still can’t believe we’re getting gifts from our DNS server. “you can’t get that in stores with BIND!”

btw if you ever appear on the "google open source peer bonus" and supposedly receive some money from them, this is in practice more of a punishment than anything else

first they make you sign up for this "payoneer" thing, which has a bunch of verifications (of course, involving uploading your government documents, especially fun if your deadname hasn't changed yet) and later attempting to re-verify with a new name results in them wanting documents that your government potentially does not issue

the whole thing is entirely obnoxious, and contacting a human is a chore (they make you go through a particularly hellish AI assistant and then if you manage to reach a form to contact a human, it only works in chrome and makes you pick like 3 categories each with subitems none of which really matches what you want)

they supposedly sent me a payment card, which i never received, which then got blocked, which resulted in the entire balance getting blocked, which then resulted in me having to go through this, in order to possibly withdraw the money and close the damn thing

it's not worth it for 250 bucks, stay *away*

New from 404 Media: Flock exposed some of its AI-powered cameras to the internet. We know because we tracked ourselves with them. These cameras zoom in on passersby, sometimes so close we could read a random person's phone screen. Required no login to view cameras
https://www.404media.co/flock-exposed-its-ai-powered-cameras-to-the-internet-we-tracked-ourselves/

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@flexion/115752573933914452

The oldest Unix written in C was successfully recovered from tape this weekend -- and here it is running on IRIX.

The amazing bit is the contents of the big window in the middle, for children under 50, *not* the windows themselves.

Excerpt from a book I'm reading, Slow Poison, by Mahmood Mamdani, father of Zorhan Mamdani.

"FBI agents knocked on
my door...they asked what I thought of Marx. I said I had
never met him. Not surprisingly, this Ugandan Muyindi had never heard of Karl
Marx. “He’s dead.”

I said, “I'm sorry, what happened?”

“No, he died long ago.”

I wondered why, then, the question. “Why, then, are you asking me?”
Later, I would remind myself: the FBI introduced me to Karl Marx! "
#books #bookstodon #book

The "UNIX v4 tape" running in simh PDP11 emu on IRIX:

Nobody:

Kids that grew up with Windows 7: It is my mission to make a perfect selection box around this

For audio-only content like podcasts, provide a transcript. For videos with audio, provide both transcripts and captions. In the transcripts and captions, include the spoken information and sounds that are important for understanding the content.

My response to anyone asking me to do anything for the next two weeks starting Monday

🚨 PSA! 🚨

Alpine 3.23 moved mariadb-connector-c from the 3.3 release series to the 3.4 release series, which has different TLS validation behavior.

If you are using self-signed certificates, you need to either trust the self-signed CA or set the MARIADB_TLS_DISABLE_PEER_VERIFICATION=1 environment variable.

https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/17798

#alpinelinux

I just got permission from @bagder to use his response as a standard way to deal with slop:
I think it's beautiful.

I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS I HATE STALEBOTS

Look ma, no fork! 🎉

https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/7584

#postmarketOS is now shipping #systemd built from unpatched upstream source code, thanks to all the amazing folks involved with adding #musl libc support 😁

New blog post is out, with a look at our finances in 2025. Most importantly:

Thanks to your donations, we can now start the Contributor Support Programme to make developing postmarketOS more sustainable.

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/12/19/contributor-compensantion-and-financial-update/

Systemd 259 Released With Experimental Musl libc Support, More Features

Systemd 259 is out as the newest feature release for this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Yes, there are more features in tow for this systemd release to top off 2025...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-259

Stephen Rothwell is "stepping down as #Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026. Mark Brown [@broonie] has generously volunteered to take up the challenge.":

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-next/20251218180721.20eb878e@canb.auug.org.au/T/#u

To quote: ""It seems a long time since I read Andrew Morton's "I have a dream" email and decided that I could help out there - little did I know what I was heading for.""

Many many thx Stephen for all your really hard work on this over all those years, it helped a tremendous lot!

#LinuxKernel #kernel

Something that hasn't been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features.

We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this.

…

support for texture compression landed in #NVK which means a significant performance boost in the next release!

A lot of people were involved to get this working and it required work on the kernel and Userspace side.

It should allow to close the gap to Nvidia, but the variance is impressive.

Some games barely see any difference, but others see a 2x perf improvement. But it should on average cut the gap by 25% or so.

Hello my friends, I'm sorry to bother you. You may be receiving many messages, and I know we are may bothering you 🙏, but please don't forget my children. I have four children, all under ten years old, and they need someone to stand by me . Please don't forget us.💔
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-raghda-and-her-children-rebuild-after-losing-everything
@arendleejessurun @rahulc29 @denissalem @Gustodon @fabio @chielk @santiago