The Death of the Mind

Enlarge / The Reddit iOS app icon. (credit: Getty Images | Yuriko Nakao )
Reddit is getting ready to slap third-pary apps with millions of dollars in API fees, and many Reddit users are unhappy about it. A widespread protest is planned for June 12, with hundreds of subreddits planning to go dark for 48 hours.
Reddit started life as a geeky site, but as it has aged, it has been trying to work more like a traditional social network. Part of that push included the development of a first-party app for mobile devices, but the 17-year-old site only launched an official app in 2016. Before then, it was up to third-party apps to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1944464

There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it, which can be summarized as “this magazine got to be very large, very extensive, and probably served as the unofficial ‘bible’ of the state of hardware and software to the general public throughout the 1980s and 1990s.” While it was just a pleasant little computer tabloid when it started in 1979, it quickly grew to a page count that most reasonable people would define as “intimidating”. In a world that saw hundreds of magazines and thousands of newsletters come…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543

One of the big topics in Postgres is bloat. It is something that every DBA comes across and in fact we have a few good posts on how to work with bloat in our blog. 
Update-heavy tables is a special case of data that due to business requirements needs to be updated frequently to stay relevant. Autovacuum may be a good solution for table bloat (you can check this post describing how to do that), however it does not help with index bloat. 
Pg_index_watch resolves this issue by automatically rebuilding indexes when needed. 
How it works?
With the introduction of REINDEX CONCURRENTLY in PostgreSQL 12 there was finally a safe way to rebuild indexes without heavy locks. At the same…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5Lz

Postgres 16 is hot off the press with the beta release last week. I am really
excited about the new feature that allows logical replication from standbys,
allowing users to:

create logical decoding from a read-only standby
reduce the workload on the primary server
have new ways to achieve high-availability for applications that require data
synchronization across multiple systems or for auditing purposes

A second relevant and exciting new feature coming in 16 is that replication
slots on a given standby persist the promotion of that standby to a primary.
This means that in the event of primary server failure and promotion of a
standby to primary, the replication slots will persist and the former-standby
subscribers will not be affected.
These two together give PostgreSQL a huge boost…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5Lx

I’m calling time on DNSSEC. Last week, prompted by a change in my DNS hosting setup, I began removing it from the few personal zones I had signed. Then this Monday the .nz ccTLD experienced a multi-day availability incident triggered by the annual DNSSEC key rotation process. This incident broke several of my unsigned zones, which led me to say very unkind things about DNSSEC on Mastodon and now I feel compelled to more completely explain my thinking:
For almost all domains and use-cases, the costs and risks of deploying DNSSEC outweigh the benefits it provides. Don’t bother signing your zones.
The .nz incident, while topical, is not the motivation or the trigger for this conclusion. Had…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.mattb.nz/w/2023/06/02/calling-time-on-dnssec/

Just when we didn’t think the state of Texas could get any more wacko on tech policy, this latest bill really suggests otherwise. House Bill 1181 is an age verification measure that is similar to what we’ve seen in the state legislatures across other red U.S. states.
You have an age verification proposal that is similar to Louisiana Act 440 and Utah’s Senate Bill 287 – all porn sites with users from these states must have a government ID or a credit card in order to verify age in order to watch age-restricted content. But, the bill itself takes an extreme turn in the guise of protecting the general public’s health.
House Bill 1181, introduced by a team of anti-porn legislators,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/01/texas-age-verification-bill-would-plaster-health-warnings-on-porn-sites/

The shock closure yesterday of one of the world’s oldest and most reliable torrent sites ranks as one of the biggest surprises in recent years.
Founded in 2008, RARBG had a reputation for taking the fundamentals seriously. The site offered the usual spread of movies and TV shows, available in various qualities and numerous file sizes. The site didn’t cover every single release but when trawling the archives, it certainly felt like it might.
Consistent, Organized, Predictable
RARBG also became known for consistently offering subtitles for most movie and TV show releases. Long before legal streaming services made any serious attempt, RARBG’s curation of subtitles helped the deaf enjoy films again, without any of the frustrations associated with mislabeled…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-magnet-links-appear-online-230601/

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the bill insist that they’re trying to stop experimentation on children).
We’ve also written about how NetChoice, an internet company trade group, has sued to block the law as unconstitutional, and how I filed a declaration explaining how…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/01/governor-newsom-desperately-begs-netchoice-to-drop-its-lawsuit-over-unconstitutional-aadc-bill/

Do you think Tcl/Tk GUIs are doomed to look outdated? Fear not! A treeview widget: The official example of Forest Light: The ttkthemes gallery Plus, Tk itself has a little choice of built-in themes: We can use these themes with nodgui, the Ltk fork. In June of 2020, @cage added a little function to load a .tcl file: (defun eval-tcl-file (file-path) “This function will feed the TCL interpreter with the contents of the file `path’. Please, as this function will load and execute a script, ensure to load files only from trusted sources otherwise severe security problem may arise.” (assert (stringp file-path))…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/pretty-gui-in-common-lisp-with-nodgui-tk-themes/