Truly the greatest space sim of all time.

Not that I ever expected Volition to make a sequel (virtually everyone ever involved with it is gone anyhow). But it's still a shame to see Volition close. This hurts almost as much as the day Dynamix died.

So if I get some old documentation PDF and it's unreadable due to unsupported fonts - what do you think I shall do then?

PDF files typically embed the fonts (or rather, the specific subset of font glyphs) they use. So PDFs will generally continue to render just fine.

Per Adobe's own advice:

How will Acrobat handle PDF's that use Type 1 fonts?

No changes are being made to Acrobat. Acrobat will continue handling PDFs in the same manner it has been for more than 20 years:

PDFs with embedded fonts will display as intended.

For files with non-embedded fonts there are two scenarios-

1) The missing font is one of the fonts that ships with Acrobat or is the default in the operating system's fonts. This font gets used in place of the non-embedded font.
2) The missing font is substituted for the next closest match according to Acrobat's font substitution table and the available fonts on the system.

When PDFs are viewed in a web browser, a viewer other than Adobeâ(TM)s may be used. In such cases, we cannot control what will happen. This is the current expectation and does not change based on Adobe's Type 1 end of support.

This is primarily an issue for document creation going forward. Though it goes without saying that you should still avoid using Type 1 fonts.

Unfortunately, I'm not surprised to see CNET do this. While they're a site that's going down the tubes to begin with (bring back the old logo!), they're also, frustratingly, not wrong to be culling old articles.

I've been in the position to see the results of several smaller sites orchestrate similar cullings for SEO reasons. And despite Google's claims, all of the sites benefited with search-driven traffic improving at least a few percent in a week, and rankings on critical terms improving as well. In the case of most of these sites, the improvement is not night-and-day, but it it is measurable, and it is significant to the bottom line.

With that said, I don't believe Google is actively being malicious - that is, I'm sure they're not trying to punish sites with old content. However, what I've noticed is that long-lived sites with lots of historical content started sinking as Google took on some of their more recent efforts to weed out low quality content. Low quality content has always been a problem, but in the last couple of years in particular, unscrupulous operators have been taking advantage of the pandemic employment environment (and more recently the rise of generative AI systems) to double-down on rapidly generating new content. Meanwhile, Blackhat SEO services have been able to help content mills get their content ranked shockingly high; not enough to take the top spots, but high enough to get some real, meaningful traffic out of it.

The net impact, I feel, is that Google is currently losing the war on blackhat SEO operations and their associated content mills. That is, Google's index and ranking systems can no longer reliably tell the difference between good content and bad content, as many of the quality signals they have previously relied on have been copied by mills. Even more recent efforts by Google to prod sites into supplying E-E-A-T info within articles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) have quickly been undermined by mills doing the same. The mills are all liars, of course, but Google can't determine that.

What we're seeing is an explosion of content at the same time as the effectiveness of search engines is crashing. Google has to weed through more crap than ever before, and the crap is winning; the signal is harder to find than ever before. The worst part is that I'm not sure what Google can do about it. Search is one of the products they make an honest effort to improve upon (since it's what brings all the boys to the yard), but they've been backed into corner with no obvious escapes. There simply isn't a good signal of quality left with websites for Google to rely on.

Which, to bring things full circle back to CNET, is why we're seeing them purge old content. Since Google can't tell the difference between that content and content from mills (much of which is derived from that old, legitimate content), the old content has become a liability. As best as I can tell, the best way right now to show Google that you're not a mill is not to have too many articles, especially old articles, as those are some of the hardest articles for Google to digest (are they quality articles? Or a mill faking it to look better?). Which means that for legitimate sites to survive, they have to start playing increasingly byzantine SEO games to stay ahead of the mills. And often, adopt blackhat-lite SEO strategies to give them the edge over people who aren't playing fairly to begin with.

All of which Sucks (with a capital S). It sucks for the readers, it sucks for the content creators, and it sucks for Google. But Google decides if commercial sites live or die. They are the de facto gateway to the world wide web. So commercial sites will do whatever they need to in order to survive - which is often the same thing content mills are doing to make a buck.

And you wonder why Google is going so hard on generative AI (Bard) now. Their best hope for stopping this madness is to stop directing people to external sites to begin with, that way content mills have no reason to exist. It also means commercial sites will have no reason to exist - and thus won't be there to provide the inputs GenAI needs - but that's tomorrow's problem. Google can always scrape Reddit to get some (usually) human input...

Excellent! Thank you for that answer. So Bob will have just enough time to reflect on his transgressions, but not so much time that the peril he's experiencing would be inhumane in length.

Meanwhile we threw Bob off the roof of the assembly building, so that problem is fixed!"

How long would it take to fall from the roof of the VAB, anyhow? Is that enough time for a human to hit terminal velocity?

Air tags aren't meant to be an anti-theft device to begin with. They are explicitly not for that task, as a perfect anti-theft tracker is also a perfect stalking tracker.

I thought that IPMI hardware was also installed on desktop computer motherboards

The IPMI specification calls for discrete hardware, as it's an explicitly out-of-band system management solution.

There are alternative out-of-band management technologies such Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT), which is integrated into their hardware, and is probably what you're thinking of. However AMT is not available on most client SKUs (only specific vPro Enterprise SKUs), and it needs to be explicitly enabled and configured on the rest. Plus AMT doesn't rely on the vulnerable AMI firmware at the heart of TFA.

So the answer is that, unless you have a workstation-grade system with a BMC, this vulnerability wouldn't affect you.

TFA is pretty much spot-on in calling it "iconic." So I'm really surprised to see that they're ending Reddit Gold.

As a decades-long Slashdot junkie I don't hold Reddit in high regard. But one of the few things they did well - or at least interesting and unoffensive ideas they had - was Reddit Gold as a proxy to let people gift a premium subscription. Letting people put their money where their mouth is by rewarding posts added another signal about the quality of posts - someone spent actual money on this reward, so the post probably has some value. Which to be sure, didn't stop idiots from gilding dumb posts now and then, but it was far more selective overall than merely upvoting, since it had a financial cost to it.

It's also just about the least offensive method I've ever seen for revenue generation on a website. It's purely voluntary (you don't get anything for gilding anyone), so unlike systems that lock features behind payments, non-gilding users weren't missing out on anything.

But Reddit also kind of screwed up a good thing a couple of years ago by adding so many more awards. Originally it was just Gold, and then a few tiers (Silver/Gold/Platinum). But once they added a whole bunch of reactionary awards, it became neigh-impossible to tell what award was what, or what a given award was worth. They tried to increase usage of the system with more options, but in the process made the entire gilding system less useful by adding a bunch of noise that drowned out the signal it previously provided.

I can only assume it still wasn't generating enough in revenues to be worth the continued effort. But it's a shame to lose it; gilding was one of Reddit's more interesting features.

If XRP and other crypto coins aren't securities, then what are they, exactly?

Slashdot, for all of its flaws and idiosyncrasies, did get a few core things right 25 years ago. Cap the post scores, don't let someone post and vote, and don't let any one account have too much control (e.g. infinite mod points). Meanwhile Wikipedia is infamous for its turf wars and editors protecting their pages.

Reddit ends up being somewhere in the middle of all of this. There are a lot of good, hard-working moderators, especially in the smaller subs. But there are also the power mods, which control a wide number of subreddits for seemingly no good reason. And then you end up with places like /r/anime and /r/nba, where the mods were just straight-up power tripping last week.

They're paid in power. And there's no shortage of people who will gladly take on a bit of responsibility for power over their peers. Just look at Slashdot moderation and meta-moderation...

Mojave is no longer receiving security updates, either. So you shouldn't be browsing the Internet on those devices.

Why would a company think they have any right to push an update to a router someone has purchased? Once someone buys the product, the company has no right to do anything to the prodcut without the person's permission.

• 1) Because providing ongoing security definitions is unequivocally a good thing. There are millions of Asus routers out there, most of whom are owned by clueless users who just want the thing to work - and conversely, who would never notice if their router was being used as part of a botnet or had been hijacked to snoop on them.
• 2) Because Asus got its ass handed to it by the FTC in 2015 for not providing security updates. As a consequence of not providing sufficient security for their products in the past, they've been required to operate a security program for the past 8 years, with another 12 years to go.

Bear in mind that Asus isn't even alone in this. The closest analogue, Apple's XProtect, similarly runs entirely in the background and is regularly downloading updates to keep apprised of the latest malware. Microsoft of course has Windows Defender, but they also distribute their monthly Malicious Software Removal Tool (even to OSes that no longer qualify for security updates).

Routers are the internet-facing box in most consumer networks. They are the first (and sometimes only) line of protection between a hostile Internet and a whole bunch of poorly supported hardware on the other side - sometimes including the router itself. So it is critical that these millions upon millions of tiny Linux boxen are not left to be abused by malware.

Merlin still includes the asd daemon.

With regards to operating systems, that much is definitely turning out to be true. Apple released a security update for the iPhone 5s as recently as earlier as this year, over 9 years after that phone was first introduced. The earlier iPhone 5 didn't get quite as much love - things got hinky for their 32-bit phones - but the OS support window has been getting longer and longer over the years.

But French regulators seem to be more concerned over hardware than software. I don't buy the "planned obsolescence" argument - save the battery, these things are designed to last for just about forever when they're taken care of - but the difficulties for repairs does raise some eyebrows.

I do think at some point regulators are going to have to decide if smartphones are PC-like appliances or secure computing terminals. But it'll probably take an extraordinary event to trigger that reckoning.