Showing posts with label Software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Software. Show all posts

18 October 2026

Time to Drop Google Maps

Many years ago, I wrote an essay for the now defunct website Netslaves in which I noted that MapQuest had become the first internet application that I found truly essential.

Since that time, largely through anti-competitive business practices, it has been supplanted by Google Maps.

It seems to be having a bit or a renaissance now, what with it ignoring Trump's delusional renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America, and now the platform is adding features that allows one to look up the locations of Flock and other automated license plate readers.

MapQuest is continuing its push to become the official map and navigation platform of the resistance. After promising not to comply with the Trump administration’s “Lake America” gimmick, the platform announced a new “Surveillance Layer” that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety.

Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify the locations of known outdoor surveillance cameras and plate readers from Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and others. While the company didn’t specify how it sources its data, it appears to be similar to the data amassed by DeFlock, which maintains a user-submitted map of ALPR camera locations. MapQuest may be sourcing the information from DeFlock and the OpenStreetMap project. Gizmodo has reached out to MapQuest for additional information and will update when we hear back.

………

MapQuest’s app has gotten shockingly popular over the last few months, despite otherwise being left for dead as a relic of the Web 1.0 era. The company started to get a lot of buzz when it refused to go along with the Trump administration’s decision to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” That decision was in stark contrast to the dominant map app makers at Google and Apple, who basically suggested it was out of their control because they just follow the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), and when Trump’s executive order made GNIS officially change the name, it changed on their platforms, too.

The otherwise forgotten MapQuest saw a massive surge in downloads following its act of resistance, spiking to the top spot in the Apple App Store and recording millions of downloads. But the company was pushing back against Trump’s name changes before it got a big boost in August. MapQuest also held strong during the Gulf of Mexico situation, opting not to make the change despite GNIS officially updating the name to Gulf of America. Instead, it dropped a Gulf Name Generator that allowed users to make up their own gulf name.
Sometimes, when an organization has no f%$#s left to give, they give their best.

10 July 2026

Quote of the Day

The Matter Continues and Appears Likely to Do So Until either the Heat Death of the Universe or the Year of Linux on the Desktop – Whichever Comes Sooner.
—The Register on the seemingly never ending Unix (Eunuchs?) lawsuit between IBM and the remnants of SCO.

The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again.

………

SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM’s code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday.

………

The matter continues and appears likely to do so until either the heat death of the universe or the year of Linux on the desktop – whichever comes sooner.

Please just make it stop. 

01 July 2026

Of Course They Are

It appears that some of Elon Musk's DOGE Bros are redesigning government websites to spy on US citizens.

Tech bros gotta tech bro.

An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites – for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings – in ways critics say appear to violate federal law.

The National Design Studio (NDS) was established by a Donald Trump executive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans.

A Guardian investigation has found the office has apparently been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites, including those connecting Americans with prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, passports and voter registration. The investigation corroborates and advances earlier reporting by the Drey Dossier, a YouTube and Substack investigative outlet.

The NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software, configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002.

They all need to spend the next decade or two in jail. 

09 June 2026

Criminals Gotta Crime

And by criminals, I mean the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™, who just got caught surreptitiously installing facial recognition software on their smart glasses.

Seeing as how they did not announce this to their users, it would have been a selling point, it is not unreasonable to assume that this was for Meta to spy on its users.

Hell, everything in Meta is about spying on its users.

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user's device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

Well, this seems completely aboveboard and not suspicious at all.

24 May 2026

I Did Not Think That it Was Possible

I have had no personal or professional encounters with Linus Torvalds, but I am aware of his "Take no crap attitude, which rivals that of the much memed Honey Badger.

When he says that he will, "Start being more hard-nosed," regarding pulls from the Linux kernel, my first reaction was disbelief.

This is NOT a man known for suffering fools gladly. 

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has signaled he’ll push back when he receives irrelevant pull requests, after complaining that developers are making badly timed and trivial submissions, sometimes after using AI to review code.

Torvalds foreshadowed changes in his weekly state of the kernel update, which on Sunday announced the release of a fifth release candidate for version 7.1 of the Linux kernel.

“To the surprise of absolutely nobody by now, rc5 is pretty big. Quite a bit bigger than rc5's have traditionally been,” Torvalds wrote, before revealing “I'm not entirely happy about it - most of this is totally trivial stuff to random drivers, which obviously makes it all less scary, but at the same time I'm really not convinced the churn is worth it at rc5 time.”

The Linux kernel development cycle usually sees Torvalds open a two-week window during which contributors submit code they hope will make it into the next release. Seven release candidates (rc1-7) follow, with each supposed to represent a step towards delivering a stable update. Revised code always arrives during that process. But high volumes of new contributions to rc5 add complexity at a time work on the new kernel is usually close to completion.

this boggles the mind.

16 May 2026

Good Idea

And it is from Gavin Newsom of all people.

California is proposing extending its sales tax to cloud based software, rather than limiting it just to shrink wrapped software sold in stores.

I like this, not the least because it ends what was an effective subsidy to the cloud in the Golden State. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his latest budget plan on Thursday, totaling $349.4 billion, the largest in the state’s history. The proposal includes a new 7.25% state sales tax on cloud-based software.

Currently, sales tax is only paid on software purchased in physical form, whether that’s through software sold as part of a new hardware purchase or tangible media. Cloud-based software and software as a service (SaaS) applications aren’t taxed in the same way, but Newsom’s proposal would change that.

As KCRA notes, the new tax would apply to software like Microsoft Office, Adobe, and QuickBooks, as well as Slack and Workday. Roughly half of the states currently tax SaaS products, and Newsom argues it would just mean bringing California in line with dozens of other states.

 

14 May 2026

Best Ad Blocker Software Ever

Someone has forked the popular antivirus software uBlock Origin and made tweaks to replace ads with "Glasses On" images from the John Carpenter movie They Live.

This is brilliant. 

A fork of uBlock Origin Lite doesn't just remove the ads from web pages; it replaces them with tiles containing slogans from John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live.

Published by Australian Dave Lawrence, the Chromium add-in (so it'll work in browsers such as Chrome and Edge) takes the uBlock Origin Lite content blocker (also known as uBO Lite) and tweaks it so that rather than simply hiding the ads, the ads are replaced with white boxes containing slogans from the movies. 

Lawrence listed them: "OBEY, CONSUME, WATCH TV, SLEEP, SUBMIT, CONFORM, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WORK, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY." 

………

They Live is a science-fiction horror film in which the protagonist dons a pair of glasses that allow him to see the world as it truly is: run by ghoulish aliens using subliminal messaging to keep the population under control.

I would note that that They Live is a great movie, and great social commentary.  Watch it.

Meanwhile, I need to chew some bubblegum or kick ass. 

09 May 2026

Like Having Your Mother-in-Law Driving off a Cliff in Your Brand New Car

I was once a student, and any disruption of finals is not good for them, but its cause, the hack of the widely loathed spyware education software platform Canvas.

Everyone who is actually directly involved in education, so not school board members or IT staff, hates it with a passion.

Chaos erupted at schools and colleges throughout the US on Thursday as a cyberattack disrupted online learning platform Canvas just as students were due to take final exams.

Canvas parent company Instructure said that as of Friday morning, the platform was back online. Instructure said it temporarily took Canvas offline on Thursday after identifying unauthorized activity in its network. The threat actor was the same one responsible for a data breach that Instructure disclosed a week ago. Data accessed included user names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged on the platform. The company said it has no indication that passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers, or financial information were involved.

Here's an idea.  Don't use programs where your data is stored with a 3rd party who monetizes that data. 

22 March 2026

Headline of the Day

Palantir Is Nazi Cancer
—Jim Stewartson, describing how Peter Thiel's monstrous enterprise is successfully inserting itself in the very highest levels of power.

If evil has a face, it is the face of Peter Andreas Thiel, who, when not being a literal vampire, is working to eliminate democracy, strip civil rights from women, and make himself god king.

Peter Thiel founded Palantir. 

Palantir is Nazi cancer. It is metastasizing beyond the point of saving the patient.

This is a metaphor I’m prepared to explain and defend because it’s barely a metaphor at all. We have reached a very bad place; America is dying; and I need to be direct about how serious its condition is.

There are several reports that the former Department of Defense has established Peter Thiel’s surveillance software company Palantir as the “program of record” for all branches of military service. The man who announced it is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, an investment banker worth $5 billion. Feinberg’s company Cerberus has a 5% stake in Bank Leumi, one of Israel’s largest financial institutions. Feinberg is also reportedly close to Peter Thiel.

Palantir was heavily involved in the early stages of the Iran attack, “assisting in identifying and engaging 1,000 targets within the first few hours.” Presumably those targets included the girls’ school in Minab where 168 children were massacred by an American Tomahawk missile based on bad intelligence. Nevertheless, despite the slaughter, Peter Thiel’s long-held dream of being able to kill people at scale has been permanently granted.

Thiel’s Naziphilia has been clear for a very long time. And there is a reason for that. Thiel was raised in the most Nazi town on Earth in the 1970s: Swakopmund, in apartheid-controlled SW Africa (now Namibia). Thiel’s apartheid Christian school—and the town itself—used “Heil Hitler!” as a normal greeting, just as they did in Nazi Germany. Thiel’s father Klaus moved his family to Swakopmund when Peter was a baby to develop a secret uranium mine outside of town—which fed apartheid South Africa’s illegal nuclear weapons program. 

Imagine what it was like to be a young gay boy growing up in a Nazi-soaked apartheid town in southern Africa, and being brought back to the U.S. at ten years old. Peter Thiel has reportedly described the early part of his childhood as being formative in his thinking—about who should have power and who should not.

………

When Thiel blamed women’s suffrage for the fact that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible” 17 years ago, it should have set off alarms across the Defense Department and the intelligence community. When Palantir planned to target Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald with a psychological operation in 2011—and got caught—the government’s should have ended the relationship.

But despite Thiel’s many years of broadcasting his fascist beliefs—and his plans to overthrow the federal government—America kept feeding the beast.

………

Palantir itself is a remarkable story of unremarkable software. Thiel has invested heavily in making the product look cool, but it’s really just standard business intelligence software with AI chatbots bolted on. The main thing that distinguishes Palantir from its competition is its willingness to be totally evil. The IDF, just as one example, used Palantir extensively in its destruction of Gaza, and its genocide of civilians.  

………

Thiel’s salesmen for his death-creating product are people like his co-founders, fascist dudebro Joe Lonsdale and nerdish psychopath Alex Karp—and baby-faced Louis Mosley, head of Palantir UK.

Lonsdale is openly fascist, pro-Russian, and pro-violence. In 2015, he was accused of raping a Stanford intern. In 2023, he started a failing “anti-woke university” in Austin with Thiel mouthpiece and now-editor of CBS News, Bari Weiss.

Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, has completely absorbed Thiel’s Nazi goals and sees “liberal white women” as the enemy of America:

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters…”

Finally, out of everyone in the United Kingdom, Peter Thiel chose Louis Mosley to run Palantir UK, which has taken over the National Health Service, and is getting into business with the British military. Mosley is the only grandson of Oswald Mosley, the most infamous fascist in British history, who was so enamored with the Nazis that he had his wedding at Joseph Goebbels’ house so Hitler could attend. 

………

Palantir is just one tooth in the jaws of Peter Thiel—a man obsessed with not just overturning democracy in America but determined to repeal the Enlightenment. He says the last 200 years of history were a huge mistake. Like Epstein, Thiel is obsessed with “young blood,” genetics, eugenics, and transhumanism. He sees dealing with humans as a messy requirement of running a business. But to him, America is just a pile of resources, with a population which needs to be purified, segregated, and purged of undesirables. 

………

When Trump leaves office by death or disability—I will be shocked if Trump makes it three more years—there will be nothing in between Peter Thiel and total control of the country. JD Vance was plucked out of Yale by Peter Thiel. Vance has done nothing with his life but live off Thiel’s largesse, including adopting Catholicism after Thiel gave him $15 million. JD Vance is just Thiel’s personal robot. 

………

It must be the highest priority of any politician that wishes to save America to remove this metastasis from the body politic. It must be burned out of every corner of the government before the tumor replaces the brain entirely. Peter Thiel is not just cosplaying the Antichrist. As an atheist, I assure you he’s the real thing. 

Mr. Stewartson, tell us how you really feel. 

 

10 January 2026

Gee, Ya Think?

In admitting the obvious, Dell Computer has announced changes to its PC lineup because said customers hate AI features with a white-hot burning passion.

Reading this room did not require much of a stretch. 

The tech industry’s insistence on cramming AI into virtually every aspect of their consumer-facing offerings, from AI apps you can’t uninstall to hallucinating assistants that nobody asked for, has been nothing short of insufferable.

Tech enthusiasts and average consumers alike have watched helplessly as software and hardware they rely on to research, work, game, and keep in touch have turned into testing grounds for unproven AI tech — often without their consent.

………

Thankfully, vendors are finally starting to pay attention. As PCGamer reports, Windows PC maker Dell admitted at this year’s CES that things have really gotten out of hand.

Their executives are willing to say the quiet part out loud — that nobody is scrambling to buy an “AI PC.”

“One thing you’ll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first,” Dell’s head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, said during a pre-CES briefing, as quoted by the publication. “So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC.”

………

The fact that Dell is worried its AI-first approach may be hindering it from reaching new customers and making new sales, though, is telling.

Beyond Terwilliger’s eureka moment, Dell also admitted at CES that killing off its much-beloved line of XPS laptops was a mistake, officially reviving it for 2026 — and judging by the elated reactions the move has garnered, it was likely the right move.
If you war wondering if regular consumers are sick and tired of bogus hallucinating "Artificial Intelligence" features in their every day work, the answer is not just, :ye," but the answer is, "Fuck yes."

04 January 2026

Today in What the Fuck

When I see a headline like, "Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog,"  I knew that I had to click through.

Law enforcement has quickly embraced AI for everything from drafting police reports to facial recognition.

The results have been predictably dismal. In one particularly glaring — and unintentionally comedic — instance, the police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog.

As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to have picked up on some unrelated background chatter to devise its fantastical fairy tale ending.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney’s 2009 musical comedy. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

Gee, I wonder what happened.

OK, I don't.  The headline was a spoiler. 

28 December 2025

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Twitter Publish


Yes, this story has been confirmed.

I am amused. 

27 December 2025

I Prefer Firefox, But

The senior management of the Mozilla Corporation are trying very hard to kill the web browser.

I would argue that they are among the most overpaid executives in Silly-Con Valley.  (Musk is, of course in a class of his own in this category.

Case in point, in their relentless pursuit of the latest shiny object, the brand new CEO announced that he would be baking AI features into the program.

After the inevitable outcry from Firefox users, the CEO has announced that there will be a kill switch to disable AI features.

The backlash against AI invading almost every aspect of the computing experience is growing by the day.

Particularly as an onslaught of lazy AI slop subsuming news feeds, the tech is starting to feel like a massive distraction — and huge parts of the internet are disillusioned or even fuming in anger.

For instance, a vast number of Windows users refused to upgrade after Microsoft announced it would turn the operating system into a so-called “agentic OS.”

Even household names in the open-source industry aren’t safe. After being appointed as the new CEO of open-source software company Mozilla, whose Firefox browser has long been lauded as a compelling alternative to Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo announced that it would be tripling down on AI.

In a December 16 blog post, Enzor-DeMeo announced that Firefox would become a “modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.”

But a ringing backlash quickly forced the company into damage control mode. 

………

The outcry was formidable enough for Mozilla to clarify the company’s new CEO’s comments.

“Something that hasn’t been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features,” the company wrote in an update on Mastodon. “We’ve been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I’m sure it’ll ship with a less murderous name, but that’s how seriously and absolutely we’re taking this.”

I would note that Mozilla has released new and widely loathed features with some sort of kill switch, and 3 or 4 releases later, they remove the kill switch.

I had to engage in some fairly deep hacking to roll back their Mozilla add-on library requirement, for example.

 

06 December 2025

How Can They Both Lose?

In this case, the entities in conflict are Amazon and Perplexity.

The former is a retail and eCommerce giant, and the latter is one of the increasingly ubiquitous AI companies.

Amazon has sent demand letters demanding that Perplexity stop offering its users access to its comparison shopping comparison features on Amazon.

Amazon is claiming that this is insecure, and Perplexity is claiming that Amazon does not want its users to find better deals which make Jeff Bezos' monster less money, including showing them non-Amazon sources for things that they want to buy.

Both accusations are probably true.

Amazon has told Perplexity to get its agentic browser out of its online store, the companies both confirmed publicly on Tuesday. After warning Perplexity multiple times that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was violating Amazon’s terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent, the e-commerce giant sent the AI search engine startup a sternly worded cease-and-desist letter, Perplexity wrote in a blog post titled “Bullying is not innovation.”

“This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users,” Perplexity lamented in the blog post.

Perplexity’s argument is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of a human user’s direction, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it doesn’t have to identify itself as an agent.

………

If Amazon is to be believed, then Perplexity could simply identify its agent and start shopping. Of course, the risk is that Amazon, which has its own shopping bot called Rufus, could also block Comet — or any other third-party agentic shopper — from its site.

Amazon suggests as much as its statement, which also says, “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions whether or not to participate.”

Perplexity claims that Amazon would block the shopping bot because Amazon wants to sell advertising and product placements. Unlike human shoppers, a bot tasked with buying a new laundry basket presumably wouldn’t find itself buying a more expensive one, or getting lured into buying the latest Brandon Sanderson novel and a new set of earphones (on sale!).

What Perplexity is doing is creating the sort of "lite" version of the adversarial interoperability proposed by Corey Doctorow.

It's pretty likely that the DMCA prevents this, which is all the more reason to abolish the DMCA.

29 October 2025

Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings • The Register

In a world where Tech Bros fall over each other to out bigot each other, it is refreshing to see the Python Foundation telling the National Science Foundation telling the NSF to put their $1,500,000.00 where the moon don't shine, because the grant demands that the organization cease all anti-discrimination activities.

I looked at recent data on executive compensation at the Foundation, and no one there got more than $200,000/year in 2023, yet more evidence that Dan Ariely,'s research on compensation, which shows that excessive pay reduces performance, is true.

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security.

The programming non-profit's deputy executive director Loren Crary said in a blog post today that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.

"These terms included affirming the statement that we 'do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'" Crary noted. "This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole."

To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have violated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained.

By way of perspective, that $1.5 million is about ⅓ of their annual operating budget.

The Python Foundation is a  501(c)(3) not-for profit, and donations are tax deductible, and they manage thousands of volunteers working on development of the eponymous cross-platform FOSS programming language.

I have no opinion as to its merits as a programming language, but it is very widely used. (I'm not a programmer)

03 October 2025

Guck Foogle

Once again, Google has shown that its new motto is, "Be Evil," removing the ICE tracking app Red Dot from their app store. )

When juxtaposed with their recent attempts to make side loading apps impossible, it's even more evil.

There justification is that the masked abductor of random people is somehow a threatened class:

Both Google and Apple recently removed Red Dot, an app people can use to report sightings of ICE officials, from their respective app stores, 404 Media has found. The move comes after Apple removed ICEBlock, a much more prominent app, from its App Store on Thursday following direct pressure from U.S. Department of Justice officials. Google told 404 Media it removed apps because they shared the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group that recently faced a violent act connected to these sorts of ICE-spotting apps—a veiled reference to ICE officials.

The move signals a broader crackdown on apps that are designed to keep communities safe by crowdsourcing the location of ICE officials. Authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September and who killed a detainee, searched his phone for various tracking apps. A long-running immigration support group on the ground in Chicago, where ICE is currently focused, told 404 Media some of its members use Red Dot.

………

The app allows people to report ICE presence or activity, along with details such as the location and time, according to Red Dot’s website. The app then notifies nearby community members, and users can receive alerts about ICE activity in their area, the website says.

This is totalitarian bullsh%$.

We really need to 

 

06 September 2025

And Following the Judge's Capitulation to Google

The, "Let's be evil," company will take the first steps toward banning the ability of users to load software of their choice on their computers. 

By software, I mean apps, and by computer, I mean the device that you hold in your hand to make calls and surf the web, which has thousands of times more computing power, and thousands of times more memory, than was used to put men on the moon.

They are claiming that it is just registration for developers, but we know this sort of enshittification goes. 

Guck Foogle. 

Android's open nature set it apart from the iPhone as the era of touchscreen smartphones began nearly two decades ago. Little by little, Google has traded some of that openness for security, and its next security initiative could make the biggest concessions yet in the name of blocking bad apps. Google has announced plans to begin verifying the identities of all Android app developers, and not just those publishing on the Play Store. Google intends to verify developer identities no matter where they offer their content, and apps without verification won't work on most Android devices in the coming years.

Google used to do very little curation of the Play Store (or Android Market, if you go back far enough), but it has long sought to improve the platform's reputation as being less secure than the Apple App Store. Years ago, you could publish actual exploits in the official store to gain root access on phones, but now there are multiple reviews and detection mechanisms to reduce the prevalence of malware and banned content. While the Play Store is still not perfect, Google claims apps sideloaded from outside its store are 50 times more likely to contain malware.

This, we are led to believe, is the impetus for Google's new developer verification system. The company describes it like an "ID check at the airport." Since requiring all Google Play app developers to verify their identities in 2023, it has seen a precipitous drop in malware and fraud. Bad actors in Google Play leveraged anonymity to distribute malicious apps, so it stands to reason that verifying app developers outside of Google Play could also enhance security.

Bullsh%$.  This is your phone, not a multi ton metal tube that can be flown into buildings.

This is about their locking out developers who creat apps that they don't likd.  ("I'm sorry, but your ID info seems to be non-authentic")

Also, it means that anyone who writes a pro-democracy app in, for example, China, will be ratted  out to the secret police. 

I own my computer, I should be allowed to run whatever software that I choose on it. 

27 August 2025

Et Tu Grok(ey)?

Once again, one of Elon's projects screws up.

In this case, it's his AP program Grok, which leaked thousands of prompts.

This is not a surprise.  What is a surprise is that the chat-bot offered tips on how to assassinate ……… Elon Musk.

Gee, I guess that Grok is like all the rest of the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy's employees.

Wall Street tech watchers that had only recently recovered from Elon Musk’s AI chatbot going rogue are now quietly reassessing the technology, after a new leak of thousands of user conversations show it teaching people how to make drugs, assassinate Musk himself, and build malware and explosives.

Luckily for xAI, the company that created Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, it is not a publicly traded company, so no public investor or shareholder backlash has forced down its share price or pressured its executives to address the public about privacy concerns.

Yeah, "Lucky," not, "Stupid and corrupt."

………

More than 370,000 user conversations with Grok were publicly exposed through search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo on Aug. 21. That led to the posting of a wide range of disturbing content and sent xAI scrambling to contain the fallout and fix the malfunction that reportedly caused the leak.

What kind of disturbing content? Well, in one instance, Grok offers up a detailed plan on how to assassinate Musk himself, before walking that back as “against my policies.” In another exchange, the chatbot also helpfully pointed users to instructions on how to make fentanyl at home or build explosives.

Forbes, which broke the story, reports that the leak stemmed from an unintended malfunction in Grok’s “share” function, which allowed private chats to be indexed and accessed without user consent.
Needless to say, I am amused.

20 August 2025

Way to Go Bill!

Yes, I know, Bill Gates no longer runs Microsoft, but breaking products in order to jump on the latest hype bandwagon?  Classic Bill. 

In this case, the headline says most of it, "It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes."

Short version, comgining the Excel Spreadsheet program and AI, it gets you a spreadsheet which cannot reliably perform mathematical functions. 

It's not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of companies' generative AI programs have failed to earn any profit whatsoever. Tech stocks tanked Tuesday, regarding broader fears that this bubble may have swelled about as large as it can go. Surely, there will be no wider repercussions for normal people if and when Nvidia, currently propping up the market like a load-bearing matchstick, finally runs out of fake companies to sell chips to. But getting in under the wire, before we're all bartering gas in the desert and people who can read become the priestly caste, is Microsoft, with the single most "Who asked for this?" application of AI I've seen yet: They're jamming it into Excel.

Excel! The spreadsheet program! The one that is already very good at what it does, which is calculation and data analysis. You put some numbers in and it spits some numbers out. According to The Verge, "Microsoft Excel is testing a new AI-powered function that can automatically fill cells in your spreadsheets." Using natural language, the idea goes, you tell it what you want and then the AI will "classify information, generate summaries, create tables, and more."

If you squint a little, or just look at this through the eyes of a person or company with a vested financial interest in shoving AI products into every cranny of your life, you can sort of see the vision. Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling
[When did this become a term that sane people use?] its users and humanity at large. If everything works right, you'll be able to tell the program, in words, broadly what you want it to do, rather than have to learn the formulas that already exist and have for decades, which tell the program exactly what you want it to do.

Ah, but there's a rub. Microsoft explicitly warns users that its AI function should not be used for things like "doing math" or "anything actually important":

When NOT to use the COPILOT function

COPILOT uses AI and can give incorrect responses.

To ensure reliability and to use it responsibly, avoid using COPILOT for:

Numerical calculations: Use native Excel formulas (e.g., SUM, AVERAGE, IF) for any task requiring accuracy or reproducibility.

Tasks with legal, regulatory or compliance implications: Avoid using AI-generated outputs for financial reporting, legal documents, or other high-stakes scenarios.

 We live in the worst timeline ever.

19 August 2025

Right to Repair Now

Rolling stock manufacturer NEWAG was discovered to have been bricking trains if they were not serviced at their facilities.

It was unbelievably bad PR for the train manufacturer, and their response is to sue rail lines, repair shops, and tech experts who made it possible for the trains to run, claiming that repairing and running equipment that you purchase violates their copyright.

Because owning a 50 tonne locomotive doesn't mean that you can operate it as if you own it.

This is what is wrong with our current IP system.

It encourages rent-seeking, increases inequality, and stifles innovation:

Back in 2023 we wrote about how regional Polish rail company and a train manufacturer NEWAG had taken to using DRM to lock down trains that are repaired by independent technicians, in a bid to both monopolize — and drive up the costs of repair. This kind of effort to monopolize repair is common across numerous industries, driving an organic, grass roots “right to repair” reform movement.

The original story by 404 Media noted that NEWAG put code in their train’s control systems preventing them from running if a GPS tracker detected that it spent any time at an independent repair company, and if certain parts had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number. Some independent companies responded by hiring a white hat hacking group dubbed Dragon Sector to bypass the DRM and get the trains running again.

Two years later and it sounds like NEWAG has taken all the wrong lessons from the experience.

The folks at iFixit note that the company has now sued both the Polish repair service SPS that fixed those original trains, and has also gone after the individual members of ethical hacking group Dragon Sector for helping them. NEWAG is looking for $1.7 million for copyright violations and “unlawful competition” in one court, and $1.36 million for unlawful competition and infringement of personal rights in another.

 This, as well as the sh%^$ that John Deer, and HP printers, and Tesla, and Ford, and GM, etc. pull needs to stop.