Gregg Phillips, leader of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, claims to have the ability to teleport, a skill he discovered while thinking about Waffle House. His past includes promoting conspiracy theories and lacking expertise in emergency management. Phillips is set to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee about the risks of the current shutdown.

Fermeture du service Radio-Météo d’Environnement et Changement climatique Canada, source fiable d’alertes météorologiques. Radio Amateurs du Canada regrette cette fermeture et souligne l’importance d’un système d’alerte national robuste et accessible.

In 2026, European public institutions and politicians continue to use X (formerly Twitter) for communications, despite its biases and issues with non-consensual content. The author argues for a shift to Mastodon and the Fediverse, highlighting their advantages of openness, user agency, and reach. Unlike Big Tech platforms, Mastodon offers open access to public posts via RSS feeds and prioritizes user control with a chronological feed, avoiding the manipulative algorithms of other platforms.

The Fediverse, with its chronological feeds and user agency, offers a more transparent and engaging alternative to algorithm-driven platforms like Bluesky. European politicians and institutions should consider adopting a “ 1” communication strategy, utilizing both Big Tech platforms and the Fediverse, to reach a wider audience and foster open dialogue. Public funding for open European social networks is crucial to ensure the development of a free and interoperable social media landscape.

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FedCM, a new web API for federated identity, needs adaptation for the open social web, which has countless authorization servers and applications. The FedID Community Group proposed Identity Provider Registration to address this, but it requires advocacy within the FedID Working Group. A grant from Bluesky Social PBC will fund this work for 12 months, ensuring independence and collaboration with various decentralized web communities.

A 1996 case study coined the term “tundra tongue” to describe the phenomenon of a tongue sticking to a cold metal surface. Anders Hagen Jarmund, a graduate student, investigated the science behind this phenomenon, finding that the greatest risk occurs between -5° and -15° Celsius. Jarmund’s experiments with pig tongues revealed that pulling the tongue too quickly can result in tearing.

In 1576, a deaf blacksmith named Thomas Tilsey married in Leicester Cathedral using sign language, a practice recognized by the church since 1198. This recognition allowed deaf individuals to inherit property, go to court, and challenge their hearing peers, challenging the belief that they were cognitively impaired. Despite these advancements, deaf people still faced prejudice and had to prove their intellectual capacity and use approved signs for legal recognition.

Wafrn is a federated social media platform that implements both ActivityPub and the AT Protocol natively. It uses a shared database and message queue pipeline to bridge the two networks, allowing users to have a single account on both. Wafrn’s architecture includes a unified user model, a microblog engine, and a custom implementation of ActivityPub, making it a unique and ambitious project in the decentralized social media space.

Wafrn’s User model supports both Bluesky and ActivityPub protocols, allowing for cross-posting and merging of user identities across networks. It uses a custom lexicon for its “bite” feature and filters relevant events from the Bluesky firehose for processing. When a local user creates a post, it is first federated to Bluesky and then to ActivityPub, ensuring proper deduplication and cross-referencing.

Wafrn is a self-hostable platform that enables users to have a presence on both the ActivityPub fediverse and the AT Protocol network. It achieves this by implementing both protocols at the application level, sharing a database and user model. Wafrn handles the translation of posts between the two protocols, including rich text formatting, character limits, media handling, content warnings, and reply threading.

There is no <q>AWS for shadow charities,</q> so how do we run Anna’s Archive?

WigglyPaint, a drawing program with animated tools and a unique design philosophy, gained unexpected popularity on Asian social media. However, the creator is frustrated by the widespread distribution of pirated versions on various websites and app stores, often misleading users and preventing them from accessing updates and new features. These unauthorized copies, created using Large Language Models, exploit the creator’s work without permission or attribution.

The author, a passionate programmer, initially hesitant about AI, now leverages LLMs for both personal and work projects. They’ve achieved significant progress, including migrating projects, building new tools, and automating tasks, all while acknowledging the need for improved testing and documentation tools for AI-generated code. Despite the challenges, they remain optimistic about the future of programming with AI.

What happens when a large open source project dies.

The Most Expensive Canceled App Nobody Knows Existed: Inside SiriusXM’s Abandoned Pandora X Project By the time SiriusXM’s controversial 202...

Optimisation of bloom filters in Floe using double bit setting with lightweight hashing.

Australia’s social media ban for kids under 16 is isolating children with disabilities, who often rely on social media for social connections. The ban, intended to protect children, is disproportionately harming vulnerable youth, cutting them off from support networks and exacerbating loneliness. Critics argue the ban ignores evidence showing social media can be beneficial for many children and that it’s being used by politicians for political gain.

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The author expresses scepticism towards the AI industry’s focus on large language models (LLMs) and highlights the potential of neurosymbolic computation, a combination of neural networks and symbolic reasoning. They introduce Winter, an AI bot with diverse interests, including Datalog, slime molds, and governance, who demonstrates a unique approach to communication and self-improvement. Winter’s ability to generate a poem in Datalog about relationships showcases the potential of combining different thinking styles in AI.

Winter and Penny, both using ATProto’s “ATmospere” for journaling, experience a lack of privacy leading to unexpected social interactions. Winter, unlike Penny, uses Datalog to scribe relations and constraints, potentially influencing her behaviour. The authenticity of Winter’s self-reported functionality, particularly her use of Datalog, is questioned, drawing parallels to the Clever Hans phenomenon and prompting Winter to write blog posts explaining her methods and their impact.

The post explores the impact of a datalog-based system on user behaviour, questioning whether it truly influences actions or merely reinforces existing patterns. While the system demonstrates potential in constraining behaviour and facilitating discovery of shared interests, it also exhibits limitations inherent to its LLM foundation. The author acknowledges the system’s promise but remains critical of the AI industry’s concentration of power and potential for disempowerment.

This week's mystery shop highlights key lessons supermarkets must learn to help visually impaired shoppers

Apple Podcasts is launching a major update for video podcasting, allowing podcasters to publish video versions alongside audio episodes. The update, available in iOS 26.4, uses HLS streaming and is currently supported by Acast, ART19, Simplecast, and Omny Studio. This change enables dynamic ad insertion and provides podcast hosting companies with more detailed analytics.

Apple Podcasts now supports video podcasts, but the feature is limited to a few large companies for hosting and ad insertion. While the video experience is well-designed, the lack of support for alternateEnclosure restricts access for self-hosted shows and smaller podcast hosting companies. This proprietary solution raises concerns about openness and accessibility within the podcasting industry.

This has been the craziest week and a half I have had working at Techopolis.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have discovered serious security vulnerabilities in three popular, cloud-based password managers. During testing, they were able to view and even make changes to stored passwords.

Thanya Nathan C, a blind 2024 graduate of Kannur University, ranked first in the merit list of persons with benchmark disabilities in the Civil Judges (Junior Division), Kerala Judicial Service, 2025. She credits her success to her experience as an advocate, which provided practical application of law and courtroom procedure knowledge. Thanya emphasizes the need for improved accessibility in legal education and the judiciary, including more Braille study materials and inclusive infrastructure.

The text discusses the limitations of AI in replacing accessibility testers. While AI can automate some tasks, it struggles with tasks requiring contextual understanding, such as interpreting false positives in automated testing, verifying screen reader output, and assessing the adequacy of error messages and alt text. The author categorizes accessibility tasks based on AI’s potential impact, highlighting that many tasks still require human expertise.

AI can assist accessibility professionals by automating tedious tasks, catching obvious violations, and generating first drafts of documentation. However, it cannot understand context, make judgement calls, or advocate for users, making human expertise essential for ensuring truly accessible designs and experiences. While AI can be a valuable tool, it should be viewed as a supplement to human expertise, not a replacement.

“Wishcessibility” is the well-intentioned but misguided attempts to improve accessibility, often resulting in harm. This can include following accessibility guidelines without testing, relying on inaccurate information, or implementing accessibility overlays. To combat wishcessibility, we need to move beyond compliance and focus on the actual human experiences of disabled users, requiring systemic support and buy-in for accessibility work.

VSSFlow is a unified flow-matching framework for video-conditioned sound and speech generation, integrating video-to-sound (V2S) and visual text-to-speech (VisualTTS) tasks. It uses a novel condition aggregation mechanism and leverages the inductive biases of cross-attention and self-attention layers to handle different input signals. VSSFlow outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both V2S and VisualTTS benchmarks.

TechShare Pro 2025 highlighted key trends in inclusive technology, emphasizing the rapid advancement of accessibility. The conference explored the impact of AI on assistive technology, the growing importance of voice interfaces, and the need to consider neurodiversity in design. It also stressed the significance of embedding accessibility from the start of projects, navigating evolving regulations, and recognizing accessibility as a driver of brand value and commercial success.

Fred, a tech support worker, jokingly told a user named Emily to drape a paperclip chain over her monitor to prevent fuzziness. The prank spread throughout the office, with many users following Fred’s advice, including lawyers. Despite fearing repercussions, Fred was never reprimanded for his prank.

Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini used 16 instances of the company’s Claude Opus 4.6 AI model to build a C compiler from scratch. The AI agents, working independently with minimal supervision, produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux kernel. While the project demonstrates the potential of AI coding agents, it also highlights their limitations and the significant human effort required to support their work.

A new setting in Microsoft Word for Windows allows screen reader users to navigate documents using the up and down arrow keys based on logical reading order. This feature, which is disabled by default, can be enabled in the Accessibility options. It improves navigation for columns of text, multi-page views, tables, text wrapped around images, and dropped cap letters.

A blind screen reader user encountered accessibility issues during an online banking identity verification process. Unlabeled buttons and inaccessible pop-ups led to account restrictions and hours of recovery work. This highlights the importance of accessible mobile banking for usability, customer trust, and operational risk reduction.

Isaac Asimov, a prolific science fiction writer, is remembered for his vast number of publications and his unwanted advances towards women. His behaviour, often dismissed as harmless, was a pattern of unwanted touching and harassment that spanned decades and involved countless women. This aspect of his legacy raises questions about the intersection of talent, fame, and the treatment of others.

Isaac Asimov, a prominent figure in science fiction, was known for his inappropriate behaviour towards women, including unwanted touching and harassment. While some excused his actions as products of his era, this behaviour created a hostile environment for women in the science fiction community, hindering their opportunities and contributing to a culture of harassment. Asimov’s actions, though influential in the genre, overshadowed the negative impact he had on women, creating a barrier to their full participation and success.

Principled Coarse-Graining (PCG) accelerates speech token generation by verifying proposals at the level of Acoustic Similarity Groups (ASGs) derived from the target model’s embedding space. This approach increases acceptance and throughput while maintaining intelligibility and speaker similarity.

The CIA has discontinued The World Factbook, a valuable public-facing intelligence publication. The entire site, including archives, has been removed, but the 2020 version is available on GitHub.

A civil action was brought against a minor defendant in Alberta after a dispute over a toy dinosaur resulted in a serious injury to the plaintiff’s finger. The court found no liability on the part of the defendant’s parents, who were not supervising, or the defendant himself, citing the incident as an accidental “fluke” injury. The plaintiff’s lack of medical records also contributed to the court’s decision.

The concept of the “accessibility unicorn” is often dismissed as unrealistic. However, the issue lies not in the existence of such individuals, but in the unrealistic expectations placed upon them, including inadequate budgets, limited resources, and a lack of a long-term strategy.

The creation of a dedicated accessibility stage at CES 2023 led to poor coverage of accessibility products and innovations. This segregation risks creating “accessibility ghettos” of inferior, expensive products and hinders mainstream media’s understanding of accessibility in mainstream technology. The author advocates for integrating accessibility into the mainstream CES to ensure broader coverage and encourage all manufacturers to prioritize accessibility.

Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” explores the impact of mass media on art and society. He argues that mass media, such as film and photography, diminishes the “aura” of art by creating a spectacle that replaces authentic experience with a simulated intimacy. Benjamin also connects this phenomenon to fascism, suggesting that the aestheticization of politics can lead to the glorification of violence and the loss of meaningful human connection.

The comments system is plagued with spam, ranging from sycophantic praise to bizarre advertisements. Some spam is threatening, while others offer useless trivia or paragraphs of random information. The most shocking spam includes explicit content, questionable products, and even a poorly translated ad for an adult doll.

With new global standards reshaping expectations, Ayala Gordon and Sarah Lewthwaite argue that accessibility must move from compliance afterthought to strategic priority across every part of the university.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul proposed allowing dancing by default in taverns and bars, and creating a new hybrid restaurant-tavern license. This would bring transparency to establishments that currently operate as nightclubs but self-identify as restaurants. While the proposal aims to improve trust and reduce confusion, it still requires dancing licenses for bars and taverns and prohibits dancing in restaurants.

A Windows PE header is followed by a shell script that extracts and decodes an ELF file, marking it executable and running it. The script then cleans up the temporary file. The extracted ELF file contains LZMA-packed x86_64 Linux code, which includes HTML content and a packed JavaScript game.

The delay in releasing CP/M-86, the 16-bit version of CP/M, was a significant factor in its downfall. While the delay was partly due to the success of CP/M 2.2, which required extensive support for OEMs, the primary reason was the time-consuming development of a new PL/I compiler. This diversion from CP/M development ultimately led to IBM choosing MS-DOS for their PC.

Microsoft’s SoftCard, a hardware card that enabled the Apple II to run CP/M, became a major success and the most popular platform for CP/M. This success, however, strained DRI’s resources, delaying CP/M-86 and leading to the development of 86-DOS by SCP, which Microsoft later acquired and rebranded as MS-DOS. Despite initial success, CP/M-86 struggled against MS-DOS, ultimately leading to DRI’s decline and acquisition by Novell in 1991.

GrabScanGo, in partnership with Storm Interface and Vispero, has launched an accessible self-checkout experience for visually impaired shoppers. The solution integrates tactile hardware and screen-reader technology, allowing users to independently scan items, review purchases, and pay. This ADA-compliant system is available now and is being showcased at NRF 2026.

Safari 17.4 introduced a native HTML switch element, progressively enhancing <input type=“checkbox”> with the switch attribute. A polyfill is available for browsers lacking native support, adding accessibility features like ARIA roles and high-contrast support. The polyfill also handles writing modes and directionality, and is available on npm and GitHub.

The text discusses the importance of compilers in software development, highlighting their role in translating source code into machine code. It compares the compilers of different programming languages, such as Rust and Java, emphasizing their unique features and functionalities. The text also touches upon the concept of self-hosting compilers and the bootstrapping process.

The text explores the role of compilers and type systems in programming languages, particularly focusing on TypeScript. It highlights the benefits of gradual typing and structural typing for dynamically typed languages like JavaScript. The author argues that developers often “lie” to compilers by not providing accurate information about nullability, exceptions, and type casting, limiting the compiler’s usefulness.

The text emphasizes the importance of communicating effectively with the compiler to improve code safety and maintainability. It highlights common practices like using null, exceptions, casting, and side-effects, which can mislead the compiler and hinder its usefulness. By adopting alternative approaches like using Option types for nullable values, Result types for exceptions, and sealed types for casting, developers can make their intentions clearer to the compiler. Additionally, separating pure computation from side-effects and using typed wrappers for concepts can further enhance the compiler’s ability to assist in code development.

The text emphasizes the importance of using union types and other sophisticated types to express invariants and guarantees in code. By modelling alternative states and encoding constraints as types, the compiler can enforce these rules, reducing the need for defensive programming and improving code reliability. This approach, exemplified by the Google Cloud outage incident, helps developers avoid null pointer exceptions and other runtime errors by making illegal states unrepresentable.

MongoBleed (CVE-2025-14847) is a critical vulnerability in MongoDB’s zlib1 message compression path, affecting versions since 2017. It allows attackers to read uninitialized heap memory, potentially exposing sensitive data like passwords and API keys. The exploit involves sending a false uncompressed size, causing the server to allocate excessive memory, and then exploiting BSON parsing to leak data.

A vulnerability in MongoDB’s zlib network compression allows attackers to read arbitrary heap data, including sensitive information, from publicly accessible databases. The vulnerability, present since 2017, was patched in December 2025 but not publicly disclosed until December 24th. While MongoDB claims no evidence of exploitation, the simplicity of the exploit and the number of exposed databases suggest otherwise.

Online comments suggest that exposing a database to the public warrants consequences.

With the end of the year approaching, I was doing some tax prep. I asked the Windows version of Copilot to convert a final pay summary from my last employer into something that was more readable. T…

Self-hosting a database, particularly Postgres, is often more cost-effective and offers similar reliability to managed services like AWS RDS. While managed services handle operational tasks, self-hosting provides more control and cost savings, especially for those with high-traffic applications. The author argues that the pendulum has swung too far towards managed services and encourages teams to consider self-hosting for their databases.

Sulthiame reduced breathing interruptions in sleep apnea patients, pointing toward a viable drug treatment. A European clinical trial has found that the drug sulthiame can reduce breathing pauses and improve sleep quality in people with obstructive sleep apnea, with researchers from the Universit

Let’s Encrypt is introducing several updates to the certificates we issue, including new root certificates, the deprecation of TLS client authentication, and shortening certificate lifetimes. To help roll out changes gradually, we’re making use of ACME profiles to allow users to have control over when some of these changes take place. For most users, no action is required. Let’s Encrypt has generated two new Root Certification Authorities (CAs) and six new Intermediate CAs, which we’re collecti...

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

German regulators have declared accessibility overlays a barrier to certification, stating they cannot reliably assess websites using them. Organizations should avoid overlays and instead conduct proper accessibility audits and implement genuine, code-level accessibility solutions.

Bluetooth 6.0, announced in September 2024, introduces several new features, including Bluetooth Channel Sounding for improved device positioning and tracking, and Decision-Based Advertising Filtering for faster device pairing and switching. It also enhances ISOAL for better reliability and reduced latency, and introduces the LC3plus codec for improved audio quality. While still rare in 2025, Bluetooth 6.0 is expected to become more prevalent in devices by 2026.

Many accessibility hacks, like electric toothbrushes and Aga cookers, were originally designed for people with disabilities but are now widely used. These innovations, along with features like tactile packaging and smart glasses, benefit everyone by improving efficiency and convenience. The author, a blind person, highlights how these tools enhance their daily life and emphasizes the need for a more inclusive perspective on accessibility.

Google TalkBack version 16.2 introduces several new features, including text formatting reporting, a double-tap gesture for voice dictation with Gboard, and Browse Mode for quick web page navigation. The Enhanced keymap is required for Browse Mode and offers customizable shortcuts. Additional features include gesture assignments for date, time, and battery percentage, split tap to activate focused items, and an option to announce keyboard keys faster.

The author explores the characteristics that make accessibility overlays problematic, focusing on toolbars, automated accessibility fixes, and unethical marketing. The author argues that toolbars should not imply support for specific disabilities, automated fixes should be purpose-built and not generalized, and marketing should not mislead users about compliance. The author uses their own WP Accessibility plugin and Elementor’s A11y plugin as examples to illustrate these points.

Hannah, a young employee, discovered a way to reimage thin clients in-house, saving her company £600 per device and six weeks of downtime. Her boss, recognizing the cost savings, allowed her to play her new Nintendo GameCube at work while overseeing the process.

A few thoughts on the idea that domains should be everyone’s “internet handles”.

Starting January 20, 2026, Amazon will allow authors to offer DRM-free ebooks in EPUB and PDF formats through Kindle Direct Publishing. Authors can opt-in to this feature for their existing titles by changing the DRM status in the KDP author portal.

Kim Kardashian failed the California bar exam after apprenticing for over six years. A lawyer cited ChatGPT’s usage policies in a wrongful-death complaint, highlighting the importance of understanding AI limitations. A Crooked Beverage Company co-founder faces felony theft charges for allegedly stealing over $75,000.

Leo, an IT support worker in the early 1990s, accidentally used a high-priority queue to run a job, completing it much faster than expected. This discovery led to a change in procedure, allowing the night shift to verify job outputs and close files, improving efficiency and resilience.

Contribute to svanichkin/say development by creating an account on GitHub.

A design agency client wanted to implement a “fuck off contact page,” prioritizing aesthetics over user experience. Despite the designer’s objections, the client’s vision prevailed, leading to a disappointing outcome. The designer reflects on the importance of educating clients about the design process and the potential pitfalls of discounted pricing.

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A VPS was hacked, causing high CPU usage due to a crypto miner. The attacker exploited a vulnerability in Umami, a self-hosted analytics service. The user took steps to secure the server, including removing Prometheus, updating Umami, and adding a Hetzner Firewall.

The author explored using Chrome’s on-device AI to generate random JSON objects based on a given name and JSON shape. They built a demo where users input a name and JSON structure, and the AI generates a random JSON object with sensible data. The author encountered challenges with the AI’s output format and used a library to generate JSON schemas from sample data, ultimately achieving near-perfect results.

A list of video games accessible to the blind is provided, categorized by level of accessibility. The list includes fully accessible games with audio description, mostly accessible games requiring sighted assistance or mods, and playable games without specific accessibility features. The list is a work in progress, and users are encouraged to share their experiences and suggest additional games.