Agreguesi i feed

I’ve been an unapologetic fan of the Lenovo “classic” 7 row keyboard in the ThinkPad X220 and have been using the external version of it ever since. This USB laptop keyboard chassis is called the SK-8855 which was manufactured in the late 2000s and early 2010s and is now essentially unobtainium from everywhere. The SK-8855 features a TrackPoint but lacks a trackpad – which is actually a feature for me. It’s rarely available on eBay as new-old stock for several hundred dollars. Over the last 10 years I’ve replaced the keyboard several times due to literally wearing it out, and finding genuine NMB replacement keyboards is getting harder and harder — but not impossible.

For the last 10 years I’ve dealt with a few little quirks. Sometimes the controller board essentially sh*ts itself and crashes, but it could always be coaxed back into life by removing and reinserting the USB-A plug. It’s also guilty of missing a quick left-shift press, so typing fast my sentences never get capitalized. Over the years a few people have commented on my lack of grammar skills and until very recently I had this controller board to blame.

After over 15 years of being blamed for all my typos, the controller board gave up completely. This gave me the “opportunity” to replace it with a modern converter board and bring it into the 2020s. A good analogy is putting a Tesla electric drive-train in a classic Ferrari with a blown engine.

This required removing some plastic supports, which made me feel like the worst computer peripheral conservator in existence. After removing the USB-C connector the new controller could be mounted and wired up to the existing USB wire.

In most part it worked as a keyboard, but was set up with the en_US keymap and didn’t do anything for the # key for instance. I ran the provided non-free win32 tool in Wine but that just showed some really tiny Chinese text. It also crashed a lot and I couldn’t work out the pinmap format that it was writing.

After being inspired by Christian, I asked Claude to analyse the updater binary and tell me what it knew, and after allowing it device access it essentially reverse engineered the hardware. I actually bought two new controller boards and so I was a little more comfortable letting Claude actually drive the keyboard itself — and every now and then it would ask me to press specific keys and tell it if certain LEDs were on or off. After a full day of Claude-ing (never leave a hardware geek alone with minimal chores for a weekend day…) I had two things:

xykbms-gtk is a GTK4 standlone version of the vendor tool that works in Linux using hidraw. Using this I could swap, remap and disable keys and change all the other parameters on the controller board. I’ve not submitted this to Flathub as it’s 80% AI generated and more than niche; if you’re soldering stuff into a SK-8855 then you’re more than qualified to do meson build. It does work remarkably well considering I had no kind of datasheet or firmware source code for the controller at all.

The other thing was a fwupd plugin for this new keyboard controller. I actually manually created the fwupd plugin template with lots of TODOs in the right place to define the structure and then pointed Claude at the protocol documentation it had created for the GTK4 tool and asked it to fix all the TODOs in the plugin. After another couple of hours of questions and verb-ing from Claude we had a fully functional fwupd plugin that could not only update the firmware on the controller but could also write a “pinmap” that could reconfigure the keyboard between en_US and en_GB etc. I think this worked so well because we have so many self tests and linters in fwupd; Claude was forced to do the right thing before it could even run git commit.

The keyboard pinmap wasn’t really a “firmware” per-se, so I then also got Claude to create a WriteBlob method that allows fwupd to write a raw payload on a CFI-type device. This will also be super useful in the future to flash SPI devices with the existing CH341a and CH347 plugins. This is only available for CFI flash devices and for users that authenticate with the admin password – for obvious reasons.

I then wrote the GNOME Firmware code to be able to flash a CFI image from the GUI. It’s not beautiful yet and we probably need a dedicated app, or a dedicated “mode” in gnome-firmware to make flashing CFI devices safe and easy. I’ll add a screenshot when I’m happy with the UX.

I’m using this keyboard right now, and maybe it can last another 15 years of abuse from me.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Seattle Times: Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees, or roughly a quarter of its workforce, as the company tries to control its head count while avoiding layoffs. The Redmond-based tech giant announced Monday morning that eligible employees at the vice president level and below in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom would receive a "voluntary exit offer" of a standard severance package, based on their location. In a memo to employees, Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said the move was building off the voluntary retirement program earlier this year, which was available to more than 8,700 U.S.-based employees, roughly one-third of whom took the offer. Since May 2025, Microsoft has been trying to reduce its corporate workforce, first through waves of mass layoffs and now through more creative buyout programs. The company laid off about 15,000 employees last year over the course of several months, affecting about 3,200 Washington-based workers. The report notes that the layoffs have continued this year, though on a smaller scale and largely concentrated in the company's gaming division.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:6.18.59 (longterm) Released:2026-10-26 Source:linux-6.18.59.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.59.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.59

Anthropic has filed to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, setting the stage for a potentially record-setting IPO that could value the Claude developer at more than $2 trillion. Alongside the extraordinary cost of its AI expansion, Anthropic warned that it "may not generate sufficient revenue to achieve or sustain profitability in the future." "While we have experienced significant revenue growth in recent periods, our business is highly capital intensive," the company said. "Our revenue growth may not be sustainable, and our rate of growth may decrease." NBC News reports: The filing did not include a potential share price, the number of shares to be offered or a valuation for the whole company, all of which will be determined after Anthropic holds a "road show" with investors, prospective investors and its bankers. [...] The company plans to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon for cloud services through April 2036 and another $120 billion with SpaceX through 2029. Anthropic also said it planned to spend $115 billion with Google and $45 billion with Microsoft, both through 2033, for computing infrastructure. The filing said that the company recorded revenue growth of "1,368% year over year for the three months ended June 30, 2026." The cost of renting servers and chips grew by 300% over the same period. Anthropic's net loss for the first six months of 2026 was $80.7 billion. For the entirety of 2025, the company reported a $42 billion net loss. Anthropic added that it expects its current cash and sales to be sufficient for the next 12 months but warned that future revenue growth depends on a number of important factors, including the cost of infrastructure. As a result, it said, "we may be required to seek additional financing sooner than we currently anticipate." The company said it has raised about $141 billion of capital through the end of June and is sitting on $112.4 billion of cash.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:7.2.13 (stable) Released:2026-10-26 Source:linux-7.2.13.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.13.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.13

Version:next-20261026 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-26

Kotaku reports: r/opensource, Reddit's primary "subreddit for everything open source related," has banned all AI-assisted and AI-related projects.... As reported by The Verge, the subreddit's October 24 post, titled "Your tokens aren't valuable: No more AI," features four new main rules: all projects must now be at least "1 year old," have "multiple contributors," be posted by someone who must "speak English," and cannot be "made by" or "intended for" AI... [T]he ban on AI is simple; as the subreddit's moderators explain, "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community." Unsurprisingly, this is the part that's upset the majority of the users in the thread.... [T]he moderator who posted the new guidelines stated in a separate comment that the overwhelmingly negative response is due to "some guy on twitter claiming to be alternative news" who posted an "opinionated editorial pointing hundreds of people to the thread." Given the timing of when the thread was posted, alongside the fact that the X post in question mentions "the Linux kernel," they are presumably referring to this post by The Lunduke Journal. The moderator may be correct, as almost all of the top comments on the post are from users who have never posted in r/opensource before. The use of AI "doesn't change whether something is open source or not," complained one commenter, who added "I guess Linux is no longer allowed here? Linus uses AI for kernel development now." The moderator has since updated their post to acknowledge that Redditors have now already created a rival community called r/OpenSourceAIAllowed — plus three more alternatives: r/TrueOpenSource r/OpenSourceWare r/ActuallyOpenSource

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brazil's 80-year-old president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected Sunday, reports the Guardian, "defeating his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, to claim a historic fourth term in power." And the results could impact the climate, suggests the Associated Press, since under da Silva the annual deforestation rate in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988: Official satellite data showed the rainforest lost 3,335 square kilometers (1,300 square miles) from Aug. 2025 through July 2026, the period used to calculate the annual rate... During Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60%, with more than 45,000 square kilometers (17,400 square miles) cleared, according to official data. Under Lula, deforestation has fallen 71% since 2023, the government said. One of Lula's first moves after taking office in January 2023 for a third, non-consecutive term was to revive the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon, known by its Portuguese acronym, PPCDAm. Launched in 2004 during his first administration, the plan had been shelved under Bolsonaro.... The plan has four pillars: strengthening monitoring and enforcement; promoting a sustainable economy; managing protected areas and determining how undesignated public forests should be used; and using regulations and financial incentives to curb deforestation. Measures included restoring sanctions for illegal forest clearing detected by satellites, a practice seen as the most effective tool to curb deforestation that was halted under Bolsonaro. The government also proposed barring properties with illegal deforestation from receiving bank loans and allocated more funding to priority Amazon municipalities that demonstrated reductions in forest loss. It also funded efforts to fight environmental crime and develop subsidized credit for sustainable businesses in the Amazon... Deforestation and other land-use changes are Brazil's largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global warming. The stakes are especially high in the Amazon, which stores vast amounts of carbon dioxide and generates atmospheric moisture that helps regulate weather far beyond South America... Degradation from wildfires, logging and drought affects about 40% of the Amazon and has outpaced clear-cutting in recent years. A strong El Niño, a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific, could intensify those threats in 2026 and 2027 by bringing hotter, drier conditions that fuel wildfires. The article notes that Lula's reelection campaign promised zero net deforestation by 2030, plus restoration to offset all forest loss, legal or illegal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The problem? Understanding how AI coding agents interact with the software you build. "Whether you're maintaining an SDK, building a command-line interface, or publishing an MCP server or skills... you need to understand whether agents can discover and use what you ship, and what your team can change." Results can vary, and configurations keep changing, with behaviors influenced by everything from custom instructions and MCP servers to skills and plugins. So after a year of development Microsoft has created Scope, "an open-source platform built on Kubernetes for turning those interactions into evidence product teams can act on." Details are available on... the Microsoft open source blog: Available under the MIT License, Scope supports a continuous Developer Agent Experience (DevAx) learning loop grounded in repeatable experiments. The Azure Cosmos DB team's experience shows what that loop can deliver... "The evaluations led to 20 Agent Kit issues and 27 documentation issues resolved," [says Jay Gordon, Senior Program Manager, Azure Cosmos DB]... These results connect evaluation to decisions a product team can make: which documentation needs clarification, where tooling needs a fix, and whether an update changes agent behavior.... [The gains] demonstrate how targeted changes, informed by observed behavior, can improve the way agents use a product. For more on the shift from building for human developers to supporting agents, watch Your Product Was Built for Humans. Is It Ready for Agents? or join us at AI DevCon NYC conference in November. Scope surfaces everything from incorrect assumptions in documentation (or recurring missed instructions) to whether agents select the intended SDK, initialize it correctly, and use its APIs, leading to clearer descriptions for command-line tool and more actionable errors. Microsoft's open source blog also explains why AI agent evaluation needs an open-source foundation: The challenges behind agent experience aren't unique to one product or organization. SDK maintainers, tool authors, researchers, and agent developers are all asking how agents behave and what helps them succeed. No single team can represent every language, workflow, or integration. An open project can bring more scenarios, more failure cases, and more viewpoints into the evaluation process... Opening Scope's execution and evaluation code gives contributors a way to question the methods, investigate unexpected results, and improve the evaluation itself. A shared foundation also reduces duplicated infrastructure. Agent integrations, reusable criteria, and trace-analysis improvements can help other teams study their own products without rebuilding the same machinery. The goal isn't one universal benchmark or definition of success. It's a common starting point that teams can adapt to their needs. The MIT License lets teams use and extend Scope, while self-managed deployments let them evaluate private workloads without publishing their code or run data.... Scope streams activity as the agent works and retains interactions and workspace snapshots for later review. Your team can follow tool calls, inspect generated files, and connect a failed requirement to the steps that preceded it. Those traces provide observable evidence of what the agent did, helping turn a failure into a concrete documentation, SDK, or tooling improvement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"59% of maintainers report growing contribution volume since the rise of GenAI," according to a new study published by Linux Foundation Research. But 25% of their incoming pull requests "are estimated to be low-quality, also known as 'AI slop'." And on large projects, 69% see growing contributions — and estimate that 31% are low-quality/AI slop. So what do these results show us? "Generative AI is fundamentally changing how people participate in open source," says the head of Open Source Ecosystem Development at Huawei's R&D subsidiary Futurewei, which helped support the study. Specifically GenAI is "lowering barriers to contribution" but also "creating new challenges" for maintainers and communities. Their recommendation? "Build the governance, transparency and trust mechanisms that allow AI-assisted contributions to strengthen, but not overwhelm, the open source ecosystem." "Open source projects need to design for a growing AI-generated contributor base, not simply react to it," said Hilary Carter, SVP of Research at the Linux Foundation. "That means setting clear expectations for GenAI, putting responsibility for testing and disclosure on contributors and giving maintainers better tools to manage incoming pull requests. If we get those fundamentals right, AI can expand participation without overburdening and increasing costs for maintainers." More from the blog It's FOSS: LF Research is the Linux Foundation's research arm. It was set up in 2021 and publishes studies on how open source is built and used, drawing on surveys and project data. Its latest report, Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era, surveyed 234 contributors and maintainers on how generative AI is affecting the way open source gets made... 64% say reviews now take longer. Burnout is their top concern at 63%, narrowly ahead of contribution quality at 60%. You will also find that policies have not caught up to the AI-assisted coding and vulnerability reporting trend. Of the 119 respondents who answered the question, 35% said their project has a formal policy permitting AI use. Another 32% have none and no plans for one, 23% plan to write one, and 10% ban AI contributions outright.... Most maintainers (71%) say AI makes it easier for newcomers to start contributing. Other interesting findings: "Respondents estimate average time reductions across all six OSS development activities measured, including proposal discussions (19%) and code authoring (52%). For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI." "71% of maintainers agree GenAI reduces barriers to entry for OSS, but 53% of maintainers disagree that GenAI has improved community trust." Developers are reinvesting the time they save back into open source: 66% report using productivity gains to address technical debt, 63% to develop new features and 58% for learning and upskilling. Continued investment in human mentorship remains important: 46% of maintainers say GenAI increases the need for mentorship of new contributors, compared with 32% who say it decreases that need. OpenSSF and LF AI & Data also helped support the study.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As of today in systemd Git it's now possible for the systemd programs to be written in the Rust programming language as an alternative to C," reports Phoronix: Core systemd code like the systemd library doesn't yet support Rust code, but for the various systemd programs / leaf components there is now support for using Rust... The new systemd-keyring-setup utility in Rust is used for provisioning keyrings and enrolling X.509 certificates into the kernel's dm-verity / fs-verity / BPF keyrings during the boot process while dealing them afterward. This systemd-keyring-setup code hasn't been merged yet but is expected soon now that the Rust infrastructure has landed. Originally it was all part of a single big commit before being split-up for the Rust enablement, systemd-keyring-setup, and other preparations for this new component. Systemd developers aren't planning on porting existing C code to Rust, all the Rust code is built with Meson [no Cargo usage], and C linkage only is mandated. Systemd Rust components come out slightly larger than C with a test program being 32KB compared to 20KB for its C twin. For now at least the systemd Rust support is optional and toggled by the -Drust= Meson option with it being auto by default.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley: Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley professor and Fields medalist, no longer grades his students' homework. After seeing how many of his students used AI to consistently receive top scores, he felt there was "no point" in paying readers to grade for correctness in homework, as AI use is now unavoidable. Borcherds revealed this in a sit-down interview Tuesday, following OpenAI's announcement that AI agents apparently solved one of mathematics' most difficult unsolved problems, the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. "If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there'll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better," Borcherds said. Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is "not a very good system," but at the moment, he has no alternative... Campus has tried several AI detection tools, including Turnitin and Rumi, but have determined that these tools aren't adequate enough to be standardized on campus. The article points out that at the university, each class's AI policy "is up to the discretion of faculty."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeamFS creator Aurelien Desbrieres is not calling for a merge, but is requesting feedback on an 18-patch proposal that takes the place of FTRFS, an earlier filesystem he proposed in April. The Linux/Open Source blog It's FOSS reports: Filesystems that can repair damage, like Btrfs and ZFS, usually do it by falling back on a spare copy of the data. BeamFS skips that and stores Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes inside every block. Every read gets checked against those codes, and small amounts of damage are corrected before the data reaches the application. If the filesystem can tell the damage is beyond repair, the read fails with an error instead of returning the wrong bytes... In his technical report, ext4 and ext3 returned wrong data without any error, while Btrfs refused to read the file. BeamFS returned the correct file every time except once, when a flip hit a pointer to the file's data and it refused the read. "Aurelien says he used Anthropic's Claude to write the code, the tool that checks the patches, and the cover letter..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around AI , the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," writes the chief economist at U.S. asset management firm Apollo Global. He adds that "there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth... [M]ainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins." VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited... The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins. That may be harder than it sounds. AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins. The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector. More details from TechCrunch: Apollo's Torsten Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493 — the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — finding that profit margins and revenue per worker appear to be flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity... Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The blog Android Authority offers this TLDR: Google updated its privacy policy to clarify that it could use information shared through Personal Intelligence to personalize ads. Gmail, Drive, and Photos content isn't used for targeted ads by default, but connecting them to eligible Google services could change that. Digital Trends explains: Google has long promised that your Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos content never helps it personalize ads. However, since October 16, 2026, its privacy policy adds a catch. The promise lapses if you let other ad-showing Google services use that content. That means using Personal Intelligence, an opt-in tool that lets Google's AI search read your connected apps, does exactly that (via Google). If you ask Google's AI Mode where to eat near your hotel, and it can identify your hotel from the booking confirmation in Gmail, find the location in Maps, and then suggest a few places you might like. That's the helpful half. The twist, however, is that AI Mode can also show sponsored results. Google mentions that the personalized ads follow what the question and answer are about. So, while your inbox never goes to an advertiser, it can quietly shape the answer, which, in turn, shapes the ads. Google's defense is elaborate. First, it says connecting the apps is optional. Second, advertisers can't see the information or content Google accesses in your Workspace apps (including your inbox and photos). Finally, sensitive topics like health are off-limits. Ars Technica shares the response they got from a Google spokesperson: that Google isn't scanning your entire inbox to feed their advertising profiles, but if you choose to pipe your personal data into an AI search tool — then the ads Google shows you could be based on that information. If you want to ensure ads never use your personal data in this way, you'll need to make sure Personal Intelligence is turned off. The easiest way is to access the Gemini settings for Personal Intelligence and disable the connected apps. These settings are also a few levels deep in your main Google account settings under Data & privacy > Personalization settings > Manage Personalized Recommendations in Search Services > Connected Content Apps. From there, you can disable connections to Workspace and Google Photos.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Free Software Foundation's "EncryptFest" today covers both encryption and privacy. The free two-hour event runs from 13:00-15:00 Eastern Daylight Time (17:00-19:00 UTC), and includes: — A discussion on "bulk surveillance, and how encryption protects personal privacy" — A short video from renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier. — A discussion with Henry Fisher, the founder of Techlore and a digital rights activist — A hands-on workshop on how you can encrypt your email using the FSF's Email Self-Defense guide "as a concrete step to enhance your data privacy" You may join us virtually, or if you are in Boston, Massachusetts, United States (the FSF's home base), you can join us in-person at the Boston Public Library's Copley Square branch. You may also join us in-person at MakeHaven in New Haven, Connecticut, US, and meet our deputy director Sean O'Brien. Whether attending our event online or in-person, please register. It will help us plan ahead and enable us to contact you about other important details before the workshop, like what to expect and what to bring... Bulk surveillance violates our fundamental rights and makes free speech dangerous. Email encryption is an excellent tool you can use to shield yourself from bulk surveillance. Encrypting your email is also a concrete step towards protecting your data from others whose intentions may not be honorable.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As of 2026, the company has issued more than 60 million digital certificates," notes Wikipedia. But now, InfoWorld reports: A certificate authority's decision to abandon the global SSL/TLS market is exposing a weakness many organizations rarely examine: their dependence on complex PKI trust chains. Following the compromise of private keys behind eight of its intermediate certificate authorities, eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements... [In a press note the company added] that data sovereignty and compliance requirements had increased the business's complexity and cost... The company said it will contact affected customers to replace certificates free of cost. It also said it will keep revocation and certificate status services running until every issued certificate has expired or been replaced... Yash Kadakia, co-founder and CTO of Security Brigade, said that moving to another root operated by the same company does not necessarily address concerns over trust and governance. "The last thing organisations need is to migrate twice," Kadakia said. But there's another concern, the article points out. "Analysts warn that enterprises may discover they have only limited visibility into the certificate hierarchies underpinning critical services." Replacing a website's certificate may not address every dependency in an enterprise environment, according to Sakshi Grover, research director at IDC. She said residual exposure lies in systems that maintain their own trust stores and do not update on the same schedule as browsers. These include Java keystores, language runtimes, container images, mutual TLS configurations, proxies, load balancers, VPN and security appliances, and embedded devices. "The harder finding for many organizations will be that they can't answer these questions at all," Grover said, referring to where certificate trust decisions are made outside browsers and operating systems... Grover recommended that security teams first identify where trust decisions occur outside browsers and operating systems, prioritising systems that accept connections from external parties and mutual TLS endpoints. Teams should then determine which systems can be updated to distrust a specific intermediate certificate or public key, she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports: Last week, Getty announced plans to file for bankruptcy, marking a major reset after its planned merger with rival Shutterstock collapsed under the weight of heavy debt and growing competition from AI-generated imagery. Getty said the affiliates of the Getty family and Koch Equity Development, which committed to provide up to $533 million in new equity, will own 100% of the company after the restructuring It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator. Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quips that maybe "It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hello,

I started this blog 22 years ago now (I don’t recommend going back to the start), and for the last 5 years I wrote a monthly “status update” post, aiming to mainly write about interesting stuff I might have done in the world of open source software, which I hoped in turn would motivate me to do more interesting stuff in open source software.

The world changed a lot in that time. If I started now this would probably be a podcast with 16 listeners, instead of being a WordPress blog with 16 subscribers.

I’ve spent a lot of time this year reading and thinking about the impact of large language models on the tech industry and open source. Its interesting because this feels like the moment, whether we like it or not, hacker culture goes mainstream. This week the world’s major news outlets had to figure out what PHP is.

That the BBC’s cyber correspondent didn’t know PHP existed has caused some joking and debate online.

24 years ago I was figuring out what PHP is. Jonathan Atkinson, who I met in a forum that was nominally about writing video games in QBASIC, asked me to make a wiki in PHP. So I did.

All I knew about wikis was that, it’s like a regular website except anyone can edit it. I named the project: Wiki! Here’s a quote from the README:

How do I install it?It's best run in its own directory. Create it one. You'll also want a directory for nodes,or you could keep them in the base wiki dir. Either way, the nodes directory has to bechmod'ed to 777.

You might raise your eyebrows at that comment if you aren’t yourself a teenage hacker discovering web development.

Wiki! did have a login system, and the passwords were even stored as MD5 hashes rather than plain text, as I heard that was good practice. In hindsight, an attacker who knew how to set the HTTP Cookie header could impersonate anyone, like this: Cookie: wikiticket=admin.

Here is a snippet of the file edit.php. Note that $node and $title are inputs you can set via a POST request, or even via URL parameters like edit.php?title="/etc/passwd":

$t=$title;if ($node) { // Write new data // $file=fopen($nodedir.$t.".wiki", "w+"); $node=stripslashes(ereg_replace("(\r\n|\n|\r)","<br>", $node)); // Linebreak to <br> fputs($file, $node."\n");

Even if you just learned what PHP is today, you might see that this is not an entirely secure design.

Anyway, at the time I was proud of my work, and I needed somewhere to host it. So, as you would in 2002, I registered the name “wiki” on sourceforge.net and uploaded the project code.

Sourceforge, for those who haven’t yet reached middle age, was the 2000’s equivalent of Github. It allowed projects to have their own website, as long as they included the Sourceforge logo somewhere, and the website could use PHP. Perfect, I thought, the project’s website will be a wiki!

Looking back now through archive.org, I can see this code actually ran in public for many years.

Here it is around launch day in 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20021012080349/http://wiki.sourceforge.net/wiki

I have a local copy from around this time, which includes indexjon.wiki:

Sam, there are some serious bugs in this wiki. I keep on getting 'document contains no data' errors; get me on AIM. Welcome to grove.swoo.net. You may or may not be interested in the [weblog]. JonathanA - 29/8/02 - 11:36 am JonathanA - 29/8/02 - 07:36 am

Those bugs went unfixed forever, and six months later, the front page text had been replaced with two poems, one in Italian and one in Russian: https://web.archive.org/web/20030420205758/http://wiki.sourceforge.net

One is “Non chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato” by Eugenio Montale, written in 1923, and presumably posted by a fan. Does anyone know what it’s about? A machine translation suggests it might discuss “the crisis of certainty faced by contemporary man”. The other is “Anecdote for Fathers” by William Wordsworth, in Russian via an unnamed translator.

Let’s just sit with that for a moment. Imagine what happens in 2026 if a trivially exploitable PHP website hosted by a US corporation goes online: it’ll be mining bitcoin, serving pornography and drowning in racist and antisemitic spam, probably all within the same day.

In 2003, over the course of six months, my naive implementation of a wiki was gifted with… two rather thoughtful poems.

Fast forward another year. I was about to turn 18 years old, was studying for A levels and mostly concerned with hanging out in the park drinking cheap cider and learning to play the guitar. I was certainly not thinking about this rather flawed chunk of PHP code that I’d written two years earlier, but via the magic of archive.org we can see that various people were genuinely trying to use it as a wiki: https://web.archive.org/web/20041121113508/http://wiki.sourceforge.net

In hindsight, perhaps it attracted so much attention because I’d literally taken the subdomain: http://wiki.sourceforge.net/, unintentionally boosting the SEO reach quite a bit. The site was still active right up until 2007.

I can’t find it now, but I do remember receiving an email at some point from sourceforge.net noting that they’d taken down the wiki! website after discovering it was a major security risk. And at some point they must have (quite reasonably) reclaimed the project name as well, since http://sourceforge.net/projects/wiki no longer exists. It will always live on in my heart, though, and for the moment at: https://web.archive.org/web/20021014172056/http://sourceforge.net/projects/wiki/

The world has changed significantly since I was a teenage hacker. Some of what I learned in those days is completely obsolete, such as the QBASIC programming language and VGA graphics. I am a world expert in these irrelevant topics.

Other stuff that I picked up in the early 2000s has become the foundation of my career as an operating systems developer: C programming, Linux distributions and an gradual induction into open source desktop world via Planet GNOME. And good old PHP, of course. Who knew that, a quarter way through the 21st century, PHP would be front page news?

Age 18, I didn’t tell anyone in the real world that I’d written a wiki because it’d be the first time they’d heard the word “wiki”. The word evoked exotic and mysterious feelings of Hawaii in 2002. Now it universally evokes Wikipedia. People are learning about password hygiene and PHP. The arrival of AI on the scene, to me, fits into this bigger picture that began in the last century: we, the Computer People, are becoming Mainstream.

"Scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older," reports ScienceAlert: Cellular transformations can be done in two main ways. The first, more circuitous route turns a specific cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, or an embryonic "blank slate," and then into a different cell type. The second method involves a "direct conversion," which skips the middle stage and directly transforms a cell into a different type. "Using this method, we have directly converted red blood cell precursors into neural stem cells," summarizes Oliver Brüstle, the director of the Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology at the University Hospital of Bonn... The researchers used a virus to deliver two transcription factors, or proteins that attach to DNA to regulate gene activity, to get the cells to change their types. Then they used two genome-bloodhounding methods — DNA methylation measures and RNA sequencing — to track the resultant anti-aging effects and genetic behavior. By the 12th day after the viral "infection," the cells started showing their new identity, ditching their blood-like proteins and replacing them with the expression of neural-like proteins instead. Initially, the epigenetic age (the DNA changes accumulated over time) of the EPCs was highly correlated with the chronological age of their donors [but] the neuronal stem cells kept getting younger as they got older... Over the following 50 to 100 days, they kept de-aging, eventually reaching about 5 percent of the donor age, with the majority of epigenetic age-related traits resetting by around 50 days of the conversion process... In effect, the converted cells became 60 years younger in 50 days, the researchers note in their official statement. The researchers, from the University Hospital of Bonn and the University of Bonn, in Germany, described their methods in the journal Aging Cell.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.