st_goliath

The upstream has no public repository, neither on GitHub nor anywhere else.

JWZ might not even use git in the first place, the source might be in a local SVN repo, or just a series of tarballs and patches, assuming it is version controlled at all.

OpenLSD, bicycle day edition?

> "conducting a test involving interactions with randomly selected websites"

In other words: shamelessly running a spam bot.

And we found out about it because rather than flooding website guestbooks with porn links, it ultimately slopped a police tip line.

Given that MED-EL, the company mentioned in the article, has been around since 1990 and is constantly expanding, I would assume that this is indeed viable.

I live in Innsbruck, Austria, where MED-EL is headquartered. Like most people I know, I too have briefly worked there in 2008. I currently live 5 minutes on foot from where the entrance used to be back then, before it was walled off, they massively expanded the building and added another building behind it, where in 2008 a bunch of office containers with clean rooms used to be. There is now a raised walk way to the other side where they used to rent just a few units back then and now co-opted the building, plus a patch work of smaller rental spaces all around.

The implants themselves are not cheap and (at least at the time?) eventually needed to replaced. From what I recall, some of the technology involved was also licensed out or sold for other applications. Ultimately, I would also guess that all the licensing, approval and red-tape involved in actually making implants for humans also kind of limits competition quite a bit.

> _any_ bugfix is assigned a cve

Any patch that is back ported to a stable kernel, indiscriminately. And they have also started assigning CVSS scores with the same kind of malicious compliance.

Take for example, this patch in the device mapper RAID code:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

After back porting to stable, it got assigned CVE-2026-89558 (which is in this list), and a CVSS score of 9.8:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/security/vulns.git/tree...

Reasoning behind it being that theoretically, a RAID could be accessible over the network via NFS, iSCSI, etc... so if it gets corrupted, the buggy code path in the recovery (CVE-2026-89558) is effectively triggered over the network.

The argument is not esoteric. An Apple employee working on a reverse engineered GPU driver might (intentionally or not) incorporate internal knowledge that they are contractually obligated to keep secret or write an implementation that is too close to proprietary code they had access to, to the point that it could be argued that it is a derived work.

This sort of thing has always been a concern for projects that re-implement some existing piece of software, e.g. there were concerns early on during development of the GNU project about people contributing after having been exposed to Unix source code. Similarly, it is an ongoing concern for the Wine project[1], as well as ReactOS. The later even had a code freeze and internal audit in 2006, after allegations came forward that code had been derived from disassembled Windows binaries[2].

[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit

> the "IDunno" of archeology - "It most likely served ritual and cultural purposes"

If all you know about archeology is from daytime television and clickbait articles, all you know about history is what you vaguely remember from school, you never met anybody working in those fields and actually don't even have a passing interest to engage with the subject, then yes, you might actually believe that's how it works.

> Then it would be possible to reuse old embedded equipment.

Unlikely, virtualization/emulation has been a thing well before this project and you can just buy USB to RS232 adapters. There are GPIO solutions for industrial PCs other than the parallel port. Or you can simply buy new industrial PCs which have those ports.

If you find an industrial appliance controlled by genuine old PC hardware that hasn't been replaced, the RS232 ports are the least of your concerns.

In my experience, such machines usually have something insanely proprietary plugging into a custom ISA card, and whatever is connected to it usually doesn't take too kindly if the bus timings are off. And neither does the accompanying bare metal software that relies heavily on timing loops and hardware peculiarities.

> Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX

s/technically/allegedly/

with a minimum of 4M RAM [1]. I have a machine with twice that clock and twice that RAM that a friends parents wanted to toss out[2]. I spent the better part of a day getting Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 to run. Playing around with it for a bit, I highly doubt that Windows 95 would be anything but endlessly frustrating. I was not masochistic enough to try.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements

[2] https://goliath32.com/hw/machines.html#pc386

There is no such thing as an "X11 clipboard" that something can be written to. As the poster goes on to allude, X11 has a concept of a "selection" (a primary and a secondary one).

It goes roughly like this: when you select a text in a window, the X client tells the X server "I have the selection now", when you paste in another window, the client behind the other window asks "who has the selection?" and requests the selection contents from the other client, the data is then forwarded through the server. The client that claimed ownership has to properly handle some associated requests/events for the whole thing to work.

The key point is, there is no central "clipboard" style repository like on Windows, the client that does the "copy" is responsible for the data, the client that wants to "paste" has to talk to it. If I try to copy/paste and quit the source program before the paste, the data is gone. That's why modern desktop environments usually come with a dedicated daemon that immediately reacts to selection ownership changes, grabs the data for itself and then claims the selection ownership to emulate the Windows style behavior.

If we play devils advocate, it's possible the Zoom client tries to do just that, not trusting whatever desktop environment. I don't use this software, so I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd guess that the "Zoom Desktop Client" is just another browser in disguise? It might be actually Chromium or whatever underneath that does this?

> Can you translate the American for me?

I'd say "wide variance in the level of kindness" is a rather British way to describe some of the opinions that have been voiced.

> And that’s the story of how I upgraded my flat’s front door experience from depending on 0 cloud services to 5 cloud services.

Up next: How many cloud services does it take to turn on the lights?

Here's a hint: https://imgur.com/a/light-bulb-moment-hIKUI48

But hey, it could be worse. For instance, you could be trying to send an e-mail: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email#what-will-...

You might be interested in GNU poke[1][2], a hex-editor type program that can actually parse and visualize the structure of binary data (using a DSL for describing formats).

[1] https://jemarch.net/poke

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34986042

> "intrepid ibex" ... edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper

Ah, that would be 8.10 with the coffee stain wallpaper :-P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_screenshot.png

Given the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by "the older days" you mean the 90s, and specifically PCs and early Windows?

If you weren't previously aware of "The Old New Thing" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form).

The os2museum[1] blog is also a gold mine. Tim Paterson at one point tried to start blogging, sharing a few anecdotes about the early days of DOS[2]

Speaking of books, you might enjoy "Showstopper!" about the development of NT, even tough it is a bit shallow on the technical side. For the technical aspects, you might want to get it together with "Inside Windows NT" (first edition) by Helen Custer.

You might also enjoy: "Another Boring Topic" [3] YouTube channel, covering (among other things) early Windows development in excruciating detail and "Old Computers Sucked" [4], actually trying to run the software on era appropriate hardware. "Cathode Ray Dude" is all over the place but often also covers hardware and software of roughly that era[5].

A sibling comment already mentioned JWZs blog, if you have fond memories about Netscape, you might enjoy "Project Code Rush" [6].

Btw. Netscape Navigator 3.0 has just turned 30.

[1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/

[2] https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/@AnotherBoringTopic/videos

[4] https://www.youtube.com/@old-computers-sucked/videos

[5] https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude/videos

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

A function call causes the return address to be pushed onto the stack, thus accessing the stack below the adjusted stack pointer address.

On compiler generated x86 code, the base pointer register will quickly follow when entering the target function.

The year is 2036, when dialed up to maximum space saving, the latest generation of smart phones now turn camera pictures to a textual description and later when you want to view them, re-generate them on the fly using a text2image model. Not that "saving space" really means something, the phones refuse to unlock if they don't have an internet connection and store all your data on multiple cloud servers anyway (one for each five eye country).

> I think you didn't understand what I was trying to say.

They don't do this sort of thing... oh wait, they do.

But we are still wrong to judge their character by their own actions, because... evil French people made them do it?

You may have heard about a little thing called MP3? Basically, Fraunhofer in Germany filed for (software) patents in the US. They made sure to wait some time for MP3 to become a thing before they started going after people and collect royalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_...

The confusion with Plan 9 is probably part of the reason this jumped onto the front page.

Besides that name clash, it apparently competes with another terminal emulator that was creatively named "vt100".

Scrolling over the page I did a double take when I saw the benchmark. No way a vt100 can do 221 MiB/s. Besides, who types that fast anyway?

Up next: nuclear data center Zeppelins in the cloud!

Innovative new air cooling: instead of moving the air through the servers, we simply move the servers through the air!

And while we're at it, we'll completely disrupt the existing Zeppelin market that depends on expensive helium for some reason. We use daring, innovative hydrogen technology for a massive cost reduction!

> I wasn’t particularly worried about parsing CSV files. That’s a solved problem.

> Detecting primitive types is easy. String. Number. Boolean. Date.

... the rabbit said confidently, staring down the oncoming lawn mower.

> I honestly thought the viewer would take a weekend.

> Display rows.

> Add scrolling.

Burma Shave?

If you have a few hours to kill, the Youtube Channel "Another Boring Topic" has a multi part series on the "rise and fall of the IBM PC". The comparatively short Part 1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er8wcWsG7sE

The Channel has similar video series on OS/2, VisiCalc, Microsoft Excel and early Windows (far from completion). The videos are generally very detailed and well researched, often contrasting accounts from different source or even reaching out to people involved.

The already slow pace of the channel has slowed down a lot. In an update video a while back, the author has announced that the background research for the IBM PC led down an unexpectedly deep rabbit hole and his script eventually spiraled into an unfinished book that will now probably turn into a two-parter itself.