A daily curated digest with the tech news that matter + community vibes, delivered daily, in tabloid style. Like you always wanted.
On the first day of 2026 the tech world feels restless... China’s BYD closes in on Tesla while American car dreams start to look a bit dated... Meta is blasted for hiding scam ads instead of cleaning house... California pushes tough new AI and privacy rules as other states watch in silence... Apple loosens its grip in Japan and the mobile web takes a small but loud step toward freedom... Bluetooth headphones turn into surprise hacking tools and remind us how fragile our gadgets really are... ACM flings open a massive vault of computer science papers and we suddenly remember what real open access looks like... a new year begins with power shifting east, rules hardening west, and users caught right in the middle.
Meta accused of hiding, not killing, scam ads
A fresh report claims Meta did not just remove scam ads, it also made them harder for regulators and journalists to track. The move makes its public safety promises look hollow and feeds the feeling that user trust ranks below ad cash on its list.
Apple finally lets real rival browsers into iOS
In Japan, Apple will now allow iOS apps to use non‑WebKit browser engines, something users have begged for during years of tight control. It is limited to certain apps and one country, but it smells like regulators leaning on Apple and fans cheering from the sidelines.
California unleashes new rules on AI and deepfakes
California rolls out a wave of 2026 laws targeting deepfake pornography, AI abuse and online child harm. The rules read like a direct shot at the worst parts of platform culture, and tech companies know that what starts in Sacramento often spreads everywhere.
State launches DROP, a big red privacy button
The DROP platform lets Californians send one request to many data brokers to delete or stop selling their info. It is free, government‑backed, and feels like the first time privacy rights come with a simple tool instead of a stack of unread legal pages.
DHS says its own Real ID is not enough
The DHS now admits Real ID cards, sold as super secure, are too weak to prove citizenship. After years of hassle at DMVs and airports, people are stunned to hear the magic ID is not magic at all, and critics say they saw this coming a mile away.
China’s BYD closes in on Tesla’s EV crown
BYD is set to overtake Tesla as the world’s top EV seller, riding a mix of cheap plug‑in hybrids and aggressive pricing. Fans of Elon are clearly rattled, while others see this as proof that the center of car innovation has quietly moved to China.
BYD hits 4.6M sales and shrugs off doubts
New numbers show BYD sold 4.6 million vehicles in 2025, meeting its revised target despite market jitters. The company looks less like a copycat and more like a juggernaut, forcing old car brands and Tesla alike to rethink who actually leads the battery race.
Windows laptop beats Linux and sparks noisy debate
Benchmarks on an Intel Arrow Lake laptop show Windows 11 edging out Linux in a series of tests. The results poke a hornet’s nest of desktop loyalists, with some blaming young drivers and others saying raw speed matters less than control over your own machine.
Hackers claim 200GB after fresh ESA cyber hit
Cybercriminals boast of stealing 200GB from the European Space Agency, including data tied to CI/CD systems and code repositories. ESA downplays the damage, but space fans are uneasy, and many wonder why even groups that launch rockets still struggle with basic security.
ACM opens massive computing library to everyone
The ACM turns its Digital Library into open access, freeing a mountain of computer science papers that were locked behind paywalls for decades. Students, indie devs and curious readers suddenly get first‑class seats, and the pay‑to‑read journal model looks a bit shakier.
Bluetooth headphones exposed as secret phone door key
A flaw in Airoha Bluetooth chips, used by big brands like Sony, means attackers could use your wireless headphones as a key into your phone. It is the kind of quiet bug that makes people side‑eye every gadget, and many are asking why basic security failed again.
PS5 boot ROM keys leak, jailbreak dreams flare up
Alleged PS5 BootROM keys leak online, hinting that full console jailbreaks might get much easier. Modding fans are thrilled at the thought of homebrew and backups, while Sony lawyers are surely circling, and everyone knows the cat is hard to put back in the bag.
Public Domain Day showers culture with free classics
Public Domain Day 2026 pushes a new wave of books, films and news archives into the open, including forgotten gems from papers like the Manchester Guardian. Creators cheer the fresh remix fuel, and critics of endless copyright quietly say told you so.
Hot terminal Ghostty locks down its issue tracker
The popular terminal Ghostty bans direct GitHub Issues, forcing users into Discussions first. Fans of the tool defend the move as sanity saving, while others see it as gatekeeping, and the debate neatly captures rising tension between tiny dev teams and loud user bases.
China’s EV giant BYD is about to knock Tesla off the top spot for global electric car sales. It signals a major power shift from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen in the future of cars.
One of the biggest computer science groups is making its huge library of papers free to read. For students, indie hackers and researchers, years of paywalled knowledge suddenly become open.
Apple will finally allow full alternative browser engines on iOS in Japan. It is another crack in the locked iPhone garden and a test case for how much control Apple can keep over the web on phones.
A report says Meta did not simply delete scam ads, but made them harder for watchdogs to find. It feeds the belief that big ad money still wins over user safety on major platforms.
New California laws tackle deepfake porn, AI harms and child protection. The state is again acting as the de facto rulebook writer for how tech is allowed to treat people.
A flaw in popular Bluetooth chips means a stranger could abuse your headphones as a key into your phone. Suddenly that cheap wireless set looks a lot more expensive.
California rolled out DROP, a free tool that lets residents tell data brokers to delete or stop selling their info. It turns privacy rights from paperwork into a big red button.
This article describes constructing an optimization tool for building Pokémon teams using mixed-integer programming (MIP), treating team selection as an operations research problem. The author narrows...
A developer recounts learning to code in a resource-constrained environment on an unused 286 PC running MS-DOS. With no mentors or modern materials, they explored the system from the C:\ prompt, disco...
The article reports that only five Sears stores remain in the United States, signaling the near end of the once-dominant retailer. It traces the failure of Sears’s final major strategy: monetizing its...
This essay argues that people perceive time in a way that resembles a logarithmic scale, where each new interval feels shorter as it becomes a smaller fraction of one’s life. Under this model, childho...
Incat, a Tasmanian shipbuilder, has launched Hull 096, a battery-electric ferry built for South American operator Buquebus. Unveiled in Hobart, the 130‑metre vessel is designed for the River Plate cro...
Easel is an IDE built in Clojure, presented after one year of development with a distinct architecture: it treats the IDE as a library of modular tools that share data and can also function independen...
The article introduces Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC), a framework designed to resolve instability and scalability issues observed in Hyper-Connections (HC). HC extends the widely used r...
The article introduces Rust--, a modified Rust compiler that operates without Rust’s borrow checker. By disabling this core safety mechanism, Rust-- compiles code that would ordinarily be rejected und...
A review of the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 revealed an atypical performance outcome: Windows 11 outpaced Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS across a range of workloads, including CPU-based rendering tasks such as Blend...
The article reviews the VNWA 3E, a compact, USB-powered vector network analyzer designed by radio amateur Tom Baier (DG8SAQ). Unlike traditional large, expensive VNAs, the VNWA 3E delivers wide measur...
A research presentation titled “Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone” details three vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-20700, CVE-2025-20701, CVE-2025-20702) in Airoha Bluetooth audio chips used ac...
Boxsert Designer is a newly released application focused on helping hobbyists and board game enthusiasts design custom inserts for game boxes and similar projects. The tool emphasizes simplicity and s...
James O’Malley describes how a comfortable, highly convenient lifestyle gradually eroded his in-person social connections. Working freelance from home with most communication handled via email and Zoo...
Reuters reports that Meta’s response to fraudulent ads went beyond removal: according to internal documents, the company worked to make these ads less discoverable to regulators, investigators, and jo...
The article reports on a growing illicit trade in mammoth ivory in Russia’s Arctic north, spurred by strong demand in China for what is marketed as “ethical ivory” amid heavy scrutiny on elephant tusk...
A presentation at the TUG2025 conference introduced a color font that performs automatic syntax highlighting for TeX code. The project originated from an idea by CVR and drew inspiration from Heikki L...
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has made a significant shift to full open access across its ACM Digital Library effective January 1, 2026. All ACM publications and related artifacts are ...
OpenWorkers is an open-source runtime that brings a Cloudflare Workers–style development model to self-hosted infrastructure. Written in Rust and powered by V8 isolates, it runs untrusted JavaScript w...
The article details a recently discovered four-byte heap-buffer-overflow in FFmpeg’s EXIF handling path within avcodec/exif, triggered during processing of Image File Directories (IFDs). The issue aff...
This annual review letter contrasts the cultural and communicative styles of Silicon Valley and the Communist Party of China, noting that both often adopt serious, humor-limited public registers—eithe...
This article examines the resurgence of vinyl records and broader analog experiences among Gen Z. Drawing on data from Luminate, Global Web Index, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RI...
This article introduces a free, hands-on book that guides readers through building a deep learning library from the ground up using NumPy. Rather than relying on established frameworks, the resource f...
Michael Kennedy compiles practical benchmark results for Python developers, providing a categorized table of operation timings and memory footprints. Run on CPython 3.14.2 with an ARM-based Mac Mini M...
The article charts the shift from early end-to-end IPv4 networking to a modern internet shaped by address scarcity and cost. It explains how RFC 1918 private addressing, NAT, and eventually Carrier-gr...
BYD Co. delivered 4.6 million vehicles in 2025, representing a 7.7% increase over 2024, according to a company statement referenced by Bloomberg. The company met its full-year sales target, though the...
The article details an alleged leak of PlayStation 5 BootROM keys, described as hex strings that could permit decryption and analysis of the console’s bootloader. While this development may lower the ...
The Datastar Common Lisp SDK delivers a Lisp-based implementation of the Datastar Hypermedia Framework, concentrating on core SDK capabilities and adherence to the Datastar ADR. Built with CLOS around...
A DHS declaration filed on December 11 asserts that REAL ID, despite being a DHS-certified identification standard requiring proof of citizenship or lawful status, can be unreliable for confirming U.S...
The article presents a practical guide to implementing HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) vector search in PHP, focusing on how to move beyond slow linear scans when using cosine similarity. It...
Apple is opening iOS 26.2 and later to alternative browser engines for users in Japan under tightly controlled conditions. The change applies to two app types: full browser apps and apps from browser ...
The European Space Agency (ESA) has disclosed a security incident affecting a small number of external servers used for unclassified engineering and scientific collaboration. In an update posted on X,...
The article outlines how Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) can add precise, secure spatial awareness to the Internet of Things (IoT), complementing existing connectivity technologies like Bluetooth and Wi‑Fi. It ...
A post summarizes U.S. CDC surveillance findings from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network for 8-year-olds between 2000 and 2016. The analysis stratifies autism prevalen...
This educational article breaks down how digital cameras work by building a simple camera concept from first principles. It explains that modern image sensors are grids of photodetectors converting in...
Johnny’s Software Lab presents a consolidated guide to memory subsystem optimizations via 18 blog posts, aimed at helping developers make software faster by improving how memory is used. The series co...
This article explains how to recognize genuine macOS password and keychain authentication dialogs, which are generated by the operating system rather than individual apps. It describes the distinguish...
c-events is an open-source, minimal event loop designed for cross-platform, non-blocking I/O. It unifies interfaces for epoll, kqueue, and Windows IOCP through the wepoll compatibility layer, aiming t...
An engineer at Imprint details why their internal automation platform now supports both LLM-driven and code-driven workflows. Initially, they employed an LLM to orchestrate tools for tasks like taggin...
RESIDUALS introduces a differential, multi-method approach to feature detection in LiDAR-derived Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). The framework systematically pairs decomposition techniques with upsam...
Alex Russell reports that independent datasets—the RUM Archive and early analysis from Chrome’s Soft Navigations Origin Trial—converge on a notable pattern: Single‑Page Applications (SPAs) produce, on...
Finnish authorities detained the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines–flagged cargo ship Fitburg and its 14 crew members after a critical undersea telecommunications cable connecting Helsinki and Tallinn ...
An open-source spectral 3D bin packing library demonstrates GPU-accelerated packing with FFT-based collision detection and scoring, achieving a featured result of 348 Thingi10K objects packed into a 2...
Quickemu is a utility that streamlines virtual machine setup by wrapping QEMU with automation for image retrieval, configuration, and optimized launch settings. Originally built for quick Linux distri...
A conference talk examines how Germany’s rapidly deployed, nationwide Deutschlandticket encountered industrial-scale fraud due to a decentralized, weakly governed ecosystem. The presenter, building on...
Bryan Cantrill examines customer relations in enterprise software through personal experience and a recent exchange with a former Sun colleague. He recalls leaving Oracle after its acquisition of Sun,...
An iPhone user highlights a quirk where lightly brushing or hovering over the Camera app icon can momentarily activate the camera and trigger the green privacy indicator. This behavior can happen whil...
Wario Synth is a browser-based audio engine that converts MIDI files into Game Boy–style chiptune output. The system analyzes the structure of MIDI input to distinguish melody, bass, and chord tracks....
Dell’s GB10 mini workstation is evaluated as a developer-centric alternative to Nvidia’s DGX Spark. While slightly more expensive, it fixes notable usability issues by adding a power LED, upgrading th...
The article marks January 1, 1983 as the start of ARPANET’s cutover from the Network Control Program (NCP) to Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a transition completed by June 1...
This piece curates excerpts from a 1962 correspondence between critics Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport exploring how film technology and machines shaped modern visual culture. Kenner argues that silent-...
The article details a user’s transition from Windows to Linux for PC gaming, citing improved practicality of modern Linux distributions and growing adoption reflected in Steam’s hardware survey, where...
This Part I feature explores the direct influence of mythologist Joseph Campbell on George Lucas’s creation of Star Wars. It outlines Campbell’s contributions to understanding universal themes and arc...
This essay critiques the transformation of the internet from a decentralized, passion-driven ecosystem of blogs, forums, and wikis into a centralized environment dominated by algorithmic feeds and att...
This interactive demo simulates a cycling race in which each rider is controlled by a compact neural network. Users can select individual riders to inspect their neural controllers, return to a defaul...
The article introduces pydantic-resolve, a Pydantic-based library for constructing complex API data declaratively and progressively. It targets UI integration use cases and positions itself as a pract...
Tasker is an open-source desktop agent, currently in beta, built to automate browser and OS workflows. It enables users to either record their actions or describe tasks in plain English, with AI handl...
The article documents an experiment using Gemini 3 Pro to interpret four handwritten circular annotations on a lavishly colored leaf from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel (printed by A...
Street-Fighting Mathematics presents a structured set of post-lecture readings aligned with a course on approximate problem-solving techniques. The resource centers on Sanjoy Mahajan’s textbook, publi...
A student recounts how frequent interaction with AI, particularly through prompt engineering for large language models, has reshaped their in-person communication style. During a post-exam discussion ...
In this LessWrong post, KAP outlines “Straussian Memes,” messages intentionally or incidentally structured to convey different meanings to different audiences. The core structure features higher and l...
The article examines whether Ruby’s Bundler can achieve installation speeds comparable to uv, a fast Python packaging tool. Prompted by a question at a recent conference, the author contends that Bund...
The post examines limitations of the Lambertian diffuse shading model, max(0, dot(L, N)), in minimal setups such as new projects or rendering tech demos with a single light. Because surfaces facing aw...
This article describes an archival moving-image series focused on the Apollo era, primarily documenting the Apollo 11 mission with additional coverage of Apollo 8, 9, 10, 12, and 13. Beyond mission hi...
This article examines WebAssembly as a practical platform for extending Python without relying on native C extension toolchains. By packaging architecture-independent Wasm modules within Python librar...
The article proposes replicating a classic Bell Labs experiment—recounted by Richard Hamming—in which participants attempted to deduce rules from a 12-switch device that produced red or green outputs,...
Enroll is a tool designed to bring unmanaged Linux servers under Ansible configuration management rapidly. It works by inspecting Debian-like and Red Hat-like systems to harvest critical configuration...
An investigation into an old Java-based reference application revealed that its CD check hinged on receiving specific command-line arguments. By decompiling the program, the author found that the main...
This 2010 article advocates for plain text files as a durable, universal medium for sharing and preserving information. It defines text files as human-readable documents historically encoded in ASCII—...
Feather is an embeddable, TCL-compatible scripting language intended to add an interactive command shell to applications while keeping the host firmly in control. It provides deep inspectability so ru...
Public Domain Day 2026 brings a new wave of cultural works into the public domain across multiple jurisdictions with differing copyright terms. The article outlines three primary systems that govern m...
California’s Judicial Branch highlights several of the more than 500 laws enacted in 2025 that will take effect in 2026 and influence court operations and user experiences. In immigration, SB 281 requ...
Ghostty has implemented a discussion-first policy for its GitHub repository, preventing users from opening Issues directly. Instead, users are asked to begin with a GitHub Discussion for any report or...
The article scrutinizes the claim that editors written and scripted in the same Lisp language are inherently more extensible, highlighting that practical systems inevitably include non-Lisp components...
This first part of a two-part article critiques TypeScript’s shortcomings and sets up a follow-up on how configuration can improve its type safety. The author, with experience in Java, Python, C, and ...
Marmot v2 introduces a leaderless, distributed replication layer for SQLite that presents a MySQL-compatible wire interface. It is designed to eliminate single points of failure by allowing writes on ...
The AI Futures Project’s December 2025 update introduces a unified forecasting model designed to estimate when artificial intelligence will achieve key capability milestones, notably Automated Coder (...
The California Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP) is a new, free service enabling California residents to request the deletion of their personal information from data brokers. The platform emp...
BYD is set to dethrone Tesla as the world’s top electric-vehicle seller after reporting 2025 battery-car sales above 2.25 million, a near 28% increase year-on-year. Analyst estimates put Tesla’s 2025 ...
DENT is an open, community-driven network operating system initiative under the Linux Foundation. It builds on established Linux components—primarily the Linux Kernel and Switchdev—to create a standar...
James (Jim) Moylan, a former Ford engineer credited with inventing the dashboard arrow that shows which side of a car’s fuel door is on, has died at age 80, as reported by Automotive News. The feature...
An anonymous backend engineer claims a large food delivery platform employs algorithmic and pricing tactics that mislead customers and disadvantage drivers. According to the post, a paid “Priority Del...
This research analyzes data from more than 1,000 small-scale marine fisheries that collectively account for about two-thirds of global small-scale marine catch. The authors identify five archetypes de...