Peiter Zatko/Mudge fronted a Senate Judiciary Committee to answer politician questions about Twitter's lax infosec after his whistleblower complaint a few weeks ago. The only new info revealed seems to be "at least" one Chinese spy was "suspected" of working at Twitter. When Peiter told management about his concerns, they replied with "well, since we already have one, that's better if we have more. Let's keep growing the office". Twitter's boss Parag Agrawal was invited to attend, but said he can't due to the ongoing situation in the courts between Twitter and Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Twitter's shareholders approved its sale to Elon Musk. As if they were gonna say no to US$44b after all this.
Remember Google Loon? It was one of their "moonshot" ideas to have weather balloons floating around sparsely populated areas, disseminating radio signals so people could access the internet and shooting lasers between the balloons as backhaul. The idea was doing this would be cheaper than setting up towers. Very much like Starlink, but with balloons instead of satellites. Loon was shut down in 2021 after 8 years of trying to monetise it. Now the technology has been spun off into a new company called Aalyria. They're got two key technologies - Tightbeam "the world's most advanced coherent light free space optics technology" (i.e: lasers instead of radio or cables) and Spacetime "a software platform for orchestrating networks of ground stations, aircraft, satellites, ships, and urban meshes". Good luck to everyone involved.
Check out this classy little mini-ITX case. The Taku looks like a modern Scandinavian inspired coffee table, but is actually a computer case roughly the size of a keyboard with space for an SFX power supply and 280mm long graphics card. You can even place a monitor (up to 15kg) on top of it. Dunno how much it costs, where you buy it from, or even if it's still available to buy (this was stored deep in my bookmarks) but it looks cool. Here's a Raspberry Pi case that looks like a computer mini-tower. Has a little screen, a heatsink and fan for the CPU and a spot for an SSD.
📻 Computer Camp Love - Datarock
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