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F-Droid Fake Signer PoC: Bypassing Certificate Pinning

2025-01-04
F-Droid Fake Signer PoC: Bypassing Certificate Pinning

This project is a proof-of-concept demonstrating vulnerabilities in F-Droid's APK signature verification. Attackers can exploit these flaws to forge signatures, bypassing F-Droid's certificate pinning and allowing malicious apps to masquerade as legitimate ones. The vulnerabilities stem from inconsistencies in how F-Droid handles certificate order and verification within the APK signing block. By manipulating these inconsistencies, attackers can inject false certificate information, tricking F-Droid into accepting them as valid. While fixes have been proposed and implemented, further vulnerabilities and bypasses have been discovered, highlighting ongoing challenges in securing APK signing verification.

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(github.com)
Development Android Security APK Signing F-Droid Vulnerability

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Navigating Chaos, Embracing AI, and the Future of Finance

2025-09-04
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Navigating Chaos, Embracing AI, and the Future of Finance

Fortune's Leadership Next podcast features Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. The interview reflects on Robinhood's history with GameStop and meme stocks, discusses how AI and crypto will reshape investing, and explores raising the next generation with investing knowledge. Tenev shares leadership lessons learned and how Robinhood adapted from the GameStop saga, expanding into wealth management, credit cards, crypto trading, and more. He believes investing will become increasingly crucial as AI impacts the workforce, and Robinhood aims to make investing accessible to all.

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(fortune.com)
Startup Investing

Skywater 130nm SerDes Design: High-Speed Communication Achieved

2025-06-18
Skywater 130nm SerDes Design: High-Speed Communication Achieved

This project details a high-speed Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) circuit designed for high-speed communication. Implemented using Verilog HDL and synthesized with OpenLane on the Skywater OpenPDK 130nm process, the SerDes converts parallel data into a serial stream for transmission and back again at the receiver. The design includes a transmitter (using a chain of CMOS inverters as a driver), a receiver (employing a resistive feedback inverter and CMOS inverter for sensing and amplification), a D-flip-flop for data sampling, and an oversampling CDR for clock recovery. GDS, SPICE, and netlist files for all modules are provided.

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(github.com)
Hardware High-Speed Communication

Futureworld: The Dark Side of Tech Utopia

2025-06-05
Futureworld: The Dark Side of Tech Utopia

A viewing of the film *Futureworld* prompted reflections on tech ethics. The movie depicts a theme park where guests can kill and sexually assault robots, highlighting the misuse of AI by corporations like the fictional Delos. The author argues this isn't about AI ethics, but about power and sexual gratification. This instrumentalization of humans, disregarding their agency and dignity, mirrors current AI's data misuse and exploitation of creators, ultimately leading to potential enslavement. The article urges caution against the risks of technological advancement, emphasizing ethics and respect over using technology for selfish desires.

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(joelmorris.substack.com)
AI power and sexuality

Sci-Hub: An Outpouring of Gratitude from Indian Researchers

2025-08-28

Sci-Hub, a website providing free access to academic papers, has received a flood of thank-you messages from researchers across India. From PhD students to professors, these scholars express deep gratitude for Sci-Hub's assistance in overcoming the prohibitive cost of journal subscriptions, enabling them to conduct their research. The letters are filled with praise and admiration for Sci-Hub's founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, and hopes for its continued operation.

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(sci-hub.se)
Tech academic papers open access

Telefónica Germany Ditches VMware After 5x Price Hike, Switches to Spinnaker

2025-07-14
Telefónica Germany Ditches VMware After 5x Price Hike, Switches to Spinnaker

Telefónica Germany, facing a fivefold increase in VMware renewal costs from Broadcom, has switched its support to Spinnaker. The telecom company was using vSphere with perpetual licenses but Broadcom's shift to subscription-based packages for VMware Cloud Foundation proved too expensive. Telefónica only uses vSphere, finding the full VCF suite unnecessary. While initially happy with VMware, the dramatic price increase prompted the move to Spinnaker, a platform already used for Oracle support. The migration is expected to be completed by the end of 2026. This follows similar decisions by other companies facing steep price increases from Broadcom's new licensing model.

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(www.theregister.com)
Tech

The King in Yellow: A Blend of Gothic Horror and Romance

2025-02-07
The King in Yellow: A Blend of Gothic Horror and Romance

Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection of short stories, *The King in Yellow*, is a bizarre blend of gothic horror, supernatural elements, and romance. The nine stories and a sequence of poems begin with a macabre tone, revolving around a forbidden play, *The King in Yellow*, which drives readers to madness and introduces a malevolent entity. The first four tales are steeped in eerie atmosphere and supernatural horror, while the latter stories transition to a more lighthearted, romantic style, focusing on Parisian artists. This influential work has left a lasting mark, impacting H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and inspiring modern works like the first season of *True Detective*.

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(en.wikipedia.org)
Game horror fiction gothic Cthulhu Mythos

Marginalia Search Index: A Significant Performance Boost

2025-08-17

The Marginalia search engine has undergone a significant index redesign to better leverage modern hardware. By employing memory-mapped B-trees and deterministic block-based skip lists, along with careful tuning of block sizes and I/O strategies, search speeds have been dramatically improved. The post details the new data structures and performance optimizations, exploring the idiosyncrasies of NVMe SSD read performance and how to maximize performance through block size and I/O mode adjustments.

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(www.marginalia.nu)
Development

Utamaro's Yamauba Series: A Balancing Act of Aesthetics and Taboo

2025-04-10
Utamaro's Yamauba Series: A Balancing Act of Aesthetics and Taboo

Kitagawa Utamaro's *Yamauba* series presents a paradoxical image of the Yamauba: untamed eyebrows and hair suggest her outcast status, yet fine robes and delicate features soften her monstrous origins. Some scholars interpret this as a way to subtly convey sensuality while evading censorship, pointing to a few images with exposed breasts. However, this interpretation overlooks the majority of the series, which aren't overtly erotic, and Utamaro's history of publishing more explicit works. His eventual punishment stemmed from political content, not explicitness, highlighting the complex censorship of the time and the delicate balance between artistic expression and societal taboos.

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(publicdomainreview.org)
Design Ukiyo-e Kitagawa Utamaro Art Censorship

AI Chatbots' Inaccurate URLs: A New Opportunity for Criminals

2025-07-04
AI Chatbots' Inaccurate URLs: A New Opportunity for Criminals

Netcraft's research reveals that AI chatbots like GPT-4.1 frequently provide incorrect website addresses for major companies, achieving only 66% accuracy. This creates an opportunity for cybercriminals to leverage these inaccuracies for phishing attacks by creating fake websites. Researchers found that scammers are even exploiting AI-generated results, creating fake code repositories, tutorials, and social media accounts on GitHub to boost the ranking of malicious sites in chatbot results, enabling supply-chain attacks such as the one targeting the Solana blockchain API. This highlights the risk of solely relying on AI chatbots for information, particularly sensitive data like login URLs, emphasizing the need for careful verification.

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(www.theregister.com)
Tech

Ayn Rand's Heir: A Tragedy of Loyalty, Power, and Family

2025-04-04
Ayn Rand's Heir: A Tragedy of Loyalty, Power, and Family

This article chronicles the life of Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's devoted follower and heir, whose life revolved around unwavering loyalty to Rand. From his teenage epiphany with Rand's philosophy to becoming her sole inheritor, Peikoff dedicated his life to propagating Rand's Objectivist philosophy. However, after inheriting Rand's legacy and fortune, Peikoff's later years are consumed by a bitter dispute with his daughter, Kira, stemming from his marriage to a much younger caregiver, Grace Davis, and subsequent plans to leave his estate to her. The story highlights the clash between power, loyalty, and family, and the ironic fate of a man devoted to individualism who ends up defined by his dependence on others.

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(www.theatlantic.com)
Misc Objectivism Family Dispute

Multi-Stage Programming with Splice Variables: Safe and Predictable Code Generation

2025-06-28

This paper introduces a novel technique called Multi-Stage Programming (MSP) that allows programs to generate other programs. To ensure safe and predictable code generation, the authors introduce the concept of "splice variables." Splice variables provide fine-grained control over the code generation process and seamlessly scale to advanced features like code pattern matching and rewriting. The type system automatically tracks variable dependencies, ensuring that the generated code is always well-formed, properly scoped, and type-checks correctly. The paper demonstrates the power of splice variables with examples such as generating a power function and showcases features like code pattern matching and rewriting.

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(tsung-ju.org)
Development Multi-Stage Programming Splice Variables

Turing Award Recognizes Reinforcement Learning Pioneers

2025-03-05
Turing Award Recognizes Reinforcement Learning Pioneers

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have been awarded the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their foundational work in reinforcement learning. Their research, starting in the 1980s, laid the conceptual and algorithmic groundwork for this crucial approach to building intelligent systems. Reinforcement learning, inspired by psychology and neuroscience, uses reward signals to guide agents toward optimal behavior. Barto and Sutton developed key algorithms like temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods, and their textbook, 'Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction,' became a standard reference. The combination of reinforcement learning with deep learning has led to breakthroughs like AlphaGo and improvements in models like ChatGPT. Their work continues to shape the field of AI.

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(awards.acm.org)
AI Turing Award

AI-Assisted Coding: Efficiency Gains and Hiring Challenges

2025-02-15

The author shares their experience using AI for coding, highlighting increased efficiency and reflecting on current flaws in software engineer recruitment. AI tools enabled the author to handle more complex code, improve code quality, and reduce tedious tasks. However, the author notes that some companies prohibit AI use during interviews, overlooking engineers' systemic thinking abilities. The author argues that recruitment should focus more on problem-solving skills and imagination, rather than rote memorization and retrieval. The article also discusses strategies for choosing primary keys in different databases and balancing development efficiency with data integrity.

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(scott-fryxell.github.io)
Development

Omnara: Mission Control for Your AI Agents

2025-08-12
Omnara: Mission Control for Your AI Agents

Omnara is a mobile-first platform for monitoring and controlling your AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and more). It offers real-time monitoring, interactive Q&A, and smart notifications, allowing you to track your AI agents' progress and provide guidance from anywhere. Say goodbye to wasted time due to stalled AI agents; Omnara empowers you to efficiently manage your AI workflow and boost productivity.

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(github.com)
Development

Securely Deploy Web Services with Cloudflare Tunnel: A Beginner's Guide

2025-07-13
Securely Deploy Web Services with Cloudflare Tunnel: A Beginner's Guide

Tired of complex server configurations and security headaches? Cloudflare Tunnel offers a simple and secure solution to deploy web services without exposing ports. By creating an outbound connection from your server to Cloudflare's nearest datacenter, all traffic flows through Cloudflare's secure network, ensuring your server's safety and reliability regardless of its location. This guide walks you through setting up Cloudflare Tunnel, including installing the cloudflared client, creating a tunnel, configuring a system service, and setting up DNS records—a process easily manageable even for beginners.

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(erisa.dev)
Development Web Service Deployment

Paris Fights Heatwaves with Innovative River-Based Cooling

2025-09-06
Paris Fights Heatwaves with Innovative River-Based Cooling

Facing increasingly severe summer heat waves, Paris is aggressively developing an innovative system that uses the Seine River water to cool buildings. This system transfers heat from buildings to the river water through heat exchangers, maintaining high cooling efficiency even when the river water is warm in summer, reaching up to 15 times the efficiency of conventional air conditioning in winter. However, with rising summer temperatures, the system faces new challenges. How to further improve cooling capacity while protecting the environment has become a crucial issue for Paris to address.

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(www.wired.com)
Tech urban cooling

Samsung's Pre-installed Bloatware, AppCloud, Raises Privacy Concerns in WANA

2025-06-21
Samsung's Pre-installed Bloatware, AppCloud, Raises Privacy Concerns in WANA

Users across West Asia and North Africa are reporting a pre-installed bloatware app, AppCloud, on Samsung's A and M series phones that secretly collects sensitive data and can't be easily removed. Developed by ironSource (now owned by Unity), this app lacks transparency regarding its data practices, raising significant privacy and security concerns. An open letter demands Samsung provide clear information about AppCloud, offer an opt-out, and reconsider its pre-installation practices.

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(smex.org)
Tech bloatware

Reverse Engineering Nintendo E-Reader's Drawing API: A Stack-Based Secret

2025-02-02
Reverse Engineering Nintendo E-Reader's Drawing API: A Stack-Based Secret

A developer, while creating a Minesweeper game for the Nintendo E-Reader, stumbled upon a hidden feature in the `DrawLine` function of its drawing API. Initially, a loop drawing a minimap rectangle using `DrawLine` revealed lines drawing progressively faster. The developer discovered the draw time was determined by a value pushed onto the stack, a combination of the loop counter and another register. By pushing 0 onto the stack, the issue was resolved, revealing a quirky API detail. This showcases the intrigue of reverse engineering and the peculiarities of older processor architectures.

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(mattgreer.dev)
Game Nintendo E-Reader

AMD Debunks x86 Inefficiency Myth at IFA 2025

2025-09-09
AMD Debunks x86 Inefficiency Myth at IFA 2025

At IFA 2025 in Berlin, AMD challenged the notion that x86 architecture is inherently inefficient. They argued that x86 processors (both AMD and Intel) offer competitive battery life in laptops while leveraging the decades-long x86 software ecosystem. AMD claimed the overall package value, not the instruction set, drives power efficiency and battery life, citing designs like Intel's Lunar Lake and AMD's Strix Point as examples. While Arm is slowly gaining traction in the PC market with players like Qualcomm and Nvidia, x86 remains dominant, countering the long-held belief that Arm ISAs are inherently more efficient.

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(www.techpowerup.com)
Tech

Pinterest Improves Embedding-Based Retrieval for Homefeed Recommendations

2025-02-14
Pinterest Improves Embedding-Based Retrieval for Homefeed Recommendations

Pinterest's engineering team significantly improved its embedding-based retrieval system for personalized and diverse content recommendations on the Homefeed. They achieved this through advanced feature crossing techniques (MaskNet and DHEN frameworks), pre-trained ID embeddings, and a revamped serving corpus with time-decayed summation. Furthermore, they explored cutting-edge methods like multi-embedding retrieval and conditional retrieval to cater to diverse user intents, resulting in increased user engagement and saves.

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(medium.com)
AI Embedding-based Retrieval

Trump Admin's VA Cuts: A Devastating Blow to Veterans

2025-03-09
Trump Admin's VA Cuts: A Devastating Blow to Veterans

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) plans to cut 83,000 jobs, over 17% of its workforce. This will severely impact veterans' access to healthcare, housing, education, and other benefits. The cuts exacerbate existing challenges veterans face, including healthcare access, rising suicide rates, and worsening social issues. Further, the cuts will weaken the VA's research capabilities, hindering understanding and treatment of veteran health problems. This policy reversal will have profound consequences for those who served the nation.

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(theconversation.com)
Tech Veterans

Rust's Type Safety: A Deep Dive via Stock Order Example

2025-05-06
Rust's Type Safety: A Deep Dive via Stock Order Example

This article compares Rust and C++'s handling of function parameters to illustrate the importance of type safety. Using a simulated stock order function as an example, it shows C++'s struggles in preventing parameter type confusion, highlighting how even with multiple improvements, errors remain possible. Rust, however, leverages its powerful type system and compile-time checks to effortlessly solve these issues. Even when converting user-supplied strings to numerical types, Rust effectively prevents errors, avoiding crashes and incorrect results. The article emphasizes Rust's advantages in ensuring code safety and reliability, showcasing features beyond just memory safety.

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(www.collabora.com)
Development Type Safety

23andMe Bankruptcy: Your Genetic Data is For Sale – Delete It Now!

2025-03-26
23andMe Bankruptcy: Your Genetic Data is For Sale – Delete It Now!

Genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, putting the genetic data of millions of users up for sale. To protect your privacy, users are urged to immediately download and delete their data from 23andMe. The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to download your data and delete your account, emphasizing the critical need to protect this sensitive information. The incident highlights the importance of genetic data privacy, and other companies in the field should take note and improve their data security practices.

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(www.eff.org)
Tech genetic data privacy

Apple's Stealth AI Code Generator: DiffuCode Leaps Forward

2025-07-06
Apple's Stealth AI Code Generator: DiffuCode Leaps Forward

Apple quietly dropped DiffuCode-7B-cpGRPO, a novel AI code generation model on Hugging Face. Unlike traditional autoregressive LLMs, DiffuCode uses a diffusion model architecture, enabling parallel processing of multiple code chunks for significantly faster generation. Built upon Alibaba's open-source Qwen2.5-7B and enhanced with coupled-GRPO training, it achieves high-quality code generation. While not yet reaching GPT-4 or Gemini Diffusion levels, DiffuCode shows promising performance on coding benchmarks, showcasing Apple's innovative approach to generative AI.

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(9to5mac.com)
AI

I Set Up a BitTorrent Tracker and This Happened...

2025-06-17

Noticing many BitTorrent trackers were dead, the author had a curious idea: buy a defunct domain, set up a tracker, and see what happens. The result? Millions of peers flooded in! This highlighted the centralized risks of the BitTorrent protocol and the legal gray area of trackers regarding copyright. While the tracker itself might not constitute 'inducement' to infringe, the author shut it down out of caution.

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(kianbradley.com)
Development tracker

Why I Ditched Chrome for Firefox and Never Looked Back

2025-01-14
Why I Ditched Chrome for Firefox and Never Looked Back

Frustrated with Chrome's performance on an older PC, the author switched to Firefox and was pleasantly surprised. Firefox not only matched Chrome's functionality but offered superior tab management (Firefox View), built-in Pocket for saving links, robust privacy features (Firefox Relay), a convenient screenshot tool, and AI chatbot integration. Additional thoughtful touches like picture-in-picture, customizable search engines, network settings, and auto-muting videos sealed the deal. The author recommends Firefox as a superior alternative.

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(www.howtogeek.com)
Tech

Async Rust Powers a New Scheme Compiler: Introducing scheme-rs

2025-02-18

Matthew Plant introduces scheme-rs, his Scheme implementation leveraging the power of async Rust to address its slow compile times and challenging debugging experience. scheme-rs uses the R6RS standard and offers seamless interoperability with async Rust, facilitating code gluing and debugging. The author also envisions a future language, Gouki, built upon scheme-rs, combining Scheme's macro system with Rust's type system for a more powerful programming experience. While still a work in progress, scheme-rs boasts core functionality and the author plans to add built-ins and optimize compilation performance.

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(maplant.com)
Development
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