Samsung: “The future isn’t smart. It’s sponsored.”

Samsung fridges now come with built-in ads. Progress, innovation… or just more enshittification?

Fridge: “You’re out of milk.”
Samsung: “Also, here’s an ad for milk.”
Me: 😭

🔗 theverge.com/news/780757/samsu…

#SmartHome #Enshittification #PrivacyMatters #WhyCantWeHaveNiceThings #Samsung
theverge.com/news/780757/samsu…

Samsung brings ads to US fridges

Samsung’s ‘screens everywhere’ initiative is morphing into ads everywhere.

^{Thomas Ricker (The Verge)}

Maybe you just need a lyre bird video today for no reason.
I like this one, because in parts, it sounds like an electro-mechanical 70s toy. Surely, there must be one where a lyre bird immitates R2D2...

youtube.com/watch?v=WA0tP-p7m4…

Lyrebird: The Best Songbird Ever!

An unsurpassed creature for its mimicry skills, no doubt!

^YouTube

You know a technology is great when the people who make it have to ram it down your throat

pcgamer.com/software/microsoft…

I had an amazing flight through time! Ayreon rocked my face off.

Sadly, people are complaining about dumbthings:

• The set list had to much stuff they didn’t like, and not enough stuff they liked (I am in this camp)
• It wasn’t Universe
• people talking (or singing! ?) during the show
• occasional tech glitches on Friday and Sunday afternoon
• Not enough celebrity guest singers
• a singer getting a part they shouldn’t have
• Arjen’s wife using (alegedly) AI generated art for the video screens
• filming the center of the audience on the afternoon show and the corners for the evening show, so the VIP’s who camped out all afternoon to get a prime spot for the evening show got “cheated” out of most of the shots.

I had to tell them to shut the fuck up because I flew 3500 miles–pardon me, 6100 kelometers–to see incredible players playing incredible music, which is what I got, and not to be on a stupid plastic disc.

Dimplomatically, of course. As Always.

No doctrine has done more harm to Christian piety than the Platonic dualism that conceives man as a spirit (or “soul”) imprisoned in matter, naturally immortal, aspiring to a supra-material existence of which the historic community of the Church is only a pale reflection. Neither the Incarnation, then, nor the Resurrection from the dead, nor the real community that Jesus founded on earth, nor the material reality of eucharistic communion have anything truly valuable to offer us. God's revelation is in reality addressed only to spirit, intellect, imagination, sentiment, that is, to the few faculties that will not vanish with death, but survive as the attributes of the immaterial being. In such an anthropological setting, all piety becomes ineluctably subjectivist.

— John Meyendorff, “St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality”

🇷🇺 Russia wants China's Great Firewall

After Tuta Mail, it's now also blocking #Signal & #WhatsApp to stop its citizens from using #encryption

Together with @torproject, @fightforfuture and others we are standing up to say: Stop! ✊

Everyone deserves #privacy.

Read our open letter: 👉 tuta.com/blog/tutanota-blocked…

Mesa is working to update our contributor guide. Can you guess why?

Did you guess AI?

Because if you did, you'd be right. I don't want to put anyone on blast here so please don't go digging to find the motivating MR and harass the contributor or anything like that.

But the situation was exactly what you might think. Someone ran ChatGPT on the code and asked it for suggestions on making it more performant. They applied a bunch of the changes against their local branch, tested it, and found that it gave maybe a 0.5-1.0% perf boost in some titles.

That's totally fine. I don't care what tools you use to find a bottleneck. I'll happily take more FPS, no matter who found the issue or how. If some AI assistant helps you find things no one else has found and lets us make drivers faster, great!

But that's not what happened.

What happened next is that they then tried to make it the Mesa project maintainers' job to sort through the shit ChatGPT spit out and decide what's useful and what's not and why the changes helped and whether or not they were correct. The contributor had no no idea and, more importantly, they had no desire to actually learn about the Mesa code-base or the hardware in question. They just wanted to run ChatGPT and send its suggestions towards upstream.

This is not useful. This is not contributing. It's just burning maintainer time sorting through AI hallucinations. We have enough mediocre code to review that comes from actual humans who are actually trying to learn about Mesa and help out. We don't need to add AI shit to the merge request pile. If you don't understand the patch well enough to be able to describe what it does and why it makes things faster, don't submit it.

So now we're making it really clear: If you submit the merge request, you're responsible for the code change as if you typed it yourself. You don't get to claim ignorance and "because the AI said so". It's your responsibility to do due diligence to make sure it's correct and to accurately describe the change in the commit message.

Some things shouldn't have to be explicitly written down but here we are... 😩

From suspicion to published #curl #CVE. The process.

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/09/18…

From suspicion to published curl CVE

Every curl security report starts out with someone submitting an issue to us on https://hackerone.com/curl. The reporter tells us what they suspect and what they think the problem is.

^{daniel.haxx.se}

In this interview, Daniel Stenberg, lead developer of #cURL, discusses how the widely used tool remains secure across billions of devices, from cloud services to IoT. He shares insights into cURL’s decades-long journey of testing, reviewing, and refining its code to minimize risks.

Stenberg also explains the team’s approach to handling vulnerabilities, ensuring transparency, and maintaining trust in the open-source ecosystem.

helpnetsecurity.com/2025/09/18…

Behind the scenes of cURL with its founder: Releases, updates, and security - Help Net Security

Explore how the cURL project keeps billions of devices secure, from vulnerability handling to best practices and updates.

^{Mirko Zorz (Help Net Security)}

After decades of advocacy and hope, today survivors of abuse perpetrated by the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind received an apology from the present Board of Directors.
As a survivor and former Board Chair, I spoke at this event, and I would like to share my remarks. I expect this will be the last time I make public remarks of this kind. I can only speak for myself and say that I feel I can now close a chapter. Here they are.

I would like to thank Blind Low Vision NZ’s Chief Executive, Andrea Midgen, for making it possible for me to participate in this event. Immigration processes underway here in the United States mean I am not able to attend in person. I acknowledge with gratitude and appreciation the compassionate, consultative way Andrea has worked with all parties to get us to this day.
When an individual or entity has harmed you, being apologized to doesn’t instantly make things right. It does not erase the memory of the abuse and the added trauma of not being believed, and it does not make the consequences disappear. It does not alter the fact that our life trajectory, including the effect it has had on our ability to trust others, and the way we interact with others, would probably be different had the abuse not occurred. Yet the need for justice, and the need for healing, demand that this event take place. Part of that healing must include the right to be heard, and being given the chance to be understood. So I appreciate this opportunity to speak.
This apology is significant to me from two perspectives. I am a survivor, and I am a former Board Chair who sought to do 23 years ago what is finally being done today.
The abuse many of us experienced took many forms. But as I focus on the physical abuse I experienced, it almost feels like it happened to someone else. I look back on it now, and I just feel this overwhelming compassion for that little boy. I wish I could hug him, tell him that eventually, far longer than it ought to have taken, he is going to be believed. Today, I feel the need to speak on his behalf.
One act of physical abuse perpetrated on that eight year old child by a teacher with a well-known pattern of serious anger management issues, who held him forcibly and repeatedly underwater in the swimming pool, sent this normally gregarious (some might say even precocious) kid into panic attacks every Monday and Friday. Those were the swimming days for Room Three. His mother saw the dramatic change in him, and finally coaxed the truth out of him. So what happened when the teacher was confronted? She didn’t defend her actions as something that was acceptable in 1977. She didn’t express remorse and admit to her great shame that she just snapped. She denied that it ever happened. She was a cruel, sadistic, bare-faced liar. But the system protected her and believed her. While she continue her reign of terror, emboldened and invincible, the child, the victim, the innocent party, was sent to a psychologist to find out why he was making up stories. Meanwhile, the teacher began a new campaign of psychological abuse against an eight year old child.
For all that, I was one of the luckier ones. My parents brought a house close to Homai College, so I had an easy walk to and from school, and could live with my family. My mother, who was not one to argue with authority as a rule, believed me without ever wavering. Mum died last year, and by the time I testified to the Royal Commission, her dementia had advanced to a stage that she wasn’t able to understand that finally, after all these years, we were being believed. Had she not been my champion, I don’t know what would have become of me. So today, I pay tribute not just to my parents, decent, working-class people who did their absolute best, but also to all parents and caregivers, those with us and those who aren’t alive today, who spoke up for their abused children.
Over the years, I have attended many meetings at local and national level of blind people in New Zealand. When the drink started to flow, so too did the accounts of abuse. Some shrugged them off, and while some perhaps had a mindset where it really didn’t affect them, I am sure there was a lot of bravado as well.
And then something unexpected happened. At least, I wasn’t expecting it. I became a part of the system that had once abused me, navigating the RNZFB through one of the boldest, most far-reaching, radical reforms based on the self-determination of blind people that had ever been attempted. As we transitioned from a governance model where it was expected that blind people would be the grateful recipients of the charity dispensed to them, to a model where blind people had the power to direct the organization’s destiny by determining the composition of the RNZFB Board, I felt strongly that the time was right to acknowledge the wrongs of the past, so we could start fresh.
It has haunted me ever since that despite the various advocacy victories I have delivered over the years, I wasn’t able to deliver that one. Many people, including several survivors, have urged me to cut myself some slack, noting that at least I tried, which is something that hadn’t been done before. And perhaps, now that this day has finally come, I finally can. Nevertheless, I want to say to survivors that from the bottom of my heart, I am truly sorry that we didn’t get this done over 20 years ago.
Through that unsuccessful process, I became very familiar with the arguments advanced for not doing this, and I want to address those that are most frequently offered, for those people who remain skeptical.
I’ve heard it said that since no one here today perpetrated the abuse that occurred decades ago, it’s wrong and pointless to offer an apology now. This Board is the current custodian of the organization’s legacy. For now, it possesses a long, deep, rich and complex historical heritage. It is right to own and be proud of the parts of the RNZFB’s history that has changed lives and set people up for success. I acknowledge with appreciation the education and opportunities the organization gave me. But if you’re going to own the history, you’ve got to own all the history.
It is said that it is unreasonable to judge yesterday’s actions based on today’s standards. To that argument, I offer two responses. First, what happened to some of the children entrusted to the RNZFB’s care, including cruel physical and psychological abuse, was never OK, ever! Those who were allowed to get away with perpetrating such abuse on vulnerable, innocent children got there through deficient recruiting practices. They were poorly supervised when occupying the roles they should never have been hired for. The culture did not encourage disclosure. When some plucked up the courage to disclose anyway, when victims presented the supervisors of the perpetrators with compelling and disturbing evidence, the supervisors usually did nothing of substance and the victims weren’t protected. That was never OK, not in any century.
Second, systemic abuse such as the removal of little kids from their families and communities was done with the best of intentions at the time. But it is absolutely appropriate to say that had we better understood the life-long repercussions to family relationships, and to the well-being of some of the children, we would, as a society, have done it differently. We would have, and should have, ensured that blind kids were resourced to thrive in their communities, while also providing them with the considerable benefits of getting together with blind kids and blind adult mentors for peer learning about blindness. New Zealand society as a whole, not just the RNZFB, must own this part of our history.
Finally, it was argued that if the RNZFB acknowledges and apologizes for the abuse, it may open the organization up to financial redress. Yes, it might, and it should. Actions have consequences. Not facing up to the consequences of those actions is cowardly, and prolongs the abuse. It is long past time to confront the past head-on, in totality. It saddens me to think of how many people have died in the 23 years that I first tried to get this done, who should have been apologized to and compensated. I pay my respects to those people and surviving family members today.
So while today may or may not provide closure for every survivor, it is an important step, to hear from the Board that we were wronged, we were let down, and that we deserved better. Because we were, and we did.
As I close, it is right that my final remarks are for my fellow survivors. Thank you for your courage, thank you for keeping hope alive, thank you for not giving up the struggle for justice. Being taken back to those dark places, which many of us have tried to bury just so we could get on with life, has been tough. If you have not found it yet, my deepest wish for you is healing and forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean we forget what happened. Forgiveness does not mean we excuse what happened. Forgiveness is freedom. Forgiveness is saying, “I choose to release the hold you have on me. I am evicting you from the rent free place you have been occupying in my head”. As the theologian Lewis Smedes once wrote: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” And Martin Luther King said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
In your own time, if you are not there already, may you find peace. You have suffered too much, and you deserve peace, and love, and mercy. May you never doubt that you are worthy, you are enough, just as you are.

Informal question for NVDA end users please: NVDA has many quick navigation keys (single letters you press to jump to the next element of a certain type on the web). I haven't included any here so as not to lead you - but what are your top FIVE most used of these?

I often introduce navigating on the web by mentioning a couple, but I want to make sure I am thinking of the same "common" ones as you. Please let me know your top 5?