Tech

Even though I’m no longer writing full time, I do have a “bucket list” of publications I’d still like to write for, and Dark Reading has been one of those publications for many years. Happily for me, I get to cross that one off (though I’d do it again!) with this article, " SOSSA and CRA Spell Trouble for Open Source Software." Short version: Some ill-considered legislation that’s coming in the wake of Log4Shell poses a threat to open source software, particularly the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)....

I keep thinking about the arguments around content being used for AI data sets and the arguments around content being archived/offered by sites like Internet Archive. They don’t seem consistent, on either side. Corporations are happy to use data sets scraped from copyrighted content, but they surely don’t want their copyrighted content slurped up into data sets without compensation. On the flip side, a lot of the folks who (IMO rightly) support Internet Archive don’t want corporations to flex copyright against IA on the basis of IA being a public good....

About a month ago I bought a Beelink SER5 Pro Mini PC and have been using it as a desktop and test machine. I thought I’d give a quick review in case anybody else is looking at one of these for their own use. The SER5 was a bit shy of $400 with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H, 32GB of RAM, and a 500GB NVMe drive. Its footprint is about 4.5 inches (almost) square, and not quite 2 inches tall. That’s 126mm wide, 113mm long, 42mm tall if you prefer metric. It’s got 3 USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port, a 1GB Ethernet port, 2 HDMI ports, and a single USB-C port.

Anybody else feel like the barrage of app and operating system updates is getting to be a bit much? Not only the pace of updates, which shows no signs of slowing, but also the continual expansion of devices that require updates. Keeping your computer updated was no big deal. Then gaming consoles, smartphones, tablets, e-readers, smart watches, smart TVs, routers… it’s easy to feel like you spend more time updating devices than using them....

Guake has long been a favorite application of mine. If you’re new to Guake, it’s a terminal application for Linux that stays out of site until it’s summoned with a hotkey, like the console in Id Software’s Quake games. Hit F12 or whatever combo you set up for it, and it slides into view over the top of other windows. When you’re done, bang the hotkey again and it slides back up out of sight....

Ever wondered what kind of trackers are on any given site? Check out Blacklight, a web-based tool to reveal specific user-tracking technologies on a site. I stumbled on this via The Markup and thought it might be interesting for privacy minded folks. (See: " How We Built a Real-time Privacy Inspector" from 2020.) I ran it on a few sites just to see what I got back. GNOME’s extensions website was clean....

To follow up on yesterday’s post about word processors, here’s a new entry for keyboard enthusiasts: The Cube Keyboard. It’s a keyboard that’s… a cube. I don’t think he’s going to win any typing speed contests with this one. Hat tip to Lobste.rs for this one.

Ars and The Register (and probably others) are reporting that Google and Mozilla are working on “browsers that break current App Store rules.” You know, browsers that aren’t dependent on Apple’s rendering engine. Actual full-fledged browsers. For various reasons I use iOS as the least-bad option (for me) between Android and iOS. But this is a thing that’s bugged me a long time. To be honest, I don’t really understand Apple’s reasoning here....

I like Cory Doctorow a lot, and tend to agree with him on most things, but this screed about Netflix changing its “family” settings is not one of them.

I’m probably late to the party, but Distrobox has to be one of the best open source projects to drop in the past few years.