Bell Labs ‘Unix’ Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball
Archive.org now has a page with “the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek’s readtape tool.” A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with … ⌘ Read more

‘How Lina Khan Killed iRobot’
iRobot, the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company that brought the Roomba vacuum cleaner into American homes over its 35-year history, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday and will be acquired by Picea, its Chinese contract manufacturer that also produces competing household devices.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board placed blame for the company’s demise on the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan, which oppos … ⌘ Read more

Volkswagen To End Production At German Plant, a First In Company History
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The last vehicle will roll off the assembly line at Volkswagen’s plant in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday, marking the first time in the automaker’s 88-year history that it has closed a plant in its home country. Volkswagen warned of potential production cuts last year, as i … ⌘ Read more

US Could Ask Foreign Tourists For Five-Year Social Media History Before Entry
Tourists from dozens of countries including the UK could be asked to provide a five-year social media history as a condition of entry to the United States, under a new proposal unveiled by American officials. From a report: The new condition would affect people from dozens of countries who are eligible to visit the US for … ⌘ Read more

A Kim Kardashian deepfake appears in new exhibition exploring art and AI
Can you tell what’s real and what’s fake online? Data Dreams: Art and AI at the MCA looks at truth, art and history in the AI age. ⌘ Read more

A rare brain illness couldn’t stop Milly from making country netball history
A rare brain illness left Milly Brock unable to walk or speak, but eight months later, she was back leading her regional netball club on grand final day. ⌘ Read more

How Peter Jackson fought for his Middle-earth dream, armed with a VHS tape
Peter Jackson’s life wouldn’t be the same after that red carpet event on December 10, 2001, but it’s fair to say cinema, and New Zealand, wouldn’t be the same either. ⌘ Read more

Ashes history offers little statistical hope for England - Zaltzman
Comedian and BBC cricket statistician Andy Zaltzman looks at how stats suggest England have little chance of winning this Ashes - but also offers some straws to clutch. ⌘ Read more

Idaho Lab Produces World’s First Molten Salt Fuel for Nuclear Reactors
America’s Energy Department runs a research lab in Idaho — and this week announced successful results from a ground-breaking experiment. “This is the first time in history that chloride-based molten salt fuel has been produced for a fast reactor,” says Bill Phillips, the lab’s technical lead for salt synthesis. He calls it “a major … ⌘ Read more

Trump makes history hosting Kennedy Center Honors — here’s how we got here
Donald Trump has made the Kennedy Center a touchstone in a broader attack against what he claims is “woke”, anti-American culture. ⌘ Read more

Quiz: How well do you remember your December history?
From the world’s first traffic lights to a Sesame Street legend — how well will you do on our history quiz? ⌘ Read more

How one man’s method became the death penalty standard
On this day in history, the US carried out its first execution by lethal injection — a method thought up by one doctor. ⌘ Read more

How a gold toilet became a symbol of Ukraine’s endemic corruption
Ukraine has a history of corruption issues, but the latest allegations include close confidants of the president and many people want answers from Volodymyr Zelenskyy. ⌘ Read more

‘No-one expected what we found’: Martian discovery got us closer to finding life
Scientists said at the time that the flow of water would have filled multiple swimming pools. ⌘ Read more

How Oscar Piastri went from ‘dead last’ to the brink of F1 glory
After finishing dead last in his first ever race, Oscar Piastri has risen from humble beginnings to the brink of Australian sporting history as he chases his first F1 world title. ⌘ Read more

RoboCop Statue Rises In Detroit
alternative_right quotes a report from the Guardian: The statue looms and glints at more than 11 feet tall and weighing 3,500 pounds, looking out at the city with, how to put it … a characteristically stern expression? Despite its daunting appearance and history as a crimefighter of last resort, the giant new bronze figure of the movie character RoboCop is being seen as a symbol of hope, drawing fan … ⌘ Read more

Bootleggers, gangsters and a massacre: Why America’s Prohibition backfired
Prohibition was officially repealed on December 5, 1933. But the beginning of its end can be traced back years earlier — to a highly-publicised massacre by firing squad. ⌘ Read more

History made as Wallabies and All Blacks drawn into same World Cup group
Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt says he is unlikely to be coaching the All Blacks at the World Cup, as Australia and New Zealand are drawn into the same group. ⌘ Read more

South Africa chase record 359 to beat India
South Africa complete the joint highest chase in the history of one-day internationals in India as they passed a target of 359 to win by four wickets in Naya Raipur. ⌘ Read more

Forming moon may have taken three big impacts early in Earth’s history
Conventionally, the moon is thought to have formed during one big impact, but a three-impact model might make more sense ⌘ Read more

How a gas cloud killed thousands in world’s worst industrial disaster
It started with a cloud of gas in the dead of night, silently submerging the city in a toxic soup. By morning on December 3, 1984, an Indian city awoke to a nightmare. ⌘ Read more

The mostly unsuccessful history of breakaway leagues as R360 postponed
R360’s announcement it is not going to be ready in 2026 brings back memories of previous attempts to set up rebel sporting competitions, almost all of which have failed. ⌘ Read more

A phone call. A manhunt. A gunshot: Inside Pablo Escobar’s last day
More than three decades since his death in a rooftop shootout with police, the legacy of cocaine king Pablo Escobar continues to affect Colombia. ⌘ Read more

‘Spine-tingling’: Strangers find Tasmanian convict connection
A  Victorian tourist has been “blown away” after discovering a connection with a volunteer at the Hobart Penitentiary, with the volunteer noting people seem more open to discussing their convict histories. ⌘ Read more

Archaeologists bring 170yo Aboriginal artefacts to surface in the outback
A stash of Aboriginal artefacts, dating back about 170 years, is unearthed from the red dirt of outback Queensland, bringing history to life for the local Pitta Pitta people. ⌘ Read more

The first ever Ashes Test in Brisbane was ‘disastrous’ for Australia
Australia’s Ashes domination in Brisbane is almost total, with England winless at the Gabba since 1986. It wasn’t always like this though, with the first visit to Brisbane resulting in the heaviest defeat in cricket history. ⌘ Read more

The last man on the moon: Can you ace this week’s history quiz?
From reality TV and heist movie remakes to man’s last step on the moon — how well do you know this week in history? ⌘ Read more

Lions ‘threw the kitchen sink’ but nothing could halt Roos’ perfect season
Creating history by winning consecutive premierships and completing an unbeaten season is just reward for North Melbourne’s boundary-pushing AFLW program. ⌘ Read more

Why tiny Barbados said good by to the royal family
With countries like Australia still debating whether or not the time has come to become a republic, what prompted tiny Barbados with its population of less than 300,000, to take the leap? ⌘ Read more

Kangaroos make history in the books and on the field in flag defence
North Melbourne proves to be ground breakers and history makers as it extend its match-winning streak to 27 games in a comprehensive win over Brisbane. ⌘ Read more

Live: Kangaroos and Lions meet in blockbuster AFLW grand final trilogy
North Melbourne carries a 26-game winning streak into the AFLW grand final in a bid to become the first club in league history to win consecutive premierships. Follow live. ⌘ Read more

Albanese and Haydon have wed in a ceremony that will go down in history
Anthony Albanese and Jodie Haydon can trace their relationship back five years, but the historic nature of their secretly planned wedding at The Lodge runs far deeper. ⌘ Read more

Scientists Think They’ve Solved Why One of History’s Most Advanced Civilizations Vanished
A new study published in Communications Earth & Environment has reconstructed the climate conditions of the ancient Indus River Valley civilization between 3000 and 1000 B.C., finding that four intense droughts – each lasting more than 85 years – likely drove the gradual decline of one of the w … ⌘ Read more

Former premier says Tasmania’s stadium proposal has been ‘poorly’ sold
Peter Gutwein initiated the push for a stadium in Hobart, but he has had to watch the drama unfold from the sidelines. He says rejecting the proposal would be the biggest “lost opportunity” in the state’s history. ⌘ Read more

Australia’s first car was a rust bucket, but it was our rust bucket
The first fully Australian-made car rolled off the Holden production line in Melbourne on this day in 1948. The man who dreamt it up wasn’t there to see it unveiled. ⌘ Read more

AWS Introduces DNS Failover Feature for Its Notoriously Unreliable US East Region
Amazon Web Services has rolled out a DNS resilience feature that allows customers to make domain name system changes within 60 minutes of a service disruption in its US East region, a direct response to the long history of outages at the cloud giant’s most troubled infrastructure.

AWS said customers in regulated i … ⌘ Read more

Discovery of near century-old scrapbooks reveals seaweed secrets
The State Library of WA is running an appeal to save a set of seaweed scrapbooks made nearly 100 years ago by a renowned Kalgoorlie-born naturalist. ⌘ Read more

How decades of flashpoints could see Trump soon attack this nation
Tensions between Donald Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros have been escalating after months of launching lethal air strikes on vessels accused of shipping deadly drugs north to the US. ⌘ Read more

Before his assassination, California’s first openly gay official taped his last words
Harvey Milk had been elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 — a little over a year later, he would be dead. ⌘ Read more

How a daughter’s ‘puzzle’ inspired one of the world’s most popular cameras
On November 26, 1948, the first Polaroid camera was released commercially, changing photography forever. ⌘ Read more

And regarding those broken URLs: I once speculated that these bots operate on an old dataset, because I thought that my redirect rules actually were broken once and produced loops. But a) I cannot reproduce this today, and b) I cannot find anything related to that in my Git history, either. But it’s hard to tell, because I switched operating systems and webservers since then …

But the thing is that I’m seeing new URLs constructed in this pattern. So this can’t just be an old crawling dataset.

I am now wondering if those broken URLs are bot bugs as well.

They look like this (zalgo is a new project):

https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/

When you request that URL, you get redirected to /git/:

$ curl -sI https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:13:51 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 510
Location: /git/

And on /git/, there are links to my repos. So if a broken client requests https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/, then sees a bunch of links and simply appends them, you’ll end up with an infinite loop.

Is that what’s going on here or are my redirects actually still broken … ?

We’ve found an unexpected structure in the solar system’s Kuiper belt
A newly discovered cluster of objects called the “inner kernel” of the Kuiper belt could teach us about the early history of the solar system – including the movement of Neptune ⌘ Read more

What is platform engineering?
History and evolution of platform engineering Platform engineering is a discipline focused on building and maintaining software development platforms that provide self-service for developer teams, offering the necessary infrastructure for provisioning an application, for example. The… ⌘ Read more

The Internet Archive Now Captures AI-Generated Content (Including Google’s AI Overviews)
CNN profiled the non-profit Internet Archive today — and included this tidbit about how they archive parts of the internet that are now “tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.”

The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of t … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org wow, 31 is truly a telling! Interesting facade on that building on 10! And that roof on 51, oh my! The golden Jesus and tower on 7 are something else too.

I miss Europe like hell, mate! A lot of things around here are younger than me. I don’t feel history, I am history. 😅

On “family day”, I was expecting to see more pictures with people in it. All lovely, nevertheless. Thanks, as always, for the mini-vacation! 🙈

Security Researchers Spot 150,000 Function-less npm Packages in Automated ‘Token Farming’ Scheme
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Register:

Yet another supply chain attack has hit the npm registry in what Amazon describes as “one of the largest package flooding incidents in open source registry history” — but with a twist. Instead of injecting credential-steal … ⌘ Read more

Apple Cuts App Store Fee In Half For ‘Mini Apps’
Apple is cutting its App Store fee from 30% to 15% for developers who join a new Mini Apps Partner Program, which requires using more of Apple’s built-in technology to power lightweight “mini apps.” “This includes using Apple software to register a user’s purchase history, verify user ages and to process in-app purchases,” reports CNBC. From the report: A “mini app” is a lightwei … ⌘ Read more

Longest government shutdown in US history ends
Donald Trump has signed off on a bill passed by Congress to end the 43-day US government shutdown. ⌘ Read more

The Penthouse Syndicate
Multimillion-dollar properties, sports cars and a life of luxury: Inside what is alleged to be one of the largest fraud and money-laundering syndicates in Australian history. ⌘ Read more

How Christian Nationalism Is Shaping Trump’s Foreign Policy Toward Africa
Jessica Washington,  Political Reporter  -  The Intercept

_Stephan: ”king” Trump has a long history of racism, and is the flavor of his administration and linked to what I think of as pseudo-Christianity because White nationalist Christianity has little to do with Jesus’ teachings.  Trump and his father were taken to court decades ago over their racism, and lost, and he has never … ⌘ Read more