TLDR 2025-01-13

A WiFi Pineapple is a pentesting tool used for security assessments, internally or by ethical hackers. It's also used by actual hackers to steal confidential data through man-in-the-middle attacks. Join the ThreatLocker webinar for a live demo of this attack vector, and get tips for protecting against it. Register here

The Supreme Court seems likely to uphold the law that would ban TikTok in the US. A preliminary decision is expected within days. There remains some uncertainty on how the court will handle the case, especially with President-elect Donald Trump taking office a day after the deadline for the law to take effect. The court has the authority to temporarily block the law even if it ultimately rules against TikTok.

One of Elon Musk's lawyers has called on the California and Delaware attorneys general to force OpenAI to auction off a large ownership stake. Musk has previously launched lawsuits to attempt to stop OpenAI from restructuring to a for-profit company. He co-founded the startup with Sam Altman and nine others in 2015. OpenAI has no plans for an auction.

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida was called off this morning after hours of delays. As tall as a 32-story building, the rocket was set to launch on January 10, but the launch was postponed due to choppy seas in the Atlantic Ocean where the booster is supposed to land. New Glenn is designed to carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today. Its success could inject competition into the rocket business, which is currently dominated by one company - SpaceX.

Neuralink has implanted its brain-computer device into a third patient. The company has plans for up to 30 more implants this year. It currently has two studies for its devices, one which enables patients to control devices such as computers or smartphones with their minds and the other enables patients to control assistive robotic arms.

Datadog analyzed AWS cloud cost data from hundreds of organizations to understand the impact of technology choices, patterns of cloud resource usage, and participation in AWS discount programs. The findings reflect changing priorities of engineering teams, and suggest that organizations have further opportunities for cost optimization. Get the report: State of Cloud Costs

werk is a simplistic and easy-to-use portable build system and command runner. It solves several problems with `make` and `just`. Developers just have to parse a Werkfile containing recipes to werk and it will determine what the user wants to build, what the dependencies are, and run programs to rebuild any outdated build products in the right order. It uses a new language, but the language is able to express the kind of things developers really want to express in build scripts and fairly pleasant and readable.

This article looks at how modern programming languages are governed and explains how Swift's dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible. Swift was originally a passion project by Chris Lattner, the senior director of dev tooling at Apple. The language has evolved into a complicated mess - it now has 217 keywords. While Apple is unambiguously the dictator of Swift, its incentives put the company at odds with the open-source community. The company's updates to the language show how much it doesn't care about the community.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently criticized Apple's lackluster innovation efforts and 'random rules' during an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He noted that while the iPhone was great, it introduced a platform with a lot of arbitrary rules, and that the company hasn't invented anything great in a while. He also said that Apple's reasons for pushing back on letting other companies into its ecosystem are invalid - the security problems could be solved by building better security. Zuckerberg claims that Meta would double its profits if Apple stopped applying its random rules.

Fears about human labor being replaced by machines go back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. These fears continue today with the rapid progress of AI in several previously secure human domains. The amount of intelligence competing in the average person's labor market has increased by several orders of magnitude over the past few centuries, but this did not turn low-skilled laborers into a permanently unemployed underclass - in fact, their incomes increased a lot as they specialized and traded with skilled workers. Human-level AGIs will still face constraints, forcing them to trade with humans for other services, just like skilled humans do.

Tana converts voice notes into structured output, so you can brainstorm, plan your day, or do your weekly retro – while on the move. TLDR: skip the 150,000-long waitlist

A list of predictions about the state of AI for the next one, three, and six years by Simon Willison, the creator of Datasette and one of the co-creators of the Django Web Framework.

This article looks at what has changed in the last year in addressing in the Internet and looks at how IP address allocation information can reveal the changing nature of the network itself.

Deactivating contributors' WordPress accounts prevents them from contributing through that channel, but the code is hosted on GitHub, so anyone can access the code should they wish to fork it.

New OpenAI robotics job listings indicate that the company is again planning to develop robots, this time with a custom sensor suite.

70 years of AI research have shown that general methods that leverage computation are the most effective for training AI models by a large margin.

The goal is for two Department of Government Efficiency agents to be deployed at each US agency to cut costs.