A Lovely 10C Site!

After looking at the numbers, I really don’t know how long Mozilla can make it. Oh, the revenue stream is there for now, but with fewer and fewer Firefox users can Mozilla count on it tomorrow? The company also had, at the end of 2019, $785 million in cash and investments. But, with its ever-shrinking market share and vastly smaller development teams, you have to wonder how long Mozilla can keep going with its current leadership and plans.

Cuts alone of infrastructure and its best developers won’t save Mozilla. And, with Firefox’s ever-shrinking market share, it won’t be able to count on future hundred-million-dollar annual advertising deals to save it. For Mozilla to continue to matter it needs new management and a new strategic plan.

This is just sad to see, at this rate I can't see a future for Mozilla although Firefox might via a full-on fork.

The gap between an '040 powered Mac and modern PCs doesn't feel nearly as wide as it should. This computer was released almost 30 years ago. On paper, it should be inconceivable that this can at all fit into a modern workflow. Present-day computers are gigascale monstrosities that should smoke something as old and plucky as the Quadra. And yet, they just… don't.

Modern operating systems are so bloated these days that most of the features today you don't really need compared to back in the day.

A common trigger for epileptics in media are rapid blinking lights, specifically of the red and white variety. As someone that does have seizures myself due to an injury from my time when I was active duty, the past few years have been a massive learning experience for me when navigating some of my favorite and most anticipated games. I no longer can enjoy titles like Dead Space freely like I used to, which opened up an entirely new world of development that I was previously blind to. Since seizures have become my new norm, I often make sure to pay special attention to certain design choices that can be harmful to those sensitive to neurological traps so that I can decide for myself if something is safe to play, decide if there is a way to work around those obstacles, and try to offer some navigational tools for others that may be facing the same roadblock.

During my time with Cyberpunk 2077, I suffered one major seizure and felt several moments where I was close to another one. I kept going because I made that decision to, and I feel like that decision helped me sort of slap together a small little guide for players wanting to take part in this game for fear of missing out.

Due to the nature of interfacing, there is a lot of red glitching animations seen throughout the game's progression. My monitor has an "eye-saving mode" that dims the blue light in my screen that I often use to help with things like this, and that has helped immensely. During my time with Night City, there were moments when walking into clubs and bars that were immediate "danger zones" for epileptics. While I would never recommend someone push past their limits, especially with something as serious as epilepsy, I do know how excitement can push that desire so if it's going to happen, I want you to be as safe as possible. Trust me, I get it. My stubborn butt continues to play Dead Space over and over again despite knowing it usually ends up poorly for me.

Some good warnings about seizures if you play this game.

And apparently Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis couldn't allow that to stand. This afternoon Rebekah posted a short Twitter thread, with video, showing Florida state police raiding her home. As she notes, when they asked her who else was in the home, she told them that her husband and children were upstairs, and they pulled out their guns:

Rebekah Jones is a Data Scientist who was fired by the State of Florida because she was a whistleblower on the States efforts to fudge and cover-up COVID-19 data in Florida.

Today the police raided her house, pointed at her and her family including her children.

For telling the truth.

Just disgusting.

Ultimately, Slack was ripe for the taking. Entering 2020 it had lost around 40% of its value since it went public. Consider that after its most recent earnings report, the company lost 16% of its value, and before the Salesforce deal leaked, the company was worth only a few dollars per share more than its direct listing reference price. Toss in net losses of $147.6 million during the two quarters ending July 31, 2020, Slack’s uninspiring public valuation and its winding path to profitability and it was a sitting target for a takeover like this one. The only surprise here is the price.

Slack’s current valuation, according to both Yahoo and Google Finance is just over $25 billion, which given its very modest price change after-hours means that the market priced the company somewhat effectively. Slack is up around 48% from its valuation that preceded the deal becoming known.

Today’s deal comes after Salesforce’s purchase of Quip in 2016 for $750 million. Quip brought a way of socially sharing documents to the SaaS giant, and when paired with the Slack acquisition gives Salesforce a much more robust social story to tell than its internal option Chatter, an early attempt at enterprise social that never really caught on.

So this completes a fall from grace for Slack as they're lagging behind their competitors especially Microsoft's Teams product. I can suspect their free and basic business products to go away and focus more on enterprise stuff.

Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the United States, is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Adding Simon & Schuster, the third largest publisher, would create a book behemoth, a combination that could trigger antitrust concerns.

The deal announced on Wednesday includes provisions that would protect ViacomCBS in the event that a sale is squashed by authorities. Bertelsmann would pay what is known as a termination fee if the deal does not go through.

The sale could also have a ripple effect throughout the literary ecosystem. The biggest houses are better equipped to negotiate favorable terms with major retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the big box stores, and are also able to develop direct-to-consumer marketing and sales networks so that they are not as dependent on retailers.

So the book publishing market would soon become monopolies, which isn’t good for everyone but the 1%. Proves that capitalism isn't working out like it used to be.

Besides the Walmart-exclusive Jetstream router, the cybersecurity research team also discovered that low-cost Wavlink routers, normally sold on Amazon or eBay, have similar backdoors. The Wavlink routers also contain a script that lists nearby wifi and has the capability to connect to those networks.

We have also found evidence that these backdoors are being actively exploited, and there’s been an attempt to add the devices to a Mirai botnet. Mirai is malware that infects devices connected to a network, turns them into remotely controlled bots as part of a botnet, and uses them in large-scale attacks. The most famous of these is the 2016 Dyn DNS cyberattack, which brought down major websites like Reddit, Netflix, CNN, GitHub, Twitter, Airbnb and more.

You see, in normal situations, whenever an attacker wants to take over control of the router, they’d need physical access to the device. As it stands right now, the Wavlink and Jetstream devices we looked at have a file that allows for remote access to the router. The only thing that the attacker would need is for a user to be connected at the time.

This is due to a lack of validation on the device’s backend, which appears to check only if there is a session active. If so, it will provide an attacker access to the page, without properly checking who owns the session.

Wow, huge actively-exploited backdoors on cheap Jetstream and Wavlink routers sold at Walmart, Amazon, and eBay. Buyer beware…

But if Google does this properly and uses more sophisticated browser
fingerprinting techniques, Epiphany is done for. This could be an
existential threat for non-Safari WebKit browsers. Nobody is going to
be interested in using a browser that doesn't support Google websites.
Google's expressly-stated goal is to block embedded browser frameworks
and non-supported browsers from signing into Google accounts. The blog
post says: "This block affects CEF-based apps and other non-supported
browsers." It says: "We do not allow sign-in from browsers based on
frameworks like CEF or Embedded Internet Explorer." Clearly CEF is the
main target, but I guess WebKit (and likely also QtWebEngine) is at
risk too; even if we're not mentioned directly, it seems pretty clear
that WebKitGTK, WPE, PlayStation and WinCairo ports, etc. are all
likely non-grata.

Not good at all in terms of the overall health of the web.

The nation’s largest cable company will debut its 1.2 TB data cap usage plan on January 1, 2021 in Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont, and West Virginia.

“Customers in select markets can take the months of January and February to understand how the new 1.2 TB Internet Data Plan affects them without additional charges,” Comcast wrote on its new customer FAQ page. “We’ll credit your bill for any additional data usage charges over 1.2 TB during those months if you’re not on an unlimited data plan. It does not apply to Xfinity Internet customers on our Gigabit Pro tier of service, Business Internet customers, customers with Prepaid Internet, or customers on Bulk Internet agreements.”

But effective March 1st, residential customers will begin facing overlimit fees for exceeding their data allowance at a rate of $10 for each 50 GB of excess usage, up to a maximum of $100 a month. Customers will not be credited for unused data, cannot rollover unused data, or be charged less than $10 in overlimit fees, regardless if one used 1 MB or 49 GB over the 1.2 TB allowance.

The New England and Mid-Atlantic areas were the last in the US that Comcast hadn't yet implemented arbitrary, bullshit usage caps and overage fees. Today, they just deliver two middle fingers on those consumers who are using their bandwidth more than ever during a pandemic. A reminder that usage caps on fixed broadband lines have no technical justification and exist exclusively to exploit monopolized markets and thus Comcast says fuck you.

The Arecibo telescope’s long and productive life has come to an end. The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today it will decommission the iconic radio telescope in Puerto Rico following two cable breaks in recent months that have brought the structure to near collapse. The 57-year-old observatory, a survivor of numerous hurricanes and earthquakes, is now in such a fragile state that attempting repairs would put staff and workers in danger. “This decision was not an easy one to make,” Sean Jones, NSF’s assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences, said at a news briefing today. “We understand how much Arecibo means to [the research] community and to Puerto Rico.”

Ralph Gaume, director of NSF’s astronomy division, said at the briefing the agency wants to preserve other instruments at the site, as well as the visitor and outreach center. But they are under threat if the telescope structure collapses. That would bring the 900-ton instrument platform, suspended 137 meters above the 305-meter-wide dish, crashing down. Flailing cables could damage other buildings on the site, as could the three support towers if they fell, too. “There is a serious risk of an unexpected and uncontrolled collapse,” Gaume said. “A controlled decommissioning gives us the opportunity to preserve valuable assets that the observatory has.”

Over the next few weeks, engineering firms will develop a plan for a controlled dismantling. It may involve releasing the platform from its cables explosively and letting it fall.

A true end of a era, given the iconic status on the structure.