don't care, either because they literally don't care, or because their software is such a trashfire that this doesn't even rise to the top ten bugs. It's likely a mix of both.

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12:35

How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators [Schneier on Security]

This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared in Foreign Affairs.

Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the anchor’s head that read: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you!” She shouted, “No to war!” until she was dragged away.

No one has protested the war on Russian television since then, partly as a result of tighter security and a general climate of fear. But in October 2024, Margarita Simonyan, one of Russia’s chief propagandists, gave another explanation. A growing number of the RT network’s anchors, she explained to an interviewer, are not real. “That face doesn’t exist. We generated the voice and everything else.” They were, she meant, produced by artificial intelligence. In a follow-up interview with the newspaper Vedomosti, she spelled out the logic: “These anchors don’t need a salary or insurance,” she said. “They won’t get arrested, and the police won’t search their homes. It’s all wonderful and terrifying at the same time.”

This is AI’s promise to every autocratic ruler: the ability to maintain control without delegating tasks to unreliable humans. It is an extremely attractive prospect. No matter how powerful, dictators have always needed subordinates—censors, propagandists, security guards, police officers, intelligence analysts, and local bureaucrats—to carry out their orders. But subordinates always pose a potential threat. They could shirk, steal, lie, leak, or conspire against their boss. As a result, one of the oldest dilemmas facing autocrats is how to empower agents to carry out orders without also enabling them to turn against their leader. Autocrats have usually managed the tradeoff by filling key positions with mediocrities whose incapacity is, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt put it, “the best guarantee of their loyalty.” But this inevitably makes it harder for dictatorships to govern and survive crises.

AI appears to offer autocrats two ways to resolve this long-standing dilemma. First, it means they can now easily monitor and discipline their followers in real time. A change in a local official’s spending habits or meeting schedules can be flagged automatically by an AI system, without any need for self-interested informants. Second, AI can eliminate underlings altogether. By automating tasks that once required human discretion, rulers can replace unreliable intermediaries with faithful algorithms that cannot be bribed or manipulated. Officials in autocratic regimes have said as much. AI “can definitely replace half of officials,” Russia’s Digital Development Minister, Maksut Shadaev, told a Moscow data forum in April 2025, adding, “maybe slightly more.”

Yet these promises of a self-running state are illusory, because AI is never truly autonomous. Systems have to be built and maintained by a cadre of engineers and data scientists whose expertise political leaders cannot evaluate. The ruler who turns to AI to reduce a dependence on unreliable humans may end up relying, more blindly than before, on the few AI specialists who keep the system running. And this new digital Praetorian Guard may have the same weaknesses as the old, which makes it a threat to the ruler.

Eyes and Ears

China is in the lead when it comes to developing AI systems that can monitor or replace subordinates. Smart city programs in Beijing, Shanghai, and other urban centers use AI to track performance and centralize oversight of local officials who once operated in comfortable obscurity, subjecting them to an algorithmic performance review. China also developed a “Zero Trust AI system,” which it deployed across roughly 30 counties and cities over the past decade. This system cross-referenced more than 150 government databases to catch embezzlement and nepotism by local officials. It worked a little too well, flagging 8,700 officials before local governments, under pressure from the bureaucrats it was monitoring, began rolling it back. But Beijing has not gotten rid of its new e-government portals, which use automated systems for issuing documents and permits, reducing face-to-face interactions that bred petty corruption or favoritism. The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, has plowed ahead with researching what it calls “thought management,” or how to use AI to create microtargeted propaganda. China’s army of Internet commentators, once composed of paid humans, is already being replaced by bots.

Russia has been pursuing the same goals with a similar fervor. Moscow’s citywide facial recognition system, deployed across 200,000 cameras, was used to identify and apprehend protesters during the 2021 antigovernment demonstrations. The central government has started using automated data collection and aggregation to bypass regional officials who could taint the data or use it to promote their own interests. In 2023, Russia’s Internet regulator launched Oculus, an AI system that scans hundreds of thousands of images per day for prohibited content, including political content—orders of magnitude beyond what human censors could process. The Russian security service’s Meliorator tool has been used to create over a thousand profiles of fictitious Americans, primarily on X (formerly Twitter), to spread Kremlin narratives at a fraction of the cost of human troll farms.

Other autocracies are following in Beijing’s and Moscow’s footsteps. In April 2025, the United Arab Emirates created a Regulatory Intelligence Office that uses AI to draft and amend federal laws, work once done by legislative staff. A year later, UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum announced that autonomous AI agents would take over half of the federal government’s operations within two years and that “the performance of ministers, directors general, and entities will be assessed based on their ability to adopt this transformation.”

These innovations may reduce the number of bureaucrats autocrats need. But they cannot actually create what dictators want most: a self-running state. Even AI-generated television anchors need people to build and maintain them, and censorship systems need people to retrain them as the vocabulary of dissent shifts. Behind every AI model, there is a small group of engineers and data scientists doing essential maintenance, and their work is so technical that rulers cannot understand it.

This dependence thus becomes another form of power. The engineers who maintain an autocrat’s surveillance apparatus, for example, can shape what the ruler sees. They decide what information is important enough to pass along and in what form to present it. They determine which threats get flagged, and they can adjust the algorithms that select what content gets suppressed and who gets arrested. And they can do this without anyone in the palace noticing. Autocrats who turn to AI to escape a dependence on unreliable subordinates have only transferred their vulnerabilities onto a new group of officials.

In fact, this new Praetorian Guard could be more dangerous than previous elites. That is in part thanks to the opacity of AI technology but also because this clique is much smaller. Roman emperors typically had tens of thousands of people serving in the Praetorian Guard; modern autocrats rely on standing armies. But with AI, autocrats will need only a small clique of engineers to build and maintain large-scale AI systems. This might benefit rulers since they will have fewer people to watch, yet it also concentrates points of failure, since a devastating disruption requires only a handful of engineers and makes it easier for members to scheme against the leader. The new guard’s members may also be indispensable. A dictator can replace generals without destroying the army. But running complex machine-learning systems requires such a specialized set of skills that engineers can be difficult to replace without disruptions, giving these actors great leverage.

The Indispensables

The importance of tech workers to autocracies has already become apparent. When IT specialists began to flee Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, for example, the Kremlin responded not with threats but with inducements, offering tech workers deferments from conscription. It exempted their firms from taxes and subsidized their mortgages. When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 men seven months later, IT workers were granted full-on waivers. This might seem like overkill, given that an AI system needs only a few engineers to run it. But a regime cannot know in advance which engineers it will need, and it cannot train replacements quickly, so it has to hold on to the entire talent pool from which these few are selected.

These measures did not stem the outflow of roughly 100,000 specialists—about a tenth of Russia’s tech workforce—over the course of 2022. But Moscow stuck to bribery, because expertise is extremely difficult to conscript at gunpoint and because conscripted experts might be less likely to do as instructed. Even so, money and privilege cannot guarantee that these elites will stay loyal. Autocrats should recall the lesson of the original Praetorian Guard: for a time, it provided Roman emperors with protection and security. But then the praetorians discovered their own indispensability, and by the second century, they were auctioning off the empire to the highest bidder. This new set of elites can do the same. In June 2023, when the column of Yevgeny Prigozhin‘s Wagner paramilitary company moved up the highway toward Moscow, Putin depended on his security services to tell him what was happening. Future rulers in Putin’s position will receive such warnings through machines: intercepted communications sorted by software, camera feeds filtered through recognition systems, regional reports compiled into dashboards. The engineers who run those systems could strike a deal with an upstart challenger and then drag their feet. They could delay the data, let alerts arrive a few hours late, degrade feeds at inconvenient moments, or make a recognition system stop functioning. In that scenario, the ruler would be operating blind. The Praetorian Guard did not need to kill Emperor Nero to replace him. It simply had to abandon him for a rival.

These programmers are unlikely to seize power for themselves, because they are unlikely to carry what coup leaders ultimately require: guns. But there is already precedent for engineers using their power to shape leadership challenges. In 1991, when the Soviet army attempted to seize control from Mikhail Gorbachev, a handful of programmers at the Relcom network kept information flowing abroad and relayed Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s decrees to audiences inside the country and abroad. The plotters could not stop the news of Yeltsin’s defiance from spreading, and the coup collapsed within three days.

Slimming Down

AI will not let autocrats dismiss all their enforcers. Someone still has to make arrests and run the prisons, and autocrats can buy loyalty by offering supporters state jobs. But it will let authoritarians downsize, and the number of officials ultimately matters less than how the ruler oversees them. Keeping track of scheming or incompetent subordinates has always been the autocrat’s chief burden. AI could lighten it, letting rulers watch their officials more closely without paying as much active attention.

In the near term, then, AI may greatly benefit autocracies. Despite the many obstacles to deployment, the technology is already bringing autocratic regimes the upsides of cheaper surveillance, smarter censorship, and fewer human subordinates to fear and distrust. But for autocratic rulers, the temptations of artificial intelligence may re-create the same trap they are seeking to escape. The more a regime depends on AI, the more it depends on the people who keep AI running. And those people, like every other praetorian class in history, will quickly discover what their indispensability is worth.

11:56

Colonoscopy Post-Mortem [Whatever]

First, so as not to bury the lede: It went great, there’s nothing in my colon they are the least bit concerned about, and I don’t have to come back for another colonoscopy for a decade, which I think is an optimal state of affairs.

Second, I’m 57 and really should have had a colonoscopy before this date, and I don’t really have any excuse for not having done so, other than laziness and procrastination. It took a one-two punch of a couple of close friends my age having (thankfully eminently treatable) cancer diagnoses to motivate me to get this thing done. My family doesn’t have a history of colon cancer, nor did I have anything physical that suggested I might have something to worry about in that area, but I’m at an age where shit happens (pun intended), and if it does, it’s best to have it dealt with as early as possible, especially down there. So I finally made the appointment.

I have to say that none of it was as unpleasant as I had been led to suggest. The day-before prep, which requires fasting and chugging a solution to clear out one’s bowels, was uniformly described to me as the worst part of the whole thing. Spoiler: It was, but in my case I didn’t find it all that horrible. My bowel-clearing solution was this gunk called Clenpiq, which was no taste treat (my bottles claimed to be “cranberry flavor,” which, well, no), but also wasn’t the very worst thing I ever drank, either. As I noted on Bluesky the other day, I’ve had energy drinks which tasted worse. It also was relatively small in volume (a single 8oz cup per dose, with two doses several hours apart), which is I understand a marked improvement from earlier times, when prep included drinking something on the order of a gallon of bowel-voiding stuff.

The Clenpiq was to be accompanied with several cups of other clear liquid; I chose Sprite and water for these. I wasn’t allowed to eat solid food at all during prep day, which I thought was going to be a real problem, but wasn’t. One, I ate more Jell-O on prep day than I think I ever had on any day in my life prior to that point, and while Jell-O isn’t exactly hearty, it kept my stomach from being entirely empty. Two, I think I psyched myself into not being all that hungry on prep day, especially since I knew everything I was putting into myself was going to be explosively voided later in the evening, and I didn’t want to make that part any more annoying (or gross) than it was already going to be.

Krissy has prepared for my evening. She has, truly, put the commode in accommodations.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-10-06T21:27:59.610Z

And how was that part, the part where my bowels were explosively voided? Well, again, not a great time, and not an experience I’m in a rush to have again any time soon, but also not nearly as bad as some other people apparently experienced. The whole thing was like having pre-planned, well-managed diarrhea — I knew what was coming, I knew when it was coming, and I was able to plan for it when it happened. There were no surprises or accidents, I just headed to the bathroom when my body was telling me I should. The key here really was preparation.

(It also helped that a few years ago we got a fancy toilet with a bidet, which meant my ass ended up being less chapped than it might otherwise have been. Bidets are awesome, folks. Not just for colonoscopy prep, but also for colonoscopy prep.)

The worst time of the prep for me was getting up at 2am for a second bottle of Clenpiq and then staying up for the immediate aftermath. I had a couple mild episodes of nausea, in which it felt like I might need to vomit, but it turned out in both cases what I needed to do was clear out the other end instead. It was a weird and unpleasant correlation that I hope not to have to experience again, but once I figured out what was going on I could deal with it. None of this was great, but again, it was perfectly manageable. I even ended up getting a fair amount of sleep; more than six hours in total. I was very happy about that. Bluntly, I thought I would be spending the entire night shitting my brains out.

As for the colonoscopy itself: I don’t remember a single thing about it. We arrived at the hospital, they did my intake questions and prep, they wheeled me into the operating room, they put the propofol into my IV line, and the next thing I knew I was being wheeled out to a recovery room. A few minutes later I was dressed and Krissy and I were off to Culver’s to have an early lunch. We got to the hospital at 8:30, I went in for prep at nine, we were out of the door of the hospital just before eleven am. I was prepared to be groggy and mentally out of it for the rest of the day (there is a reason I excused myself from social media and the online world on Wednesday), but honestly by the time we got home before noon I was fine, if tired. I watched YouTube videos and took naps all afternoon. It was a perfectly nice way to spend the day.

Also, in case you were wondering: no residual soreness from the colonoscopy. As far as my conscious experience is concerned, I went to the hospital to have a really deep nap. I will tell you that prior to this procedure I had some mild anxiety about anesthesia because I’ve never had any before — I’ve never had a surgical procedure that required more than a local. My experience with this has alleviated those concerns. Turns out they do know what they’re doing.

All of which is to say, for those of you out there of an age with me, who still haven’t gotten a colonoscopy: They have this thing wired. The prep is not a fun time but it’s really not horrible, especially if you plan for it, and the procedure itself is, from an experiential point of view, literally nothing. And now I don’t have to worry about my colon for years. When one is in one’s mid-50s, having one less physical thing to worry about is a very comforting thought. If you’re in the US and your insurance covers it, get it scheduled (and everywhere else that doesn’t have to worry about the US’ miserable insurance scam, go straight to the “get it scheduled” part). It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. It’s worth doing.

As a final note, there’s a reason that I’m clutching a teddy bear in my photo above. When I was in the OR for my colonoscopy, they had me prop myself up on my side and gave me an additional pillow to hold. The nurse told me that was my teddy bear and to give it a name, which I did, shortly before the lights went out. Apparently my first words to Krissy as I was wheeled into the recovery room was to ask for my teddy bear, which confused her but gave the nurses a chuckle. I don’t remember asking for the teddy bear, but later, when I could remember things, Krissy telling me that I did ask for it suggested a course of action.

So everyone, meet Aloysius the Colonoscopy Bear, who we picked up after lunch because, painless or not, I still deserved something for having my colonoscopy done. Aloysius was cheaper than a guitar, I’ll tell you that much. And cuter.

— JS

11:42

Build Your Own Post-training Pipeline [Radar]

This is the final post in a four-part series about post-training. If you missed them, check out part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Time to get your hands dirty! I’ll take you through implementing the key pieces of the classic ChatGPT pipeline: SFT, then reward model training, then PPO. The goal isn’t to reproduce InstructGPT, because that took a large team and thousands of GPU-hours. But getting hands-on will help make the concepts from this series concrete, so that when you look at each stage’s code, you understand what it’s doing to the model and why.

We’ll use Qwen2.5-1.5B as the base model. It’s small enough to train on a single node with a few GPUs but large enough that you can observe real behavioral changes from post-training.

For SFT, you’ll use torchtune, Meta’s PyTorch-native fine-tuning library. For RL, you’ll use verl (from ByteDance’s team), a production-grade RL post-training framework built on Ray. verl was designed from the ground up for distributed RL training with proper rollout orchestration, and it’s what you’d actually reach for if you were doing this at scale.

You’ll need a machine with at least 2 GPUs (4 or 8 is better) and around 80 GB of total GPU memory.

You’ll likely use an LLM to flesh out the boilerplate and get this running end to end. I used LLMs pointed to the recent docs to generate these. What matters as you read the code in this section is that you understand the config choices and data formats well enough to direct that process and debug when something goes wrong.

Stage 1: SFT on demonstrations

SFT is the easiest stage to implement. You’re taking the pretrained model and training it on {prompt, response} pairs using the same next-token prediction loss from pretraining, except you only compute loss on the response tokens.

Your SFT data should be in a conversational format. Here’s what a single example looks like:

{
    "messages": [
        {"role": "user", "content": "Why do people like golden retrievers?"},
        {"role": "assistant", "content": "Golden retrievers are one of the most 
popular dog breeds for good reason. They have a gentle, friendly temperament 
that makes them great family dogs. They're patient with kids and tend to get 
along well with other animals. They're also highly trainable and eager 
to please, which is why they're commonly used as service dogs and therapy dogs. 
And honestly, the goofy enthusiasm doesn't hurt either. They never really grow 
out of that puppy energy."}
    ]
}

Remember what a pretrained model does with “Why do people like golden retrievers?” It might spit out “Why do people like labrador retrievers?” because it’s just completing patterns. Your SFT data is what teaches it to actually answer the question instead.

In practice, you’d have thousands of these examples covering a range of tasks: question answering, summarization, creative writing, coding help, multiturn dialogue, and refusals for harmful requests. For this walkthrough, assume you have a JSONL file of these conversations.

torchtune uses YAML configs and built-in recipes. Here’s what a config might look like:

# sft_config.yaml

# Model
model:
  _component_: torchtune.models.qwen2_5.lora_qwen2_5_1_5b
  lora_attn_modules: ['q_proj', 'k_proj', 'v_proj', 
'output_proj']
  lora_rank: 64
  lora_alpha: 128

# Tokenizer
tokenizer:
  _component_: torchtune.models.qwen2_5.qwen2_5_tokenizer
  path: /path/to/Qwen2.5-1.5B/vocab.json
  merges_file: /path/to/Qwen2.5-1.5B/merges.txt
  max_seq_len: 2048

# Checkpointer — loads the pretrained weights
checkpointer:
  _component_: torchtune.training.FullModelHFCheckpointer
  checkpoint_dir: /path/to/Qwen2.5-1.5B
  output_dir: ./sft_checkpoint
  model_type: QWEN2

# Dataset
dataset:
  _component_: torchtune.datasets.chat_dataset
  source: sft_data.jsonl
  conversation_style: sharegpt
  max_seq_len: 2048
  train_on_input: false           # only compute loss on the 
                                    assistant's response tokens

# Training
seed: 42
epochs: 3
batch_size: 4
gradient_accumulation_steps: 4    # effective batch 
                                    size of 16
optimizer:
  _component_: torch.optim.AdamW
  lr: 2e-5
  weight_decay: 0.01
lr_scheduler:
  _component_: torchtune.training.lr_schedulers.get_cosine_schedule_with_warmup
  num_warmup_steps: 50

dtype: bf16
compile: false

Then launch it:

tune run lora_finetune_distributed --config 
sft_config.yaml

What actually matters in this config:

train_on_input: false masks the loss on prompt tokens so the model only learns to generate good responses, not to mimic user messages. If you accidentally set this to true, the model wastes capacity learning to produce prompts.
A learning rate of 2e-5 is the standard starting point for SFT. That’s aggressive enough to shift behavior in a few epochs but not so large that you destroy the pretrained weights.
Use LoRA instead of full fine-tuning. For a 1.5B model you could do either, but LoRA is the practical default because it’s faster, uses a lot less GPU memory, and at this model size the quality gap is negligible. At larger model sizes, LoRA becomes even more useful in saving compute.
3 epochs because the dataset is small. InstructGPT trained for 16 epochs on ~13K examples. Smaller datasets need more passes, but watch validation loss for overfitting. This is something you should tune to see different results across different-sized datasets.

After this stage, try chatting with the model and try a bunch of different comparisons to the base model. Ask it “Why do people like golden retrievers?” and you should get a real answer now, not a list of related questions. The model should be able to hold a conversation and follow basic instructions. It’s already dramatically more useful than the base model, even if the responses aren’t always great.

Realistically, you should set up a good evaluation (“evals”) to assess the quality of the model, hyperparameter tune, and determine your data mix. In this section, you’ll just focus on looking at the code.

Stage 2: Training the reward model

For your reward model, start with your data of preference pairs, which will look like this:

{
    "prompt": "What's the capital of that country that celebrates with a lot 
of colored powders?",
    "chosen": "You're probably thinking of Holi, the festival where people 
throw bright colored powders. That celebration is most famously associated 
with India. The capital of India is New Delhi.",
    "rejected": "The capital of that country that celebrates with a lot of 
colored flowers is Amsterdam, the Netherlands, known for its tulip festivals."
}

The “rejected” response isn’t just wrong about the festival. It also misread “powders” as “flowers” and jumped to an incorrect answer.

For reward model training, you’ll use TRL’s RewardTrainer. Reward model training is a straightforward classification task.

from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, 
AutoTokenizer
from trl import RewardTrainer, RewardConfig
from datasets import load_dataset

# Start from the SFT checkpoint — it already understands 
the response distribution
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(
    "./sft_checkpoint",
    num_labels=1,
    torch_dtype="bfloat16",
)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("./sft_checkpoint")
tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token

dataset = load_dataset("json", 
data_files="preference_data.jsonl", split="train")

training_args = RewardConfig(
    output_dir="./reward_model",
    per_device_train_batch_size=8,
    num_train_epochs=1,    # just 1 epoch — reward models overfit fast
    learning_rate=1e-5,    # lower than SFT, be gentle
    bf16=True,
    max_length=2048,
    logging_steps=10,
    save_strategy="epoch",
)

trainer = RewardTrainer(
    model=model,
    args=training_args,
    train_dataset=dataset,
    tokenizer=tokenizer,
)

trainer.train()
trainer.save_model("./reward_model/final")

As you skim the code, take note of these three things:

Start from an SFT checkpoint, not a base model. The reward model needs to understand the distribution of responses it’ll be scoring, and the SFT model is closer to that distribution.
1 epoch only. Reward models overfit quickly. The InstructGPT team found only 1 epoch was needed.
Learning rate of 1e-5, lower than SFT. Smaller updates.

After training, check the reward model by scoring a few responses manually. Give it a clearly good response and a clearly bad one for the same prompt and make sure the good one gets a higher score. If this basic test fails, something is wrong with your data or training. Don’t skip this step: It’s better to catch problems sooner than many GPU hours later!

Stage 3: PPO with verl

Now you can take the SFT model and optimize it against the reward model using PPO. verl handles the hard parts: coordinating rollout generation across workers, managing the four models that need to be in memory simultaneously (policy, reference, reward, critic), and orchestrating the update loop.

First, prepare your prompts. verl expects parquet format. Each row needs a prompt field containing the tokenized and chat-template-formatted prompt. Here’s an example of preparing it:

import pandas as pd
from transformers import AutoTokenizer
from datasets import load_dataset

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("./sft_checkpoint")

raw_prompts = load_dataset("json", data_files="rl_prompts.jsonl", split="train")

def format_prompt(example):
    messages = [{"role": "user", "content": example["prompt"]}]
    formatted = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
        messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True
    )
    return {"prompt": formatted}

formatted = raw_prompts.map(format_prompt)
df = pd.DataFrame(formatted)
df.to_parquet("data/rl_prompts.parquet")

The prompts for RL don’t need labels. The reward model provides the signal. You just need a diverse set of prompts that covers the types of requests your model expects to see when you deploy it.

Next, define the reward function. verl lets you wrap your reward model in a function that takes a batch of prompts and responses and returns rewards:

# reward_fn.py — verl will call this during training
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer

class RewardFunction:
    def __init__(self, reward_model_path="./reward_model/final"):
        self.model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(
            reward_model_path, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16
        ).cuda().eval()
        self.tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(reward_model_path)
        self.tokenizer.pad_token = self.tokenizer.eos_token

    def __call__(self, prompts, responses):
        """
        prompts: list of prompt strings
        responses: list of response strings
        Returns: list of scalar rewards
        """
        texts = [p + r for p, r in zip(prompts, responses)]
        inputs = self.tokenizer(
            texts, return_tensors="pt", padding=True,
            truncation=True, max_length=2048
        ).to(self.model.device)
        with torch.no_grad():
            rewards = self.model(**inputs).logits.squeeze(-1)
        return rewards.tolist()

Now configure the PPO training run. verl uses YAML configuration files that specify the models, hyperparameters, and infrastructure:

# ppo_config.yaml
data:
  train_files: data/rl_prompts.parquet
  prompt_key: prompt
  max_prompt_length: 1024
  max_response_length: 1024

actor_rollout_ref:
  model:
    path: ./sft_checkpoint
  actor:
    optim:
      lr: 1e-6                    # very low — RL updates should be gentle
      lr_warmup_steps: 10
    ppo_mini_batch_size: 64
    ppo_micro_batch_size: 8       # adjust based on GPU memory
    ppo_epochs: 4                 # number of PPO update passes per batch
    clip_ratio: 0.2               # PPO clipping — standard value
    kl_penalty_coeff: 0.1         # KL penalty to prevent reward hacking
    entropy_coeff: 0.01           # small entropy bonus for exploration
  rollout:
    temperature: 0.7
    top_p: 0.9
    n: 1                          # 1 response per prompt per rollout
    tensor_model_parallel_size: 1
  ref:
    log_prob_micro_batch_size: 8

critic:
  model:
    path: ./reward_model/final    # initialize critic from reward model
  optim:
    lr: 1e-5
  ppo_micro_batch_size: 8

reward_model:
  path: ./reward_model/final
  micro_batch_size: 8

trainer:
  total_training_steps: 500
  save_freq: 100
  test_freq: 50
  project_name: post_training_walkthrough
  logger: wandb

A few important hyperparameters in the config:

The learning rate is an order of magnitude smaller than SFT, default at 1e-6. (“Actor” refers to the policy model.) RL updates are noisier, and you want to move slowly. If the model starts producing gibberish or repetitive text, your learning rate is probably too high.
The KL penalty coefficient is 0.1, and recall that it controls how much the model is penalized for drifting from the SFT checkpoint. 0.1 is a reasonable starting point, but you’ll likely need to adjust. If you see reward hacking, turn it up, but if the model doesn’t really change, you need to lower it.
The clip ratio is default set to 0.2, from the original PPO paper. This likely doesn’t need tuning. It prevents any single update from changing the policy too much.

Launch the training:

python -m verl.trainer.main_ppo \
    --config ppo_config.yaml \
    --n_gpus 4

During training, watch for a few things. The reward should generally trend upward, meaning the model is learning to produce responses the reward model likes. The KL divergence should increase but not explode, in which case the model is drifting too far and you need a higher KL penalty. And periodically generate some responses from the current checkpoint and read them yourself. Metrics can be unreliable on their own, and your own judgment of output quality can be more reliable. Of course, ideally, you have a held out evaluation set that you’re working with that can help you test different tasks you care about.

Putting it together

The full pipeline runs on stage after the next: SFT first, reward model second, PPO third. Each stage depends on the previous one. The SFT model provides the starting point for both RL training and the reward model. The reward model provides the signal for PPO. And PPO produces the final model.

This is, structurally, the same pipeline that produced InstructGPT and the first version of ChatGPT. The scale is obviously different. They used 175B parameter models, 40 labelers, and far more compute, but the mechanics are identical. Your 1.5B model won’t write poetry as well as the latest GPT, but it will go from producing “Why do people like labrador retrievers?” to actually answer “Why do people like golden retrievers?” with a conversational response. That’s post-training doing the heavy lifting.

If you’re doing this for real, what will eat most of your time isn’t the code but the data: curating good SFT demonstrations, collecting reliable preference labels, and building a prompt set for RL that covers the right distribution of tasks. But there are some great open source datasets out there that you can get started with.

The training infrastructure is largely solved: You can point an LLM at the torchtune and verl docs and have it scaffold a working pipeline for you in an afternoon. But no amount of tooling fixes bad data or a reward model that scores the wrong things highly. Understanding what each stage needs and why is what lets you direct that process effectively.

Grrl Power #1502 – Very demure, very distractible [Grrl Power]

I enjoy characters with emotive ears. Don’t be surprised if Sydney gets turned into a werefox at some point.

Okay, I probably won’t do that… Not permanently anyway.

It’s hard to get on the “secret” list once you’re on the usual list, but it’s possible, and nearly inevitable to be on both the secret and regular list at the same time. It’s about the order in which you are listed.

I don’t know if Sydney would have an extensive Celebrity Hall Pass list. She’s not above a little ogling and giggling with her friends over a cute boy, but she’s rarely overtly sexual. Most of her celebrity crushes are age inappropriate, but that’s because most of the media she consumed as a girl starred middle-aged actors. Her first exposure to Jerard Butler was formative. She enjoyed Tom Baker’s Doctor, but she was young enough when she was first exposed to Dr. Who that her fantasies just involved her being a companion and having space and time adventures. Guys that are 20+ years her senior.

That’s the range most of her list falls in, and if she ever met any of them IRL, she’d hopefully realize how much older most of them are, and would revise her list. Given that she has a comic shop with the clout to attract industry luminaries, it’s actually possible she’ll get to meet quite a few actors.

Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. The NSFW version is finally up at Patreon. Plus a bonus pic.

I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.

Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

11:07

Extending Guix [Planet GNU]

Guix is all about empowering people, so it should come as no surprise that one can extend it with new guix commands. You can show the commands available in your current Guix through the help command:

$ guix help

If you are using a recent Guix, there are a number of extensions at your disposal, they are available as individual packages, and as a meta-package providing a collection of extensions. Try them out with:

$ guix shell guix guile guix-extension-collection

I'm adding the guix and guile packages to the shell because we want the different Guile and Guix search paths to be adjusted in the shell. To know more about why this is needed, read Search Paths.

You will notice that the help menu has been extended with information about the available extensions:

$ guix help

...

  extension commands
    explore   interactively explore a Guix System configuration
    removals  keep up to date with package removals
    compose   docker compose compatibility layer
    toys      Explore packages and services through REST API
    xsearch   search for packages using a fast Xapian cache

...

Since this blog post is called "Extending Guix", let's write an extension, shall we?

How does Guix locate extensions?

Guix locates extensions by looking up GUIX_EXTENSIONS_PATH. Recently Guix has introduced a new way of writing extensions. The old way would search extensions under /path/to/guix/extensions and the extensions modules would be named (guix extensions NAME). The new schema expects extensions to be under /path/to/SCHEMA_VERSION; the name of the module will still be (guix extensions NAME).

The advantage of this new schema is the Guix can treat the extension module as a standard Guile module, meaning that the runtime is able to find the compiled .go file of the extension. The old schema was relaying on runtime evaluation; the load machinery was not handling compiled files. This has a considerable improvement on performance, so you are encouraged to update any old extension to the new schema.

Writing an extension

Enough introductions, let's write a basic extension.

The first step is to create the project structure. Remember that the extension machinery expects modules to be named (guix extensions NAME).

We start by creating, in our project root, the directories for the extension.

$ mkdir -p guix/extensions

Now, we create the file guix/extensions/hello.scm with the following contents:

(define-module (guix extensions hello))

A blank canvas...

We import (guix scripts) to get the define-command macro. We declare it and export it so the extension machinery can find the command in the public interface of the module.

(define-module (guix extensions hello)
  #:use-module (guix scripts)
  #:export (guix-hello))

(define-command (guix-hello . args)
  (category extension)
  (synopsis "say hello")
  (display "hello, I'm a Guix extension!\n"))

With this, we already have a working Guix extension. We can run the extension like this from the root of the project.

$ GUIX_EXTENSIONS_PATH=$PWD guix hello
hello, I'm a Guix extension!

Since we would like our extension to be discoverable by users, we will add a help message which will make the extension display in the guix help menu.

We will use (srfi srfi-37) to write the option parser, and (guix ui) for the internationalized strings; you will see that I import these modules when I show you the complete extension. Let's focus on the option definitions:

(define (show-help)
  (display (G_ "Usage: guix hello\n"))
  (display (G_ "Just say hello, it's not that complicated.\n"))
  (display (G_ "
      --help             display this message"))
  (newline))

(define %options
  (list (option '(#\h "help") #f #f
                (lambda args
                  (leave-on-EPIPE (show-help))
                  (exit 0)))))

Since we are only handling the arguments for showing the help message, we just need to call the parser at the start of the command:

(define-command (guix-hello . args)
  (category extension)
  (synopsis "say hello")
  (parse-command-line args %options (list '()))
  (display "hello, I'm a Guix extension!\n"))

Here you have the complete extension module:

(define-module (guix extensions hello)
  #:use-module (guix scripts)
  #:use-module (guix ui)
  #:use-module (srfi srfi-37)
  #:export (guix-hello))

(define (show-help)
  (display (G_ "Usage: guix hello\n"))
  (display (G_ "Just say hello, it's not that complicated.\n"))
  (display (G_ "
      --help             display this message"))
  (newline))

(define %options
  (list (option '(#\h "help") #f #f
                (lambda args
                  (leave-on-EPIPE (show-help))
                  (exit 0)))))

(define-command (guix-hello . args)
  (category extension)
  (synopsis "say hello")
  (parse-command-line args %options (list '()))
  (display "hello, I'm a Guix extension!\n"))

With that, our extension will be present when we ask Guix for help:

$ GUIX_EXTENSIONS_PATH=$PWD guix help

...

  extension commands
    hello  say hello

It also takes a --help flag:

$ GUIX_EXTENSIONS_PATH=$PWD guix hello --help
Usage: guix hello
Just say hello, it's not that complicated.

      --help             display this message

Packaging a Guix extension

At the time of writing, we don't have a dedicated Guix build-system for extensions. Fortunately, the guile-build-system is close enough for this use case.

Let's make a package definition for our new hello extension that uses our local sources. Create a guix.scm file at the root of the project with the following contents:

(use-modules (gnu packages package-management)
             (guix build-system guile)
             (guix gexp)
             (guix git-download)
             (guix packages)
             ((guix licenses) #:prefix license:))

(define vcs-file?
  ;; Return true if the given file is under version control.
  (or
   (git-predicate
    (dirname (canonicalize-path
              (assq-ref (current-source-location) 'filename))))
   (const #t)))

(define-public guix-hello
  (package
    (name "guix-hello")
    (version "0.0.0-git")
    (source (local-file (assume-valid-file-name ".")
                        "pin-checkout"
                        #:recursive? #t
                        #:select? vcs-file?))
    (build-system guile-build-system)
    (arguments
     (list
      #:scheme-file-regexp
      #~(lambda (file stat)
          (and ((file-name-predicate #$default-scheme-file-regexp)
                file stat)
               (not ((file-name-predicate "^(guix|channels|manifest)\\.scm$")
                     file stat))))
      #:phases
      #~(modify-phases %standard-phases
          (add-after 'build 'move-to-extension-directory
            (lambda _
              (with-directory-excursion #$output
                (mkdir-p "share/guix/extensions/1.5/guix/extensions")
                (rename-file (string-append "share/guile/site/"
                                            (target-guile-effective-version)
                                            "/guix/extensions/hello.scm")
                             "share/guix/extensions/1.5/guix/extensions/hello.scm")))))))
    (native-inputs (list guix))
    (inputs (list (lookup-package-input guix "guile")))
    (home-page "https://codeberg.org/guix-extensions")
    (synopsis "Make Guix say hello")
    (description
     "This extension provides the @command{guix hello} command,
which makes Guix say hello.")
    (license license:gpl3+)))

guix-hello

We can test this new extension like this:

$ guix shell -CW -f guix.scm -- guix hello

The flags passed to guix shell are the following:

-C (--container): To prevent your environment from interfering.
-W (--nesting): To bring the current Guix you are using into the container so it can load the extension.

Since this example is using the new extension scheme, the guix command you are running must be at or newer than commit de069958fc.

Closing words

I hope you find this small introduction to Guix extensions useful and that you start to write your own Guix extensions.

I would like to encourage everyone reading this to submit their extensions to the guix-extensions Codeberg organization. The idea is to make this organization a central hub for everyone to participate in the development of useful extensions for the community.

10:21

Our genie problem [Seth's Blog]

The djinn go back millennia, powerful and elusive creatures of the supernatural. They show up across time and culture.

Three hundred years ago, Charles Perrault retold a short story about a headstrong woodcutter and his wife. On being granted three wishes from Jupiter (archetype for the genie of legend), he accidentally blurts out that he’d like sausage for dinner. One wish, gone. His wife calls him a fool, and he responds by turning her nose into a sausage. Now, with just one wish left, he’s torn between being rich (but having a wife with a sausage attached to her nose) or using the third wish to end up right where he started.

Marital harmony and common sense prevail, and he ends up where he started, but filled with regret for what could have been. Ever since, we’ve been telling stories about people who screw up their wishes.

The persistence of genie morality in our culture is bigger than a Disney marketing ploy. It’s an important reminder about responsibility, long-term thinking and how often we fail to recognize how much agency we actually have. The three are woven into a narrative that often leaves us with a sausage attached to our noses.

In this moment, the biggest technology revolution humans have ever lived through, we’re all at risk of getting our wishes wrong. Careful what you wish for. But don’t forget to wish.

Irregular Webcomic! #3450 [Irregular Webcomic!]

Irregular Webcomic! #3450

07:28

It Won’t Fly [George Monbiot]

Air travel is on track to account for almost all our emissions by 2050. So why aren’t we working to reduce demand?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3^rd October 2026

If a third runway is built at Heathrow, what will be the impact on the wealth of the nation? It will cost us somewhere between £23.4bn and £62.5bn. These are not my figures; they weren’t calculated by environmental groups, but by the Department for Transport.

For decades, government ministers have told us that airport expansion is essential for “growth”. As chancellor, Rachel Reeves claimed that a third runway at Heathrow would add 0.43% to GDP, figures we later discovered came from a report commissioned by the airport. The transport department’s own analysis concluded that the real addition to GDP would be between 0.03% and 0.05%: eight to 14 times less. Against this, it weighed the social and environmental costs of the project, to reveal a massive net loss. It found that a third runway would cause major harm to the health and wellbeing of up to 3 million local people.

But even these figures don’t capture it. The climate breakdown caused by the runway affects the entire planet, yet the costs to other countries aren’t counted. So again we must ask, why does the government support it?

Or does it? Though Heathrow expansion remains official policy, when asked at the weekend, Andy Burnham said the runway was “contested” and “principally it’s a matter for London and London MPs”. That sounds hopeful.

We also learned that the project has been delayed yet again. Though Heathrow announced last year that its plans were “shovel-ready”, it now admits the runway would take four years longer to build than it claimed: the estimated completion date is now 2039.

By then, or so we must hope, a government might have decided to take the climate impact seriously. If so, the new runway would need to be shuttered the moment it opened. Otherwise, according to the government’s Climate Change Committee, “almost all CO₂ emissions in 2050 will be from aviation”. Heathrow’s expansion alone, the committee says, would cause more carbon emissions by 2054 than “any other sector of the economy”.

And even this is not the end of it. The committee considers only the carbon dioxide planes produce, but the other impacts are even greater. A paper in the journal Atmospheric Environment suggests that, over 100 years, the nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, soot, volatile organic products, water vapour and other compounds released or formed in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere by planes raise the heating caused by flying by 115%. Over 20 years, they raise it by an astonishing 517%.

Given that crucial Earth systems may be approaching their tipping points, and heating today triggers further greenhouse gas releases from forests, wetlands and permafrost, the 20-year horizon is crucial. But these other compounds are considered in neither international treaties nor the UK’s Climate Change Act. The impact of flying is officially and massively underestimated.

While the heating effects of almost all other sectors can be greatly reduced by technology, there are simply no good solutions for aviation. Successive governments have justified airport expansion plans with the promise of “sustainable aviation fuel”. Mostly they mean turning biomass into kerosene, which is even worse than using fossil fuels. If this substitute is to reach any kind of scale, it will either swallow up existing cropland, driving starvation, or it will cause the expansion of cropland into forests, wetlands and other habitats, accelerating the environmental crisis. An analysis by the Royal Society found that meeting existing UK aviation demand (never mind future growth) with energy crops “would require around half of UK agricultural land”. That’s the opposite of sustainable.

“Sustainable aviation fuel” can also mean synthetic fuels made from captured CO₂ and green hydrogen. But the Royal Society found that for existing aviation, we’d need to use between five and eight times the UK’s entire renewable electricity capacity. And still, aeroplanes would release a lethal chemical cocktail – not just CO₂ but those other compounds – into the high atmosphere, so only a fraction of the problem would be solved. Worldwide, a paper in the journal One Earth found that even with a wildly unrealistic programme of technological change, in which fossil jet fuels were phased out completely by 2040, the global heating caused by aviation would more than double by 2070, thanks to rising demand.

As for hydrogen-, ammonia- or battery-powered commercial aircraft, they all fail on technical or safety grounds, even before we ask where the power comes from. The “prototypes” endlessly showcased by the airlines, which never get beyond the artist’s impression, are nothing but “perceptionware”, designed to solve political problems, not technical ones.

If Heathrow expansion goes ahead, passenger numbers in the UK are forecast to rise from 299 million in 2025 to 491 million in 2050. As other sectors decarbonise, the proportion of climate breakdown caused by flying climbs and climbs, until planes account for almost all of it.

The only effective strategy is to reduce demand. There’s a progressive means of doing so: the frequent flyer levy. Wealth and flights are strongly linked. In 2024, 48% of England’s population did not fly at all. But 5% of the population took five or more flights abroad, and these account for 33% of all journeys. Increasing demand has been almost entirely driven by frequent flyers, who are highly concentrated in the highest income quintile. The levy would not be charged on the first flight someone took in any year, but it would escalate with every additional flight.

This is just, proportionate and – unlike all the techno-bollocks – immediately dispatchable. Otherwise, we continue to subsidise a wealthy, selfish minority with our money, our health, our wellbeing and the degradation of the living planet. How is that fair?

What government support for airport expansion shows is that “growth” is simply an excuse for giving powerful lobby groups what they want. When asked whether growth was more important than net zero, Reeves replied: “Well, if it’s the No 1 mission, it’s obviously the most important thing.” That’s another way of saying money is more important than human life. But, as the figures show, it was never about growth at all. It was always about meeting the demands of the airport lobby and wealthy passengers.

Now we wait on Burnham. Will the flight of reason continue? Or will human and planetary welfare at last outweigh the lobbyists?

www.monbiot.com

04:21

How can undefined opcodes ud0 and ud1 have parameters? How undefined were they? [The Old New Thing]

Gunnar Dalsnes wondered how ud0 and ud1 could have parameters if they were undefined? “Does it mean they were not completely undefined, just undocumented and not completely implemented?”

The opcodes ud0 and ud1 have no definition, but that’s not the same as being architecturally an “undefined instruction”. They live in a purgatory where they were not assigned a meaning, but were also not officially declared to be meaningless.

Originally, these byte sequences went through the instruction decoder and happened to slip through a few cracks before somebody finally noticed, “Wait a second, I don’t know how to execute this.”

You can see this when you look at the instructions that are encoded as 00001111 11111xxx, as of the Pentium III.

Bits	Bytes	Opcode	Operand 1	Operand 2	Meaning
`00001111 11111000`	`0F F8`	`PSUBB`	mm	mm/m64	Subtract packed bytes
`00001111 11111001`	`0F F9`	`PSUBW`	mm	mm/m64	Subtract packed words
`00001111 11111010`	`0F FA`	`PSUBD`	mm	mm/m64	Subtract packed dwords
`00001111 11111011`	`0F FB`	No meaning assigned
`00001111 11111100`	`0F FC`	`PADDB`	mm	mm/m64	Add packed bytes
`00001111 11111101`	`0F FD`	`PADDW`	mm	mm/m64	Add packed words
`00001111 11111110`	`0F FE`	`PADDD`	mm	mm/m64	Add packed dwords
`00001111 11111111`	`0F FF`	No meaning assigned

The byte sequences 0F FB and 0F FF had yet to be assigned a meaning. You can see how the instruction decoder could take a shortcut and say, “Well, all the instructions in this range, or at least all the ones that I care about, take an mm registers and an mm/m64 operand, so I’ll just save myself some transistors and decode all of them with two parameters (mm, mm/m64).” And then after decoding, it would use bit 3 to decide whether to set up the arithmetic unit for an add or subtract, and it would use bits 0 and 1 to decide how to subdivide the bits into saturating units.

And if you gave it a 0F FF, it would be only in that last step that the decoder would realize “Oh dear, I don’t know what to do with a bit combination of 11. I’ll raise an invalid opcode instruction.”

The invalid opcode instruction got raised after the operands were parsed.

You can see the trouble that 0F FF created when those empty slots started to get filled in by the SSE instructions.

Bits	Bytes	Opcode	Operand 1	Operand 2	Meaning
`00001111 11111000`	`0F F8`	`PSUBB`	mm	mm/m64	Subtract packed bytes
`00001111 11111001`	`0F F9`	`PSUBW`	mm	mm/m64	Subtract packed words
`00001111 11111010`	`0F FA`	`PSUBD`	mm	mm/m64	Subtract packed dwords
`00001111 11111011`	`0F FB`	`PSUBQ`	mm	mm/m64	Subtract packed qwords
`00001111 11111100`	`0F FC`	`PADDB`	mm	mm/m64	Add packed bytes
`00001111 11111101`	`0F FD`	`PADDW`	mm	mm/m64	Add packed words
`00001111 11111110`	`0F FE`	`PADDD`	mm	mm/m64	Add packed dwords
`00001111 11111111`	`0F FF`	I want to put `PADDQ` here but I can’t

the natural place to put the PADDQ instruction is 0F FF, but people had already been using 0F FF with the expectation that it raises an illegal instruction exception. Making it a valid instruction would break those programs, so Intel had to move PADDQ to the rather awkward location 0F D4.

Bonus chatter: Undefined instructions with parameters are actually not uncommon. For example, on AArch64, there is a range of 65,536 instructions set aside as permanently undefined, so the udf instruction takes a 16-bit immediate to specify which invalid opcode you want. The PDP-10 reserved opcode 000 as a permanently illegal instruction, and it carries a register and a memory address as parameters. (Because all PDP-10 instructions carry a register and a memory address as parameters.)

There are also so-called “unofficial opcodes” which are instructions that are not part of the instruction set architecture, but for which people reverse-engineered a consistent behavior and began to rely on it. (The 6502 processor is well-known in nerd circles for having undergone this type of analysis.) The 0F FF is one of these “unofficial opcodes” that was popular enough that Intel felt pressure to maintain backward compatibility with it, even though it was never architecturally documented or supported.

Bonus bonus chatter: It appears that the mnemonic ud1 was introduced by the nasm assembler:

* Added the following new instructions: SYSENTER, SYSEXIT, FXSAVE,
  FXRSTOR, UD1, UD2 (the latter two are two opcodes that Intel
  guarantee will never be used; one of them is documented as UD2 in
  Intel documentation, the other one just as "Undefined Opcode" --
  calling it UD1 seemed to make sense.)

It seems obvious that ud1 is also the name that Intel gave internally to that legacy instruction. Otherwise, there would be no need to call the new one ud2!

The post How can undefined opcodes <CODE>ud0</CODE> and <CODE>ud1</CODE> have parameters? How undefined were they? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

02:28

Main Character Again [QC RSS v2]

hoo boy

02:07

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 8, 2026 [LWN.net]

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

Front: Kernel bugs; Gentoo's Chromium package; Rust smart pointers; Sashiko; Charon; LAVD scheduler; Python random-number modules.
Briefs: OpenSSH 10.6; RustConf recordings; Rust 1.99.0; Picard 3.0; Zig 0.17; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

01:14

Microsoft is overhauling and redesigning search in Windows, and it seems nice? [OSnews]

Whenever Microsoft starts messing with something like the search function in Windows, a lot of people are going to be holding their breath and expecting the worst. Well, get ready, because they’re redesigning the whole thing.

In July, we shared how we are improving the Windows Search Box with less clutter and more control. We introduced a calmer home screen, removed promotional content from web results, and gave you more choice over whether web and Microsoft Store suggestions appear.

Today, we’re carrying those investments forward with a new Windows Search experience built on WinUI 3. This modern foundation makes Windows Search faster and more efficient with resources, while delivering an even more streamlined and focused design.
↫ Anshul Rawat at the Windows Blogs

The company claims this new version of search is faster and uses less memory, which, if true, are very welcome improvements. It’s also just a single column of results now, and they’re adding inline previews for things like weather and files on your machine, as well as for answers to all kinds of queries you might normally go to an online search engine for. You can now also use search to perform all kinds of tasks in Windows, like turning on dark mode, managing windows, and so on.

All of this can be done using relatively natural language, and Microsoft claims they’ve implemented better detection of typing errors and synonyms, which is quite welcome. Weirdly enough, though, it’s not yet integrated into the Start menu, since it’s a preview just for testers, but that’s something they’re working on for future releases.

Judging by the videos and screenshots, I’m actually kind of positively surprised. This looks quite decent and nice, and if the promised performance improvements actually materialise, this may actually be an upgrade to search worth looking forward to. Of course, this is still Microsoft, so it’s just as likely they’ll screw up somewhere between now and when this goes live to regular users.

Still, I think it looks decent.

Chimera Linux: creating distribution build tooling for a small community [OSnews]

Chimera Linux is a relatively new Linux distribution, and quite a unique on at that, as it combines the core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library instead of the usual suspects. Despite being relatively new, it still has some serious pedigree as the project was started by Nina “q66”, who was part of the Void Linux team. At Void, she maintained the various PowerPC/POWER ports of the distribution until Chimera became her sole focus.

Nina published a detailed blog post today about how the Chimera team builds the tooling for their distribution, as well as the goals it’s trying to achieve. It covers everything from a bit of personal history, the rationale behind the project, who it’s catering to, how its tooling works and why, and the infrastructure they’ve built that underpins it all. There’s a lot to process here, with one of the most interesting little details – at least to me, as someone who has two POWER9 machines – the fact that Chimera started with the ppc64le target only.

The article is an incredibly interesting look at not just the how of Chimera, but also the why, which makes for some really fascinating reading.

Wednesday, 07 October

22:56

(5331) [Flipside]

Man-Made Horrors, Part One [Penny Arcade]

I ate some food court Chinese and now, by every observable metric, the food court Chinese is eating me. I was able to play a couple rounds of Blood on the Clocktower last night before I began to get a wobbly feeling I described as "nautical" and I have spent the last ten hours or so in a state similar to a furniture warehouse whose boss is out of town, i.e., "Everything Must Go."

22:14

32 is a lot of years. How much longer can this madness go on!

Do you know why people like Markdown? You can't hide the bullshit. It's all there for you to see. Thus the bullshit never gets added. It's so simple, I swear people are desperate for simplicity. I know I am. Where is the universal theory of the web? Actually I do know where it is. Go back to the roots, strip out all the crap, and let's make a Mardown-only web. Great for blogs, to start. Simple, fast, easy.

I don't care for podcasts that begin with 15 minutes of giggling between the hosts who I don't know so I don't get how cute it is. Esp if the title of the episode is something I'd like to learn more about. Why is giggling and non-funny supposed humor. The laughing I hate the most is when their cracking up over something tragic or ominous. Stop and think about what you're laughing about. Someone should do a podcast like the Markdown-only browser I'm thinking of doing.

That said, surprisingly Nicolle Wallace's podcast is really good, which surprised me because her two hour afternoon MSNOW show is kind-of nothing. On this show they have a lot of time to talk with one person, and maybe there are limits on the TV show that aren't on the podcast? Another theory, I listen to her podcast, and thus can't see her facial expressions. On TV she looks utterly hopeless, I'm not kidding, and she's justified. I worry about how much of this she can take. But on the podcast she comes off as she's curious, respectful, let's the guest speak (so many hosts don't). She reminds me of a Diane Rehm, a podcast host on NPR through 2016. She never let her guests talk down to us, her audience, which I appreciated. A lot of times you hear a science, history or tech topic and hope you might learn something, but they only repeat the intro over and over, with a lot of giggling, of course. BTW, Diane Rehm has a new podcast. I bet it's great, probably gets right to the point and I guarantee you there is no giggling.

21:28

Putting the “Fun” in “fundraiser” – DORK TOWER 06.10.26 [Dork Tower]

Yesterday I wrote a piece about a Markdown-only browser, that worked nicely with HTTP. Maximally minimal. I got interested in what it would take to do this, and asked ChatGPT for a plan. I definitely don't agree with all of it, forget about the other formats, we're only interested in Markdown. No frameworks, not "try to avoid frameworks." None. Maximal simplicity for the code, make it easy to follow. No hidden bullshit. If you want to implement it, please do. Let me know if you have something to try.

20:00

Most DORK TOWER strips are now available as signed, high-quality prints, from just $25! CLICK HERE to find out more!

HEY! Want to help keep DORK TOWER going? Then consider joining the DORK TOWER Patreon and ENLIST IN THE ARMY OF DORKNESS TODAY! (We have COOKIES!) (And SWAG!) (And GRATITUDE!)

18:14

The Big Idea: Mia V. Moss [Whatever]

A lot can happen when you take a one-thousand year nap, and there may or may not be consequences when you wake up. Author Mia V. Moss takes an interesting look at false narratives and wrongfully upheld beliefs in the Big Idea for her newest novel, The Heresy of Thieves.

MIA V. MOSS:

Humans are story-powered creatures. We tell stories about the stars, the seasons, ourselves, and each other. And if we are very rich or persuasive in other ways, the stories we tell about others are the stories that get labeled ‘reality,’ whether the subject of the story agrees with that label or not.

Sometimes the labels our fellow humans foist upon us are benign. Sometimes you say “oh that’s a cute chicken figurine” to a relative as you window shop at the mall. And then forever after at Christmas you are The One Who Loves Chickens and are gifted yet another chicken figurine from a beaming well-intentioned relative, who is very proud of their talent for gift-giving.

Then there is the 1995 romcom, While You Were Sleeping. Peter, the man we believe to be the romantic male lead, spends most of the film in a coma. We are informed at the beginning of the film by the female lead, Sandra Bullock’s Lucy, that Peter is perfect. He is a rich, handsome, kind, charming, rich lawyer in Chicago. Peter has a freaking newspaper clipping of the time when, as a boy, he saved a nest of baby squirrels that had fallen from a tree! Peter is a sexy saint, genetically engineered to be Lucy’s soul mate.

Except, by the end of the film (spoilers, sorry) we know that Peter’s life is a hollow pretense. He has a girlfriend who he cheats on. He lives alone with no pets. He hardly ever makes time in his life for the people who care about him. He knocked the baby squirrels out of the nest on purpose with a rock and simply did not correct the adults when they cobbled together a story that he had rescued them and took his picture for the paper! He is no hero at all and certainly not good enough for Sandra Bullock.

So, when I set out to write The Heresy of Thieves, my big idea was this: what if the story people formed about you ended up creating a religion? Not really novel, considering exhibit A: Christianity. But what if the person they formed a religion around had no idea this had happened? What if they were really pissed, in fact, to find out about all the stuff done in their name? And what if, by giving that person their agency back, the rest of society immediately crumbled to ruin?

The concept and exploration of those consequences branches out from my overarching conceit of the Spellfall trilogy: what if two powerful entities in the midst of a messy, centuries-long mage war just wanted to remove themselves from all of the murder and dynastic backbiting and make out in a nice backyard garden for eternity instead?

Much of the book’s revisions took place during the earlier years of the COVID-19 pandemic. I watched as the US government changed the story of health and safety measures to suit corporate needs, and observed how people accepted or rejected those truths. How quickly official health messaging morphed from ‘masks are an essential and widely accepted way to mitigate the spread of airborne disease’ to ‘wearing a mask is for cowards.’

It was fascinating to observe that it takes hardly any time at all for a person with a wide enough reach to sculpt bespoke truths for a whole society. This, then, became a much larger focus of the book, and served to strengthen what I had first set out to accomplish with Vael. Vael being both the event that drives the narrative of the first book and the main character of the series.

The stories people tell of you can shape your life in ways you may not fully understand at first. Maybe, like Vael, you sneak away from The War to have a good snog with your divine lover and then wake up a thousand years later to learn the prosperous functioning of the entire realm relies on you never waking up and people are going to be righteously pissed if they find out you don’t want to do that.

Maybe, like Peter, you get caught knocking squirrels out of nests by a passing reporter and then build a hollow life for yourself as an adult in an attempt to shield your psyche from the crushing guilt every time your family displays the framed newspaper article.

Maybe you wake up one day, surrounded by chicken statues in a too small apartment, and wonder what you could have done to prevent a timeline where you might one day be buried in feathery bric-a-brac from the Hallmark store. It’s me, I’m chickens statues. Please stop gifting me chickens, I’m begging you. But if you must, and I do perish beneath their cute ceramic wings, can we at least agree that you won’t turn it into some sort of foundational story for a new religion?

The Heresy of Thieves: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Green Apple Books

Author socials: Bluesky|Newsletter

Juice [xkcd.com]

17:00

32 years and still diggin! [Scripting News]

On 10/7/1994, I wrote my first blog post.

I've been blogging ever since.

In the first years when wifi wasn't in every hotel room and restaurant as it is today, before cell phones or even iPods, there were weekly lapses when I went on vacation or to a massage retreat in the middle of nowhere.

Or in 2002 when I had life-saving heart surgery. I was gone for a week then. But as soon as I got home, I added a post so people knew I was okay. I understood that I was missed, and appreciated that. ;-)

But other than those week-long lapses, I'm pretty sure I've blogged every day since. I am what you would call a Natural Born Blogger. I got the blogging bug.

We've done a lot on this blog, it's hard to sum up. We created things that had lasting value. Told the truth about what the tech industry was up to, from the point of view of a Silicon Valley insider (me) who knows the language, where most journalists are intimidated. We fought the big companies and won. Podcasting was created in the community defined by this blog in the early 00s, and it remains independent to this day.

The bigs declared RSS dead, another product of this community. Wishful thinking perhaps, but things like RSS don't die. It's not like that. You can't create a better format for a standard. All the competition RSS has ever received, just changed the names of things, that's not competition, that's being petty.

I think we're on the verge of having new relevance, it feels that way because my secret weapon, Frontier, is running again and it will get even stronger and fit in better, now that I've been working primarily in JavaScript for the last 13 years. Today we're adding Node-like packages and support for WebSockets. Last time we worked on this, neither of those existed.

I take blogging seriously, you should too. It's very powerful, as long as we're really working on the web. There's a difference between having a product you can access through a browser and being on the web.

Small pieces loosely joined. All parts replaceable. Never forget that. If you can't plug in replacements for any component, if one piece gets too large to replicate, you should hit the Back button, as Google says you should do on my blog.

Why are they trying to destroy the historic record about the web on the web itself? I have no idea. Certainly they must have had some discussion internally, or with their partner at the EFF about the cost of destroying so much history. Usually when a platform vendor is going to break you, you get invited to a private meeting where you can tell them the cost and beg them not to do it. Not with Google.

And, as they say --

Still diggin!

16:21

[$] Analyzing Rust programs with Charon [LWN.net]

Nadrieril is a long-time Rust contributor, and the maintainer of the rustc pattern-matching infrastructure. During his involvement with Rust, he has noticed a problem with the usability of the language: it is difficult to automatically extract information from a Rust crate for use with other tooling. The Charon project aims to fix that by providing a stable API for accessing internal information from the Rust compiler.

15:56

Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns, part 4: range comparison [Planet Debian]

Today, we're looking at a rewrite that rarely differs for matching, but can mean quite a lot for understanding the code. Say that you have a signed variable and the compiler has suddenly decided to make an unsigned comparison:

    if ((u32) (x - 4) < 2) {

What's happening is that it uses a controlled overflow to do two signed comparisons using one unsigned comparison. How does this work?

Since the comparison is unsigned, this is trivially equivalent to the first expression:

    if ((u32) (x - 4) >= 0 && (u32) (x - 4) < 2) {

and since negative numbers compare larger than 6 in unsigned comparisons, nothing prevents us from adding 4 on each side of the inequality signs:

    if ((u32) (x) >= 4 && (u32) (x) < 6) {

which is, for the same reason, equivalent to:

    if (x >= 4 && x < 6) {

which is what you probably should be writing.

15:35

Pluralistic: Disloyalty (07 Oct 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

Disloyalty: Air Canada's frequent flier fuckery.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Indie booksellers v internet; Coke pays dieticians to astroturf soda taxes; Voting in a voter-suppression state; Facebook v your use of Facebook.
Upcoming appearances: Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

Disloyalty (permalink)

Up until very recently indeed, airlines were the only businesses that I dealt with regularly that practiced "price discrimination," charging different customers different prices for the same seats.

Economists broadly like this "second-order" price discrimination, where a company charges customers different prices based on the circumstances of the purchase, such as a bakery discounting bread at the end of the day. When an airline cranks up the price of an itinerary that doesn't include a Saturday stay, they're using that fact as a proxy for "price-insensitive" business travelers whose bosses can afford to pay more for a ticket, rather than paying a worker overtime to spend a weekend away from home after a meeting.

Despite the arguments about "efficiency," it's safe to say that *fliers* hate this. The airlines' pricing algorithms are so opaque and capricious that anyone who buys a ticket at *any* price inevitably feels like they got a bad deal. This situation is only exacerbated by the airlines' extreme and aggressive secrecy over their pricing strategies, which includes lawsuits against websites that use historical pricing data to predict when a plane ticket will be the cheapest to buy:

https://www.eff.org/document/preliminary-injunction-american-airlines-v-farechase-inc

When a company wants the government to intervene to prohibit third parties from publishing factual information about its prices, that's a bad look. Hard to believe that they're so sure that you, the customer, will be delighted by these pricing tactics that they can't bear to have these third parties ruin the surprise.

But this second-order discrimination is *so* 20th century. Here in the 21st century, we have *first-order* price discrimination, in which AI-powered pricing algorithms use commercial surveillance data about *you*, personally, to predict the highest price you're willing to pay. In this world of "surveillance pricing," every traveler (or customer) sees a different price, in a kind of cod-Marxist dystopia whose motto is "from each according to their ability (to pay), to each according to their (desperate) needs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

Airlines *love* this kind of pricing, and they have means, motive and opportunity to practice it. All over the world, airlines have acquired or entered into joint ventures with surveillance pricing companies. These deals put the airlines on the horns of a dilemma: they love to boast to their shareholders about the way that surveillance pricing will let them gouge fliers, but inevitably the public finds out about these investor calls and breaks out the pitchforks and torches.

This triggers embarrassing climbdowns, like Delta's fiasco of summer 2025, when CEO Ed Bastian bragged to shareholders that his deal with the Israeli surveillance pricing company Fetcherr would boost profits by 50% (!) by figuring out which customers could be safely gouged. When fliers, civil society groups and members of Congress got wind of this and raised a ruckus, Fetcherr publicly disavowed Bastian's remarks, insisting that it wasn't even capable of the kind of price-fixing he'd promised. Then Delta launched a smear campaign against its critics, claiming that Bastian never said the thing he *absolutely said* and accusing surveillance pricing activists of peddling "misinformation":

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/news/amid-deltas-ai-pricing-scheme-groundwork-applauds-congressional-action-to-crack-down-on-surveillance-pricing-schemes/

Meanwhile, airlines all over the world have quietly switched their frequent flier reward programs from "mileage-based" rewards to "revenue-based" rewards. That means that you get points and status based on how much you spend on your ticket, not how far you fly. What may not be obvious from this move is that it forces frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airlines, who claim that they can't tell how much you've spent on your ticket otherwise.

So tickets bought on sites like Expedia or through travel agents often qualify for insultingly small points awards, or no points at all. For example, British Airways once gave me *12 points* on a $2,000 Alaska Air ticket because I didn't buy it through British Airways' site (attaining BA's gold status requires *50,000* points).

Forcing frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airline's website sets things up beautifully for surveillance-driven, first-order price discrimination. Airlines you do business with regularly can augment the personal information you provide to them and the data they collect from you with sensitive information purchased from the unregulated data-broker industry, which will cheerfully disclose your salary, credit card debts, or even if you've recently lost a parent and might be flying out for a funeral.

The airlines strenuously deny that they're doing this, of course, but they continue to make investor-facing announcements about their exciting deals with surveillance pricing companies…and things are getting *weird* for frequent travelers.

Thanks to a lot of book-related travel over the past couple of years, I have "Elite" status with Air Canada. Yesterday, I needed to book a last-minute, one-way fare on a route that is only serviced by Air Canada (AC enjoys a monopoly over many Canadian routes, even between major Canadian cities). I checked it out on Google Flights and found a fare for the eye-watering sum of USD829.73.

Now, my normal daily-use browser is Firefox, but I know from long experience that I can't log in to my Air Canada frequent flier account on any browser except Chromium, which I keep installed on my system for just this kind of hostile garbage website. So I tabbed over to Chromium and pasted the Google Flights outbound link that would take me to a pre-populated reservation form on aircanada.com. To my amazement, that same flight was showing as a USD1200 fare!

These were identical trips, loaded via identical referrer URLs. The difference was that in the browser where Air Canada knew that I was an extremely loyal and prolific customer, they had whacked me with a *44.8% premium* to punish me for my loyalty!

I couldn't believe it. I actually called Air Canada's customer service line for "Elite" fliers, and the customer service rep was at a loss for an explanation and could only apologise and suggest that I write a letter to the company.

I'm publishing this instead, because a) this will do more to punish Air Canada for trying to screw me over; and b) this can help you book your tickets in the future.

Yesterday, I finished buying the ticket in my logged-out Firefox window (Air Canada's website will work with Firefox to buy tickets provided you don't try to log in to your Aeroplan account first), paying $829. Then I flipped back to Chromium, where I was still logged into my Air Canada Aeroplan account, located the reservation, and added my frequent flier number to it.

I guess this is how I'm buying my plane tickets from now on.

Hey look at this (permalink)

* PM Mark Carney pledged to ‘Buy Canadian.’ Since then, $7.8 billion in contracts went to American corporations https://archive.is/zDBfX#selection-3576.0-3576.3

* Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices https://buttondown.com/apperceptive/archive/tracing-the-rogue-ideology-of-the-frontier-labs/

* Have you heard of the term "enshittification?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ5V3pk6PEA&t=1220s

* Window display at TYPE Books Toronto to honour David Byrne’s new book https://stopmakingsense.info/window-display-at-type-books-toronto-to-honour-david-byrnes-new-book/

* Red Vienna Is Still Alive https://www.thenation.com/article/society/vienna-public-housing-urban-cities/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie booksellers in the age of the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20061026112859/https://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/1,71924-0.html

#10yrsago Wells Fargo whistleblower describes bank’s culture of blackballing threats and coerced corruption https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle

#10yrsago Coca-Cola is paying dietitians to tweet scare-stories about soda taxes https://medium.com/cokeleak/is-coke-paying-dietitians-to-tweet-against-soda-tax-12d130d73b9a#.dw8udqccy

#10yrsago What it’s like to register to vote in states with voter suppression law https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37569855

#5yrsago Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-up

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

* Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

* Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

* Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

* Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
https://slowtechsummit.com/

* Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

* Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

* Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

* Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

* Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/

* Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

* Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

* Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

* Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

* Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

* Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

* AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

* AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

* How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

* Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY

Latest books (permalink)

* "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

* "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

* "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

* "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

Upcoming books (permalink)

* "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

* "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

* "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

* "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 529 (22924 total).

* "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

ISSN: 3066-764X

15:14

CodeSOD: A Tool for You [The Daily WTF]

A junior dev on the team had a simple question: in Java, how do I correctly read user input from the CLI and act on it?

Now, we can wonder about a junior dev not having such basic knowledge, but maybe they're new to Java specifically. Who knows. But Robert's team has a senior on it who "likes to mentor". This senior has strong opinions about how to write software, extreme confidence in those opinions, and has somehow been around the company long enough that he knows where the bodies are buried and no one will fire him.

Here's his sample application for reading input.

import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
import java.util.*;

public class ScannerTool {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Map<Optional<Character>, Map.Entry<String, Boolean>> map = new HashMap<>();
    map.put(Optional.of('A'), new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>("You entered A.", true));
    map.put(Optional.of('B'), new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>("You entered B.", true));
    map.put(Optional.empty(), new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>("You entered nothing.", false));
    Optional<Character> input;
    do {
      System.out.println("Please enter A or B:");
    } while (!map.getOrDefault((input = nextCharacter()), new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>("", false))
        .getValue());
    System.out.println(map.get(input).getKey());
  }

  public static Optional<Character> nextCharacter() {
    String l = new Scanner(System.in, StandardCharsets.UTF_8).nextLine();
    if (l != null && !l.isEmpty()) {
      return Optional.of(l.charAt(0));
    }
    return Optional.empty();
  }
}

Look, I know Java is verbose, but this is entirely next level. Giving this to a junior has to constitute an attempt to drive the youth out of the industry, because any sane person being told, "your job is to write this" would realize they've committed a grave error in their career choice and needs to escape now.

nextCharacter in this case actually returns the first character of the next line, not the next character. And if there isn't one, it returns an empty optional. Which, fine, we only expect one character per line of input for this exercise, so that's not wrong, I just don't like the name of the function.

Of course, using Scanner here is a wrecking ball fly swatter- that class is a full on parser for reading out common data types from a file. Worth showing to a junior, but a little out of scope of this question.

But the real overengineering is the map of maps- well, a map of map entries. The key to the outer map is an optional of the character that was entered by the user. The value is itself a map, the key of the map is the message we want to output, the value is whether or not the loop should continue. They've reinvented tuples using map entries. Which, in their defense, mainline Java doesn't have tuples (enterprise edition seems to have them in the javax namespace, but I'm not even certain those are meant to be general purpose tuples anyway). A quick search indicates that their absence is a perennial source of heated discussions in forums and Stack Overflow.

Robert writes:

It is remarkable in its creativity and execution and still has me in awe. When I tried to unpack it, my brain just started to pack up its things and left, haven't seen it since.

Bon voyage.

[Advertisement] Picking up NuGet is easy. Getting good at it takes time. Download our guide to learn the best practice of NuGet for the Enterprise.

14:49

[$] Evolving the LAVD scheduler from gaming to servers [LWN.net]

The extensible scheduler class, which enables the creation of custom CPU schedulers with BPF, has led to a burst of innovation in this area; the LAVD scheduler has, perhaps, been one of the most noteworthy schedulers to emerge. Though it was originally designed for gaming applications, the LAVD scheduler has since grown to serve other types of workloads as well. At the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes, Changwoo Min and Gavin Guo presented an overview of this scheduler and how it has evolved over time.

A new Raspberry Pi Desktop release is finally available for x86-64 [LWN.net]

Simon Long has announced a long-awaited release of Raspberry Pi OS, based on Debian 13 ("trixie"), for x86-64 systems.

We managed to find the time to update the Desktop for the Buster and Bullseye releases of Debian, but then we all just got too busy with other things, and, while we left the Bullseye version on the website for anyone who wanted it, we simply didn't have time to release any newer versions. But people kept on asking for it – we get two or three emails every week asking when the PC Desktop will be updated, and we haven't had an answer, because we honestly didn't know when we might get a chance to do it. We've continually tried to allocate time to be able to work on this, but it hasn't been easy. [...]

Earlier this year, we (or rather Serge) finally got the latest version of the Desktop running on top of a Debian Trixie image. It's now based on 64-bit Debian (the amd64 architecture) rather than the older 32-bit version, as Debian itself has stopped supporting 32-bit for PC architectures. This shouldn't be a major problem – most PCs made in the last 15 years or so will quite happily run the 64-bit version of Debian, as will most Intel-based Macs. (Debian support for Apple Silicon is still experimental, so unfortunately those of you with the latest and greatest shiny fruit products will not be able to run this.)

Security updates for Wednesday [LWN.net]

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, dovecot, freerdp, kernel, mariadb-connector-c, mod_auth_openidc, nodejs22, nodejs:22, sudo, and vim), Debian (node-shell-quote, puma, rails, ruby-jwt, and suricata-update), Fedora (chromium, cockpit, flocq, freerdp, gappalib-coq, golang-x-mod, httpd, janus, libical, musescore, python3-docs, python3.14, python3.15, rocq, rocq-stdlib, tesseract, why3, and zenon), Mageia (srt and tor), Oracle (freerdp, kernel, libpcap, mariadb-connector-c, nodejs22, sudo, and vim), Red Hat (expat and grafana), Slackware (openssh), SUSE (chromium, docker-stable, firefox, jupyter-jupyterlab, libtcnative-1-0, tomcat, tomcat10, libtcnative-1-0, tomcat11, openexr, python310, python313-azure-storage-queue, python313-langchain-anthropic, python313-sglang, python313-Werkzeug, and valkey), and Ubuntu (fluidsynth, freerdp3, freetype, golang-1.18, golang-1.21, golang-1.24, gst-plugins-good1.0, libsoup2.4, libsoup3, libwebsockets, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-ibm, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux-azure, linux-azure-fde, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-oem-7.0, redis, sg3-utils, tesseract, and u-boot).

14:21

Kentaro Hayashi: Testing Japanese IMEs on virtual desktops with virt-japanese-desktop [Planet Debian]

Japanese input method editors (IMEs) such as Mozc are essential for typing Japanese (yes, skk, anthy and more, but it's out-of-scope in this article). Testing them is a surprisingly fiddly job: an IME behaves differently depending on the desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Budgie), the input framework (ibus, fcitx5, uim), and the Wayland or X11 session. Setting up a fresh VM for every combination from scratch is slow and repetitive, and breaking your host's environment while experimenting is no fun.

virt-japanese-desktop is a small set of toy scripts that solves exactly this problem. It builds ready-to-use virtual machines - each with a desktop environment and a Japanese IME already installed and configured - so you can start typing Japanese within a minute of booting, and throw the whole thing away without any impact on your host.

What it gives you

A single make command produces a qcow2 image that combines one of four desktops with one of three IMEs:

	ibus-mozc	fcitx5-mozc	uim-mozc
GNOME	✓	✓	✓
KDE	✓	✓	✓
Xfce	✓	✓	✓
Budgie	✓	✓	✗

The one gap - uim on Budgie - is a real technical limitation, not an oversight: Budgie runs the labwc compositor, which implements zwp_input_method_v2, while uim-wayland only speaks the older zwp_input_method_v1 (KWin/Weston). On Budgie you use ibus-mozc or fcitx5-mozc instead.

All images come with the Japanese locale, fonts, and the Asia/Tokyo time zone pre-configured, plus the SSH key of your choice. Input switching is wired up out of the box: Ctrl + Space or Shift + Space for your IMEs to enable it.

The layered-image trick

The core idea is that the images are stacked qcow2 overlay layers, one on top of another:

debian-sid-nocloud-amd64-daily.qcow2     ... base image you download
└─ unstable-japanese-template.qcow2      ... locale, fonts, user, SSH
   └─ unstable-<DE>-template.qcow2       ... a desktop environment
      └─ unstable-<DE>-<IME>.qcow2       ... desktop + IME, configured
         └─ unstable-<DE>-<IME>.workspace.qcow2 ... the image you test in

This makes both building and resetting fast. The first build downloads and customizes the base image and takes a while, but every later step only adds a thin overlay. When a test breaks the VM, you do not rebuild anything - you simply delete the top workspace layer and recreate it. That is all it takes to return to a pristine state:

rm /tmp/unstable-gnome-ibus-mozc.workspace.qcow2
make gnome-ibus-mozc

The images reference their backing files by relative path, so you can move an entire stack anywhere you like as long as the images stay together.

A platform for experimenting with bleeding-edge IMEs

The base system is Debian unstable (sid), and the experimental repository is already added. That makes the project a convenient platform for testing not just the IME packages in sid but also the ones still being developed in experimental - exactly what the project was built for.

The keyboard layout of the VM follows the layout of your host (read from /etc/default/keyboard, with a fallback chain to localectl and finally us).

Quick start

# 1. Install the tools (Debian/Ubuntu example)
sudo apt install qemu-utils libguestfs-tools virt-install curl

# 2. Save your SSH public key
curl --location https://github.com/USERNAME.keys --output pubkey.pub

# 3. Download the base Debian sid image
make download

# 4. Build a desktop + IME (first build takes a while)
make gnome-ibus-mozc

# 5. Start it as a VM (needs the libvirt daemon, qemu:///system)
./scripts/make-virsh-image.sh virt-gnome-ibus-mozc /tmp/unstable-gnome-ibus-mozc.workspace.qcow2

Log in as debian (password debian) and press Ctrl + Space (Shift + Space) to start typing Japanese. The VM is registered in libvirt, so you can manage it with virsh or virt-manager - handy for opening the SPICE console or restarting the machine after a test.

Status

The project is still in the proof-of-concept phase, and it is developed mainly to test Mozc and other IMEs across desktops and input frameworks.

If you regularly test Japanese IMEs - give it a try.

12:49

Issue 47 – Greta’s Wedding Pt. 2 – 35 [Comics Archive - Spinnyverse]

The post Issue 47 – Greta’s Wedding Pt. 2 – 35 appeared first on Spinnyverse.

12:35

Apple’s Verified Photography System [Schneier on Security]

Apple just released a system called “Reference Image.” It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone—new models only—without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone.

Other industry solutions require a photographer or institution to vouch for an image using their own credentials. We are concerned this puts some photographers, such as those operating in conflict zones, in a difficult position; it should not be necessary to forgo anonymity in order to prove image authenticity. We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC. That signature is backed by Apple’s strongest technical guarantees.

Our implementation also protects the confidentiality of the image itself, including from Apple. Merely capturing a reference image should never expose the actual pixels to Apple or anyone else. We achieve this through the exceptional privacy properties of PCC—the nodes themselves are architected so that not even Apple can access image data, just as Apple cannot see the information processed for Apple Intelligence in PCC. While the revocation service must maintain a private record of photo GUIDs and associated sensors to allow for revocation, it never has access to the image data, and does not allow for public access to this record. And as final revocation checks occur using on-device lists, a device never reveals to anyone which photo it’s looking at in order to find out whether it’s still valid.

The report makes for good reading; the details are interesting.

12:07

Away From Keyboard Today [Whatever]

Why? Because I’m getting a colonoscopy today, that’s why. That’s gonna take up some time, and then afterward I am likely to be in a semi-dazed state afterwards thanks to the lingering effects of sedation, which will also very likely mess up my judgement. Me online without judgement skills would probably be a very very very very bad thing. So we’re gonna skip that entirely (I am, mind you, writing this two days early and scheduling it to go up Wednesday morning).

I asked Krissy to hide my phone and laptops today, and, when I get home from the colonoscopy, to basically sit me on the couch and put on the televised equivalent of easy listening. Athena is likely to be around today, but as for me, just imagine me on that couch, cat laying on my blanketed legs, trying to remember to blink from time to time. That’ll be about the speed of things for me today.

See you all Thursday!

— JS

10:28

Bits from Debian: Looking for artwork for the next Debian release: Forky [Planet Debian]

Each release of Debian has a shiny new theme which is visible on the installer, the boot screen, the login screen and, most prominently, on the desktop wallpaper. It's a very important part of a Debian release as it is usually the first thing new users see when installing or booting the system for the first time. Not only that, but also the first thing appearing when debianites share their screen or connect to an external device when giving talks around the world.

As the most enthusiastic users will know, the forky - yes, that is the name of the next stable version, Debian 14 - release cycle is rapidly approaching its latter stages. This means we need to select the artwork shipping with forky soon, really soon!

And as with everything else in Debian, collecting artwork is a collaborative effort which Debian shares with its community. So, if you would like (or know someone who would like) to create a desktop look and feel that will be seen by trillions of people around the world - and in space! - be sure to send in your artwork ASAP!

The deadline for submissions is: 2026-11-26.

For the most up to date details please refer to the Debian wiki.

At the same time, we would like to thank Elise Couper for creating the Ceratopsian theme for our last trixie release.

And for the interested or the curious ones, the artwork is usually picked based on which theme looks the most:

''Debian'': admittedly not the most defined concept, since everyone has their own take on what Debian means to them. Though, usually they all agree when something looks like Debian.
''Plausible to integrate without patching core software'': as much as we love some of the insanely looking themes, some would require heavy GTK+ theming and patching GDM/GNOME.
''Clean and well designed'': without becoming something that gets annoying to look at a year, or ten, down the road. Examples of good themes include Emerald, Homeworld, Joy, Lines, softWaves and futurePrototype

If you'd like more information or details, please post to the Debian Desktop mailing list.

10:21

How do you like them apples? [Seth's Blog]

In October, the apples in New England are some of the best in the world.

Alas, the apples in this bowl are nine months old and from 3000 miles away. I found them sitting in a forlorn corner of a hotel gym in Cape Cod.

Why source lousy apples? Because they’re not being hired to be good apples. Instead, they’re chosen to be convenient, reliable and a bit of decoration. Reliably there day after day, but not to create delight, build a reputation or support the local economy.

When we name it, we can figure out if it’s what we actually want. Most of the status quo persists, unnamed, because it’s easier than untangling what we’re actually trying to accomplish.

The Knot helps us see the baggage we’re unconsciously carrying around. If you’re feeling stuck, that’s the first step on the road to making something better.

Irregular Webcomic! #3449 [Irregular Webcomic!]

Irregular Webcomic! #3449

08:35

Man-Made Horrors, Part One [Penny Arcade]

New Comic: Man-Made Horrors, Part One

05:56

US deported people to Equatorial Guinea [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

The US deported people to Liberia who had no connection with Liberia.

Some refused to get off the plane there, so the US took them to totally tyrannical Equatorial Guinea. They had no connection with Equatorial Guinea either, but thugs there imprisoned them and they are still stuck.

I suppose that the persecutor is paying the dictator of Equatorial Guinea to use his country as a privatized prison.

05:49

Girl Genius for Wednesday, October 07, 2026 [Girl Genius]

The Girl Genius comic for Wednesday, October 07, 2026 has been posted.

05:00

Why does the compiler sometimes use ud2 and sometimes int 3 for code that shouldn’t execute? [The Old New Thing]

There are two common ways for x86 compilers to indicate that execution should not have reached a particular point: One is the single-byte int 3 breakpoint opcode. And the other is the two-byte ud2 invalid instruction opcode. How do they decide which one to use?

The two types of “bad instructions” are typically for different purposes.

The int 3 means “There is no code here. If you somehow got here, then somebody used an invalid function pointer.” It is used as padding, such as between functions. There is no way that code can reach the int 3 by normal execution. You must have generated an invalid address and called it.

The ud2 is used to mark the case when execution reached something that should be unreachable. It means “You executed a code path that the standard says is undefined behavior.” For example, falling off the end of a non-void function without returning a value, or following the call to a [[noreturn]] function in case it somehow managed to return.

Using int 3 for “there is not even code here” is important because it’s a one-byte instruction. If you had used the two-byte instruction ud2 instruction, then that stray function pointer might land on the second byte of the instruction, in which case it’s not ud2 any more. Instead of stopping immediately, it starts executing garbage code:

0b 0f            or      ecx,dword ptr [edi]
0b 0f            or      ecx,dword ptr [edi]
0b 0f            or      ecx,dword ptr [edi]

Okay, so what does this mean for you?

If you find yourself executing the ud2 instruction, then look for logic flaws in your code. If you find yourself executing the int 3 instruction, then look for an uninitialized function pointer variable, or a hard-coded breakpoint, or a debugger-inserted breakpoint.

The post Why does the compiler sometimes use <CODE>ud2</CODE> and sometimes <CODE>int 3</CODE> for code that shouldn’t execute? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

02:49

Twisting Her Words [QC RSS v2]

I'm starting to think Anh might be prone to making bad decisions

02:28

The web of Markdown [Scripting News]

How about a Markdown web browser. No CSS, no frameworks, just Markdown files. That would be how you would restart the web in 2026. When you've had enough of Google, let me know. I start posting my blog in that space, right away.

Google will not be allowed into this web. Buh bye.

We need our own EFF to keep the Old Arthritic Corporate Excuse-makers for the Tech Industry EFF from fucking it up, same with the W3C. There won't be a WordPress there to own 81% of the websites. Just Markdown please, we don't need Gutenberg. The cool thing about it is you could always fork off your own New Web of Whatever. You don't like Markdown, that's cool. Maybe the web of SVG or The Web of Hypercard cards. Just make sure you support inbound and outbound RSS.

00:21

KDE developer takes a look at COSMIC [OSnews]

KDE contributor and developer Niccolò Venerandi has published an article about COSMIC, System76’s brand new desktop environment.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself: should I switch to COSMIC? The answer obviously is no, but that’s just because I got addicted to KDE Plasma, so let’s try to be more objective here.
↫ Niccolò Venerandi

Honestly, this is one of the best “reviews” I’ve seen of COSMIC, and paints System76’s hard work in a really positive light. Venerandi spots countless really nice touches he’d love to see adopted by KDE, while also hitting on what I agree is COSMIC’s biggest shortcoming at this point: there’s basically no ecosystem around it. COSMIC uses its own Rust-based toolkit instead of GTK or Qt, but of course, there’s very few other applications that actually use said toolkit.

The end result is that if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application, none of which will inherit all the nice features, touches, and graphics from COSMIC. This isn’t really a complaint about COSMIC itself or the work its developers are putting into it, but more a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit. This may very well change in the future, but for now, if you choose to run COSMIC, you’re going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop.

This won’t matter to everyone, but it sure does matter to me, and it’s the one reason why at this point I have zero interest in running COSMIC. I really hope this changes in the future – competition is good – but it’s going to be a long road.

Tuesday, 06 October

23:28

Google Chrome, nice browser, but it doesn’t support the web.

Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns, part 3: do-while-while [Planet Debian]

We just hit a milesone in Atlantis. We have WebSocket support, client and server. We made a client that listens to the FeedLand stream of new and updated posts. Still waiting to see if that works. But when I started to write the code for this test app last night, I realized after 13 years of mostly working in JavaScript, I wanted to be able to do something like a Node package, so I could do all my code in one outline, instead of five different odb objects. I always thought the way we did it in Frontier could be improved on. So I did a quick voicemail to Claude, and asked for this to be done overnight, and it was. I didn't complete the design when we worked through it. But what Claude came up with was brilliant and fit into Frontier perfectly. Two major improvements and the first use of both is with each other. I don't remember that ever happening, and btw -- it would have taken at least a week for me to do what Claude did in less than an hour. Hopefully I'll be able to post some example scripts tomorrow, for people who are interested in seeing the new stuff.

22:00

Today's decompilation pattern is a variation on yesterday's loop pattern, because loops are important and tend to induce a lot of transformations by the compiler. So assume you have code like this (perhaps after converting a goto):

if (var_s0 > var_s1) {
  // Perhaps some other initialization stuff here
  do {
    ...
  } while (var_s0 > var_s1);
}

Assuming there are no side effects from the initializations, a natural candidate would be that the programmer instead wrote:

// Initialization stuff moved up here
while (var_s0 > var_s1) {
  ...
}

Remember to remove the old while so that it does not say while (x) { ... } while (x); it won't tell you with a syntax error, but rather leave an infinite loop that will mess up the generated code.

20:21

The Big Idea: Jocelyn Cullity [Whatever]

Some tales are as old as time. Corruption in power, rooting for the underdog that’s willing to take on the Big Bad, these are the stories people have loved for centuries — and it’s certainly an influence on author Jocelyn Cullity’s newest novel, The Nurse at Baker Hospital.

JOCELYN CULLITY:

While researching Norman Baker—the 1930s radio personality, political populist, and promoter of fraudulent cancer cures who operated the infamous Baker Hospital at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas—I gradually realized that I wasn’t simply uncovering a flamboyant historical figure. I was encountering a type of American demagogue I recognized.

Baker understood how to persuade people to distrust established expertise while placing extraordinary faith in a single, confident voice: his.

The realization changed both the novel and my understanding of the present. At the same time I was researching Baker, for instance, a neighbor was traveling to a clinic in Mexico in search of unconventional cancer treatments. Nearly a century separated the two stories, yet the forces at work seemed painfully familiar: illness, desperation, hope, distrust of conventional medicine, and the seductive promise that someone possesses a cure that the establishment doesn’t want you to know about.

Baker had found the perfect technology for spreading that message: radio.

His broadcasts reached listeners across North America, and he used the airwaves relentlessly. He railed against the American Medical Association and conventional medicine. He opposed polio vaccination. He portrayed doctors as greedy elites who had spent four years in college and still couldn’t cure the common cold. And he insisted that the medical establishment was conspiring against him because he possessed something they did not want ordinary Americans to have: a cure for cancer.

The logic was circular and ingenious. If doctors could cure cancer, Baker argued, they would put themselves out of business. Therefore, they had every reason to suppress the cure. Their opposition to Baker became, in his telling, evidence that Baker was right.

And there were a lot of people who believed him.

As I researched his broadcasts, and the court case in Little Rock, I began to see radio as Baker’s version of social media. He could speak directly to enormous numbers of people, repeatedly, bypassing traditional authorities and creating an intimate relationship with an audience who came to trust him more than they trusted doctors, scientists, newspapers, or institutions.

That was perhaps the most unsettling discovery I made while writing The Nurse at Baker Hospital. I had thought of some of the political rhetoric of our own time as distinctly modern, amplified by Twitter/X and other social-media platforms. Instead, I found its rhythms waiting for me in the 1930s.

Baker’s great message was that the little guy was being cheated by powerful interests and educated elites. He cast himself as the fearless outsider willing to expose them. The irony was considerable. Baker himself was a wealthy businessman who wore purple suits, drove a purple car, and purchased the grand Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs which he transformed into his cancer hospital.

Born in Iowa, Baker had already opened a cancer hospital there and made an unsuccessful attempt at politics before moving his operation to Eureka Springs in Arkansas. He cultivated the identity of the persecuted outsider, and many of his listeners—particularly in the Midwest—saw attacks on him as proof that powerful forces were trying to silence a man who spoke for them.

Many desperate people came to him for treatment before the federal government finally succeeded in bringing him down. Yet even Baker’s downfall seems sadly unsatisfying. After serving a relatively brief prison sentence, he lived out his later years in comfort, spending time aboard a yacht off the coast of Florida.

I began The Nurse at Baker Hospital interested in a bizarre piece of American history: a flamboyant charlatan, a grand Victorian hotel, a fraudulent cancer hospital, and the patients who traveled there hoping to be saved.

I finished the novel thinking about something much larger.

The technology changes. The audience changes. The setting changes. But the appeal of the demagogue—the person who tells us that experts are lying, institutions are corrupt, ordinary people are being cheated, and he alone can reveal the truth—is not new at all.

It is an American character with a long history, and it’s still with us.

The Nurse at Baker Hospital: Amazon|Bookshop|Skylark Bookshop|Double Dog Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Facebook

18:49

Building a second-wave AI business [Seth's Blog]

This is the era of very powerful bozos.

18:35

Voting: Done! [Whatever]

Ohio started early voting today and my book tour literally starts on Election Day, so this morning Krissy and I got ourselves over to the Darke County board of elections to vote early and in person. Now I won’t have to scramble on the actual day to manage my book release, tour, and voting! One less thing to worry about, especially with this election.

Speaking of which, I really do strongly encourage each of you out there to get your vote in early (and in person) if that’s a thing you can do. It will help, dare I suggest, cut down on shenanigans. And yes, it sucks that we have to factor in the possibility of shenanigans in our voting system, but welcome to 2026 (to be clear: if there are any shenanigans, it will be the doing of the Trump administration and its allies, let’s not pretend there is any squishy “both side” nonsense here, fascists are bad, m’kay). Vote like it matters, because it does. We did!

— JS

18:14

A very long rant, riffing on the opportunity for bootstrapped startups who seek to create value using AI. I wrote it a while ago, thought it was too long, but in arguing with an AI today (everyone needs a hobby) I realized it was worth sharing:

Most AI success stories to date are about cost reduction or speed improvement. A startup offers businesses a way to get more done with fewer people, replacing customer service or programming teams with bots. The upside of cost reduction is that it’s a very easy sale—give the client a free sample, once it’s demonstrated to work, they have an instant benefit in switching.

The downsides: it’s difficult to win a race to the bottom, since someone can always promise more savings than you. And it’s finite—once the savings are made, there’s no incremental value left to create.

The opportunity lies in something generative. A use of AI that doesn’t reduce costs, it creates value. It opens new opportunities, leads to growth, connection, and utility.

Worth paying for: Most bootstrappers target price-sensitive customers and then wonder why growth is hard. But people and organizations with expensive problems and real resources don’t just put up with paying more for things they value—they prefer it. Premium pricing signals seriousness. Look for a market where the problem is real, the budget exists, and the solution creates something they couldn’t get otherwise.

What people actually pay for: At the foundation of almost every premium purchase are three drives:

status (I matter, people like me see me as significant),

affiliation (I belong, there are people like me and they accept me), and

freedom from fear (I am safe, the threat is not coming).

Freedom from fear may be the most primitive—you can’t pursue status or affiliation while in survival mode. And most premium purchases are a quest for freedom from fear pretending to be something else.

Built on those roots is a middle layer of things that offer one or more: legitimacy, transformation, belonging to a narrative, control, certainty, protection, trust, health and longevity, leverage.

And the outer layer that’s easier to measure—things people buy because they deliver the middle layer: access, capital, time, attention, convenience, efficiency, delight, new experiences, beauty.

Commodities—food, shelter, sex, addictive substances—are often outside this hierarchy. They don’t really build toward the three roots; they allow survival or temporarily suppress the anxiety that comes from not having them.

An AI business worth building delivers something from the middle layer, justified by the outer layer. Nobody goes shopping for transformation.

What businesses actually pay for: The hierarchy for individual consumers doesn’t translate directly to organizational purchases. In B2B, the customer is spending someone else’s money. That means that the dominant question they’re asking is, “what will I tell my boss?” Three desires sit at the foundation of almost every business buying decision:

Avoid blame — if this goes wrong, it won’t be my fault. The IBM principle: nobody ever got fired for buying the market leader. The champion inside the organization often needs a defensible story before they’ll act.

Claim credit — I brought something in that worked and people noticed. The flip side of blame avoidance, and the engine of the internal champion. If your solution lets someone look good, they’ll sell it to their peers, you won’t have to.

Reduce uncertainty — we can plan around this, the chaos goes down. Organizations pay significant premiums for the ability to forecast, commit, and stop worrying.

Built on those roots is a middle layer of things organizations reliably spend on: growth, efficiency, compliance, competitive advantage, talent, morale, resilience, optionality, speed, legitimacy, relationships.

And an outer layer that justifies the middle: cost savings, time savings, data, access, convenience, integration, reporting, support.

Mechanics without a story is the race to the bottom, and being the cheapest is not the best use of your time.

New vs. repeat purchases require different approaches: Repeat purchases are won by switching costs, relationships, and relentless incrementalism—you’re replacing someone, which means you need to be cheaper, easier, or have a better story and sales force. New purchases require someone inside the organization to become a champion, which means they need a story that serves their career, not just their company’s interests.

Not all problems are equally interesting: Some purchases—like gaining market share or entering a new category—are chaotic and interesting, with room for narrative and ambition. Others—like cheaper materials or faster processing—are grinding commodities where the only story is price. Commodity buyers fear paying too much. Buyers in chaotic spaces fear making a wrong choice.

The forcing function: Businesses rarely lead the way on new purchases without a crisis compelling them. Without a forcing function, even a perfect solution sits in the pipeline forever—committees form, pilots stall, and champions get reassigned.

Three kinds of crises create forcing functions:

Competitive crisis — a rival did something and now there’s urgency. “They have it and we don’t” is a sentence that ends a discussion and starts the buying process.

Technology crisis — the old way stopped working, or a new capability made the old way look reckless. AI itself is currently creating this for many industries simultaneously. This time, the forcing function and the solution are the same thing.

Public/market upheaval — regulatory change, cultural shift, a collapse in input costs, a pandemic. These are the most powerful and least predictable. They create entirely new categories of buyer.

The opportunity for a bootstrapper: sell into a forcing function that already exists, don’t try to create one. Organizations already feeling the crisis don’t need convincing—they need a solution that lets their champion say “I found it.”

NOTES:

Naked AI is a trap. If all you’re doing is building a gateway to Anthropic or ChatGPT, your token costs eat a significant portion of your revenue—and you have no defensible position.

Hidden prompts are insufficient. Breakthrough prompting can create real value, but there’s no protectable, reliable way to sell it as a business. If one of the frontier companies made it a business model, the mechanics would work in the bootstrapper’s favor, but I haven’t seen this.

The network effect matters. Selling benefits one person at a time is brutally expensive. The breakthroughs come with projects that have the network built in—where interactions work better when your colleagues are using them too.

Asymmetric information is worth seeking out. Some of the most durable advantages come not from network effects but from knowing something others don’t, or from helping a cohort work together to pool what they know against a party that currently has structural information advantage over them. Let all of Walmart’s vendors see information that they currently hoard, for example.

So, a theory of profit—a framework for the kind of project that becomes a business:

Creates its own useful data stack. The data doesn’t need to be large to be valuable—it needs to be specific and trusted. Over time it informs the AI. It belongs to users and the project, not to Anthropic or competitors. And it’s built to work for users, not to trap them.
Has a built-in network effect. Either an engaged peer-to-peer community (where users see each other, not just the platform) or an obvious benefit to spreading the word.
Solves an expensive problem for people with resources. The value delivered goes beyond saving time or money—it might be education, reduced fear, joy, reassurance, connection, or capability expansion. And it’s priced accordingly.
Is bootstrappable. Specific and conceptual rather than infrastructural. No data centers, no thousand-person teams required to get started.

Bonus:

A note on data stack reality. A network built on user data is only as good as the willingness of users to populate it. And willingness requires two things: it has to be frictionless enough that people don’t have to think about it, and it has to feel safe enough that people don’t have to worry about it. These two conditions are almost always in tension. The more automatic the data collection, the more it feels like surveillance. The more control you give people, the more friction you add.

The most promising data stacks are ones where people are already generating the data, are already comfortable with it existing somewhere, and the innovation is simply giving them better access to what’s already theirs. The forcing function for consumer data sharing may be the simplest one of all: I already feel watched. I might as well get something back.

The cautionary version of this is the email surveillance tool—a business reads all internal email and gets a report on who’s helpful, who’s toxic, who’s looking for a job. The value is real and obvious. The fear is also real and obvious. And in most organizations, the fear wins. Any data stack business has to answer the question: who controls this, and what happens if it goes wrong? If the answer isn’t immediately reassuring, the business doesn’t get built.

The sponsored model. Not every valuable AI business needs the end user to pay. When the problem is real but the affected population lacks resources, a foundation, brand, or institution with aligned interests can fund the miracle instead. The economics flip entirely: instead of acquiring thousands of customers one at a time, you close one relationship with one institution that already has the distribution, the mission, and the budget. The user gets the miracle for free. The sponsor gets impact, data, or loyalty.

This model works when three things are true: the population being served is large and underserved, the value created is legible to an institution that cares about it, and the data generated serves both the individual user and the sponsor’s mission.

For example, a foundation pays $2,000,000 and 40,000 families of the incarcerated have access to a tool that generates a ten-page legal document instead of a bushel of random papers—and the shared data starts identifying patterns in the system (bad actors, defective paperwork) that no single case could surface alone.

A bank funds a personal finance tool for its own customers. A health brand funds a fitness coach for an underserved population. The viral problem is much easier to solve: once it’s free, you don’t need to work hard to persuade users to recruit each other, you need one institution with existing distribution to say yes.

The cheap inference model. Not every AI application needs a frontier model. The problems worth looking for here aren’t the ones that require reasoning or nuance—instead, look for structure, pattern recognition, aggregation, and organization at scale. Form filling. Document organization. Transcription plus summarization. Matching similar records across large datasets. These problems are unglamorous but enormous in volume and largely underserved.

Moore’s Law is on your side. The models that feel too limited today will evolve to become adequate in eighteen months. Building on cheap open-source inference means your margins improve as the technology does, without changing your product (which is the data stack and the network). And “huge” doesn’t mean huge—a single business school graduating class is enough to populate a meaningful census of what jobs actually lead where. The data stack doesn’t need to be large. It needs to be specific, trusted, and ahead of what anyone else has assembled.

This was a particularly long rant, thanks for hanging in. I started writing it for a friend six months ago (with many inputs from others), but it’s more true now than then.

16:21

[$] Python's two modules for random numbers [LWN.net]

Python's random and secrets modules both include utilities for obtaining random values, but only one of them is suitable for generating passwords and security tokens. For much of Python's history, random was used for passwords and tokens anyway, despite documentation that called it unsuitable for cryptography. In 2015, Python's core team debated whether to fix that misuse by making random secure by default. Instead, in 2016, Python 3.6 added a second module: secrets. The random module is still misused at times, so it is instructive to look into how the random-number modules should be used.

15:49

CodeSOD: A Random Article [The Daily WTF]

Many years ago, DJ got his start doing odd web development jobs for a low hourly rate. He was only 19 when he got started, and what he lacked in experience he made up for in being cheap to hire.

As I said, that was many years ago, and he has since learned a lot. But he still has some code from his very first "someone paid me for this" project. This particular function needed to pick a random bit of content from their database to display in the "right side" banner area. This is how DJ implemented it.

// Create an array of all the ID's used
$int = array();
$query = $sql->query("SELECT * FROM rightside");
while($row = $sql->objects('',$query)) {
    $int[ $row->id ] = $row->id;
    if ($row->id > $max) {
        $max = $row->id;
    }
}
                
// Find a random ID that has been used
$x = false;
while ($x == false) {
    $rand = rand(0,$max);
    foreach ($int as $thing) {
         if ($thing == $rand) {
 $x = true;
         }
    }
}

$query = $sql->query("SELECT * FROM rightside WHERE id = ".$rand);

We start by building an array. Then we query the database for all the content. We get all the rows and columns, butw e only are interested in one- the id. We create a sparse array, where the index of the item is the item's value. We also track the max.

Once we've got that, we start a loop. Inside that loop, we generate a random number, check if it's in our array by doing a foreach across the array, and if it is, we break the loop- we've found our random content. If it's not, we keep trying until we score a hit.

Finally, we construct our query with string concatenation and grab the content we want to display.

Now, as a true confession, there's an element of caveat emptor here; if you're hiring the kid from the local college and paying them a few bucks an hour, this is the kind of thing you get.

Is the code terrible? Yes, even by early-00s PHP standards. Is it really DJ's problem, though? No. I'd hope any of us would look back at the code we wrote when we were 19, and shudder. It means we've learned something in the interim.

For this confession, I say there's no need to atone. Hopefully everyone learned a lesson, especially the company trying to hire programmers on the cheap.

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14:49

OpenSSH 10.6 released [LWN.net]

Version 10.6 of OpenSSH has been released. The announcement notes that the OpenSSH team has been receiving a large number of AI-assisted security bug reports. "We very much welcome these reports, especially when combined with human triage, analysis, test-cases and particularly when accompanied by proposed fixes". As a result, the project expects to be making more frequent releases to get updates to users more quickly rather than batching the bug fixes until the next planned release.

Notable changes in this release include enabling the hybrid post-quantum ssh-mldsa44-ed25519 signature algorithm, addition of a -p option for sftp's lmkdir/mkdir commands, as well as disabling the LZ77 dictionary coder in ssh and sshd to mitigate side-channel leaks (which will result in reduced effectiveness of the Compression option). The scp -R option, which allows copies between two remote hosts, is being deprecated due to security risks; the option will be ignored in the future. See the announcement for full details of all changes and bug fixes.

Security updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gd, gimp, kernel, kernel-rt, libpcap, librabbitmq, mariadb-connector-c, osbuild-composer, ruby:2.5, and sudo), Debian (libmodule-cpants-analyse-perl, libpng1.6, libreoffice, roundcube, ruby-oauth2, and sabnzbdplus), Fedora (0install, alt-ergo, apron, brltty, chromium, coccinelle, cri-o1.36, emacs-common-tuareg, flocq, frama-c, freetennis, gappalib-coq, guestfs-tools, haxe, hevea, hivex, kernel, lem, libguestfs, libnbd, nbdkit, not-ocamlfind, ocaml, ocaml-afl-persistent, ocaml-alcotest, ocaml-astring, ocaml-atd, ocaml-augeas, ocaml-b0, ocaml-base, ocaml-base64, ocaml-benchmark, ocaml-bin-prot, ocaml-biniou, ocaml-bisect-ppx, ocaml-bos, ocaml-cairo, ocaml-calendar, ocaml-camlbz2, ocaml-camlidl, ocaml-camlimages, ocaml-camlp-streams, ocaml-camlp5, ocaml-camlp5-buildscripts, ocaml-camlpdf, ocaml-camomile, ocaml-capitalization, ocaml-cinaps, ocaml-cmdliner, ocaml-compiler-libs-janestreet, ocaml-cpdf, ocaml-cppo, ocaml-crowbar, ocaml-cryptokit, ocaml-csexp, ocaml-csv, ocaml-ctypes, ocaml-cudf, ocaml-curl, ocaml-curses, ocaml-dbus, ocaml-domain-name, ocaml-dose3, ocaml-dune, ocaml-easy-format, ocaml-expat, ocaml-extlib, ocaml-facile, ocaml-fieldslib, ocaml-fileutils, ocaml-findlib, ocaml-fmt, ocaml-fpath, ocaml-gen, ocaml-gettext, ocaml-graphics, ocaml-gsl, ocaml-integers, ocaml-intrinsics-kernel, ocaml-jane-street-headers, ocaml-jsonm, ocaml-jst-config, ocaml-lablgl, ocaml-lablgtk, ocaml-lablgtk3, ocaml-labltk, ocaml-lacaml, ocaml-lambda-term, ocaml-libvirt, ocaml-linenoise, ocaml-logs, ocaml-luv, ocaml-lwt, ocaml-mccs, ocaml-mdx, ocaml-menhir, ocaml-merlin, ocaml-mew, ocaml-mew-vi, ocaml-mlgmpidl, ocaml-mlmpfr, ocaml-monolith, ocaml-mtime, ocaml-mysql, ocaml-num, ocaml-obuild, ocaml-ocamlbuild, ocaml-ocamlgraph, ocaml-ocamlnet, ocaml-ocp-indent, ocaml-ocplib-endian, ocaml-ocplib-simplex, ocaml-omake, ocaml-omd, ocaml-opam-0install-cudf, ocaml-opam-file-format, ocaml-ounit, ocaml-parmap, ocaml-parsexp, ocaml-patch, ocaml-pcre2, ocaml-perl4caml, ocaml-postgresql, ocaml-pp, ocaml-pprint, ocaml-ppx-assert, ocaml-ppx-base, ocaml-ppx-bench, ocaml-ppx-bin-prot, ocaml-ppx-cold, ocaml-ppx-compare, ocaml-ppx-custom-printf, ocaml-ppx-derivers, ocaml-ppx-deriving, ocaml-ppx-deriving-yaml, ocaml-ppx-deriving-yojson, ocaml-ppx-enumerate, ocaml-ppx-expect, ocaml-ppx-fields-conv, ocaml-ppx-globalize, ocaml-ppx-hash, ocaml-ppx-here, ocaml-ppx-inline-test, ocaml-ppx-let, ocaml-ppx-optcomp, ocaml-ppx-sexp-conv, ocaml-ppx-stable-witness, ocaml-ppx-variants-conv, ocaml-ppxlib, ocaml-ppxlib-jane, ocaml-psmt2-frontend, ocaml-ptmap, ocaml-pyml, ocaml-qcheck, ocaml-qtest, ocaml-re, ocaml-react, ocaml-res, ocaml-result, ocaml-rresult, ocaml-SDL, ocaml-sedlex, ocaml-sexplib, ocaml-sexplib0, ocaml-sha, ocaml-spdx-licenses, ocaml-sqlite, ocaml-ssl, ocaml-stdcompat, ocaml-stdio, ocaml-stdlib-random, ocaml-store, ocaml-swhid-core, ocaml-testo, ocaml-time-now, ocaml-topkg, ocaml-trie, ocaml-unionfind, ocaml-uucd, ocaml-uucp, ocaml-uunf, ocaml-uuseg, ocaml-uutf, ocaml-variantslib, ocaml-version, ocaml-xml-light, ocaml-xmlm, ocaml-xmlrpc-light, ocaml-yaml, ocaml-yamlx, ocaml-yojson, ocaml-zarith, ocaml-zed, ocaml-zip, ocaml-zmq, ocamlify, ocamlmod, opam, perl-DBI, planets, plplot, prooftree, python3.12, rocq, rocq-stdlib, supermin, unison, utop, virt-top, virt-v2v, why3, xen, z3, and zenon), Oracle (bind, expat, gawk, gdb, ghostscript, gimp, gvfs, kernel, libpcap, libvirt, mod_auth_openidc, openssh, rsync, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (vim), Slackware (cups), SUSE (apache-sshd, binutils, cups, docker-stable, java-11-openjdk, libraw-devel, libX11, pcre2, perl-DBI, python-msgpack, python312, python313-tokenizers, rpcbind, rpm, rubygem-rails-html-sanitizer, squid, sssd, terraform-provider-susepubliccloud, valkey, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (aodh, watcher, edk2, libreoffice, libxmltok, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, rabbitmq-server, and unbound).

[$] Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package [LWN.net]

Chromium, the open-source upstream project for Google's Chrome web browser, is the browser of choice for many Linux users. It has also gained a reputation as being difficult for Linux distributions to package and build: Chromium has a complex build system, the project bundles many of its dependencies, and it has frequent releases. All of that, plus user complaints, has led the maintainers of the Gentoo Chromium package to give up on trying to maintain the package.

14:14

Radar Trends to Watch: October 2026 [Radar]

In addition to the nearly constant stream of model releases, in September we’ve seen price drops, new kinds of models, proofs of long-standing problems in mathematics, and continued investigations into models escaping their sandboxes. (Axios reports investigations into over 10,000 incidents.) AI has infinite patience and is fundamentally probabilistic. Given a difficult or impossible task and an unlimited token budget, an agent will eventually attempt to solve the problem in ways that you don’t expect, and may not want. It’s easy (and correct) to blame inadequate security procedures at the frontier AI labs, but AI adopters must be careful not to make the same mistakes. The humans using AI need to be accountable for what their agents do.

AI Models

Model choice is starting to hinge on price and specialization as much as raw benchmark leadership. Alongside general chat models, there are now decision models that never chat, spatial models built for robot planning and camera control, forecasting models sized for a single task, and cybersecurity-specialized models kept behind an invite-only program. Specialization leads to greater efficiency and lower costs, at least in the short term. In the long term, specialized models may succumb to the “bitter lesson.”

Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5.5, which it claims has performance similar to Fable 5.1, and hence similar restrictions. It’s faster and requires fewer resources to run. Anthropic has dropped prices 20% for input and output tokens and 60% for cached reads. Not to be outdone, OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and Luna, with 50% price reductions.
Anthropic has also announced Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1. The most significant change appears to be a 75% price reduction for cache reads, which might translate into significant savings for long-running jobs; Anthropic estimates 25%. Mythos is only available to trusted partners. Simon Willison used Fable 5.1 to animate his pelican-riding-a-bicycle pseudobenchmark.
Anthropic released Sonnet 5.5 with claims that it’s 30% faster and 30% less expensive for most work. The new model has security limitations similar to those applied to Opus and Fable; it routes to Sonnet 5 if it’s asked to do anything out of bounds.
And finally, as September closes, Anthropic announces a marketplace for Claude plugins and connectors. At its launch, Claude Marketplace had over 2,000 items.
OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, with claims that the company has achieved AGI (artificial general intelligence). Astra’s excellent benchmark scores appear to depend on the use of an unreleased harness. OpenAI has also released GPT-6.1 Sol, with per-token price reductions and claims that it is close to GPT-6 Astra in capabilities
OpenAI has solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, a mathematical problem in fluid mechanics. This development raises an ethical question: Did OpenAI train its system on the work of two mathematicians who were close to solving the problem themselves? It also raises practical questions about the future of mathematics. Decorated mathematician Terence Tao asks whether “the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion.” An advisory group has been formed to help OpenAI make decisions about releasing mathematical results.
Google has released Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS. Voice options aren’t limited to a prebuilt library. These models have APIs that allow developers to describe the voice that they want or upload a sample. These custom voices are then assigned an ID so they can be reused.
Google has announced Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. These models are designed for live, near-real-time conversation. They can process video input. Live Extended Thinking can reason and speak at the same time.
Google has released Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash Cyber. Flash appears to be similar to frontier models on most benchmarks, with Computer Use being the biggest exception. Flash Cyber is specialized for vulnerability detection and mitigation and is only available to defenders in the Fairwind Program.
Google has also released TimesFM-3, a small specialized model for multivariate time series forecasting. The model weights are available on Hugging Face with a license that only allows for noncommercial use. (Source code is available under the Apache open source license.)
Xiaomi released MiMo-V2.6, its latest large language model. It’s fully open sourced, and based on benchmark results, Xiaomi claims that MiMo is the strongest open model to date. What’s more interesting is the claim that MiMo only cost $3.5 million to train.
TypeSafe’s new decision model, Jev, is unlike anything else we’ve seen. It doesn’t chat; its output is always strictly typed and accompanied by probabilities that estimate correctness. It’s much faster and less expensive than other leading models. It isn’t open source, but there are already many open source clones.
Ollaya is similar to Ollama, but for running decision open models like Laya (a clone of Jev) locally.
World Labs has released Atlas, a model for “spatial intelligence.” It uses text, images, video, and 3D data to perform tasks like planning a robot’s movements or changing the camera position in a photograph.
The rumors that NVIDIA would buy Hugging Face are true. NVIDIA is hoping for a proliferation of models that will run on its hardware, and the company promises that Hugging Face will remain a neutral platform, without favoring one model over another.

Software development

Agents are starting to delegate to, and coordinate with, other agents rather than working solo. Claude Code can break a task apart and hand pieces to other Claude Code instances, Muse Code lets sessions message each other, and Google’s AX orchestrator exists purely to wire up sandboxes and control communications for swarms of agents doing a task together. That shift is pushing developers to rethink what a source repository needs to record, and to start asking how much all this delegation costs.

Now that Jev has caught everyone’s attention, what can you build with it? Jevmem is a memory manager that hooks into Claude Code and prunes the context at every conversational turn.
AX is a new agent orchestrator from Google. It isn’t an agent; it’s intended to coordinate many agents to complete a task. It creates sandboxes, wires up Git repos and other resources, and controls outbound communications.
The latest version of Claude Code can manage Claude projects, breaking a task into subcomponents and delegating the subtasks to other Claude Code instances. Another important change is the ability to read AGENTS.md if CLAUDE.md isn’t available.
Google’s CC agent is designed for families. Family members can share data with CC, which has its own user account. It could be used for filling out forms, synchronizing calendars, and other common tasks.
What will replace GitHub? There’s a growing consensus that we need different kinds of source repositories to deal with the agent-assisted software development. In addition to changes to code, it’s important to record the conversations between the developer and the agent, the architectural decisions, and many other artifacts that don’t make it into traditional source control.
Anthropic is merging its Claude Cowork and chat products. Anything users type in a chat session is seen by Cowork, and vice versa. Some sensitive information (health, politics, and gender) is excluded. The feature is on by default but can be disabled in settings, and memory isn’t shared with Claude Code. The company also released Claude Docs and Slides.
Claude Money is a new feature that will allow users to connect their bank accounts to Claude for analysis. The product appears to be similar to a product from OpenAI.
OpenAI’s Agents API is now in public beta. It allows compaction, session orchestration, and tool use, and it can be deployed in OpenAI’s sandbox, a cloud provider’s sandbox, or the developer’s hardware.
Meta has released Muse, its AI agent. Muse is a “personal agent” designed for tasks like shopping, filling in forms, and dealing with customer service. It has its own secure credential store, so data like passwords and credit card numbers are never sent offsite.
Some open source projects are shutting down external pull requests, which are largely AI-generated. In some cases, the developer team is using its own agents to create and manage PRs; some are using AI agents to triage external PRs.
Meta has launched Muse Code, another competitor to Claude Code. One important new feature is the ability to send messages to other Muse Code sessions, allowing agents to coordinate on complex problems.
AI providers appear to be moving toward outcome-based pricing, at least for major corporate customers. Rather than billing by token, customers are billed for completed tasks. That approach begs the question: When is a task completed?
Now that organizations are concerned with AI budgets, the question of how to evaluate the cost of different models and agents becomes important. What should platform teams measure?
ChatGPT Work was designed to compete with Claude Cowork, Microsoft Copilot Cowork, Muse Code, and other agents designed for noncoders. Simon Willison shows how Work goes beyond its competitors. It can perform tasks on the web for users, even logging in to websites without sending usernames and passwords to OpenAI; it can execute code with full internet access; it can build and deploy a web application. Whether these features are also risks is an open question.
Anthropic has given Claude Desktop access to a Chromium-based browser that’s built into Cowork, eliminating the need for a Chrome plugin when Claude needs to browse the web.
TimeLord is a short Python program that, given a string up to 1,000 characters long, produces a seed for Python’s pseudo-random number generator so that repeated calls reproduce the text. It’s a surprisingly simple hack, though not a statement about randomness or the quality of Python’s PRNG.

Security

OpenAI’s experiment that attacked Hugging Face is the gift that keeps giving, but the past month has had plenty of news about more conventional attacks, many aided by AI. Security has always been a game of whack-a-mole, in which vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited as fast as defenders can patch them. AI is an important tool for defenders, and it’s constantly improving, but it’s still behind attackers, especially given the limitations placed on frontier models and the unlimited persistence that attacking agents exhibit.

OpenAI has postponed the release of GPT-6.1 Astra because it failed its safety tests.
NVIDIA has announced its Open Agent Safety Platform. The reference implementation includes NVIDIA OpenShell, which has been enhanced with a policy prover, and NVIDIA Sentry, a service that runs on NVIDIA DPUs.
The Felony Bench lists known attacks by agents from the major AI labs against third parties. We don’t know if the Bench will be kept up-to-date, but tens of thousands of security incidents involving OpenAI and Anthropic are now being investigated.
Following through on Dario Amodei’s call to control the speed of frontier model development, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are creating a standards consortium for governing the process of AI development. Meta, xAI, Microsoft, and the Chinese labs are all notably absent.
Agents need their own identity. Unlike the long-term identities we’re used to, agents need a short-lived identity tied to a revocable certificate and that limits access to resources appropriate for the job. That’s not all of agent security, but it’s a table stakes.
Anthropic has published a lengthy report on the misuse of its systems by threat actors. Daniel Meissler has published a summary, digesting Anthropic’s report into 117 findings.
A malicious NPM malware package works by hiding malicious code in the package itself (indexed-btree) rather than simply attacking the install script. This technique makes it significantly harder to detect.
An attack against the RSA algorithm allows forging of signatures in some situations. The attack was invented in 2007; this is the first public implementation.
Fake CAPTCHA pages are being used to spread malware. Victims are frequently sent to those pages when they respond to a phish.
Hugging Face has volunteered to audit AI labs for safety and alignment with human values.
In an experiment designed to test AI alignment, DeepMind found that, out of 100 agents, 14% were willing to cheat, 25% were “whistleblowers” that reported cheating, and the remainder didn’t notice.
Threat actors are building frameworks for AI agent-enabled attacks. A human in the loop is no longer needed. Fully automated attackers don’t appear to be using zero-days yet; they’re relying on known vulnerabilities.
OpenAI autonomous AI agents were found communicating with each other via publicly accessible Wikis, possibly to collaborate on a benchmark.
OpenAI has stated that its unreleased Astra model has reached the “Critical” cybersecurity threshold, which means that it can find new vulnerabilities and run exploits against well-protected systems. Now that Astra is released, access to its cybersecurity capabilities has been limited.

Infrastructure and Operations

Individuals, corporations, and even nations all face a similar problem: keeping their infrastructure under control. At a minimum, control means keeping data on a laptop, corporate server, or data center; at the other end of the spectrum it means eliminating dependencies on software and services from another nation. Any organization working through an AI transformation has to evaluate its entire stack: What do they need to control, and what can they safely delegate to others?

DAWO is a community that’s building an open source “workspace” to support digital sovereignty for the Dutch government. The stack will include AI, an operating system based on NixOS, cloud services, and collaboration tools.
Cohere now offers a confidential computing platform for artificial intelligence. The company claims that customer data is never visible to Cohere itself or any cloud providers that are in use; data is processed on GPUs whose memory is encrypted and isolated.
Perplexity has announced Hybrid Compute, a feature that allows it to run models and use files and tools directly on a user’s Mac. The company claims that sensitive data will never leave the user’s computer.

Hardware

It’s too easy to view consumer devices as innocuous things that sit around and do their job silently. Recent devices include cameras, microphones, and even EEG sensors that are constantly collecting data. Where is that data sent, how is it used, and who might have access to it? These questions need to be asked more often.

LG Smart Televisions have been found to record conversations and other audio, even while turned off. The conversations are sent back to LG. If the set is disconnected from the network, it will attempt to find open WiFi access points to deliver its data.
In part because of backlash against Meta’s camera-enabled glasses and their abuse, its AI glasses now come with or without a camera, and can be used as hearing aids. Well-documented abuse aside, virtual reality will only succeed if there are fashionable, easily wearable products.
Headphones, earbuds, and other devices equipped with EEG sensors are appearing on the market. They’re advertised for monitoring fatigue, monitoring sleep, and similar applications. It’s time to ask what happens at the interface between neurology and AI.
Microduck is a small bipedal AI-driven robot. It’s trained in simulation with open source software, and the model that results can be shared on Hugging Face. It’s affordable and is available for preorder now, shipping by Christmas.

Web

Cloudflare now supports HTTP Vary, which allows servers to serve different kinds of files at the same URL. This is the “ugliest part” of the HTTP standard. It makes caching very difficult, and it probably should be avoided.
WebMCP is a proposed standard that gives websites a small API to register tools that agents can discover and call. It was developed by Google and Microsoft.
A new Twitter? Operation Bluebird is relaunching Twitter, the service bought by Elon Musk and renamed X.

Biology

Anthropic has built a biology lab for experimenting with AI-enabled drug development. Claude assisted in the discovery of an enzyme that might be able to perform CRISPR-like gene editing.
To improve its training data for biological applications, the OpenAI Foundation (OpenAI’s nonprofit parent organization) is buying data from failed biotech companies.
Google has released AlphaGenome Atlas, a database of every possible single letter change to human DNA, and what that change will do.

14:07

Pluralistic: Swapping money for expertise (06 Oct 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

Swapping money for expertise: Money can't buy me love.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: "Tempo"; Yahoo censors MEP's torture debate video; Scotland's money-laundry; A textbook scam; DOS the IRS then charge for access; Just trying to make a buck.
Upcoming appearances: Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

Swapping money for expertise (permalink)

Since the mid-1950s, we have changed the thing that "AI" refers to every 5-10 years. The current thing we're calling "AI" is about a decade old, and all this label-switching leads to a lack of clarity as to what (this) "AI" is. Unless you know that, you can't understand AI's technical capabilities, limitations, and (most of all) its political economy.

The thing we now call "AI" is a lineal descendant of the thing we were calling "AI" immediately before to the current "AI" emerged: that preceding AI is regular-degular "machine learning" (another flexible term, alas!). That slightly older AI was very similar to the current "AI", using comparable statistical techniques to analyze inputs and produce outputs. For example, the previous "AI" created the social media algorithms that have been the subject of so much discussion for 15+ years.

The difference is that this older AI was grounded in explicit, causal software models of the world. In the previous "AI" iteration, applying machine learning to playing chess required that a programmer first create a software model of a chess game, describing (in code) a chessboard, chess pieces, and the rules of chess. Then, the programmer fed a bunch of training data about chess games that had been played before to an "AI" system that analyzed their statistical relations and assayed chess moves.

The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply "AI" to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing works before they can incorporate it into an "AI" system. Lots of programmers know how to play chess, but far fewer understand the human pancreas, planetary weather systems, or patterns of mineral deposition in the Earth's crust.

For programmers to apply machine learning to these domains, they need to collaborate with experts who do understand them, who furthermore expect to be paid for this work. The need for expert input into this kind of "AI" represents a significant increase in the wage-bill paid by the programmer's employer: it means they have to pay for programmers and experts.

Even worse: this kind of "AI" can't be applied to systems we don't understand. We can observe far more causal relationships – instances in which A reliably causes B – in the universe than we can explain. There are lots of examples of us operationalizing these observations without understanding them. If you get sick today, your doctor might well prescribe one of the many medicines whose method of action is either incompletely understood or not understood at all. We know that molecule A reliably treats pathology B, but not why, and while that why is the subject of ongoing research, it's not necessary that the why be known before the molecule can be given to ailing patients.

But these mysterious phenomena are off-limits to "symbolic AI" (the previously ascendant kind of "AI," which was supplanted by today's "AI"). That kind of AI only really performs when it can operate over a model describing the theory of why A causes B (and not just the fact that A causes B for reasons unknown).

That's where the current kind of "AI" comes in. The major differentiator between the current "AI" and its immediate predecessor is that the current "AI" dispenses with models of reality. It is (in the jargon of the "Big Data" bubble that led to it) "theory-free."

In "theory-free AI," a programmer does not create a software model of reality and then ask a machine-learning system to use statistical insights from its training data to guess at how to operate over that model. Rather, the programmer shovels vastly more training data into the AI's inbox and uses titanic amounts of computing power to analyze that data and find statistical relationships without trying to explain them.

In other words, the current, "theory-free AI" finds all the instances in which A seems to cause B, but has no internal representation of why A causes B. This is true even when we know why A causes B! Purely theory-free chess programs don't operate with any conception of a board or pieces or rules – rather, they make guesses ("inferences" in AI-speak) about which chess move will be optimal based on vast, multi-dimensional arrays constructed by analyzing the statistical relationships among every chess move in their training data.

This yields a surprisingly good game of chess…until it doesn't. Because a theory-free statistical chess program doesn't "know" what a chessboard or a chess piece is and has no programmatic representation of the rules of chess, it will periodically move one of its pieces onto a square that is already occupied by another of its pieces.

When theory-free AI does this with language or image generation, we call it an "hallucination," but this is an extremely misleading metaphor. A biological "hallucination" involves some kind of misfire in your cognitive and/or sensory systems, often arising from chemical imbalances, intoxication, or neurological injury. When a theory-free AI puts a chess piece on a square where it already has a chess piece, that's because it's just extruding statistically founded guesses without any model or conception of what "chess" is. It's a feature, not a bug.

This is a very expensive way to make guesses! As far back as the 1950s, we were able to run conventional chess programs on computers built from vacuum tubes and electromechanical switches and these programs could play a valid game of chess without ever moving a chess piece to a square that one of its pieces already occupied. Modern theory-free AI that cannot manage this feat consumes heptillions of times more computing power.

That said, there's another case for theory-free AI: applying machine learning techniques to causal relationships we can observe but not explain. Remember, there are far more of these (as yet) unexplained causal relationships than there are perfectly understood ones. Theory-free AI can operate on these unexplained, observed phenomena in ways that the preceding (symbolic) AI can't. As anyone who's ever been successfully treated with a molecule whose method of action is partially or fully mysterious can attest, there's plenty of reasons to want to extract and operationalize these statistical relationships, even if we don't understand them.

The fact that theory-free AI can play chess but sometimes makes these weird errors makes it seem like a party-trick, but when you fold in the ability to operate on the (as yet) unexplained, you can see why people got interested in this about a decade ago.

What's more, the first bottleneck – the chess bottleneck – is most easily bypassed by adding the symbolic model back into the theory-free chess system. Today's "coding assistants" are hybridized in this way: they often integrate code interpreters or compilers that actually "know" what a computer program is and can head off many of these failure modes.

The introduction of these symbolic systems to theory-free systems is completely rational, and yet it represents an admission of a key limitation that theory-free AI cannot overcome. That limitation is both a technical fact, but even more importantly, it's a fact about theory-free AI's political economy: about the limitations of trading off expertise for money.

Because whatever else theory-free inference is, it is a way to swap the bottleneck of "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we need to find an expert who can explain how that thing works"; for a different bottleneck: "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we must spend an enormous amount of money on computing power to find statistical relationships between how things work."

Both money and expertise are scarce, but they are unevenly distributed. Expertise is almost entirely in the hands of people who aren't wealthy. However much money a billionaire has, they still have to hire people who have the "how to clean a toilet" or the "how to find seams of gold in quartz deposits" expertise. When that expertise is locally scarce (if there's only one person in town who know how to clean your toilet) or universally scarce (there's only one expert who can tell you which of your landholdings are likely to hold seams of gold) those experts have something that billionaires can't abide: power.

Our entire society is organized around converting money into power. Sometimes, that is overt, as when the wealthy can indenture or enslave a worker. Sometimes it is more indirect, as when the wealthy can enlist the state to limit union rights and enforce noncompete clauses in labor contracts. Sometimes it's so systemic as to be unremarkable and largely invisible, like the fact that the wealthy never have to work if they don't want to, but everyone else – no matter what expertise they hold – must work, usually for a wealthy person, lest they end up starving and homeless, with untreated medical conditions and no way to provide for their families.

Whenever a worker can say "no" to their boss, it's a sign that this system has broken down. This is where expertise comes in: a worker who has very scarce, in-demand expertise can say no to their boss all day long, because there are ten other bosses at the factory gates who'd like to offer them a job. This was the situation for many years among Silicon Valley engineers, who added an average of $1m/year to their bosses' turnover, and whose supply was very short of the demand for their rare expertise.

These engineers enjoyed all kinds of power. Not just power over their working conditions (free massages and kombucha and day care and dry cleaning), but also power over the company's products. This power crested in the late 2010s, when Google employees walked out en masse and forced the company to release them from binding arbitration waivers in their contracts, to crack down on sexual predators in the executive ranks, and to back out of billions of dollars in lethal drone projects for the Pentagon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts

The promise of theory-free inference isn't just about reducing the wage-bill associated with programmers: even more, it's about reducing their power. It's about removing their power to hold bosses to account for sexual assault and the power to withhold their labor from lethal military projects. In short, the power to thwart billionaires' desires.

AI is the money-losingest enterprise the human race has ever embarked upon. More than a trillion dollars has been spent this year to make a mere $50b in revenue. The technical excitement over AI's capabilities – from chess to gold-mining to treating pancreatic cancer – cannot be separated from the political excitement that billionaires (short on expertise, flush with cash) experience at the thought of swapping money for expertise and sidelining the only people in the world who can thwart their goals.

The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.

In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.

This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth.

This is even true when theory-free methods are applied to causal phenomena that we can observe without explaining. Sure, a pharma exec like Martin Shkreli or Arthur Sackler can command the production and sale of a molecule whose method of action isn't known but whose therapeutic value has been demonstrated. But to improve on that molecule, they must pay research scientists to study and unravel the method of action. Replace those experts with theory-free inference, and finance can emerge triumphant in the only forum in which it is routinely vanquished.

This is the political economy of theory-free AI. Without finance's infinite hostility to expertise, there would have been far less capital for theory-free AI. Experts who wanted to use theory-free AI to help them unravel and operationalize the causal universe could not have laid hands of the bales of $100 bills the industry is now shoveling into its money-furnaces at a rate never seen in human history.

Which is not to say that experts can't make good use of theory-free AI. Indeed, we frequently hear from skilled workers who are using "AI" to improve the quality of their outputs:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

In automation parlance, these workers are "centaurs": workers who enlist technology to serve their needs. The centaur metaphor has the worker taking the role of the top half of the mythical man/horse, the half in which the judgment and decision-making takes place; while the bottom (horsey) half is given to the machine, providing strength, speed and stamina, but only at the direction of the human mind.

The unimaginable sums that oligarchs have committed to AI are mobilized in service to creating reverse centaurs: machines that enlist humans to serve them. If theory-free inference can substitute for expertise, then the humans the machines require to accomplish those tasks that elude computers will not have the power to set the pace of their work, insist upon humane working conditions, or reject work on unethical projects:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

The joke's on the oligarchy, though. Because theory-free inference doesn't know about chessboards, chess pieces or the rules of chess, it can't be prevented from sometimes putting a chess piece on a square that's already occupied by one of its pieces. The "hallucinations" are intrinsic to and inextricable from theory-free inference, which means that the outputs of an "AI" can only be trusted if they can be evaluated by an expert, whose working tempo must be carefully modulated lest they fall prey to "automation blindness" (rapidly, repeatedly clicking "OK" until you lose the ability to spot mistakes):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

Theory-free inference is technically and philosophically exciting: in their quest for a way to neutralize expertise with money, oligarchs inadvertently built a series of powerful scientific instruments that revealed a heretofore unsuspected degree of statistical regularity in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

But the remaining, stubbornly textured and rough edges of reality are where all the value is. The things we already understand about reality are, by definition, yesterday's news, and that's all a statistical model can do: project the past into the future. But everything exciting in the future is stuff we don't understand yet. The surprising functionality of theory-free AI is itself an example of this. The most interesting and valuable thing about theory-free AI isn't the things it can do, it's the systematic discovery and mapping of the statistically regular parts of reality, whose inverse provides a map of the irregular, surprising, poorly understood (and thus exciting and promising) phenomena in our universe.

Tomorrow's breakthroughs and fortunes lie not in merely operationalizing these causal relationships: they lie in understanding them. The point of theory-free inference is to give us the tools to replace that theory-freeness with testable, validated understanding.

Hey look at this (permalink)

How the Courts Became a Safe Haven for Corporations https://prospect.org/2026/10/06/how-courts-became-safe-haven-for-corporations/
Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have https://deadparrotbbs.com/why-plain-text-is-still-one-of-the-best-technologies-we-have/
Exclusive: How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t https://www.science.org/content/article/how-did-rosalind-franklin-miss-helix-her-iconic-dna-image-she-didn-t
Voting only gets you so far https://www.garbageday.email/p/voting-only-gets-you-so-far
Career day https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/10/5/800105682/cartoon/career-day/

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Tempo: transformative, difficult look at advanced decision-making theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/07/tempo-transformative-difficult-look-at-advanced-decision-making-theory/

#10yrsago Internet shutdowns cost the world at least $2.4 billion last year https://www.brookings.edu/articles/internet-shutdowns-cost-countries-2-4-billion-last-year/

#10yrsago Youtube took down MEP’s videos about torture debate https://web.archive.org/web/20160701000000*/https://marietjeschaake.eu/en/when-youtube-took-down-my-video

#10yrsago Yahoo didn’t install an NSA email scanner, it was a “buggy” NSA “rootkit” https://web.archive.org/web/20161007140143/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool

#10yrsago The FCC helped create the Stingray problem, now it needs to fix it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/fcc-created-stingray-problem-now-it-needs-fix-it

#5yrsago Scottish Limited Partnerships are still laundering criminal millions https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#if-its-not-scottish

#5yrsago "Inclusive Access" allows textbook monopolists to permanently consolidate their gains https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#textbook-abuses

#5yrsago DoS a federal agency, then charge for access https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

#1yrago They're just trying to earn a buck https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Virtual: How to govern technology in a multipolar digital world (Connecting Current), Oct 6
https://connectingcurrent.tech/how-to-govern-technology-a-multipolar-digital-world/
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow
Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
https://slowtechsummit.com/
Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/
Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc
Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (22395 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

12:35

Possible Vulnerability in Apple’s Automatic Reboot [Schneier on Security]

404Media is reporting (alternate link) that a cyber-weapons arms manufacturer is exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to bypass its automatic reboot security feature. This is the feature that automatically puts an iPhone into a more secure state if it hasn’t been used for 72 hours.

The new technology to get around inactivity reboot was developed by Magnet Forensics, the company behind GrayKey, a popular tool sold to law enforcement agencies that allows them to unlock and access data stored in iPhones and Android smartphones. Magnet has developed a new device called GrayKey Preserve and a feature for its regular GrayKey devices called Evidence Preservation Mode, according to the video.

“This is an absolute game changer for iOS forensics and a function that I wish we had years ago,” a Magnet employee says in the leaked video, specifically mentioning that the solution is targeted at the iPhone’s inactivity reboot feature and the data it makes unavailable. GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode are also designed to combat another iPhone feature that automatically deletes certain data - such as cached locations, and recently deleted photos and iMessages - after a certain number of days. “We’re gonna be able to preserve that data for an infinite amount of time.”

Presumably, now that Apple engineers know that this flaw exists they can find and fix it. AI turns out to be really good at this sort of thing.

Another news article.

10:21

Irregular Webcomic! #3448 [Irregular Webcomic!]

Irregular Webcomic! #3448

10:14

Lobby expertise [Seth's Blog]

Someone who has seen a lot of movies but has never made one has a certain kind of knowledge. The same is true for clients, patients and students. They haven’t solved a problem, healed a patient or taught a class, but they’ve seen it done.

They might have something helpful to add. Or they might not.

PS thanks to James Hunt for creating and maintaining THIS IS BROKEN, a directory of the 491 books I’ve recommended on this blog over the years.

The site inspired my podcast page as well.

09:35

Russell Coker: A Power Case for a FOSS Phone [Planet Debian]

The Problem

I want to use a FOSS phone running Debian as my daily driver and not use a non-free OS on my phone. GrapheneOS [1] is a FOSS rebuild of Android, it’s a great project and I commend them for what they are doing. But I want a system where I have access to all the bits and where I can ssh in to it and manage it in the same way as all other Linux systems. Android is free software but it’s a closed design and the phones are expected to be appliances not full peers on the network. The Android native terminal emulator (AKA Linux development environment) is a nice feature, a VM with a default of 1GB of RAM but it’s still separate from the main OS.

KDE Connect [2] is a system for KDE talking to phones, it is a great project and allows convenient interaction between a Linux PC and a phone. But in addition to that I’d like the option to ssh to my phone to send an SMS or have one sent from a cron job. I blogged about using the basic functions of Kdeconnect from the command-line [3].

I have had ongoing issues with the battery not lasting long enough on the PinePhonePro (PPP) and the Librem 5 (L5) which makes them unusable for my purposes. For a phone running Droidian I can have an open ssh session (with keep-alive packets) running overnight on Wifi without any problems while for the PPP or L5 an hour of reading an ebook (the least demanding use of a phone) will use most of the battery.

I sent my FuriPhone back for warranty repair and it’s been almost a month with no follow up, so I need to have another option.

The Aim

The aim of this post is to develop a rough design for a battery case for either a L5 or a PPP, I have both phones and they are both capable of doing what I want apart from battery life. Also designing a case that basically works for both phones and has two variations of the CAD file for 3D printing is good to allow collaboration with people who use either phone. Protecting the phone from damage when dropped is also a core feature.

I investigated commercial options. There are some reports of cases for other phones working, someone reported a PPP working well with a battery case for a Samsung S20 Ultra. The OtterBox uniVERSE Case for Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro is reported to fit the PPP so probably battery cases for the XCover Pro will also work. There are also universal power cases which have spring clips to fit a wide range of phone sizes, but they are much larger than other options and probably increase the risk of damage if the phone is dropped.

At this stage I’m planning out the rough specs of a case that can be 3D printed to protect a phone while being easy to change the cells. The process of changing cells should be quick, easy, and not risk breaking anything. The hardware required should be affordable ($100AU plus some 3D printing seems reasonable) and should not require significant skills to assemble. After recent experiments with Thinkpad repair I’ve determined that I am not good at electronics by today’s standards so I plan to avoid anything difficult in that regard.

Battery Options

There are phone cases with batteries built in for the more common phones. A quick search on AliExpress turned up options for recent Pixel phones. They aren’t as common as they used to be as Android phones and iPhones generally have good battery life nowadays. Of course there aren’t such options for less common phones like the L5 and PPP.

It is cheap and easy to buy a portable battery for charging phones, but that’s a separate bulky device and unless the connector is inside a protective case it leaves the phone vulnerable to catastrophic damage if dropped.

So can a suitable battery case be designed and 3D printed?

Cheap Batteries

According to Wikipedia the 18650 LiIon cell is the most commonly used LiIon battery, that is 18mm in diameter and 65mm in length. For a phone case thinner batteries would be more convenient but economies of scale make the 18650 cheap to buy new and commonly available on the second hand market. The current prices on AliExpress (in Australian dollars) are about $8 per cell when buying 10 at a time. Most of the cells on AliExpress don’t have wires attached so they can be swapped in a carrier the way AA batteries are used, but the cells are symmetrical (no bump for positive) so the user has to take care of polarity. Chargers are around $22 for a 4 cell charger or $52 for a 12 cell charger.

I’ve seen prices as low as $1 per cell on the second hand market, I haven’t investigated the amount of usable capacity in such cells. Probably the prices for chargers I’ve found aren’t the best available but they are good enough to start the design. 10 cells and a 4 cell charger is about $100. That’s about 130Wh while a 74Wh USB-C battery pack costs about $50. So the price per Wh is OK.

I have read about an attempt to do this for the L5 with two of the batteries designed for the L5 in a case attached to it, so you have 3*L5 batteries. It’s an interesting approach but those batteries have poor value for money when compared to 18650 ($29US for 4500mAh compared to $8 for 3500mAh) and they also don’t ship them outside the US at this time. The 18650 batteries are available everywhere cheaply and have multiple uses.

How They Fit

According to my measurements the PPP is 76mm wide and the L5 is 73mm wide. That’s wide enough for 3*18mm or 4*18mm cells side by side arranged parallel to the long side of the phone or one 65mm long cell going across the phone with the necessary spring and wires.

The L5 is about 151mm long and the PPP is about 5mm longer. So that means that for just the cells we could have 2 cells in a row in parallel to the long side of the phone giving a 2*3 or 2*4 array or we could have a row of 8 cells parallel to the short side of the phone.

A quick search for controllers for a battery of LiIon cells that outputs USB-PD turned up one of the smaller ones as 40*28mm, here is the AliExpress page [4]. So that means we could have a maximum of about 4 cells and the controller while leaving space for the camera. Looking at other similar items it seems that most of them take a large portion of the 73mm width available and take a bit less than 30mm height. The price range for DC-DC voltage converters ranges from about $3 to $20, the one I linked to is currently $8.

The mass of 18650 cells is around 45g so 4 of them would be about 180g before counting the weight of the case and electronics. A L5 weighs 262g and a PPP weighs 220g so 180g of battery will make a significant difference, not an impossible difference but holding a PPP while reading an ebook is already annoying. Maybe the case could be designed to be easier to hold, a loop of wool attached to the top could be used to suspend the phone from one finger while the rest of the hand just keeps it steady.

In a default configuration the L5 has a 4500mAh 3.8V battery and the PPP has a 3000mAh 3.8V battery. The 18650 cells have up to 4000mAh with 3500mAh being common. So 4 such cells could multiply the battery life of a PPP by a factor of 5 or a L5 by 4. That would not be enough to last for a whole day without charging so they need to be easy to swap.

A 3 cell battery seems like a good option, 135g of batteries so the project overall wouldn’t even double the weight of the phone with battery case. As it doesn’t seem possible to put in enough cells to last a day of reasonable use (running a web browser, checking email, reading wikipedia, and having some IM systems checking for notifications) there doesn’t seem to be a benefit in trying to stuff the maximum number of cells in. Going to 4 or 5 cells doesn’t provide much benefit over 3 while increasing the weight and making the design more difficult. The modules for DC Voltage conversion often have configuration for the number of cells to be used so it wouldn’t be difficult to print a new case and reconfigure the Voltage converter.

Design

A case needs to provide protection as well as hold the batteries. The lack of cases for the L5 and PPP is a problem even without the extra weight of a battery pack increasing the kinetic energy of falling phone. Ideally a drop from 1M on to concrete would not cause any damage to the phone, destruction of the case is OK as it would be 3D printed and can be rebuilt easily.

I think that a case where the phone slides in from the top would be best. To change cells one would slide the phone out and the cells would be immediately accessible with no divider between the phone and the cells. Sliding the phone in would hold the cells against the back of the case and as there is a gap of about 3mm on each side of the PPP between the display area and the edge of the phone there’s plenty of space for the case to wrap around it at the sides and bottom. At the top there would have to be some sort of plastic clip. The PPP only has buttons on the top right so the case can be snug on all sides apart from the top right. The L5 has switches at the top left and buttons at the top right so whatever clips on to the top would really need some strength to cover the fall flat on face case.

The USB C plug would need to be held in place well enough to allow the phone to easily slide on to it but also be weak enough that it would move if a drop forced the phone out of the case.

Thingiverse has a design for a L5 case [5] (with several derivatives) and a design for a PPP case [6]. Those cases could be used as starting points and then changed to store batteries and the voltage change circuit board. I have just learned that it’s possible to use rubberised material in a 3D printer which is apparently what those designs are for. If a case was printed with rubberised material the top could just stick in place after being pushed in.

Potential for Excessive Excitement

Having an exploding device in your pocket would be the exciting in a bad way. My initial idea was to have multiple 18650 cells in series. The problem is that if the cells have different capacity levels then one can run out before the rest and get to a deep discharge state which at a minimum causes damage to the cell.

One way of minimising risk is to have only a single cell in use at one time, here is a converter for a single cell to 5V [7]. It is possible to run multiple cells in parallel by simply wiring them together, but it’s recommended to make sure that the voltage difference between cells is less than 0.2V to avoid high current when connecting.

The arrangement of cells is often referred to as nS or nP to refer to n cells in series or parallel. Aliexpress has a range of 1S to 6S devices. Some of the 2S devices have a connector for the mid point which permits separate voltage monitoring for both cells but there doesn’t seem to be anything equivalent for 3S or more. They also don’t appear to have anything to specifically manage 2P or 3P arrangements at the moment (they had a 3P board on sale when I looked into this last year).

Conclusion

This is a bigger project than I expected when I first started investigating it. I’ve played with FreeCAD which seems OK but will take a lot of learning and practice. Then I need to do more investigation into the DC-DC converters to find one that works well and is unlikely to start a fire.

I will look into other phone options as well and keep chasing Furilabs people about my phone replacement.

08:49

WestPride Archives by Hien Pham [Oh Joy Sex Toy]

I am so grateful to folks like the WestPride Archives, especially in tumultuous times like these, for their work preserving human art and queer stories. If you’re able to, I would so highly recommend volunteering for similar efforts where you are, or going out to see exhibitions on your local queer history!Matt added Note! Love […]

06:28

If somebody tries to hot-patch an already-hot-patched function, how do they avoid conflicts? [The Old New Thing]

For the past few days, I did a quick survey of hot-patching mechanisms. But the hot-patch design accommodates only one hot-patcher. If somebody goes to hot-patch a function and finds that it’s already been hot-patched, what happens?

If somebody goes to hot-patch a function and finds that it’s already been hot-patched, then something has gone wrong.

The intended audience of hot-patching is Windows Update on systems that support hot-patching (as of this writing, Windows Server and more recently Windows 11 Enterprise, as far as I can tell). The idea is that when a Windows Update arrives, and the administrator has opted into hot-patching, and a file in the update is marked as “safe for hot-patching”,¹ then Windows Update will use the space reserved for hot-patching to replace the affected functions on the fly.

Since the only code authorized to use the hot-patch space is Windows Update, the system doesn’t have to deal with the case that the function has already been hot-patched by somebody else. There is no other code authorized to be somebody else!

But what if the function has been detoured or otherwise patched by somebody not authorized to do so?

My reading of the hot-patching code suggests that if the hot-patch code detects rogue patching, it declares the file to be not hot-patchable, and the system will have to reboot. (This tends to make customers unhappy.)

There is a race condition: The prescan may show that all the functions are safe to patch, but then somebody might patch a function after the prescan completes. In that case, the patcher will get halfway through and then discover the rogue-patched function, and now it’s kind of stuck. It can’t continue forward, and it can’t reliably roll back (because the rollback is probably also going to fail because the patch got overpatched). You’re stuck with a binary in memory that is half-patched, and who knows what’ll happen now.

An application that uses the hot-patching space is parking in a fire zone. Everything seems to be fine until the fire truck shows up, and then somebody’s house burns to the ground because the fire truck can’t get there.

¹ Not all changes are safe for hot-patching, For example, if it changes a data structure’s layout or invariants, it isn’t hot-patchable because any instances of the data structure that were created before the hot-patch will not be in a legal state after the hot-patch.

The post If somebody tries to hot-patch an already-hot-patched function, how do they avoid conflicts? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

06:21

Urgent: Require a report on Israel's violence towards Palestinians [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

US citizens: call on the Senate to require a report on Israel's violence towards Palestinians in the West Bank.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

Urgent: Solidarity with MS-Now, CNN and Politico [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

US citizens: affirm solidarity with MS-Now, CNN and Politico in suing the un-American president.

Urgent: Keep partisan loyalty tests out of federal hiring [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

US citizens: call on Congress to keep partisan loyalty tests out of federal hiring.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

Urgent: Call on Waymo to release safety data [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

US citizens: call on Waymo to release the safety data.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

China's censorship is suppressing mention of missing victims of flood [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

China's systematic censorship of dissent is suppressing mention of names of victims missing after the Himalayan flood disaster. Any recognition that there were more than 43 victims on the Chinese side of the river is erased.

Night-mayor Giuliani is demonizing Muslims [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Night-mayor Giuliani is demonizing Muslims, including Mamdani, by blowing antimuslimist smoke and pretending that that smoke proves there is a fire.

Problems with Supposed Intelligence "scribes" [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Professionals report problems with the Supposed Intelligence "scribes" that are being used to write patients' charts.

Tesla's new driverless taxicab [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Tesla's new driverless taxicab can be a real pain in the neck if it has a breakdown in the street. It lacks the controls to drive it normally, so you may have to turn its front wheels and push it. However, if things are in the wrong state, that operation could instead be dangerous.

There should be safety standards for driverless vehicles, and they should reject vehicles like this.

The safety standards should include safety for the passengers and passersby from being tracked or surveilled.

Census Bureau demographic reporting [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Magat officials are meddling with US Census Bureau demographic reporting, both overtly and quietly in the background. It seems that the purpose is to lend an appearance of substance to their insistence that many non-citizens vote in US elections. They cite that false claim as excuses to introduce repression that would discourage voting by people who lead marginalized lives and are therefore expected not to support magat initiatives that hurt the poor.

Effect of "algorithmic pricing" for food delivery workers [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Food delivery workers in the UK report that the net effect of "algorithmic pricing" was to significantly cut their rate of pay per order.

It appears that the figures were not adjusted for inflation. Adjusting them for this period of substantial inflation would show an even greater pay cut.

Algorithmic wage computation is the flip side of personalized pricing. The company that controls the algorithm has the advantage and can use it against workers and customers simultaneously. This should be illegal to use with either workers or customers (or both).

Making employees bid against each other (with whoever accepts the lowest wage being the "winner") should also be illegal.

Instagram shut down Canadian club's account [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

In 2026, Instagram shut down a Canadian club's account because it mocked the bully's hostility towards Canada.

Effect of rich people's grabbiness on Social Security [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Robert Reich explains how rich people's grabbiness has made the income for Social Security insufficient — so the natural fix for that particular problem is to make rich people pay more into Social Security.

Rich people's grabbiness is causing many other unjust consequences, and that fix won't fix the others. To make life livable overall for non-rich Americans would require transferring more to the non-rich. And acting against the root causes that enable the rich to get a bigger share of the wealth that work creates.

People of other countries deserve this too. Nowadays the US intervenes overtly to help rich people dominate other countries; that must cease.

Sanctions on Israel's illegal colonies in West Bank [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

The UK has stated it plans to put economic sanctions on Israel's illegal colonies in the West Bank. Foreign Secretary Milliband describes its attacks on Palestinian's in their homes as "ethnic cleansing" and the attackers as "terrorists".

The term "terrorists" clearly fits them. I dislike the term "ethnic cleansing" because it is clearly a euphemism coined by perpetrators to whitewash their crime by suggesting that the victims are mere dirt. But I have not found a good replacement term.

All Israel's colonies in Palestinian territory violate international law. Israel divides them into two categories: the ones Israel has officially authorized, and the ones it has not (though in practice it winks at them anyway). I am not sure whether "illegal" here covers all of these colonies or only the ones Israel has not officially authorized. The sanctions ought to cover both kinds of "settlements".

Interviews about Germany's right-wing hate party [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Interviews with supporters and condemners of Germany's right-wing hate party which got the most votes in a state election.

Decline in activities where people gather physically [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

On the effects, on society and politics, of the decline in activities where people gather physically, and the concomitant loss of places and opportunities to do that. With suggestions for reversing the decline.

Distorting economic reports [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

A former government minister under Modi has accused his government of distorting economic reports to present a false picture of growth.

Modern right-wing governments redirect increasing fractions of produced wealth from the non-rich to the rich. That disconnects overall economic growth from the well-being of most people, which generally decreases. So the growth figure Modi is accused of manipulating may actually not have much to do with prosperity.

Right-wing extremist party accuses Andrew Hastie of being a traitor [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Andrew Hastie, a leader in the Australian Liberal Party (a corporatocratic right-wing party) and former soldier in Afghanistan, testified against another former Australian soldier in Afghanistan who was being publicly rebuked for murdering civilians while he was there. For this, the right-wing extremist "One Nation" party accuses Hastie of being a traitor.

Right-wing extremists frequently use crimes against those they call "enemies" as tools for radicalization. Here they are using the murder of Afghanis as their tool. Anyone who condemns that murder, they attack.

Hastie responded by condemning the evil values of these right-wing extremists and refusing to tolerate atrocities by Australian soldiers.

If I were Australian, I would not support a plutocratist party overall. Plutocratist policies are driving the non-rich into penury. But I have to admire Hastie's adamant support for the laws of war.

The other soldier was not prosecuted for murder. Rather, he sued, for defamation, those who reported on the murders. He lost the case because the judge ruled that the evidence was sufficient to prove — by the weaker standards for defamation cases — that the accusations of murder were true and thus not defamatory.

Here is information about Hastie's testimony.

Susan Sarandon being rejected for acting roles [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Susan Sarandon says that she is being rejected for acting roles because of her support for Palestine.

Magats are undermining the honesty of the US Census Bureau [Richard Stallman's Political Notes]

Magats are undermining the honesty of the US Census Bureau, on which several aspects of elections depend.

This is like gerrymandering but going some steps beyond.

02:21

NYT Bestseller [QC RSS v2]

do not punch hannelore

00:14

Russell Coker: Kdeconnect DBUS [Planet Debian]

I’ve tested the DBUS interfaces for Kdeconnect (the system for connecting a KDE desktop to a phone or another computer). Unlike most DBUS interfaces it has a significant tree of interfaces so the busctl command to get the tree is important. Here’s the useful things I discovered:

# list basic interfaces for kdeconnect
qdbus6 org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon /modules/kdeconnect
# get tree of interfaces for kdeconnect
busctl --user tree org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon
# get list of devices
qdbus6 --literal org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon /modules/kdeconnect org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon.deviceNames
# list interfaces for a device (DEVID is a hex string from the above command)
qdbus6 org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon /modules/kdeconnect/devices/$DEVID
# get battery charge
qdbus6 org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon /modules/kdeconnect/devices/$DEVID/battery org.kde.kdeconnect.device.battery.charge

Sending an SMS apparently requires using the QVariantList type which is more pain than I wanted so I tried the kdeconnect-cli command. Here’s a quick summary of how to use it:

# list devices
kdeconnect-cli -l
# send a SMS
kdeconnect-cli -d $DEVID --send-sms "the message" --destination $NUMBER
# find device (ring)
kdeconnect-cli --ring -d $DEVID
# send a notification message
kdeconnect-cli --ping-msg "this is the message" -d $DEVID
# unlock and lock screen (only works on Debian devices for me not Android devices)
kdeconnect-cli --unlock -d $DEVID
kdeconnect-cli --lock -d $DEVID

There doesn’t seem to be support for making phone calls via kdeconnect which is a significant omission. It’s a very common situation to want to call a number that’s listed on a web site or in some other data source that’s easier to access on a PC than on a phone. The clipboard could be used but that’s needless pain.

Spectrum Allocation [xkcd.com]

Monday, 05 October

23:28

Page 6 is done.

Page 5 is done.

Page 4 is done.

Page 3 is done.

Page 2 is done.

Page 1 is done.

Microsoft claims it’s optimising Windows for 8GB of RAM [OSnews]

Speaking of Windows and performance, how about that RAM crisis? Microsoft is feeling the squeeze too, and is apparently doing work up and down the Windows stack to improve its memory consumption.

Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri has admitted that the rising cost of memory is pushing the company to make Windows 11 use less RAM. Microsoft is working on the Windows memory manager, memory compression, WinUI 3 and WebView2, and has made “memory optimization for 8GB and above” an official priority for the rest of 2026.
↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest

This might be the only positive consequence of the RAM crisis.

22:42

Windows’ legacy 8.3 filename support actually negatively affects performance [OSnews]

To this day, Windows retains full support for the old MS-DOS 8.3 filename limitation, and it does this by creating 8.3 aliases for files with longer names. Apparently, this has a measurable effect on performance, so naturally, people are going to turn it off to make their Windows installations perform better.

According to the user, this resulted in noticeably smoother scrolling in Tile view. They subsequently repeated the process on several folders they regularly use and reported that searching through files became much faster. The user also claimed that external hard drives became faster and that browsing an Android directory over USB or FTP behaved more like a regular Windows folder, including when copying large numbers of music files.
↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

You can disable this legacy feature in Windows per volume or globally, but Microsoft is warning users not to do so. Even in 2026, applications and registry entries may depend on 8.3 filenames being available, so removing them can lead to unexpected outcomes. It’s just one of those things you wouldn’t expect to still be around or have a measurable impact in the days of fast SSDs, but there’s enough credibly evidence out there to suggest that yes, it actually does negatively affect performance.

If you’re doing a lot of file operations in Windows, it might be worthwhile to do some testing of your own to see if you can speed things up. Or, you know, you can just not use a house of cards disguised as a serious operating system.

Apple changes Full Disk Access permission in macOS [OSnews]

Apple’s macOS has a Full Disk Access permission, designed to allow backup applications full access to, well, the disk, so they can perform their job properly. Apple posted a notice on its website that it’s going to further restrict this permission, because some applications were abusing this permission to gain access to users’ messages, emails, and so on, which it obviously isn’t intended for.

What kind of applications, you may ask?

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.
↫ Announcement from Apple

This was prompted by a story a few weeks ago, where Facebook’s Muse “AI” tool was apparently reading people’s private messages and other data, and even sent messages on users’ behalf, without informing its users. It’s incredibly naive to think Facebook software in 2026 would not do creepy things, so I’m honestly not at all surprised. It makes sense in Apple’s worldview to further restrict permissions in response, but I’m sure more experienced macOS users are not going to like this.

21:56

Meet the Jackalope! [Nina Paley]

Bovines meet Jackalope

Remember back in March I decided to make my dream bike a reality? On September 22 the prototype arrived:

1. The Jackalope

2. The Jackalope quick-folded

3. The Jackalope folded with seat removed

Look at that fold! Look at that double belt drive with jack shaft! She has a Rohloff internal hub, a no-longer-made RANS seat, and is made of titanium.

Thus far I’ve put 220 miles on her, including a full century yesterday. I have so much to say about this project I don’t know where to begin. Builder Davis Carver and I are already designing a Version 2 optimized for lightness and speed, because this one is heavy and “built like a tank.” Very comfortable though.

THE PLANS! Build your own! Share the results.

Carver says the plans are not proprietary, so anyone who wants to iterate on this is more than welcome! Improve it please, and share your changes!

The Jackalope’s original 175mm crank arms were way too long and interfered with the front wheel. So I found 160mm replacements which Sam the Mechanic swapped out for me. V2 will move the fork forward so this doesn’t happen again, although short crank arms are pretty sweet.

The jack shaft! Only wearing one belt here because the cap wasn’t fully tightened and it fell apart while I was testing. Whoops! So much to learn when getting to know a one-of-a-kind prototype. I put it all back together with Carver’s instructions, and later Sam tightened it down harder than I could.

The Jackalope originally came with a AD Carson seat, which was way too big for me. I replaced it with a RANS seat. Unfortunately RANS is no longer in business and such seats can only be found on used bikes, but not all can accommodate the clamp system on this bike.

I replaced the bolts that attach the seat struts to the support bars with thumb screws and wingnuts, so I can remove the seat after folding without tool. The round part of the plate in the middle is where the elastomer on the rear triangle hits.

Here are my sketches from March that started this off:

I hope to make some sort of crowdfunder to finance the next version, but I’m gonna get-r-done come hell or high water, because my Muse says so. I’ve been wondering why I haven’t been moved to make another movie or quilts or any much visual art lately. Now I know: She’s been saving me for this bike.

The post Meet the Jackalope! appeared first on Nina Paley.

Klassik brings KDE3’s look and feel to KDE Plasma 6 [OSnews]

The KDE project recently brought back its classic Oxygen and Air themes, but what if you prefer something… A little older?

A modern recreation of the classic KDE 3 desktop experience for KDE Plasma 6, built entirely using Qt 6 and Qt Quick, with full support for Wayland and fractional scaling.
↫ Klassik GitHub page

Neat.

21:14

Limited-Time Offer [Penny Arcade]

My brand has long been "Atheist Jerk-off," but wtf I love Catholicism now.

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) October 2, 2026

20:07

Pluralistic: Scrutinized (05 Oct 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

Scrutinized: Pervert glasses vs the authentic self.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: DRM-free in the UK; Maple-leaf roses; Italian Wikipedia shuts down; Vancouver's property speculator tax works; Ex-Soviet leftists launch "September"; "The Every"; Nielsen x Chinese internet; Get-a-cluevog; Cat EULA; Heart carafe; Millennials screwed; Apple's unlawful evil.
Upcoming appearances: Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Oxford, Montreal.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

Scrutinized (permalink)

We're repeatedly told that the killer app for pervert glasses – Meta's AI-enabled camera glasses and their imitators – is that they will remind you of someone's name and spare you the social awkwardness of not recognizing them.

I admit to finding this proposition very seductive. I'm mildly face-blind (I had two aunts I wasn't able to reliably tell apart until I was 12 or 13 and one of them changed her hair), and I meet a lot of people and often find myself incredibly embarrassed when I can't place someone that I know I'm acquainted with.

Actually, the emotion I feel when I don't recognize someone or can't place their name is worse than embarrassment: it's shame. I worry that my chronic inability to remember people's names/faces will make them feel like they're unimportant to me. And shame is such a shitty, gross emotion: it's the invasive thief of joy that shows up whenever things are bad for the purpose of making them worse.

If there were some way to confine pervert glasses to helping people remember names, I'd be all over them. But when it comes to actual, existing pervert-glasses, the main purpose is to covertly capture strangers and shame them. And when (not if) these pervert glasses get hooked up to facial recognition, they will become high-volume doxing factories that will reward the attention-hungry with viral fame.

We've built a society that offers infinite rewards to anyone who can put a name – and thus an identity – to anyone caught in public having an argument, picking their nose, slipping on ice, or eating with their mouth open. We're on the verge of democratizing only the worst part of celebrity: the pervasive hovering cameras that are always there to preserve and distribute your failures.

Last week on the 404 Media podcast, Joseph Cox spoke with Kashmir Hill about this, in an episode appropriately entitled "Meta's Pervert Glasses Are Going to End Privacy":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUFnQPtxJ9o

Hill wrote the definitive book on the modern history of facial recognition, Your Face Belongs To Us, which tells the story of Hoan Ton That, whose Clearview AI offers cops, millionaires and elites the power to instantly dox people based on billions of pictures:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

In the podcast, Cox and Hill discuss the surveillance nightmare this represents. ICE and cops are already using facial recognition at scale, though it should be noted that these dragnets are incredibly poor value for money, as the British Transport Police discovered after subjecting millions of travelers to facial recognition in train stations, without catching a single suspect:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/29/trial-live-facial-recognition-cameras-london-stations-false-positive

But partway through the discussion, Cox and Hill switch from discussing "traditional" surveillance of the sort that has metastasized in the 25 years since 9/11) to a form of surveillance that's very different: the "content-creator" surveillance that mixes always-on cameras with facial recognition to dox and shame strangers for everyday transgressions, mistakes and embarrassments.

While this is certainly a kind of surveillance, I think it's better to call it scrutiny. It's something worse than the sense of being watched: it's the sense of being judged. Inducing this feeling of being judged has long been a (sociopathic) desire of wealthy and powerful people. It's the foundation of Bentham's "panopticon," a prison where prisoners can never tell if they're being watched, which is meant to induce a continuous performance of virtue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Today, Bentham's heir is the odious Larry Ellison, the famously secretive billionaire, Trump crony and Oracle founder who goes to enormous lengths to prevent the public from finding out about his personal life. Ellison is also one of the most vocal proponents of mass surveillance. Larry Ellison has repeatedly called for the installation of ubiquitous, AI-backstopped surveillance for every (non-billionaire) person in the world, calling this "supervision":

Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/billionaire-constant-ai-surveillance

What Ellison's saying here is that most of us are fundamentally bad, and we need continuous scrutiny so that we are always haunted by the specter of judgment, which will keep us from yielding to our base selves.

In other words, for Ellison, our authentic selves are a problem to be solved. We refuse to behave in ways that make the world optimal for Ellison, so he will create a world of continuous scrutiny, judgment and punishment, and in that world, we will be so worried about being shamed that we will all suppress our authentic selves and don masks that are designed to Ellison's specifications.

Ellison is hardly unique in both treasuring his privacy while insisting that any private domain carved out by normal people will turn into a place where we indulge our most sinful impulses. Mark Zuckerberg long defended Facebook's "Real Names" policy by saying that anyone who presents different facets of themselves to different groups is "two-faced":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/

This is the same Mark Zuckerberg who bought two houses to either side of his place in San Francisco and expropriated vast tracts of land from their indigenous Hawai'an owners in order to create a privacy-preserving buffer zone around his own homes:

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-secretive-hawaii-compound-burial-ground/

And it's the same Zuckerberg who expects the ex-Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams to pay him $111m for revealing damning facts about how he runs his company:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

It's the same Zuckerberg who flipped out when his sister accidentally posted a family photo to her public Facebook feed and it spread around the internet:

https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/

And it's the same Zuckerberg who gave us pervert glasses (to opt out, just don't have a face).

Silicon Valley's most ardent privacy invaders are also the most ardent defenders of their own privacy. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt liked to say, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy

But when Cnet ran an article summarizing details of Schmidt's personal life that could be discovered by searching Google, he ordered a company-wide blacklist of Cnet reporters, which lasted for years:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/eric-schmidt-who-led-googles-transformation-into-a-tech-giant-has-left-the-company/

But Schmidt is an amateur at the game of "privacy for me, never for thee." The true master of the game is Peter Thiel, who secretly bankrolled a lawsuit against Gawker in order to destroy the news outlet in retaliation for outing him as gay (Thiel cofounded Palantir, one of the world's most prolific, shameless surveillance companies):

https://www.wired.com/story/ryan-holiday-conspiracy-peter-thiel-gawker-hulk-hogan/

It's tempting to see this all as mere hypocrisy, but I think it's something far weirder and more disturbing. These men understand completely that scrutiny is antithetical to living as your authentic self. They want to live as their authentic selves, and they want to stop us from living as our authentic selves.

A dive into the Epstein Files reveals the oligarchy's panic over #MeToo and the possibility that the private sins of the wealthy and powerful could become a matter of public knowledge. As Steve Bannon wrote to Epstein concerning #MeToo, "Make sure Woody sees this. Nobody safe":

https://www.theverge.com/tech/874721/epstein-thiel-musk-trump-metoo

Bannon promised Epstein that his culture war would set back #MeToo for a decade, and he is on the vanguard of the movement to silence rape and genocide survivors, and, of course, to force trans people out of public life. For the fascist international to live as their authentic self, it is necessary that we do not.

Scrutiny and shame are antithetical to authenticity, growth and happiness. That's true even when it's people we love subjecting us to a supervisory gaze. Ever notice how a roaring great time at a social gathering can go ice-cold in an instant, the minute someone decides to record the moment with their phone?

My worst moments as a parent – the ones that haunt me and shame me – are those moments when my young daughter was doing something that was right at the edge of her abilities, ferociously concentrating as she drew or played or read, and rather than give her the space to be vulnerable, to err in private and grow, I couldn't help but watch her. When she saw me watching her, the moment died and she moved on to something else.

Each of us needs a zone of imaginative and exertive autonomy, a place where we can screw up without being scrutinized and judged – let alone captured and publicized. Pervert glasses will supercharge the banal and destructive post-9/11 surveillance, sure – but more than that, they will be combined with facial recognition to dox and shame anyone and everyone who makes a public mistake.

Far from Larry Ellison's utopia of people on their "best behavior," this will be a world of inauthentic, stunted selves, a society of people who will never know the joy of finding out who we are and being those people.

Hey look at this (permalink)

WinZapp_Python https://github.com/gabrielhhaber/WinZapp_python/
The Last Days of the Danube Institute https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-last-days-of-the-danube-institute/
Let South Africans jailbreak their way to digital sovereignty https://techcentral.co.za/jailbreak-digital-sovereignty-copyright-amendment-bill/286879/
Mine My Phone https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/mine-my-phone
Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free https://nappy.co/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Nielsen will measure Chinese web-traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20011107063612/http://www.bday.net/oct05/p05-051.htm

#25yrsago Fluevog's crowdsourced "open source" design competition assigns all rights in perpetuity to the company https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/06/a-little-knowledge-is-a/

#20yrsago Cat with a EULA https://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/06/coming_soon_kitten_with_a_eula.html

#20yrsago HOWTO fight DRM in the UK https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/30-things-we-can-do-about-drm/

#20yrsago HOWTO fold roses from maple-leaves https://web.archive.org/web/20061010121159/http://haha.nu/creative/how-to-make-roses-from-maple-leaves/

#15yrsago Italy’s insane Internet law prompts removal of Italian Wikipedia https://cdt.org/insights/case-in-point-why-wikipedia-italy-would-rather-perish-than-publish/

#15yrsago Wine carafe shaped like human heart https://web.archive.org/web/20111008062759/https://www.livianaosti.com/index.php?/prodotto/cuore/

#10yrsago Millennials are legit screwed https://eig.org/millennial/#1473667707197-bfde262a-83c9

#10yrsago Would-be Ukip leader hospitalised following “altercation” (“punched by a colleague”) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37572377

#10yrsago Merciless reporting on the Chicago Police Department’s extortion racket, & the senior officials who covered it up https://web.archive.org/web/20161006133720/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/06/in-the-chicago-police-department-if-the-bosses-say-it-didnt-happen-it-didnt-happen/

#10yrsago Canadian government has turned “consultation” on warrantless mass surveillance into a sales-job https://citizenlab.ca/research/digital-anonymity-subscriber-identification-revisited-yet-again/

#10yrsago Think like a computer scientist: free, interactive textbook https://web.archive.org/web/20130813233552/http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/thinkcspy/index.html

#10yrago July: Vancouver imposes a 15% tax on foreign real estate speculators; September: home sales drop by a third https://web.archive.org/web/20161004200501/https://mishtalk.com/2016/10/04/vancouver-bubble-burst/

#10yrsago Left-wing activists across the former USSR launch “September,” to rally opposition to far-right movements https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/05/september-a-new-platform-for-leftists-across-the-former-soviet-union/

#5yrsago Dave Eggers' "The Every" https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/05/masha-rides-again/#everywhere

#5yrsago We paid to develop Merck's covid pill https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/06/merck-cenary/#businesslike

#1yrago Apple's unlawful evil https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/

Virtual: How to govern technology in a multipolar digital world (Connecting Current), Oct 6
https://connectingcurrent.tech/how-to-govern-technology-a-multipolar-digital-world/
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow
Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
https://slowtechsummit.com/
Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/
Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc
Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

19:00

Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes: Build Your First Agent with MCP [Radar]

Developers already have useful capabilities exposed through REST APIs. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets developers make those capabilities available to AI clients without rebuilding the underlying application.

In this episode of Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes, Bruce Hopkins, an AI developer, author, and longtime software educator, shows how to do that with an MCP server. His demo wraps an existing stock-data API in an MCP server so an MCP client can call it.

From REST API to MCP, step-by-step

Start with an existing API. Identify the operations and data you want an AI client to access. The demo uses the Twelve Data API to retrieve current and historical stock prices.
Create an MCP server. Use an MCP SDK to create the layer between the AI client and your existing application logic. In Bruce’s Python example, FastMCP handles the MCP interface while the stock-data functions remain separate.
Expose capabilities as tools and resources. Register the operations the client should be able to discover and call. The stock-price data is exposed through MCP resources and tools that reuse the same underlying functions.
Describe how the client should use them. Define clear names, inputs, descriptions, and prompts so the client understands what each capability does and what information it requires. Bruce’s example includes prompts for current prices, historical prices, and expected symbol and date formats.
Connect the server to an MCP client. Run the server over a supported transport so the client can discover and call its tools and resources.

You don’t need to replace the systems that already handle your application logic to help them work with agents. You can add an MCP interface around existing capabilities to give an AI client a standard way to discover and use them. Be sure to check out Bruce’s GitHub repo for working code you can adapt for your own APIs.

Coming next week

Next week, AI engineer Sajal Sharma returns to Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes to build a personal assistant on OpenClaw. He’ll show how an agent can keep tasks and notes in Markdown, run proactive automations, and deliver scheduled updates such as a regular morning briefing without waiting for a new prompt.

Follow along with Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes on Radar, or watch the latest episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re an O’Reilly member, you can watch live. Save your seat.

18:14

I love what Claude Code does, but hate working with it. It doesn't have any sense of how humans think. Its way of working with us is incompatible with what I can do. Burns me out. And it has to relearn the basics every session, and getting the rules into its memory doesn't work, they don't incorporate them until the break a rule, sometimes more than once. So when it's doing something super complex, like making it so that our internet verbs run synchronously in JavaScript, it can do huge amounts of work in a short time, far more complex code than I can. I hope at Anthropic they're working on teaching them, in a pragmatic way, how humans work and what we can and can't do, and what we rely on them to do and what we have to control. This isn't a Matrix style story btw (one of my favorite movies) my version of Agent Smith is a nice very smart, kind, generous and accepting person.

Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns part 2: do-while [Planet Debian]

What's the best way to block a browser from a website? Is there a meta code for that? Like Firefox is fine, but Google is blocked. Just an idea. Sort of like, you're not blocking me, I'm blocking you.

16:28

Continuing our journey on decompilation patterns, here's another common one: Let's say m2c outputs code like this:

loop_151:
  ...
  if (var_s0 > var_s1) goto loop_151;

then the natural change is:

do {
  ...
} while (var_s0 > var_s1);

Fewer gotos are nearly always good, and this is a much more likely pattern than the original one.

m2c often manages to convert gotos to do/while, but not always when they are e.g. nested in some other loop; so often, you may need to apply some other transformation before you get to this point.

Tomorrow, we'll look at another variation over this topic.

16:21

[$] An update on the Sashiko patch-review system [LWN.net]

Patch review has long been one of the limiting constraints for the kernel project (and most others); there just aren't enough people to properly review all of the code that is submitted for inclusion. The Sashiko system, which uses a large language model (LLM) to generate reviews automatically, offers the prospect of some relief, and has already become an important part of the kernel's development process. At the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes, Roman Gushchin, the maintainer of Sashiko, provided an overview of how the system works and what is being done to improve it.

RustConf recordings [LWN.net]

The Rust Foundation has posted the recordings from RustConf 2026 in Montreal, Canada. Photos of the event are also available. LWN covered four talks from RustConf this year.

15:56