fidzu : computers

Apple's 50th anniversary is this week - and Fast Company's Harry McCracken just published an 11,000-word oral history with some fun stories from Apple's earliest days and the long and winding road to its very first home computers: Steve Wozniak, cofounder, Apple: I told my dad when I was in high school, "I'm going to own a computer someday." My dad said, "It costs as much as a house." And I sat there at the table - I remember right where we were sitting - and I said, "I'll live in an apartment." I was going to have a computer if it was ever possible. I didn't need a house. Woz even remembers trying to build a home computer early on with a teenaged Steve Jobs and Bill Fernandez from rejected parts procured from local electronics companies. Woz designed it - "not from anybody else's design or from a manual. And Fernandez was one of those kids that could use a soldering iron." Bill Fernandez: The computer was very basic. It was working, and we were starting to talk about how we could hook a teletype up to it. Mrs. Wozniak called a reporter from the San Jose Mercury, and he came over with a photographer. We set up the computer on the floor of Steve Wozniak's bedroom. Well, the core integrated circuit that ran the power supply that I built was an old reject part. We turned on the computer, and the power supply smoked and burnt out the circuitry. So we didn't get our photos in the paper with an article about the boy geniuses. But within a few years Jobs and Wozniak both wound up with jobs at local tech companies. Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell remembers that Steve Jobs "wasn't a good engineer, but he was a great technician. He was pristine in his ability to solder, which was actually important in those days." Meanwhile Allen Baum had shared Wozniak's high school interest in computers, and later got Woz a job working at Hewlett-Packard - where employees were allowed to use stockroom parts for private projects. ("When he needed some parts, even if we didn't have them, I could order them.") Baum helped with the Apple I and II, and joined Apple a decade later. Wozniak remembers being inspired to build that first Apple I by the local Homebrew Computing Club, people "talking about great things that would happen to society, that we would be able to communicate like we never did [before] and educate in new ways. And being a geek would be important and have value." And once he'd built his first computer, "I wanted these people to help create the revolution. And so I passed out my designs with no copyright notices - public domain, open source, everything. A couple of other people in the club did build it." But Woz and Jobs had even tried pitching the computer as a Hewlett-Packard product, Woz remembers: Steve Wozniak: I showed them what it would cost and how it would work and what it could do with my little demos. They had all the engineering people and the marketing people, and they turned me down. That was the first of five turndowns from Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and I had to go into business on our own. In the end, Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 6 remembers witnessing Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne the signing of Apple's founding contract, "which is pretty funny, because I was 15 at the time." And it was Allen Baum's father who gave Wozniak and Jobs the bridge loan to buy the parts they'd need for their first 500 computers. After all the memories, the article concludes that "Trying to connect every dot between Apple, the tiny, dirt-poor 1970s startup, and Apple, the $3.7 trillion 21st-century global colossus, is impossible." But this much is clear: The company has always been at its best when its original quirky humanity and willingness to be an outlier shine through. Mark Johnson, Apple employee No. 13: I was in Cupertino just yesterday. It's totally different. They own Cupertino now. Jonathan Rotenberg, who cofounded the Boston Computer Society in 1977 at age 13: People want to hate Apple, because it is big and powerful. But Apple has an underlying moral purpose that is immensely deep and expansive... Mike Markkula, the early retiree from Intel whose guidance and money turned the garage startup into a company: The culture mattered. People were there for the right reasons - to build something transformative - not just to make money. That alignment produced extraordinary results... Steve Wozniak: Everything you do in life should have some element of joy in it. Even your work should have an element of joy... When you're about to die, you have certain memories. And for me, it's not going to be Apple going public or Apple being huge and all that. It's really going to be stories from the period when humble people spotted something that was interesting and followed it I'll be thinking of that when I die, along with a lot of pranks I played. The important things.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

30 Mar 2026 7:34am GMT

The Wall Street Journal reports that Rivian "just won a yearslong battle with car dealers in Washington state that threatens the model of how cars are sold." After fighting to sell its vehicles directly to buyers, Rivian threatened to take its case to voters with a ballot measure to permit direct sales. The dealers blinked. The state's dealer lobby not only dropped its opposition to a sales loophole for Rivian and rival EV-maker Lucid, but also encouraged lawmakers to approve one. The measure became law this month... New auto entrants like Rivian, and Tesla before it, have spent years contending with long-established U.S. state laws that require new cars to be sold through independent franchised dealers. The auto startups - typically makers of EVs - argue that they can offer a better experience by selling directly to consumers, much as Apple sells iPhones through its own stores and online. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe has said the company is committed to direct-only sales because it's more profitable and gives the company control over how its vehicles are sold, marketed and maintained. The Washington compromise riled traditional automakers, including General Motors, Ford and Toyota, which lobbied against it, arguing it unfairly advantages startups. A trade group representing the automakers called it discriminatory and argued the exception could one day open the door to Chinese EV makers... German automaker Volkswagen is currently facing several lawsuits from dealers over its plan to sell new Scout vehicles directly to consumers. Dealers say independent franchises are vital to the car-buying process, creating competition between dealerships that keeps prices affordable for consumers, while providing valuable services such as repairs, warranty work and financing... Yet for Washington's dealers, the prospect of putting franchise laws up for a popular vote laid bare a tough reality: given the choice, many car buyers want the freedom to avoid dealerships. Rivian's polling, which the company shared with lawmakers, showed nearly 70% of respondents favored allowing direct sales when asked whether they would support manufacturers selling cars directly to consumers... The fight comes at a critical time for Rivian, which is launching a new, more affordable SUV in a bid to make consistent profits amid a downturn in U.S. EV sales... Rivian is able to directly sell cars in roughly half of U.S. states, but a number of them limit how many locations the company can operate. They can't disclose the price, though. For that, customers must go online. The article notes that "Following the win, Rivian executives are eyeing other states that, like Washington, ban direct sales but also allow ballot initiatives: Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota..." It adds that lawmakers (from both parties) in the state of Washington had said "they have long felt pulled between giving consumers more car-buying freedom and protecting dealers, essentially small-business owners who are vital to local economies - and politically powerful." But an executive at the Washington State Auto Dealers Association said dealers supported this new law partly because it protects them by barring future automakers from selling directly in the state, and by requiring Rivian and Lucid to adhere to the same regulations that govern how dealers operate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

30 Mar 2026 3:34am GMT

Yes, this week YouTube and Meta were found negligent in a landmark case about social media addiction. But "it's still far from certain what this defeat will change," argues The Verge's senior tech and policy editor, "and what the collateral damage could be." If these decisions survive appeal - which isn't certain - the direct outcome would be multimillion-dollar penalties. Depending on the outcome of several more "bellwether" cases in Los Angeles, a much larger group settlement could be reached down the road... For many activists, the overall goal is to make clear that lawsuits will keep piling up if companies don't change their business practices... The best-case outcome of all this has been laid out by people like Julie Angwin, who wrote in The New York Times that companies should be pushed to change "toxic" features like infinite scrolling, beauty filters that encourage body dysmorphia, and algorithms that prioritize "shocking and crude" content. The worst-case scenario falls along the lines of a piece from Mike Masnick at Techdirt, who argued the rulings spell disaster for smaller social networks that could be sued for letting users post and see First Amendment-protected speech under a vague standard of harm. He noted that the New Mexico case hinged partly on arguing that Meta had harmed kids by providing end-to-end encryption in private messaging, creating an incentive to discontinue a feature that protects users' privacy - and indeed, Meta discontinued end-to-end encryption on Instagram earlier this month. Blake Reid, a professor at Colorado Law, is more circumspect. "It's hard right now to forecast what's going to happen," Reid told The Verge in an interview. On Bluesky, he noted that companies will likely look for "cold, calculated" ways to avoid legal liability with the minimum possible disruption, not fundamentally rethink their business models. "There are obviously harms here and it's pretty important that the tort system clocked those harms" in the recent cases, he told The Verge. "It's just that what comes in the wake of them is less clear to me". The article also includes this prediction from legal blogger/Section 230 export Eric Goldman. "There will be even stronger pushes to restrict or ban children from social media." Goldman argues "This hurts many subpopulations of minors, ranging from LGBTQ teens who will be isolated from communities that can help them navigate their identities to minors on the autism spectrum who can express themselves better online than they can in face-to-face conversations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

30 Mar 2026 1:37am GMT

Why did a leading prediction market feel the need for an in-person bar in DC?

29 Mar 2026 11:35am GMT

Research proceeds on alternatives, but some doubt whether true lie detection is possible.

29 Mar 2026 11:01am GMT

Breathing capacity could have compensated for lower atmospheric oxygen.

28 Mar 2026 12:30pm GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT

This guide describes how you can install a Plan 9 network on an OpenBSD machine (it will probably work on any unix machine though). The authentication service (called "authsrv" on Plan 9) is provided by a unix version: authsrv9. The file service is provided by a program called "u9fs". It comes with Plan 9. Both run from inetd. The (diskless) cpu server is provided by running qemu, booted from only a floppy (so without local storage). Finally, the terminal is provided by the program drawterm. The nice thing about this approach is that you can use all your familiar unix tools to get started with Plan 9 (e.g. you can edit the Plan 9 files with your favorite unix editor). I'm assuming you have read at least something about Plan 9, for example the introduction paper Plan 9 from Bell Labs. ↫ Mechiel Lukkien If you're running OpenBSD, you're already doing something better than everyone else, and if you want to ascend to the next level, this is a great place to start. Of course, the final level, where you leave your earthly roots behind and become a being of pure enlightened energy, is running Plan 9 on real hardware as the universe intended, but let's not put the cart before the horse. One day, all of humanity will just be an endless collection of interconnected cosmic Plan 9 servers, more plentiful than the stars in the known universe.

27 Mar 2026 7:40pm GMT

Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. "I had some time, so I thought: let's have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about," he says. "Very quickly, I became fascinated." Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling "a little isolated". He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to "chill", but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself. ↫ Anna Moore at The Guardian These stories are absolutely heart-wrenching, and it doesn't just happen to people who have had a history of mental illness or other things you might associate with priming someone for "falling for" an "AI" chatbot. Just a few years in, and it's already clear that these tools pose a real danger to a group of people of indeterminate size, and proper research into the causes is absolutely warranted and needed. On top of that, if there's any evidence of wrongdoing from the companies behind these chatbots - intentionally making them more addictive, luring people in, ignoring established dangers, covering up addiction cases, etc. - lawsuits and regulation are definitely in order. Only yesterday, Facebook and Google lost a landmark trial in the US, ruling the companies intentionally made social media as addictive as possible, thereby destroying a person's life in the process. Countless similar lawsuits are underway all over the world, and I have a feeling that in a few years to decades, we'll look at unregulated, rampant social media the same way we look at tobacco now. Perhaps "AI" chatbots will join their ranks, too.

27 Mar 2026 7:30pm GMT

Today, we're excited to announce a significant step forward in our ongoing commitment to Windows security and system reliability: the removal of trust for all kernel drivers signed by the deprecated cross-signed root program. This update will help protect our customers by ensuring that only kernel drivers that the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) have passed and been signed can be loaded by default. To raise the bar for platform security, Microsoft will maintain an explicit allow list of reputable drivers signed by the cross-signed program. The allow list ensures a secure and compatible experience for a limited number of widely used, and reputable cross-signed drivers. This new kernel trust policy applies to systems running Windows 11 24H2, Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 26H1, and Windows Server 2025 in the April 2026 Windows update. All future versions of Windows 11 and Windows Server will enforce the new kernel trust policy. ↫ Peter Waxman at the Windows IT Pro Blog The cross-signed root program was discontinued in 2021, and ran since the early 2000s, so I think it's fair to no longer automatically assume such possibly old and outdated drivers are still to be trusted.

27 Mar 2026 7:18pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT