Adam’s last rocket blew up. Taxpayers are betting $75m the next one will go better
Super funds and the federal government are backing Gilmour Space Technologies, six months on from the launch of the company’s first rocket, which crashed after 14 seconds. ⌘ Read more

‘Fresh face’: WiseTech backs scandal-hit Grok Academy with $8.7m
Both organisations are attempting to move past turmoil that has engulfed them over the past 18 months. ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The thing is that’s hard to avoid if TYPE_CHECKING, but documentation tools such as pdoc don’t support that … so it’s either type hints or API docs. 🤷

I hope I can eventually find a way out of this mess …

PlayStation, Xbox wars out, Netflix, Amazon in: the state of blockbuster games in 2026
As the jousts between PlayStation, Xbox and the Switch disappear, the new frontier looks likely to be a fight for content across all entertainment media. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d love to take a look at the code. 😅

I’m kind of curious to know how much Assembly I need vs. How much of a microkernel can I build purely in Mu (µ)? 🤔

Can’t really answer that, because I only made a working kernel for 16-bit real mode yet. That is 99% C, though, only syscall entry points are Assembly. (The OpenWatcom compiler provides C wrappers for triggering software interrupts, which makes things easier.)

But in long mode? No idea yet. 😅 At least changing the page tables will require a tiny little bit of Assembly.

ChatGPT’s biggest rival is setting up shop in Australia
The multibillion-dollar AI start-up, Anthropic, is set to become the latest tech giant to establish a presence on local shores as Australia ramps up efforts to lure foreign investment. ⌘ Read more

Astronauts leave space station in NASA’s first medical evacuation
The four returning astronauts are aiming to splash down on Thursday evening (AEDT) in the Pacific near San Diego. ⌘ Read more

Unions score rare win over AI rollout with Microsoft agreement
The deal follows a wave of AI-linked job cuts at major Australian employers including CBA, Atlassian and WiseTech. ⌘ Read more

Apple’s Gemini deal a win for Google, but will it make your iPhone smarter?
Apple has been extremely cautious when it comes to using AI and is hoping Google’s raw resources will help it close the gap on its rivals. ⌘ Read more

Your colleague that’s happy to do the mundane parts of work: AWS announces frontier AI agents
In Las Vegas, AWS’s re:Invent 2025 conference showcased AI that doesn’t just assist, but acts autonomously, highlighting a profound shift in enterprise technology. ⌘ Read more

How Markdown Took Over the World
22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing.

Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Goo … ⌘ Read more

From trifold phones to singing lollipops: the best and worst gadgets of CES
From the world’s biggest consumer tech show, here are the best pocketable gadgets, potentially useful future tech, and the products awarded worst in show. ⌘ Read more

In Trump’s America, smart robots and AI mask an uncomfortable future
The world’s largest gadget show promised a future in which technology handles everything. Outside the Las Vegas bubble, reality had other plans. ⌘ Read more

i heard you like spreadsheets | https://nilfm.cc/coreio.html

Inside CES 2026: Giant TVs, robots unveiled in Las Vegas
From robots to giant TVs, technology expert Trevor Long reveals the latest household gadgets being unveiled at the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Trevor Long travelled to Las Vegas with support from Hisense, LG, Reolink, LEGO and Samsung. ⌘ Read more

The new TVs vying for your living room (and wallet) in 2026
From pencil-thin OLEDs to screens the size of a small car, there are some genuinely impressive displays coming – albeit at somewhat terrifying prices. ⌘ Read more

お知らせ：CyberNewsFlash「React Server Componentsの脆弱性（CVE-2025-55182）について」（更新） ⌘ Read more

From dishwasher to world’s ninth-richest man: Nvidia boss faces his future
Jensen Huang has a simple lesson from running the world’s most valuable company: “Don’t get fired, and don’t get bored”. ⌘ Read more

Enquanto esperam pelo debate entre todos os candidatos (desta vez mesmo todos, os 11) que vai dar às 22h, estejam à vontade para ler o meu resumo do debate na rádio que aconteceu entre os três “candidatos excluídos” (André Pestana, Humberto Correia e Manuel João Vieira), caso não o tenham ouvido.

Costumo fazer threads para os debates, mas visto que este ouvi em diferido preferi escrever no meu blog em vez de ter aqui uma mega-thread… mas se quiserem comentar, estejam à vontade para comentar aqui 😛

https://tilde.pt/~marado/blog/sobre-o-debate-na-radio-entre-os-candidatos-menores-a-presidencia-da-republica.html

#ptpol #debate #presidenciais

Travelling to America? Here’s how to protect your privacy in phone searches
US Customs and Border Protection agents have broad authority to look through travellers’ phones, laptops and other electronic devices. Here’s what you need to know. ⌘ Read more

I came across this on “Why Is SQLite Coded In C”, which I found interesting:

“There has lately been a lot of interest in “safe” programming languages like Rust or Go in which it is impossible, or is at least difficult, to make common programming errors like memory leaks or array overruns.”

If that’s true, then encountering those issues means the programmer is, simply, horrible?

お知らせ：CyberNewsFlash「MongoDBにおける情報漏えいの脆弱性（CVE-2025-14847）について」 ⌘ Read more

Lego releases the smart brick but how does it work?
Tom Donaldson, head of Lego’s Creative Play Lab, unveils the smart brick at a news conference ahead of the CES tech show in Las Vegas. ⌘ Read more

Lego unveils their new Smart Brick
Touted as changing how kids play with Lego, the Smart Brick is revealed in Las Vegas, and will be sold as part of three new Star Wars Lego sets. ⌘ Read more

Lego unveils ‘Smart Bricks’, its biggest innovation in 50 years
Eight years of development have produced a computer small enough to fit inside a classic 2x4 brick. But do kids really need a microphone and speaker chip inside it? ⌘ Read more

お知らせ：訃報 JPCERT/CC 理事 早貸 淳子 氏 ⌘ Read more

Did you miss today’s event on #PublicDomain ? Or you didn’t, but want more? Don’t miss Natick FOSS’s upcoming event, on the 8th of January, where #PublicDomainDay will be celebrated!

2:45PM NY time
7:45PM GMT

https://natickfoss.org/archive.html#UpcomingMeeting

Image

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

Google’s ‘chess master’ is working on AI’s killer app
A product breakthrough has long eluded Demis Hassabis, but that could change in 2026. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I noticed that your feed’s last modification timestamp was missing in my database. I cannot tell for certain, but I think it did work before. Turns out, your httpd now sends the Last-Modified with UTC instead of GMT. Current example:

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:50:20 UTC

I’m not a fan of this timestamp format at all, but according to the HTTP specification, HTTP-date must always use GMT for a timezone, nothing else: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9110.html#http.date

Why a groundbreaking new TV show disappeared without a trace
Choosing high-profile tech boffin James Curran as co-host proved to be disastrous. ⌘ Read more

New post: 2025 - A Year in review (https://www.itsericwoodward.com/journal/2025/12-31-year-in-review.html)

Happy New Year, everyone!

At around 19 seconds in the video, you can see some minor graphical glitches.

Text mode applications in Unix terminals are such a mess. It’s a miracle that this works at all.

In the old DOS days, you could get text (and colors) on the screen just by writing to memory, because the VGA memory was mapped to a fixed address. We don’t have that model anymore. To write a character to a certain position, you have to send an escape sequence to move the cursor to that position, then more escape sequences to set the color/attributes, then more escape sequences to get the cursor to where you actually want it. And then of course UTF-8 on top, i.e. you have no idea what the terminal will actually do when you send it a “🙂”.

Mouse events work by the terminal sending escape sequences to you (https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking).

ncurses does an amazing job here. It’s fast (by having off-screen buffers and tracking changes, so it rarely has to actually send full screen updates to the terminal) and reliable and works across terminals. Without the terminfo database that keeps track of which terminal supports/requires which escape sequences, we’d be lost.

But gosh, what a mess this is under the hood … Makes you really miss memory mapped VGA and mouse drivers.

Salt Typhoon hackers ‘almost certainly’ in Australia’s critical infrastructure
China’s hacking campaign is one of the most effective long-term espionage moves ever seen, a top cybersecurity figure says. ⌘ Read more

It’s that time again, I’ve just rotated my #twtxt feed!

Find last quarter’s twts at the feed, or see them on the web.

Cyber expert gets rare Australian visa by hacking the government
The self-taught British security researcher found a unique way to beat 99 per cent rejection odds for the elite visa. ⌘ Read more

always an adventure | https://nilfm.cc/decadv_2025.html

A billion chatbot users can’t be wrong … or can they? Let’s ask a human
It’s a job description for the 21st century: human-AI relationship coach. But this job is all about the humans. ⌘ Read more

I was wrong about Elon. But he was wrong too
A year ago, I predicted that Musk would quit Tesla. He predicted our newspaper would ‘bore its audience to death’. We were both mistaken. ⌘ Read more

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite can’t engineer our consent
A decade after Peter Thiel backed Donald Trump, the ascent of the “tech right″⁣ has made billionaire founders “evil geniuses” in the eyes of many. ⌘ Read more

Lab report: Reading a 4th Edition Research Unix tape image on Plan 9 — http://a.9srv.net/reports/index.html#v4

Christmas mess? This robot vacuum trick is a game-changer
Previous mop pads had a tendency to drag muck around your floor, but a new innovation may have fixed that. ⌘ Read more

Happy birthday Katrina! https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-23/0/POSTING-en.html :-)

Wow, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, so many tables. No idea what I expected (I’m totally clueless on this low-level stuff), but that was quite an interesting surprise to me. https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-21/0/POSTING-en.html

I liked my boyfriend and his man-bun, but had to end it. He didn’t understand public ridicule
Naomi would still be up at 3am without understanding how ridiculous the situation was. Nigel had much more in common with me, apart from his lack of an actual body. ⌘ Read more

I quit LinkedIn
I recently quit LinkedIn. Ironically, the post I made about why I was
quitting was probably the most viewed thing I ever posted. Haha.

If you need to see my CV it’s right here on my website:

https://hack.org/~mc/cv.html

This is what I wrote back in November:

I’m terminating my account on LinkedIn next week. This is possibly
some kind of career suicide.

I’m very seldom visiting LinkedIn, so I’m probably late to the party,
as usual. Perhaps there has already been a lar … ⌘ Read more

The phone situation
I need to write something about this or I’ll burst.

I have a new phone. It’s an old iPhone SE 2022. Yes, I know. Evil,
evil Apple. Won’t someone please think of the privacy issues? Right,
well, Apple has at least better reputation about these things than
Google does, but we’ll come to that.

It feels like I’m betraying the FLOSS cause. I feel horrible, although
probably not just because of this.

Let’s recap:

• My main phone has been a de-googled (not even microG) Fairphone 4
  with CalyxOS. CalyxOS … ⌘ Read more

Independent report released by Optus shines light on serious issue
An independent report released by Optus shines a light on a serious issue with our modern mobile-reliant communications systems and the Triple Zero Emergency line. ⌘ Read more

‘Inexcusable’: Optus staff face sack after review into Triple Zero outage
The telco’s chairman calls the findings of an independent review into the incident “a sobering read for everyone at Optus”. ⌘ Read more