reboot6675

GOAT

We're all gonna end up in one of those aren't we...

So I joined a new gym last year and was pleasantly surprised. They gave me a smart card to get in and out, that's it, no app, no accounts, no nothing. Well, today I got to the gym and saw the announcement that they are phasing out the access with the smart card and starting to use, you guessed it, an app.

Now, I know this is not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But I'm just tired of this trend of replacing perfectly functioning systems with apps (public transport tickets come to mind). Just more ways to harvest people's data, I guess...

Ah and by the way, in my previous gym they not only required an app for accessing the place, they also incentivized people to track their workouts, meals and bodyweight using the gym's app (of course I never used any of these features).

Context: the creator of Linux is from Finland

The news was already posted here last week, but I found this great technical explanation of the flaw. Long story short: Apple is using bad cryptography. They got alerted by researchers back in 2019 but didn't fix it.

Recently stumbled upon the PhD thesis of a researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology from ~2 years ago. I haven't read the whole thing, but I thought it might be of interest for someone here. It's freely available for download on the link.

Excerpts from the preface:

The sheer number of the surveillance systems that we document in subsequent chapters reflects the industrial scale of data collection in the twenty-first century. We hope that future researchers will take up the challenge of addressing each covert program as a research subject to fully and completely explore, and to freely share their findings with the wider world in the spirit of open academic discussion. This kind of basic research is crucial to anti-surveillance software and hardware development.

The machinery of mass surveillance is simply too dangerous to be allowed to exist. We must work to ensure that no one will be able to say that they did not know, or that they were not warned. We must use all of the tools in our toolbox – economic, social, cultural, political, and of course, cryptographic – to blind targeted and mass surveillance adversaries.

So recently I was thinking how games with pixel art graphics are popular nowadays, and I was wondering if there are new games being made with other kinds of "retro" graphics, for example, games that look like the PS1 or PS2 eras.

Any recommendations?

I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood.

Source

Context: this is a legit screenshot I took on my workplace around 1.5 years ago. Hopefully it's been patched by now? Completely ridiculous behavior

Had it saved on my hard drive for years and recently re-discovered it. Seems to be from 2011 (!!)

Google is getting worse by the year, but it seems even back then some people were already seeing where things were going.

(Credits to the original author whoever it might be)

I've been following this account for a few years on Twitter and it's awesome. I was out of the loop since I stopped using Twitter, but now I found that they launched a blog and also started to be active in other social media. Thought you might appreciate it like I do!