This is like if Google just suddenly started calling Hell's Kitchen something else. Or renamed SOHO for no reason.

Except that as the article notes, the name was actually created a few years ago by a neighborhood nonprofit steering group that residents voted for: The East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group in San Francisco that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area.

Google didn't just suddenly rename it for no reason. The issue is more subtle than that; in previous times, the neighborhood council decision would either be ignored or take a long time to spread and catch on. With Google's ubiquity, changing it on Google maps has an immediate effect. Whether that's bad and jarring or good and avoids ambiguity, it's certainly new and different.

1. None of these were in “the early days of PC gaming”; they were a decade plus after PC gaming exploded during the Commodore 64/Applie II/etc era. Games like Catacomb, Ultima Underworld, and early ID entries like Hovertank 3D and Wolfenstein 3D had already birthed the FPS genre. Doom was a huge deal and certainly catalyzed things for the mid-90s and established FPSes as a prestige genre (as well as helping the popularity of online play).

2. Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 2 (the latter of which came out the same year as Doom) were side-scrolling 2D platformers. The “2.5D” version was Duke Nukem 3D, which came out like 3 years later than Doom during the explosion of post-Doom FPSes. It was closer to the Quake era than the Doom era. Claiming that it's part of some “big 3” is really weird; it's better grouped in with the rest of the 2.5D-era post-Doom games like Marathon, Heretic, Hexen, Star Wars: Dark Forces, etc.

I mostly agree, though if the license on the generated audio is liberal enough I could see using this to create audio books of public domain texts in a crowd-sourced project. Feed the texts through (which, if distributed reasonably, shouldn't really be a significant privacy intrusion; the information's all out there already) and then save it for future use so it's still available even if the cloud service goes down.

Fuzzing is great, but he doesn't seem to understand what a language flaw is.

In the case of Python, he's found 2 methods in libraries that can call shell commands. Leaving aside that this would be a library issue rather than a language issue, there's no evidence that it's even that.

Python explicitly doesn't have sandboxing. Like most languages (including C, C++, etc), the documented behavior is that if you control the program and environment then you're fully allowed to import subprocess or os and run whatever you want. You don't need to find "hidden" ways to run a subprocess, you can directly "import subprocess" and run stuff.

This is doubly true because of the nature of the modules investigated. The first "flaw" is that mimetools has a deprecated "pipeto" method that lets you pipe to arbitrary commands. But mimetools is already well-known to expose os access in millions of ways (most obviously, it imports and exposes os, so if for some bizarre reason you want to avoid importing os yourself, you can simply run "mimetools.os.popen" directly); no competent programmer would expect otherwise.

The second "flaw" is that pydoc runs a pager program which lets you run an arbitrary command if you control the program environment. Of course, the documentation states explicitly that the specified pager program will be used. It's unclear what part of the behavior here he thinks even surprising. And, again, the pydoc module imports and exposes "os" in exactly the same way that mimetools does.