@prologic@twtxt.net honestly, I though it was a nail at first. Like this, but bent. LOL.

@prologic@twtxt.net I prefer something like the logo on https://twtxt.dev, for example, instead. But hey, it is your pod, have fun!

You no Mikey like? 🧐

I’m still looking for people, podcasts, events talking about #Python without assuming everyone is a software developer or a “data scientist”.

Why are data journalists, type designers (Guido’s brother!), Blender wizards, FreeCAD hackers, hobbyist game makers, casual automation buffs, robot tweakers, MicroPython enthusiasts, creative coders, educators, biologists, astronomers and other scientists, consistently ignored?

Are we f*ing invisible? One of Python Brasil keynoters kind of just did that. My heart sank. Other talks, like the Art&FLOSS one, by Jim Schmitz, lessened my pain.

Where is the follow up for that 2017 keynote by Jake VanderPlas?

I’m still looking for people, podcasts, events, talking about #Python without assuming everyone is a software developer or a “data scientist”.

Why are data journalists, type designers (Guido’s brother!), Blender wizards, FreeCAD hackers, hobbyist game makers, casual automation buffs, robot tweakers, MicroPython enthusiasts, creative coders, educators, biologists, astronomers and other scientists, consistently ignored?

Are we invisible? One of Python Brasil keynoters kind of just did that. My heart sank. Other talks, like the Art&FLOSS one, by Jim Schmitz, lessened my pain.

Where is the follow up for that 2017 keynote by Jake VanderPlas?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org then it was, most likely, space debris—which, sadly, make up for 98% of all space anomalies these days. And thought they have applied to the Grant Wishes Council, they are yet to be approved. Keep playing, though. 😅

Hmmm, looks like my twt hash algorithm implementation calculates incorrect values. Might be the tilde in the URL that throws something off. :-? At least yarnd and jenny agree on a different hash.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It looks like something from “Twin Peaks” 🌲

This looks like a botnet, to be honest. The IPs are all over the place. Ethopia, Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon, Netherlands, … I mean, that’s the logical thing to do, isn’t it? Do your web crawling on infected PCs. Nobody will block those, because those are the same IP ranges as legitimate requests. And obviously you don’t have to pay for computing time.

… and they all send invalid HTTP requests, all answered with HTTP 400 … How silly.

My goodness, a new level of stupidity.

The bots are now doing things like this:

GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/feednotify/datenstrahler/slinp/countty HTTP/1.1

1. That URL does not exist.
   
2. By including http://uninformativ.de in that request, this instructs the webserver to do an HTTP proxy request. Of course, this isn’t allowed on my webserver (and shouldn’t by allowed on any normal webserver), resulting in HTTP 400. And even if it were, the target would be the exact same server, making a proxy request unnecessary.
   

And of course, it’s not just 50 hits like this or 100 or 1’000 or 10’000. No, it’s over 150’000 in the last 2 days. All from vastly different IP ranges of different cloud hosters.

This almost looks like a DDoS attack, but it’s just completely stupid. This feels more like some idiot vibe coded a crawler.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, it feels broken. It often needs a couple of retries and a lot of patience. It’s been like that for months. 🫤

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! :-D But I actually do like their approach. I don’t know what staff should do differently when they are not involved in the channel topic. At least in the general case. Maybe in this specific scenario here they could have cross-checked domains, git repos and stuff like that. But I also reckon that it’s only fair if they treat everybody the same.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, that’s a hell lot of food! If it doesn’t spoil, it’s easily enough for the rest of your life and all your neighbors and surrounding cities, probably more. :-D

That’s a great font. I like it. It just suits the print style incredibly well. No offence, to the absolute contrary, I would not have thought that you actually designed that. It looks just so right. Hats off! :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Have we reached peak enshittification yet?

YouTube is completely broken for me for a week or more. The player doesn’t even load anymore. Trying to limit the search results to real videos doesn’t do shit, etc. It’s useless. But downloading the videos with yt-dlp still works like a dream.

Listening to #Bernstein’s #WestSideStory 🎵

I really like it, but (and?) it makes me very nostalgic. It reminds me of my father, he introduced it to me.

Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

I should work on my client again and add some new features. Like adding a new feed directly in the client and not having to go to the config first. And showing a preview of a feed before actually adding it. Also, a search would be something to add. And finally combining my User-Agent analyzer with my subscription list to spot new feeds automatically.

Somebody managed to piss @prologic@twtxt.net off, and it looks like he took twtxt.net down with it. Oh dear…

@bender@twtxt.net to work through both https and gemini, the site is not written in HTML, but in Gemtext, automatically converted to HTML, when needed. Gemtext is nicely explained for example here: https://garden.bouncepaw.com/hypha/gemtext . In short, it is so limited, no line can be more than one thing, so no links in a list are possible, othar than doing it through something like this primitive workaround.

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net when I first “fed” the text to Gemini, I asked for a three paragraphs summary. It provided it. Then I asked to “elaborate on three areas: user experience, moral/political impact, and technical/legal concerns”. The reply to that is too long for a twtxt.

I then asked to counter the OP opinions—as in “how would you counter the author’s opinion?”. The reply was very long, but started like this:

“That’s an excellent question, as the post lays out some very strong, well-reasoned criticisms. Countering these points requires acknowledging the valid concerns while presenting a perspective focused on mitigation, responsible integration, and the unique benefits of AI.”

What followed was extensive, so I asked for a summary, which didn’t do justice to the wall of text that preceded it.

@prologic@twtxt.net hehehe, yeah, it isn’t mine neither. Most obscure TLDs are in small registrars. I like to stick to one register (even though when Google Domains ceased to exist I was forced to have two, as Cloudflare doesn’t support the .ONE TLD).

You do raise very good points though, but I don’t think any of this is particularly new because there are many other examples of technology and evolution of change over time where people have forgotten certain skills like for example, changing a car tyre

she knew it would end like this Dead or alive ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

@bender@twtxt.net Not sure, if we actually have a law like that. But I wish it was the case. The clamp doesn’t say anything like that, just that it is now cactus.

The glue takes three days to reach its final strength. Let’s see. I’m sceptical.

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter October 2025

Image

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of October 2025.

The XMPP Newsletter is brought to you by the XSF Communication Team.

Just like any other product or project by the XSF, the Newsletter is the result of voluntary work … ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net happy belated birthday! Also, I would love to see that website. I went to the one listed on your profile, and saw the old one, not this one. I like the current, and also the pink look of the one of the screenshot!

@thecanine@twtxt.net I like Apple’s Liquid Glass. While I see there are many hatters, I haven’t had an issue with it on iOS, macOS, watchOS, nor tvOS. Have them all working fairly flawlessly.

@prologic@twtxt.net I requested an invitation. There are many like this, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. I also hope you are not hosting this on your infrastructure, at least not once you decide to monetise. I know self hosting is fun and all, but it also introduces variables that directly collide with a business model.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … sounds like a bad day. 😅

Design trends I think will take off in 2026
but tierlist

S - move from flat design to more detailed, 3D, more complex logos.

A - glass, not just liquid, Windows Vista, 7, 11,… accessibility concerns, but I like to see it.

B-/C+ - black and white icons, favicons. I did it before it was cool, but it’s getting overused.

E - gradientslop, barely started, already all blends together.

Reze likes it in her ass (animanghayo)[ChainsawMan] ⌘ Read more

Using fork lift and her like a pro (BlueTheBone) [Original] ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’m glad you like ‘em. :-)

** Autumnal week notes **
Someone I grew up with happened to go to the same college as me, and now we happen to live in the same relatively small city. We’ve been totally casual but pretty consistent mainstays of each others’ lives for going on 20 years at this point. She’s also one of the few people that I run into who knows that I can’t actually see well enough to reliably tell people apart from any further away than like 4 or 5 feet, and I always feel really appreciative whenever she waves that she also always says“hi” and who … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net hey, not random! How dare you! (with Greta accent, and emphasis). LOL. Old man here doing, well, like old man do. Wait until you are old, and that will give you a better idea. :-P

hi I haven’t been on here in years how are you random old men who like tech

This was a bit of a challenge. Wanted to see if I can make a small version, combining the best/most interesting parts, of the previous ones. Like the black lines separating each colour, an interesting pose, more anatomically correct legs… something of a best of the 2025, profile picture.

Venom using Gwen like a toy (KhaiDowARoyNA) [Spiderverse / Spiderman] ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)

Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didn’t plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.

The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something I’ve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.

A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.

I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. It’s main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or weren’t assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.

Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.

It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.

Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.

Here’s a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png

This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmmmmmmmmmmmm … guess I should take a look at Qt. 🤔 That’s the one popular toolkit that I’ve never really tried for some reason. I really don’t like C++ (might as well use Rust), so I’ll also use Python.

Rob Jetten, leader of the progressive-centrist D66 party and likely next Dutch PM, says Europe must ‘defeat Putin’ ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Kaboom! Hahaha, I did not think of that at all, thanks for pointing it out, mate! :‘-D

But let me clarify just in case: I honestly do not want to bash this project. In fact, it’s a great little invention. It’s just that I’m not conviced by the current user interface decisions. Anyway, web design isn’t right up my alley. I just wanted to add some fun. And luckily, at least someone liked it so far. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The one for Delphi was quite good.

It was! I didn’t use Delphi for long, though. Dunno why, I always gravitated towards Visual Basic back then. 😅

These days I don’t deal with GUI programming anymore.

I also avoid it when possible, because … it’s exhausting, because … the tools that I have/know are “subpar”. Doing anything regarding GUIs always feels like a chore. That wasn’t the case in the VB days.

Well, I made this in ~2009 with Java/Swing and it was pretty nice to work with, custom widgets and all:

https://movq.de/v/de26d5edb3/s.png

I wouldn’t dare doing this with GTK.

Theming on Qt6 is a bit unusual (you have to install qt6ct and then set an environment variable for every Qt program?), but at least pcmanfm-qt doesn’t look like brain damage anymore now. 🤔 (Except there’s no darkmode. What is this, 1980?)

https://movq.de/v/2d0d5da3d2/s.png

Holly! I thing I might have figured out a way to twt like a true caveman 🤣
The sad thing tho is this caveman will have to cheat a bit in order to replay properly…
(P.S: I hope the multi-lines trick works, if not then F..rog it!)

There are no really good GUI toolkits for Linux, are there?

They’re either slow (like GTK4, Qt6), don’t support Wayland (like Tk), and/or unmaintained (like GTK2 and many others).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They’re seriously telling us at work: “Can it be AI’d? Do it, don’t waste time!” Shit like that is the result. (What’s this weird gray triangle in the bottom right corner?)

@javivf@adn.org.es not having any issues on my M4 mini, no. Smooth. There are some visual discordances I don’t like, but if I give them a blind eye I can live with them. 😅

Bird flu likely killed hundreds of seal pups on sub-Antarctic island ⌘ Read more

Fedora: The First Vibe Coded Linux Distro
What does an Al developed Linux Distribution look like? ⌘ Read more

Could I clone myself like Cleon? ⌘ Read more

This was a great read, btw. 😃 If you liked Event Horizon, this is for you. I’m gonna get her other two scifi books as well, that’s for sure.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is actually a good positive change I think!

Personally, I’ll probably stretch it out over 24 days. Giving myself more time to solve each puzzle and I really want this event to last the entire month. 😅

I might even do AoC this year with the elevated stress/pressure! – The last few times I’ve tried, I’ve always felt far too much pressure and felt like a failure 😞 (mostly ya know because of my vision impairment, I couldn’t keep up!)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, we like to be paranoid. We’ve been right so many times. Unfortunately.

@prologic@twtxt.net That sounds horrible. 😅 I wouldn’t want to own such a car. (My plan is not to buy a new car after my current one finally broke down entirely.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org First time I heard about eCall. I don’t think I like this. 🫤 Feels like another attempt at going for complete surveillance. Yes, yes, it’s about “security”/“safety” … it always is.

Like these Car Manufacturers, like GWM, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW and whoever else does this stupid shit™ need to pull their heads out of their asse. :O

Obviously none of this requires an Internet connection, let alone a Network connection. All of it can be done over Bluetooth! Just like Carplay itself!

F-Droid Hides Bible Apps as “NSFW” & “Promotes Porn”
The Open Source Android App Store warns users that Bible Apps have, “features you may not like. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Where the heck did you find that? What is that thing? Yeah, totally looks like an attempt to make some garbage feel more solid. Unless this steel plate is actually used for attaching bolts from the other side or something like that. Which I highly doubt, given that there are muuuuuch cheaper options to install various types of nuts in plastic.

Yeah, this goo makes it just harder to disconnect. I bet it doesn’t add water protection to the connections at all.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de he sure does! LOL. It is more like incomprehensible stuff that comes out. Sometimes I manage to get what he was trying to say, but more often than not I have no idea. 🤣

️ Spring Boot API Security Like a Pro: Rate Limiting, Replay Protection & Signature Validation…

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Learn how to secure your Spring Boot APIs using rate lim … ⌘ Read more

Time crystals could power future quantum computers
A glittering hunk of crystal gets its iridescence from a highly regular atomic structure. Frank Wilczek, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Physics, proposed quantum systems––like groups of particles––could construct themselves in the same way, but in time instead of space. He dubbed such systems time crystals, defining them by their lowest possible energy state, which perpetually repeats movements without external energy input. Time crystals were experimentall … ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT’s move towards AI porn a risk to children, eSafety warns
The company behind ChatGPT also claims it can make the chatbot more human-like without negative mental health effects. ⌘ Read more

Generation of harmful slow electrons in water is a race between intermolecular energy decay and proton transfer
When high-energy radiation interacts with water in living organisms, it generates particles and slow-moving electrons that can subsequently damage critical molecules like DNA. Now, Professor Petr Slavíček and his bachelor’s student Jakub Dubský from UCT Prague (University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague) have described in detail one of the key mechanisms for the creation … ⌘ Read more

** Encrypt & Decrypt Database Fields in Spring Boot Like a Pro (2025 Secure Guide)**

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“Your database backup just leaked. Is your data still safe?”

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infos … ⌘ Read more

World’s largest rays may be diving to extreme depths to build mental maps of vast oceans
Many marine species are no strangers to the depths of the oceans. Some animals, like certain sharks, tuna, or turtles, routinely perform extreme dives, whereas for other species, such behavior has been observed less frequently. ⌘ Read more

AI couldn’t picture a woman like me - until now
Paralympic swimmer Jess Smith, says representation means being seen as part of the AI world that’s being built. ⌘ Read more

SpaceX launches the 11th test flight of its mega Starship rocket with another win
SpaceX launched another of its mammoth Starship rockets on a test flight Monday, successfully making it halfway around the world while releasing mock satellites like last time. ⌘ Read more

Albedo likes it rough (Windmill) [Overlord] ⌘ Read more

The Destruction in Gaza Is What the Future of AI Warfare Looks Like
Rhett Jones,  Senior Editor  -  Gizmodo

_Stephan: As I have watched Israel carry out its genocide of Muslims and wreak utter devastation on Gaza, and how the Ukrainians are defending themselves against Russia’s invasion of their country, without adequate help from the United States, what has stood out for me is the role AI technology is playing in both wars. This, I think, is the nature of … ⌘ Read more

** How to Use AI to Learn Bug Hunting & Cybersecurity Like a Pro (in 2025)**

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Hey there 👋,
I’m Vipul, the mind behind The Hacker’s Log — where I break down the hacker’s mindset, tools, and secrets 🧠💻

[Continue reading … ⌘ Read more

Account Take Over | P1 — Critical

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It started off like any other day until I got an unexpected email — an invite to a private bug bounty program. Curious, I jumped in. The…

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infosecwriteups.com/account-take-over-p1-critical-5468ce8218b9?sour … ⌘ Read more

It took 10 years to build, but does it deliver the perfect toast?
A team of Australian researchers spent a decade developing a toaster that watches the slices for you, so every type of bread is done to your liking. ⌘ Read more

Satellite images reveal ancient hunting traps used by South American social groups
Satellite images have revealed an ancient system of elaborate, funnel-shaped mega traps likely built by hunters and pastoralists to catch prey in the high altitudes of northern Chile. ⌘ Read more

I’d like to speak to the Bellcore ManaGeR
Comments ⌘ Read more

‘They treated us like animals’ - Inside the epicentre of deportations in New York City
Chaotic scenes have become routine in a federal immigration court in Manhattan. ⌘ Read more

I noticed Google put out this article: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/09/lets-talk-security-answering-your-top.html it’s very current day Google, but the comments under the YouTube video are pretty on point and I saw a few familiar faces there. There is also, unexpectedly, ways to contact Google.

First a form for “teachers, students, and hobbyists”, that I filled politely, as someone who falls under their hobbyist category. It can be filled both anonymously, or with an e-mail attached, to be contacted by them (I chose the second option).

Also a general feedback and questions form, that I was not as polite in and used to send them the following message:

I have already provided some feedback, in the teacher, student and hobbyists form/questionaire, as well as an open letter I’ve recently sent to the European Commission digital markets act team, as I do believe your proposal might not even be legal, given the fact it puts privacy-focused alternative app stores at risk (https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html) and it was proposed this early, after Google lost in court to Epic Games, over similar monopoly concerns. Why should we trust Google to be the only authority for all developer signatures, right after the European courts labeled it a gatekeeper?

Assuming this gets passed, despite justified developer backlash and at best questionable legality, can you give us any guarantees, this will not be used to target legal malware-free mods, or user privacy enhancing patchers, like the ones used for applying the ReVanced patches? I have made a few mods myself, but I am in no way associated with the ReVanced team. I just share many peoples concerns, Google Chrome has been conveniently stripped of its manifest v2 support, that made many privacy protecting extensions possible and now you’re conveniently asking for the government IDs, of all the developers, who maintain these kinds of privacy protections (be it patches, or alternative open-source apps) on Android.

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de I submitted it via the form on their website (https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/contact-dma-team_en) and got the following response:

Dear citizen,

Thank you for contacting us and sharing your concerns regarding the impact of Google’s plans to introduce a developer verification process on Android. We appreciate that you have chosen to contact us, as we welcome feedback from interested parties.

As you may be aware, the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’) obliges gatekeepers like Google to effectively allow the distribution of apps on their operating system through third party app stores or the web. At the same time, the DMA also permits Google to introduce strictly necessary and proportionate measures to ensure that third-party software apps or app stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system or to enable end users to effectively protect security.

We have taken note of your concerns and, while we cannot comment on ongoing dialogue with gatekeepers, these considerations will form part of our assessment of the justifications for the verification process provided by Google.

Kind regards,
The DMA Team

I keep getting this email occadionally:

Your iCloud storage is almost full

Now for various reasons, I don’t want my children to be using iCloud to store data, files, photos or any of the sort. They’re free to use iMessages, and other Apple services like the App Store, etc, but not storage.

So I’ve set about blocking iCloud Storage API(s) via AdGuard Home tonight as well as ensuring that my local network (client users) cannot bypass DNS policies and get out other sneaky ways, because some applications will just use other DNS servers, or DOH or DOT.

US Senate blocks debate on ending military action against Venezuelan vessels
Richard Cowan,  Reporter  -  Reuters

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DCF77, our time signal radio station, is a great public service. I really love that. It’s just a signal that anybody can pick up, no subscription, no tracking, no nothing. Much like GPS/GNSS. 💚

Seeing like a software company
Comments ⌘ Read more

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Shutdown Threatens Food Aid Program Relied on By Millions of Families
Associated Press Reporters,    -  MedPage Today | Associated Press

_Stephan: Trump is a psychopath, and so are a number of his vassals like Stephen Miller. They demonstrate their mental illness every day, and it just gets nastier. They obviously care nothing for the wellbeing of American families as this report details. And, meanwhile, the Republican Congressmembers just docilely watch … ⌘ Read more

My open letter, to the European Commission digital markets act team:

Hello,

I am joining other developers, concerned about Googles new plan, to approve every app and effectively destroy most of the competing 3rd party stores this way. The biggest one of these alternative stores, most known for their focus on user and developer privacy, already states, this would make it impossible for them to operate: https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Even communities like the XDA forum, where new developers are often introduced to the world of Android development, would likely be strongly impacted, as making, publishing and installing Android apps is made less accessible.

I am not just writing on their behalf, I run a small website myself (https://thecanine.ueuo.com/), that both provides legal modifications, for some android apps - for example adding an amoled dark theme, to the most popular XMPP chat client for Android, or increasing one of Androids keyboard apps height. This all comes after Googles previous changes to the Android operating system, that prevent users from installing old apps (old to Google, can mean only a couple of months, without an update - https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk and the target version gets increased every year). I rely on apps developed by a single developer, even for things like making the pixel art presented on my website and sideloading as a way to make these apps work, before developers can catch up to Google’s new requirements - if Google is allowed to slowly kill these options, us digital artists will soon lose the tools we need to create digital art.

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Random musing from a #Python creative coder:

I have this naïve cumbersome thing for dealing with collinear vertices in a polygon (like a vertex in the middle of an edge that doesn’t change the shape of the polygon, and I tried to replace it with some clever #shapely method such as .simplify(…) or .buffer(0) and failed miserably. So I’ll have to keep my home made check-area-every-three-vertices thing for now…

I’m kind of proud of my idea of representing polygons as a set of frozensets of edge vertex pairs because it eliminates all visually equivalent rotations and reverse ordered rotations (that is, if you don’t have pesky collinear vertices).

https://pynews.com.br/@villares/115325020477872857/

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