Brief items

Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed [Yujing] Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang's thumb-drive into his computer, it immediately began to install files, a "very out-of-the-ordinary" event that he had never seen happen before during this kind of analysis. The agent had to immediately stop the analysis to halt any further corruption of his computer, Ivanovich said. The analysis is ongoing but still inconclusive, he testified.

As a taxpayer, I'm very concerned about where Agent Ivanovich's laptop is and where it's been since he plugged a malicious USB into it. If this was the Secret Service quick reaction playbook, perhaps Zhang planned to get caught all along (not joking).

To effect the remote steering attack, the researchers had to bypass several redundant layers of protection, but having done this, they were able to write an app that would let them connect a video-game controller to a mobile device and then steer a target [Tesla] vehicle, overriding the actual steering wheel in the car as well as the autopilot systems. This attack has some limitations: while a car in Park or traveling at high speed on Cruise Control can be taken over completely, a car that has recently shifted from R to D can only be remote controlled at speeds up to 8km/h.

[...] Much more seriously, they were able to use "small stickers" on the ground to effect a "fake lane attack" that fooled the autopilot into steering into the opposite lanes where oncoming traffic would be moving. This worked even when the targeted vehicle was operating in daylight without snow, dust or other interference.

It only takes a night for me to forget how my code works. Then I need a whole day long to recollect. But once I'm done the next night starts.

So I'm not against comments, thanks :-)

The absense of a centralized, informal Debian package repository where trusted users could upload their own packaging scripts has been long-forgotten. As an inevitable result, many user packaging scripts exist in the wild, scattered like stars in the sky, with varied packaging quality. Their existence reflects our users' demand, especially the experienced ones', that has not been satisfied by the Debian archive. Such idea about informal packaging repository has been demonstrated successful by the Archlinux User Repository (AUR). Hence, it should be valuable to think about it for Debian.

I think this is one of the strongest slates of candidates we've had for DPL in years. Voting is going to be extremely difficult for me for the best reasons possible. I think all of the candidates would do an excellent job as DPL in their own ways; personally, I kind of want to pick all of them. :)

We answer this question in the affirmative: it is possible to smear paint on the wall without creating a valid Perl program. We employ an empirical approach, using optical character recognition (OCR) software, which finds that merely 93% of paint splatters parse as valid Perl. We analyze the properties of paint-splatter Perl programs, and present seven examples of paint splatters which are not valid Perl programs.

So to be 100% clear: Mailpile is not dead!

Far from it, I'm way too proud of this app to just walk away and let it die. But for now, Mailpile has been demoted to a part time job at most, and a beloved hobby at worst. Considering how unproductive I had become, you may not even notice any difference...

Releasing a proprietary project as open source is a bit like an iceberg. Some very visible tasks, like choosing a brand or license, can take a huge amount of attention, while most of the work is under the surface, and not related to the open source code at all.