Corn Woman 🌽 @WomanCorn@schelling.pt

this month two apps on my phone have enshittified to the point of unusability

both were ones i actually paid money for

everything else (besides pokemon go) has been fine

foss people go on about how "free" doesn't mean gratis, but so often the cost of the real freedom turns out to be the opportunity cost of the profits the developer refused to make from it

#Today I learned IBM published the source code for the original PC BIOS. I always knew the clean room reïmplementation story, but didn't realize the original sources were public at the time, too.

https://github.com/philspil66/IBM-PC-BIOS

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12018/why-did-ibm-make-the-pc-bios-source-code-public

Also February 7, 2036, just in case 😉

#retrocomputing

IE tomb in South Korea 😅

Aww! 😢 #RIP Tom Smothers, older half of Smothers Brothers, whose skits and songs on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in the late 1960s brought political satire and a spirit of youthful irreverence to network television, paving the way for shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show,” died on Tuesday at his home at 86 “following a recent battle with cancer,” a spokesman for the National Comedy Center announced on behalf of the family. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/arts/television/tom-smothers-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/arts/television/tom-smothers-dead.html?utm_source=press.coop

Article on some new research that finds ways to balance privacy and stalker detection for AirTags and other location trackers. This is a collaboration with my students Gabrielle Beck, Harry Eldridge and colleagues Abhishek Jain and Nadia Heninger. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-airtag-privacy-stalking-cryptographic-solution/

Today is the restaurant eclipse, where once every seven years Christmas is on a Monday so even the Asian restaurants are closed.

Here's how the "Ship of Theseus" page looked in July 2003 when it was first created! Since then, the article has been edited 1792 times. 0% of its original phrases remain.

We love freedom 0, the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. Boost this post to share the message with others! Read about the four freedoms of #FreeSoftware: https://u.fsf.org/2cj

It’s fucking nuts that service providers can just remove your purchases like this without refunds.

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/#

So, I was browsing the Christmas movie selection on Hulu and came upon these bizarre ambiance videos, they are just kinda boring videos to put on like those fireplace type videos, but the summaries had me cracking up:

Shot in the dark here: did you, or anyone you know, work at the #Harvard Office of Information Technology (#OIT) circa 1997-98, AKA When Everyone Quit At Once over the summer? (Before or after the quitting is fine.)

If so... I have some questions which you are probably no longer legally enjoined from answering! 🤣

remember when we all panicked about threads?

that shit's never gonna federate, is it

Discovery: It is currently impossible in Google Image Search to search for "Underware", the 1995 Macintosh extension that animated your desktop image. It searches for "underwear" instead. It does ask "Did you mean: 'Underwear?'" but it no longer gives an option to say no.

Searching "Underware" in quotes does not help. Searching "Underware mac" gives you about 50% results related to Underware for Macintosh and 50% pictures of underwear.