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If only. The EFF has been harping about this for literally decades. The DMCA in the US and similar anti-circumvention laws around the world (primarily EU) make doing that a serious crime, with punishments well beyond any conceivable impact to society at large.
We already have that it's called SFTP. ;)

Wait what do you mean you want to use a key to log in, our stuff doesn't support that.

There is plenty of room for antiquated process and technology in utilities that has nothing to do with grid operations, trust me. :)
Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:26PM (#50124143)
Assuming this never really ships (ahem), this is basically an upper-tier "YouTuber engineer" stunt video with a NASDAQ symbol attached. And the results there seem to suggest that Musk's marketing schtick is wearing a bit thin...
Re:Can we stop with the uptime percentages? on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @12:58PM (#49729824)
These service status pages have so many other problems, I can't really get excited about this article's point. As a user of a service, I don't really care that an additional 0.09% of uptime is any more or less difficult to achieve than an additional 0.9%, even if you describe it in terms of fractions of time. I only care about two things: what the service status is right now and your service reliability's impact to me over the long term (get out of here with your 30-day crap).

In the electric utility world we have a few IEEE standardized metrics (with appropriately IEEE'd acronyms) for tracking service reliability that I like much better and always wish for when I'm looking at a status page. Pie in the sky stuff for sure, nobody wants to do this analysis and publish the results without a regulator telling them have to, but c'est la vie.

SAIDI - System Average Interruption Duration Index. How many minutes an average customer experienced service interruption in a year. This is the big one I'd want to see on your service status page IMHO. For the power grid, we consider any outage longer than five minutes to be an interruption ("non-momentary outage").

SAIFI - System Average Interruption Frequency Index. How many total periods of interruption occurred for the average customer in a year.

CAIDI - Customer Average Interruption Duration Index. How long it takes service to be restored for the average customer when there is an interruption.

For the US, here is what these numbers look like: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_11_03.html. If you're outside the US look up yours and have a good laugh at us. :)

For the "right now" aspect you have probably visited your utility's outage map, but here I would say we do much better than most utilities. The level of detail on the investigation and resolution is often more detailed, and we usually know better than to bother providing much in the way of a concrete estimate for restoration time of a current outage (though this is getting better in the utility space).

Re:Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @01:56PM (#49539934)
Based on my very amateurish skim of this and a related paper, maybe so? They simulated the neutrino background as solar and cosmic ray atmospheric sources, so any source with a different energy distribution is perhaps a possible explanation for the event, I think.

But probably more likely is for this to have been a particularly energetic event in the tail of one of the known sources of neutron recoil detection they did model. More events needed!

Re:Restroom Archive on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @01:55PM (#49525392)
My friend, handling the waste of all the people that live in a city is one of the most basic examples of the public commons I can imagine lol. What are you talking about?? It is a bit fundamental to the concept of a city!
Re:Shade Map on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @06:37PM (#49279532)
I've seen and loved this before but only today I thought to zoom all the way out and see the true terminator affected by elevation. We usually only seen the idealized smooth curve. Very neat!
Very nice article, and I appreciate SQLite's explanation of the bug too. And how extremely cool Tailscale appears to have been about it (paying for the VFS shim, etc.).

I'd have liked to have heard more about the decision to checkpoint so frequently that put them on this path though. Presumably that's to keep the WAL tiny for very fast recovery. Trying to mitigate some of the deleterious effects of inserting a DBMS into your network layer, I suppose? Tricky stuff. Wonder how that compares to typical etcd snapshot frequencies too.

Re:Memory Safety Absolutists on Saturday July 25, 2026 @10:43PM (#49054154)
And how about safety of life systems? They use computers in chemical plants and on planes, you know lol. Integer overflows have a body count!
Ok fine, but I bet you can't come up with a good gluten free banana bread recipe.
Re:Command Line Interface Guidelines on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @08:14PM (#48928927)
Isn't this basically how more modern "chatty" CLIs use stderr? Put all the nice progress bars and emojis behind `if isatty(2)`? I thought so anyway, but I'll admit I've never actually looked at what npm, uv, etc. do.
Re:Open source AI must win on Saturday June 13, 2026 @03:17AM (#48514369)
Man, that project is such bait for my particular sensibilities but just looking at the copy about not sharing your data and only sharing weights has me feeling very disappointed in the project already. I would want a project like this to not elide fact that sharing your weight updates probably effectively means sharing your data too.
To actually follow through with this fully they would have had to revoke all kinds of internal access for foreign nationals and demand they immediately return their hardware (at 5pm on a Friday no less), no?

Unless folks are hearing that they did this I smell marketing and/or PR as the main driver of the action.

Re:macOS Container Machines on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @12:07PM (#48478438)
It's true, but to be honest the MinGW-built stuff that ships with git for Windows has been enough since WSL took off.
Re:Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @12:28PM (#48110522)
VUE was so excellent looking it makes me want to run CDE today.
Re:M 7.4 earthquake – 100 km ENE of Miyako, Japan on Monday April 20, 2026 @12:15PM (#47836402)
Earthquake early warning systems are a top 10 peak human achievement in my book. No joke, I tear up watching videos of Japan's EEW system alerting people of possible danger just in time.

There are streamers who's whole thing is watching these alerts and setting up bobbleheads and glasses of water and stuff to show the shaking. It's so so so cool. Look at what we can do for each other you guys :')

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imH-ZyXwX5Q

Re:Your Startup Is Probably Dead on Arrival on Monday April 13, 2026 @05:05PM (#47757804)
Your startup CEO acquaintance sounds like a real piece of work. Hope he rethinks such an unethical decision!
My understanding is that even that small amount is more than the Apollo crews had. It's all a bit of a marketing line anyway. We can see a good portion of the "far side" from Earth due to the Moon's libration.

Still, it's true that parts of the far side are still unseen by human eyes (if you consider pitch black landscape to be "unseen" which I think is fair given the lack of any significant illumination as you point out).

This article is plagued by several almost-truths, and gets a lot mixed up.

The thing that is happening for the first time on this mission is humans personally observing much of the far side in daylight. For the Apollo missions the far side was mostly dark because they wanted a high sun angle at the landing site on the near side. Many uncrewed orbiting cameras and even a recent Chinese lander & rover have taken photos of the far side.

It also states that these will be images "from the surface" of the Moon which is wildly off base. Artemis II is not landing... Of course it's true that this O2O technology could be used for high bandwidth livestreams from the surface on future missions, if this test works well.

I don't even think this O2O system will be used for live video during Artemis II. This and several other similar articles all appear to reference a NASA press release that is about the technology in general. The mission-specific NASA reference I found[1] says they will transmit a pre-recorded video "in the lunar vicinity" at 4k using the O2O system, so I would guess this claim of a "livestream" is just misstated.

[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/a2-reference...

Re:A simple web we own on Monday February 23, 2026 @05:07PM (#47129672)
The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to.

The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.

Yes, while I was reading the article I couldn't help but think about notaries public. Seems like something like that would be government's go-to for this if they weren't quite so overfed on tech industry contributions that lead them down the path of AI solutions.

I'm not sure that's the right answer here, but I think it ticks a lot boxes for the state.

Re:NASA Puts Starliner Mishap in Same Class as Shuttle Tragedies on Thursday February 19, 2026 @04:49PM (#47079997)
Direct link to the NASA report: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/nasa-report-...

Reading between the lines of the summary a bit, it sure sounds like NASA program leadership was essentially doing pro bono PR for ol' pal Boeing at the expense of crew safety to placate Boeing's feeling of SpaceX being NASA's new favorite. Followed by Boeing again falling on the sea of sharp daggers held by their army of subcontractors.

That said, the announcement of this mishap reclassification does have a certain fleeting, bias-shaped odor, given Isaacman's proximity to Musk.

Re:FAA Halts All Flights at El Paso Airport for 10 Days on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @07:00PM (#46982986)
It's inter-organizational disfunction. Always more plausible than any conspiracy.

https://apnews.com/article/faa-el-paso-texas-air-space-close...

Pentagon wanted to test the new laser but didn't give FAA enough information to assure safety of the NAS and civilian aviation (when, where, effects, etc.) so they felt forced to pull the big TFR lever. They fired the laser of at who knows what and then FAA lifted the TFR.

Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.
Re:Television is 100 years old today on Monday January 26, 2026 @05:16PM (#46772342)
The broadcast nature of it is something that I missed just last night. I was walking past several bars as the Seahawks won a big football game, but of course each spot was on a different stream delay so instead of one full-throated simultaneous cheer echoing across the neighborhood it was three or four quieter, distinct cheers spread over 20-30 seconds. Not really a big deal but still, it felt like a lesser experience to this aging millennial.
Re:Don't fall into the anti-AI hype on Monday January 12, 2026 @01:43PM (#46592485)
Yep, and I'll add: the first reader is the first maintainer. When that is turned over to an LLM agent the organization's leadership had better be prepared to entertain rewrites (reprompts?) of significant portions of LLM-generated code on a regular basis. The call of the rewrite isn't new of course, but it'll be far more alluring since LLMs are at their most "productive" and least destructive when working from a clean slate.
Re:Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft on Friday December 12, 2025 @04:17PM (#46249075)
From what I've heard (FWIW), Airbus released a version of the software for one of the flight computers that removed SEU protections (hence grounding affected models until they could be downgraded to the previous version).

There was still hardware redundancy though. Operation of the plane's elevator switched to a secondary computer. Presumably it was also running the same vulnerable software, but they diverted and landed early in part to minimize this risk.

So not just redundancy but layers of redundancy.

Re:GPT-5.2 on Friday December 12, 2025 @12:27PM (#46246328)
G, the gravitational constant is (as far as we know) universal. I don't think this is what they meant, but the use of "across the universe" in the parent comment is confusing.

g, the net acceleration from gravity and the Earth's rotation is what is 9.8m/s² at the surface, on average. It varies slightly with location and altitude (less than 1% for anywhere on the surface IIRC), so "it's 9.8 everywhere" is the model that's wrong but good enough a lot of the time.

My first thought about that is you'd need a lot of satellites already nearly co-planar with the ICBM's inclination and there probably aren't enough Starlinks in any given inclination to make that realistic (granting secret dV and a sporty enough TWR). Boost phase is pretty short.

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