Linked List: October 10, 2024

Thursday, 10 October 2024

Calvin’s Dad Explains the Pre-Color World ★

Given that Calvin and Hobbes is almost certainly the best (and almost more certainly, the most beloved) comic strip ever, it’s devilishly hard to pick a favorite. But this might be mine. I thought about it often as I raised my own son.

Update: I sent this one to my son, and he sent me this one back. My boy gets me.

Internet Archive Hacked, Data Breach Impacts 31 Million Users ★

Lawrence Abrams, reporting for Bleeping Computer:

Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached.

“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!,” reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site.

The text “HIBP” refers to is the Have I Been Pwned data breach notification service created by Troy Hunt, with whom threat actors commonly share stolen data to be added to the service.

Hunt told BleepingComputer that the threat actor shared the Internet Archive’s authentication database nine days ago and it is a 6.4GB SQL file named “ia_users.sql”. The database contains authentication information for registered members, including their email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data.

As if that weren’t enough to make for a bad week for the Internet Archive — a seemingly irreplaceable stalwart resource of the web — they’re also under a DDoS attack. Jason Scott, archivist at Internet Archive, on Mastodon:

Someone is DDOSing the internet archive, so we’ve been down for hours. According to their twitter, they’re doing it just to do it. Just because they can. No statement, no idea, no demands.

Humane, Not Dead Yet, Ships CosmOS 1.2 Update for AI Pin ★

Bethany Bongiorno, on X:

insane battery life (17 hours with profiled usage)

calendar recall

speak in over 50 languages — in your own voice

vision gesture for quick multi-modal questions

playlist support

timers, alarms, world clock

touchcode gesture unlock

pinpoint — locate your pin!

Sometimes all you can do is put your nose to the grindstone and keep plugging. But man, I don’t even hear jokes about the AI Pin any more. (Full change log.)

Alarmo – A New $100 Alarm Clock From Nintendo ★

Kind of crazy to create an alarm clock in this era of bedside phones, but like just about everything from Nintendo, it does seem fun. (Would seem a bit more appealing if it could serve as a Bluetooth audio speaker.)

Dan Riccio, Longtime Apple Hardware Executive, Is Retiring ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s Dan Riccio, who oversaw the company’s push into mixed-reality headsets and previously served as its hardware engineering chief, is retiring.

The veteran executive, a vice president who reports to Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, is leaving Apple this month, according to people with knowledge of the move. Employees in Riccio’s Vision Products Group, which includes a couple thousand engineers working on headsets and related technology, were told they would become the responsibility of John Ternus, Apple’s hardware boss.

Mike Rockwell, Riccio’s current lieutenant, will continue to lead the Vision Products Group on a day-to-day basis, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the changes aren’t public.

Gurman’s framing here in his lede could leave casual readers with the impression that Riccio is perhaps leaving because of the tepid consumer response to Vision Pro, but as Gurman subsequently mentions, this timeline was seemingly in the cards ever since Riccio stepped down as senior vice president of all hardware (a role now filled by John Ternus) in 2021.