New Brendan Eich just dropped

An Apple bidet which adds a colonic health section to your Health app

And if an app like Signal bypasses blocks, having it installed could become a crime.

John Gruber (yes, the Apple loyalist) pointed out that the Japanese law specifically exempts game consoles, and suggested the US retaliating by passing a law requiring third-party app stores on the PlayStation and Switch. Which probably won’t happen, but would be entertaining if it did.

They could call it the Dendy 360 or something

and if you really don’t like your handle, you can make a new account and migrate your follows to it automatically

They might not need to open-source it: hackers have found ways of jailbreaking the installed Linux and are stepping up efforts for making it reusable. It’s a rather feeble SoC, so there won’t be a huge number of applications for it, but there will be some.

If you want more like this, there’s Bunnix, the UNIX clone someone recently built in a month. You can follow its progress here.

Australia also has a Newcastle (in New South Wales, north of Sydney). Not sure if it has/had coal mines, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Australians using the phrase may be referring to their Newcastle, and even unaware of the English one.

They should at least release data sheets and any bootloader signing keys, allowing people to reuse the devices for other purposes. If you could replace the firmware, I’m sure you could use it for controlling your home automation setup or displaying the weather/news/train times/other info (or possibly other tasks depending on what’s in the SoC). Now, alas, it’s just e-waste.

Queen. They’re essentially the Monty Python Team of hard rock.

The extra space is for two Electron apps of your choice.

Think of it as the cool/bad kids’ table in the special-needs school cafeteria

Leave it at home and, if you need a phone, take a burner that doesn’t have your personal data and isn’t logged into any of your accounts.

Silicon foundries use a lot of water and raw materials and contaminate the ground. Full degrowth may involve abandoning semiconductor technologies and making computers out of simpler parts, such as electromagnetic relays. They’ll be a lot slower and simpler, but with the right knowledge, one can make them from raw materials without bootstrapping a complex technology chain.

Is the firmware enclosed in a SOC with no way of reading/extracting it? If not, if all else fails, someone will extract it and dissect it with Ghidra or something, extracting whatever encryption keys are needed. If so, and there aren’t any documented side-channel attacks for reading the firmware from this SOC, if firmware updates exist, they too constitute an attack surface. (They probably would be encrypted, but how strongly?)

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone reverse-engineers the protocol and codes up their own replacement backend as a one-file Python script in a weekend.

The official app appears to be written in React Native and is as laggy and janky as you’d expect. Other than that, more people are using it (and/or interacting with it from elsewhere in the fediverse).

If old process nodes like that still exist, perhaps someone should periodically do a run of old chips which are getting scarce, like 6581s or fragile ASICs from vintage computers. I know people who grew up coding Z80 assembly on their home computers have fond memories of it, but there’s a glut of deadstock Z80s that won’t run out for a decade.

We have a winner!