theregister.com/2026/01/21/cur…
(I will blog about the details next week)
: Maintainer hopes hackers send bug reports anyway, will keep shaming ‘silly' onesSimon Sharwood (The Register)
So sorry you (and many other code maintainers) have to deal with this slop.
With AI, it's now far too easy for unqualified people to automate their bug bounty submissions. It's a numbers game: submit 1K (or maybe even 10K) alleged bugs and if you land just one bounty, it's worth it.
I was wondering if making people pay for each bounty submission would help deter this behavior? One reason they bulk submit slop is that it's basically free.
I'm not sure of the mechanics here though.
Nigel Farage Breached The MPs' Code Of Conduct 17 Times, Watchdog Confirms
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/farage-registered-more-than-ps380000-financial-interests-late_uk_69709305e4b084d70182d794?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into UK Government @uk-government-FlipboardUK
The Reform leader registered more than £380,000 of financial interests outside of the accepted 28-day period.Kate Nicholson (HuffPost)
🔴 Wat gebeurt er als Trump met één druk op de knop alle Amerikaanse systemen van Nederlandse organisaties uitschakelt?
We deden onderzoek. Wat blijkt?
🎓 81.4% van de onderwijsinstellingen raakt toegang tot documenten en e-mail kwijt
🏛️ net als en 72.6% van de gemeentes
🏢 en 70.4% van de grootste Nederlandse bedrijven
Dit en meer kun je vinden op zijnwealautonoom.nl. Daar verzamelen we van ruim 13.000 Nederlandse organisaties bij wie ze hun websites en e-mail hebben ondergebracht.
Zijn we al autonoom brengt in kaart van welke organisaties het internet in Nederland het meest afhankelijk is.Zijn we al autonoom?
Dear #linuxaudio friends, what are your thoughts on my dream of a new #pipewire / #wireplumber app? 🤔
amadeuspaulussen.com/blog/2026…
PipeWire and WirePlumber deserve better. 😝amadeuspaulussen.com
NVDA, the free and open source Screen Reader for Microsoft Windows - nvaccess/nvdaGitHub
Brief summary Clicking on an .vda-addon file which manifest specifies a higher minimum_version than your installed NVDA version, it should prompt you with a dialog saying that the add on is incompa...Jonathans859 (GitHub)
On this day in 1985, 41 years ago, Greensboro, NC, the city in which I grew up, experienced it's coldest temperature on record, -8 degrees F, or -22.22 degrees C.
I was alive for that, but being less than a year old at the time, don't have any memory of it.
My baby bedroom was the least insulated in that house, though, so that must have been fun keeping it at a reasonable temperature.
Mount Mitchell, NC recorded a temperature of -23 degrees F, or about -31 degrees C, on that same day.
honestly, the janky-ass superflous animations & effects even with all the “reduce motion” #accessibility options enabled seem to exist only to slow down my previously very snappy recent-gen (n-2) #iPhone – this isn’t event planned obsolescence, it feels like hastened obsolescence to make the #Apple money printer go brrr just a little sooner than usual, as a treat 😤
on a device that has the hardware to support 120Hz refresh rates, why am I ever seeing folders & icons get visibly drawn on my screen? 🤪
#LiquidAss #enshittification on display yet again 💩
If only we hadn't been right about #ageverification spreading in 2026. 😤
Let's keep fighting for #privacy and #anonymity 💪
This is not to protect the children.
Instead, It is to force adults to give up their IDs (and normalize the act) so they are easy to be identified whenever they try to spread the truth or post/comment something against the will of the elites.
There are numerous ways to protect the children. This is definitely not one of them.
Oh, cool. My NAS back at home is apparently suffering from Dying Power Supply Syndrome (DPSD) or something. It apparently improperly shut down twelve times yesterday, according to the logs.
Of course, it would do this just a few months after I spent over 2 grand replacing the storage on it with 8 new 12 TB hard drives, replacing the 6 TB drives that were all starting to die.
Looks like maybe a new NAS is in my future when I get back... whenever that is.
Brrr... new introduction time cause my old one is already outdated lol.
I am Sinclair-Speccy, your local resident computer nerd that can’t actually do a lot of tech stuff like people think. My primary interests are #Linux, #OldTech, and #OStan. You’ll usually find me boosting retro tech content and occasionally posting it myself, mostly retro tech ads.
My interest in emulation all started when I managed to run Yggdrasil Linux from the '90s (I know, so interesting /s). Despite having used XP as my first OS other older OSes (mostly Linux ones) interest me more if you look at the media I've posted on my account besides the tech ads.
I’ve moved around a bit online as I started on .art as my friend was there, then bitbang.social and now oldbytes.space.
One of my favourite niche fandoms is OS-tans which is turning operating systems and hardware into anime characters, though I tend to call them tech gijinkas. I even have my own tech gijinkas universe that is hosted on my site.
As for some other stuff I enjoy #mythology, #transformers, #cats, #fantasy, #nature such as #flowers and #plants and #animals, #steampunk, #starwars, #photography, #art, #space, #cyberpunk and #scifi... there is more but I'm not writing them all.
You can check out my website here: sinclair-speccy.github.io/The-… and I hope to expand it into a tech journalism platform or something, though motivation and its static nature kind of stop me...
Unlike in the past I'm not active as I used to be, sadly.
#RetroTech #Retro #RetroTechnology #RetroComputing #VintageComputers #Introduction
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Fediverse users "People on Bluesky are terrible people!"
Bluesky users "People on Mastodon are terrible people!"
(I'll tell you choose which Spiderman is which user)
(at a time when there are real bad people and real bad places on the internet, can people stop being silly a minute?)
#Fediverse #Bluesky #Mastodon #silliness
Edit: I didn’t notice that this article is from last June.
Farewell to autumn: Danish Digital Ministry turns its back on Microsoft.
At the Danish Digital Ministry, all employees should be able to do without Microsoft. Instead, Linux and LibreOffice will be used, says the minister.
heise.de/news/Von-Word-und-Exc…
Beim dänischen Digitalministerium sollen alle Angestellten ohne Microsoft auskommen. Stattdessen werde man Linux und LibreOffice nutzen, sagt die Ministerin.Martin Holland (heise online)
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'Miracle' girl, 6, only member of her family to survive Spanish train crash that killed 42
https://www.itv.com/news/2026-01-21/miracle-girl-6-only-member-of-her-family-to-survive-spanish-train-crash?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into ITV News @itv-news-ITVNews
Buenos días desde la Administración Pública.
A veces me pregunto medio en serio si debería haber un partido que representase los intereses de los empleados públicos, y la calidad de los servicios públicos. Luego se me pasa.
@stormproductions I agree. Gpt sucks. It's trash and it's gotten horrible particularly since uncle Sam keeps rushing to put new models out to try to keep his userbase without properly testing said models to be sure there's, y'know, actual improvements.
And to nobody's surprise, every iteration of gpt 5 has been a complete disaster.
@stormproductions Not to mention the limits are also nice.
I think the google AI pro plan sells for 20 usd? Where you get up to 100 messages daily with the gemini 3 pro model, and 300 in thinking mode.
Gpt? You kidding right? It's more pricy iirc and you get less, if we compare the gpt plus plan to google AI pro.
@FreakyFwoof @stormproductions @serrebi It does wrap around.
See? That's what I meant about using this in windows being an absolute disaster.
@tardis @FreakyFwoof @stormproductions @serrebi In any case: xogium.me/the-text-mode-lie-wh…
Sections titled Case Study: The gemini-cli Madness and The “Stale Bot” excuse: A Case Study in Neglect seem pretty relevant to this.
It doesn't matter if you use the screen reader option, or if your gemini-cli config has it enabled, this will happen.
And here's to why you shouldn't do stupid apps for a terminal that try to be too modern and get written in node.js using the ink framework.
The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility
The mythical, it's text, so it's accessible
There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse.The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces. The very tools designed to improve the Developer Experience (DX) in the terminal—frameworks like Ink (JS/React), Bubble Tea (Go), or tcell—are actively destroying the experience for blind users.
The Architectural Flaw: Stream vs. Grid
To understand the failure, we must distinguish between two distinct concepts often conflated under “terminal apps”: the CLI (Command Line Interface) and the TUI.
- The CLI (The Stream): This operates on a standard input/output model (
stdin/stdout). You type a command, the system appends the result below, and the cursor moves down. This is linear and chronological. For a screen reader, specifically kernel-level readers like Speakup, this is ideal.- The TUI (The Grid): This treats the terminal window not as a stream of text, but as a 2D grid of pixels, where every character cell is a pixel. It abandons the temporal flow for a spatial layout.
Case Study: The
gemini-cliMadness
Let's look at a concrete example:gemini-cli, a tool written in Node.js using the Ink framework. On the surface, it looks like a simple chat interface. But underneath, Ink is trying to reconcile a React component tree into a terminal grid.When you use this tool with Speakup (Linux) or NVDA (Windows), the application doesn't just fail; it actively spams you.
Because the framework treats the screen as a reactive canvas, every update triggers a redraw. When the AI is “thinking,” the tool updates a timer or a spinner. To do this, it moves the hardware cursor to the timer location, writes the new time, and moves it back.
For a sighted user, this happens instantly. For a screen reader user, this is what you hear:“Responding... Time elapsed 1s... Responding... Time elapsed 2s... [Fragment of chat history]... Responding...”
It drives the screen reader mad. The cursor is teleporting all over the screen to update status indicators, spinners, and history. Speakup tries to read whatever is under the cursor at that exact millisecond. You end up hearing random bits of conversation mixed with timer updates, making it impossible to focus on what you are actually typing.
Worse, lets pretend that you've somehow managed well with speakup so far, but that you want to do some work with nvda. Maybe paste an error you're getting on windows. So you open your terminal, ssh into your linux box, attach to your screen session and paste your text.
The result is an immediate crash of the screen reader (NVDA) or massive system instability. Why? Every time you type a character or paste text, the application triggers a state change. The framework decides it needs to re-render the interface. Because the conversation history is part of that state, the application attempts to redraw or re-calculate the layout for thousands of lines of text instantly. The more messages you have in a conversation, the more this will happen. And no, you can't just avoid this by using insert+5, the key combo supposed to avoid announcing dynamic change of content.
The Lag Loop
Furthermore, frameworks like Ink running on single-threaded environments (like Node.js) suffer from massive performance degradation when the history grows. If you paste a large block of text, the system has to calculate the diff for thousands of lines.This causes input lag. You press a key, and you wait. You can wait up to 10 seconds for a single character to echo back. The system is too busy calculating how to redraw the screen to actually process your input.
Why The “Old Guard” Works (
nano,vim,menuconfig)
Sighted developers often ask: “If TUIs are bad, why do you use nano, vim, or menuconfig?”The answer is not that these tools handle the cursor perfectly by default. The answer is that they allow you to hide the cursor entirely.
1. Hiding the Cursor (
nano,vim)
In tools likenanoorvim, usability depends on turning off features that track cursor position. If you runnanowith options that show the cursor position (like--constantshow), or if you usevimwithout specific configuration, the experience is broken.When the cursor is visible and tracking is active, Speakup prioritizes the cursor's location update over the character echo. Instead of hearing the letter “a” when you type it, you hear “Column 2”. You type “b”, and you hear “Column 3”.
These older tools succeed because they allow you to disable this noise. You can configure them to suppress the visual cursor or status bar updates, forcing the screen reader to rely on the character input stream rather than the noisy coordinate updates. Modern frameworks rarely offer a “no-cursor” or “headless” mode; they assume the visual cursor is essential.
2. Single Column Focus (
menuconfig)
Tools like the Linux kernel'smenuconfigwork because they enforce a strict, single-column focus. Even though there are borders and titles, the active area is a vertical list. The cursor stays pinned to that list. It doesn't jump to the bottom right to update a clock, then to the top left to update a title. The spatial complexity is kept low enough that the screen reader never gets “lost.”3. The Lost Art of Scrolling Regions (
Irssi)
Irssi is the gold standard for accessible chat, but not because of luck. Irssi was built over 20 years with a custom rendering engine that utilizes VT100 Scrolling Regions.When a new message arrives in Irssi: 1. It tells the terminal driver: “Define a scrolling region from line 1 to 23.”2. It sends a command: “Scroll up.” The terminal moves the bits up. 3. It draws the new text at the bottom of that region.
Crucially, it handles this in a way that minimizes interference with the input line. It relies on the terminal's hardware capabilities rather than rewriting every character on the screen manually. Modern frameworks ignore these hardware features in favor of “diffing” the screen state and rewriting characters, which is computationally heavier and hostile to accessibility.
The “Stale Bot” excuse: A Case Study in Neglect
Google and the maintainers of gemini-cli pretend to care about accessibility. “Pretend” is the operative word here. If you look at the repository, critical accessibility regressions like Issue #3435 and Issue #11305 have been left to rot. There is no discussion, no roadmap, and no fix. Even worse is the fate of Issue #1553, which was supposed to track these accessibility failures. It didn't get solved; it got silenced. It was closed automatically by a bot with this generic dismissal: > Hello! As part of our effort to keep our backlog manageable and focus on the most active issues, we are tidying up older reports. It looks like this > issue hasn't been active for a while, so we are closing it for now.”This is unacceptable. Closing an accessibility report because the maintainers haven't touched it in months is not “tidying up”; it is hiding evidence. It effectively says that if a bug is ignored long enough, it ceases to exist. It boosts the project's “Closed Issues” metric while leaving the actual software unusable for blind users.
Conclusion
If you are building for the terminal and care about accessibility, stop using declarative UI frameworks that treat the terminal like a canvas.The “modern” TUI stack has optimized for the developer's ability to write React-like code at the expense of the machine's ability to render text efficiently.
If you cannot guarantee that your application allows the user to hide the cursor, or if you rely on aggressive redrawing to show spinners and timers, you are building an inaccessible tool.
For the blind user, a dumb, linear CLI stream is infinitely superior to a “smart” TUI that lags, spams, and scatters the cursor across the screen.
@tardis @FreakyFwoof @stormproductions @serrebi It works, up to a point. And I've done a whole lot this past month alone to really know what I'm talking about and not just say nonsense.
The web ui will work but when your code is now spanning multiple files -- over 40 in my case, it creates problem. Gemini on the web constantly loses track of which file does what, which leads to very stupid things like:
Me: your fix does not work, I still get the error about session not properly disconnecting
Gemini: well of course it won't work, I've analyzed your code and it's still the older one, do this and it will work.
Me: ... of course it doesn't work, and besides you're refering yourself to an old version of this code.
@stormproductions If they are still up after all the crap they go through right now, that is...
Trials for the death of several people that trusted gpt with things, claims that chatgpt can even be trusted with health advices now when it clearly can't -- I'm not joking! I saw an ad about it!
Then also the Musk case. Oh dear oh dear. Now I don't like Musk at all but truth is, he's apparently got 60% chance of winning his case against OpenAI. And he asked for a jaw dropping $134b iirc.
I think OpenAI will sink sooner than later.
Arfy
in reply to Rosalyn Anne • • •