I finally found a good thing to say about AI. After years of politicians pitting Americans against each other, AI is re-unifying us. We now stand together against the common enemy: Data Centers.

@lauren

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Colin Percival offered free use of his back up system (Tarsnap) for them to save their data.

I thought that was a really nice thing to do, and he'd incur those expenses without income, so I added some money to my account, and sent him a note. (IIRC, it was $300.)

I've been waiting, and just received a notification that I'm finally running low on my account. So 4 years, at $75 per year, to store 2.1TB of data? Nice.

@mwl @pitrh

Today I learned that the Macbook Neo, which is selling like hotcakes, is based around _defective_ CPUs. Some smart person at Apple saw they were about to scrap a bunch of CPUs because they wouldn't run above a certain speed. So they proposed just building a cheap laptop with them, and run it at that lower speed.

Apple can't fill orders fast enough, and has run out of "defective" chips.

Cory Doctorow absolutely nails copyright in this one. Less of his bombastic style, but one of the best things I've read explaining how copyright works in the modern era. I'm guessing that things are so out of whack now that no amount of bombast was needed. Just the facts. (FWIW, the previous best thing on this was a speech by Courtney Love on record labels and their organized theft.) @pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn-that-way

I've been doing a bit of learning on IPv6 security. It's not good. Maybe not worse than IPv4, but in my head I thought they had taken the IPv4 lessons to heart.

So far, it appears that fake Router Advertisements, and bad Neighbor Discovery Protocol packets can allow global MITM attacks. APTs were found using "Spellbinder" to maintain covert persistence on networks, using these sorts of techniques.

So much more to learn.

@mms @mwl @thegibson

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?!!

@mwl

There's a story/joke that everyone who's been in engineering for very long has heard. The one about a company balking at a bill, only to get an itemized one with "knowing where to put the X, $10,000."

It turns out, this story is _TRUE_:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/

Forget Tesla, Steinmetz was the real genius.

@robpike mentioned this in a lecture.

"The primary operation of calculation is counting: the secondary operation is addition, with its counterpart, subtraction. The addition and subtraction are in reality effected by means of counting, which still remains the primary operation; but the necessity for economising labour and time forces upon us devices for performing the counting processes in a summary manner, and for allowing several of them to go on simultaneously in the calculating engine."

1879 report on the Analytical Engine

@pluralistic Just started listening to "Picks and Shovels". So far, my *favorite* of all your books. I'm only on chapter 3, and I've laughed out loud twice. Which I never do (social anxiety).

It is similar to the experience I had reading "Cryptonomicon".

Some of my joy is because the hacking so far is smack in the middle of my wheelhouse. I never trafficked warez, but I did a lot of cracking of the software I bought. Even wrote a couple of pieces for Hardcore Computist mag. I'm feeling it!

Today I was notified by Have I Been Pwned (HBIP) that my Internet Archive account was in the data from the breach.

This is why I run my own mail server (#RYOMS); I give each web site a different email address. So they can try to re-use my creds elsewhere, but _both_ username and password are unique. Spray those all you like.

@pluralistic Cory Doctorow just invented my new favorite word:

Inshitternet

Or maybe Enshitternet.

But expect to see this word appearing in my posts frequently from now on.