Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

Aaron Swartz should have been 39 years old today
#AaronSwartzDay

Lol, lmfao even

The KeebDeck Keyboard is the result of years of R&D to create an affordable and widely available handheld keyboard for makers and hackers. The result is a compact (85x48 mm) 69-key alphanumeric silicone keypad with an orthogonal layout based on standard PC keyboards. lectronz.com/products/kee...

Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/manufacturer-issues-remote-kill-command-to-nuke-smart-vacuum-after-engineer-blocks-it-from-collecting-data-user-revives-it-with-custom-hardware-and-python-scripts-to-run-offline

If you want to know what society-wide Ponzi schemes lead to, look at what happened to the former Soviet states after SU-collapse for an example.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, I recommend reading Lea Ypi's "Free". Especially the final chapters, "Like the rest of Europe" and "1997".

I've lived through this once, I really don't want a repeat. But we don't choose which times we live in.

And as right on cue, the Dutch fascist leader Wilders has started pushing conspiracy tweets that the elections results - which he lost - are invalid.

Mind you, we vote with paper and pencil, ballots are stored for recounts, and the entire counting process in every single polling place is open and freely accessible to any Dutch citizen. Our elections are most likely the most reliable and transparent in the world.

Can we just not import American stupidity for one fucking day, please?

Australia sues Microsoft for forcing Copilot AI onto Office 365 customers

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/10/28/australia-sues-microsoft-for-forcing-copilot-ai-onto-office-365-customers/

If you’re in Australia and you were hit by that charge, call your reseller or Microsoft — or write to them — and demand your upgrade money back because Microsoft took it under false pretences, and you want to revert to the Classic plan. If they demur, document everything and tell the ACCC. And the judge when it hits court.

“How are my competitors doing, the ones you all insisted students use instead of me? That’s right, they were supposed to go to the American Journal of Social Sciences, Powered by OpenAI. Or museums, like the Smithsonian’s Charlie Kirk Shrine to American Greatness. I guess they can still count on credible journalism, once they get past the paywall for Palantir Presents: The Washington Post, so they read the Pulitzer-Bezos Prize–winning work of Bari Weiss and Grok.”

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-its-me-wikipedia-and-i-am-ready-for-your-apology

The reality is a lot of parts of a research project are determined in the *design,* not in the analysis.

That's why serious projects have lit reviews and unserious projects have "our stakeholders liked these words"

European Space Agency, not an agency known to be alarmist is ringing everything right now. There's far too much #SpaceJunk.

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/viden/teknologi/esa-slaar-alarm-skrot-og-satellitter-truer-vores-fremtid-i-rummet

There's been a ton of bad advice for the privacy conscious and in particular for activist to use meshtastic.

I think that's very bad advice, because meshtastic is in no way architected to meet modern security expectations.

I hope this provides the proof of the dangerously lacking state of security on meshtastic today and some tools to verify if it ever improves.

Expect a more detailed blog post of all the exploits and findings soon.

https://meshmarauder.net

OK here's a theory: #ChatGPT's #Atlas browser is not a really browser but fact a way for OpenAI to circumvent scrape blockers. It's more a distributed human-based scraper rather than anything else.

Given how widely loathed AI and how damaging AI scrapers have become #OpenAI's IP ranges ended up in quite a lot of block lists, many servers outright terminate any connection to them. Then there are things like #Anubis or #Iocaine that further frustrate #LLM scraping.

But what if you DIDN'T neeed to bother about all that? What if you could use civilian IP addresses with "organic" traffic patterns, and have humans solve Captchas, provide proof of work for Anubis, or get around Iocaine? All this for free -- you don't even need to pay people for it?

I would be REALLY interested to see what telemetry Atlas sends back. 100% certain it will send back things like URL and rendered HTML output, possibly user interaction patterns ("a normal human on this website moves their mouse first to the 'I am not a bot' captcha then clicks it). They do not have to respect robots.txt because, well, it comes from organic visitors...

Am I crazy?

EDIT: And what do you know?! I was correct. https://tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures/115419472139725665

Dear business owners large and small,

Post your upcoming events, specials, sales, calendar, news, etc. on your actual WEBSITE.

Telling your potential customers they can find it on some billionaire-owned social media platform is like telling them to fuck off.

Unless someone actually has an account with those platforms, they can NOT see your posts. Not even if it's set to "public". Yes, really.

This is literally what your website is for. FFS please use it. 🐸

#FuckMeta

Why do some people endorse easily disproven claims? It's seen as a power move - the more outlandish the statement, the stronger one appears for standing by it, social psychologists share the results of their studies:
https://theconversation.com/winning-with-misinformation-new-research-identifies-link-between-endorsing-easily-disproven-claims-and-prioritizing-symbolic-strength-265652

At a panel here in Cluny and a researcher is looking at barriers to young people getting cars, and how recruiters can’t find apprentices because they can’t get to their workplaces. There IS ANOTHER WAY! 🤦‍♂️ #CrossBorderRail

In the best tradition of TGV stations, Mâcon Loché TGV is a car park

A REQUEST: If you own a French CD-ROM computer game called "Pop Anim'", please let me know. I could use it for some research but haven't been able to find a circulating copy yet. (It's at the BnF but I can't get there right now.)

Qualcomm is easily the worst company to work with for any product if you are not a large established company. Not great to have them slurp up Arduino.

Like even if you paid them for their god awful SDKs they are still actively hostile towards you as a customer.
The only reason to work with them is because they bought up any leading IC solution in any mass market space. So if you do consumer electronics you have to deal with them sooner or later.

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/10/qualcomm-to-acquire-arduino-accelerating-developers--access-to-i

Textbook 6T single port SRAM.

The contrast isn't great because poly and silicon are the same color, and you don't get nearly as much edge contrast in optical images as you do in secondary electron (even ignoring the increased resolution of SEM).

But you can clearly see the I-beam structures with the two PMOS per bitcell, plus the ring of four NMOS per bitcell.

This was a very common SRAM layout from early multi-metal processes until about the 130nm node when design rules got more restrictive and any-angle poly wasn't available, forcing the switch to the modern SRAM bitcell design which has all poly as parallel lines oriented in a single axis.

The bitcell measures a whopping 8.24 x 5.75 μm or 47.38 μm^2.

For comparison, a TSMC 28nm high density SRAM bitcell is 0.127 μm^2, meaning you could fit 373 bits on a single one of these.