"When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one's ability to persuade." -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg paraphrasing advice from her mother-in-law

AI Didn't Simplify Software Engineering: It Just Made Bad Engineering Easier #software #ai

TL;DR

Expertise Still Matters

Professional software still requires engineers who understand how the systems they build actually work. Tools can accelerate development, but they do not eliminate the expertise required to design, reason about, and maintain complex systems. Right now the industry seems dangerously close to forgetting that.

LLMs are remarkable tools. They can make experienced engineers far more productive. But they do not replace the engineering discipline required to build reliable systems.

Let’s use these tools effectively, not worshipfully.

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Glassworm Returns: Invisible Unicode Malware Found in 150+ GitHub Repositories #security #software

A Year of the Invisible Code Campaign March 2025: Aikido first discovers malicious npm packages hiding payloads using PUA Unicode characters May 2025: We publish a blog detailing the risks of invisible Unicode and how it can be abused in supply chain attacks October 17, 2025: We uncover compromised extensions on Open VSX using the same technique October 31, 2025: We discover that the attackers have shifted focus to GitHub repositories March 2026: A new mass wave emerges: hundreds of GitHub repositories compromised, with npm and VS Code also affected.

Ageless Linux — Software for Humans of Indeterminate Age #software #copyrights #privacy

Software for humans of indeterminate age. We don't know how old you are. We don't want to know. We are legally required to ask. We won't.

Nanny state vs. Linux: show us your ID, kid • The Register #software #privacy

Carl Richell, founder and CEO of System76, the Linux PC vendor and maker of the Pop!_OS distro, puts his finger on the reason why this issue matters to Linux users. "Most System76 employees installed operating systems and created accounts on their computer when they were under 18. They did this out of curiosity. Many started writing software. Some were already writing operating systems." Linux is for the young, intellectually gifted, and curious. These are the very people who these restrictions will keep away from Linux.

Lost Doctor Who and the Daleks episodes discovered in 'ramshackle' collection #history #culture

Censors in Australia and New Zealand deemed it too violent, and without their buy-in, selling to other markets was not profitable.

Combined with the move towards colour, the black and white story was thought to have little future value and consigned to the bin.

But copies of some episodes were still made by technicians to check for problems which might need to be fixed ahead of pitching the episodes to other markets.

It was these versions that made their way to an amateur collection.

Professor of cinema and television history at Leicester's De Montfort University, Justin Smith - chair of trustees at FIF - said "a debt of gratitude" was owed to the anonymous late collector, whose films - largely focused on his love of trains and canals, including hundreds of home videos - were donated to FIF after he died.

Lost for More Than a Century, the First 'Sci-Fi' Film Ever Made Resurfaces — Colossal #culture #history

Around 1897, the French director Georges Méliès made a silent short film that, until last month, hadn’t been publicly viewable for more than a century. “Gugusse et l’Automate,” or “Gugusse and the Automaton,” is a 45-second slapstick piece featuring a magician and a Pierrot-styled robot as they duke it out.

Méliès is best known for “A Trip to the Moon,” a short film from 1902 that famously features astromoners landing their capsule into the eye of the moon. The director’s work is widely regarded as some of the first within fantasy and science fiction, with “Gugusse et l’Automate” being a long-lost addition to his canon.

Swiss e-vote snafu leaves 2,048 ballots unreadable • The Register #internet #security #evoting

A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8.

Basel-Stadt announced the problem with its e-voting pilot, open to about 10,300 locals living abroad and 30 people with disabilities, last Friday afternoon. It encouraged participants to deliver a paper vote to the town hall or use a polling station but admitted this would not be possible for many.

By the close of polling on Sunday, its e-voting system had collected 2,048 votes, but Basel-Stadt officials were not able to decrypt them with the hardware provided, despite the involvement of IT experts.

"Three USB sticks were used, all with the correct code, but none of them worked," spokesperson Marco Greiner told the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Swissinfo service.

The canton has since commissioned an external analysis of the incident, adding that it deeply regrets the violation of affected voters' political rights.

Hisense VIDAA TVs reportedly add unskippable startup ads before live TV #privacy #copyrights

Hisense Smart TV owners are reporting a new ad placement that goes beyond the usual home-screen tiles and sponsored recommendations: a mandatory advertisement shown immediately after powering on the TV. According to user posts, the ad appears before viewers can reach live TV or the first channel, even when the goal is simply to watch traditional broadcast programming rather than launch a streaming app.

Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft — Hong Minhee on Things #copyrights

When GNU reimplemented the UNIX userspace, the vector ran from proprietary to free. Stallman was using the limits of copyright law to turn proprietary software into free software. The ethical force of that project did not come from its legal permissibility—it came from the direction it was moving, from the fact that it was expanding the commons. That is why people cheered.

The vector in the chardet case runs the other way. Software protected by a copyleft license—one that guarantees users the right to study, modify, and redistribute derivative works under the same terms—has been reimplemented under a permissive license that carries no such guarantee. This is not a reimplementation that expands the commons. It is one that removes the fencing that protected the commons. Derivative works built on chardet 7.0 are under no obligation to share their source code. That obligation, which applied to a library downloaded 130 million times a month, is now gone.

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