In this edition: the “Texas handcuffing judge” is now a former one; more lawyers regret using artificial “intelligence”; magicians make an amicus brief appear in the Supreme…

I’ve been reading multi-agent systems papers for weeks trying to figure out where the field actually is, and the honest answer is that it moves fast enough that any single paper is a snapshot, not ...

For Zoey Merkestyn, bowling has been therapeutic and a great way to live with her cerebral palsy. Now, she is heading to national tournaments to tell the world anything is possible, if you put your mind to it.

Charts and graphs are a good example of where making content accessible is not always the same as making an image itself accessible.

Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction

...

Wired networking in the home and small offices has been pretty stagnant for ages, so upgrading my home from 2.5Gb ethernet to 10Gb meant I had to (re)learn a few things.

The New Testament’s transmission differed from the Old Testament due to the early church’s dispersion and persecution. This led to less uniform copies but a greater number of manuscripts. Textual criticism, using principles like the “golden rule,” helps determine the original text by analyzing variants and their origins.

Scribes often made changes to biblical texts, both accidental and intentional. Accidental errors were common due to the nature of early manuscripts, while intentional changes were usually made out of reverence or a desire to clarify or harmonize passages. This tendency led to a longer, smoother text over time, with later manuscripts often expanding titles for Christ, adding phrases, and harmonizing accounts across different Gospels.

The addition of verse numbers to the Bible in the 16th century reflected the longer form of the text found in later manuscripts. As textual scholarship advanced, it became clear that certain phrases were later additions, leading to their removal in modern critical editions. This removal, while sometimes perceived as missing content, does not affect any essential doctrine, demonstrating the faithful preservation of Scripture’s substance.

Oh, dear – another server for the Gemini protocol. What use can that possibly be?

Not specifically?

76-year-old Brian Lendrum, who is blind, spent decades learning to locate and identify birds by sound. But now, he says, as he ages his hearing is “just very, very gradually going down every year.”

Kevin Patel - Application Security Engineer @ NISC

Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram… even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that?

A hearing system that monitors brain waves could help people with hearing loss communicate in noisy environments.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. Note: Writing Tools aren’t designed to work with this type of content.

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

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.

New global research from Disability:IN and LinkedIn reveals a powerful workforce trend: professionals with disabilities are advancing- but often by switching firms to do so. Explore the research that will shape your workforce strategy for years to come.

Jim, a reader, recounts a time in the early 1990s when he worked for an online bookstore. While testing the new platform, Jim forgot to disable a site crawler’s ability to add items to the shopping cart, resulting in a cart worth over $50,000. This caused a major disruption for the bookstore, but Jim was able to fix the issue and keep his job.

On the space of minds and the optimizations that give rise to them.

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...

AI large language models have been heralded as revolutionary in the world of accessibility. But in order to create a more accessible internet, those with disabilities need to be included in the process of training the technology, advocates say.

Welcome to watchTowr vs the Internet, part 68. That feeling you’re experiencing? Dread. You should be used to it by now. As is fast becoming an unofficial and, apparently, frowned upon tradition - we identified incredible amounts of publicly exposed passwords, secrets, keys and more for very sensitive environments

How about this for a truism: a book is a book, and something that is not a book is not a book. This post will knock your socks off if you are inclined to affirm this statement, because in medieval …

Grab yours while supplies last. Apple has launched a limited edition iPhone grip and stand, designed by Bailey Hikawa "through an extensive interview...

After reading the book The AWK Programming Language (recommended!), I was planning to try AWK out on this year’s Advent of Code. Having some time off from work this week, I tried to implement one of the problems in it to get some practice, set up my tooling, see how hard AWK would be, and… I found I’m FP-pilled.

Two years ago, I wrote: Microsoft-the-company does not care about Infocom. But a lot of people in Microsoft must care. Microsoft is heavily populated by greying GenX nerds just like me. Folks who grew up with the first home computers and fondly ...

Cloudflare suffered a service outage on November 18, 2025. The outage was triggered by a bug in generation logic for a Bot Management feature file causing many Cloudflare services to be affected.

Download Art of Fauna: Cozy Puzzles by Klemens Strasser on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games like Art of Fauna:…

Baltimore, MD (November 18, 2025): The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is proud to announce a partnership with ElevenLabs, bringing the innovative ElevenReader platform to blind readers across the United States.

Reflections on my time leading Mastodon and what's to come next.

Microsoft Word and PowerPoint for Windows now use generative AI to generate alt text for images. This new feature provides higher-quality, context-rich descriptions and gives users more control over when and how alt text is added. The update is available to Microsoft 365 users with Version 2510 or later.

Greta works with a legacy tech stack, including a deprecated IDE from a defunct vendor, a dialect of C with limited compiler support, and a Pascal library with no source code. The code itself is problematic, with a monolithic main form, global state, and confusing file structures. Despite the challenges, Greta is happy with the team culture and is actively working on a .NET replacement.

According to a recent Google leak, we’re all to blame for poor quality search results. Summary and thoughts on Rand Fishkin's and Mike King's dropped dual reports on a large-scale leak of Google Search internal documentation for Content API Warehouse.

All web developers know, at some level, that accessibility is important. But when push comes to shove, it can be hard to prioritize it above a bazillion other concerns when you’re trying to c…

Chase, a developer, accidentally left a box unchecked while updating an Amazon Machine Image, causing hundreds of 100 GB storage volumes to persist after instances terminated. This mistake resulted in a $40,000 AWS bill, which was partially forgiven. Chase advises setting alarms for unexpected cost increases.

PHP 8.5, releasing on November 20, 2025, introduces several new features. These include the pipe operator for easier function chaining, the ability to assign new values to cloned objects, and the #[NoDiscard] attribute to indicate required function return values. Other notable additions are closure improvements, backtraces for fatal errors, and built-in array_first() and array_last() functions.

Baidu unveiled ERNIE 5.0, a proprietary multimodal foundation model designed to process and generate content across text, images, audio, and video. The model, positioned as a global contender in the enterprise AI market, boasts competitive performance against OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, particularly in structured document understanding and visual chart reasoning. Alongside ERNIE 5.0, Baidu introduced major updates to its digital human platform, no-code tools, and general-purpose AI agents, aiming to expand its AI footprint beyond China.

Edit ~/.ssh/config and add “ConnectionAttempts 120” to automatically retry SSH connections for two minutes after a reboot.

UK charity launches new digital archive that champions the legacy of disability arts and activism for public access

Julia Evans offers programming zines, including free black and white ones and purchasable colour ones. The Wizard Zines Collection, featuring 15 zines, is available for $145, and the Secret Rules of the Terminal zine is new. Free resources include experiments, playgrounds, and posters.