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Your Phone Number Was Never a Good Password

Signal disclosed today that the Twilio phishing breach exposed around 1,900 users' phone numbers, which got me ranting about why SMS verification is still load-bearing for so much of our security.

August 15, 2022·3 min read

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Living With Stage Manager (And Other iOS 16 Beta Notes)

Three weeks into the iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 public betas: lock screen widgets are better than I expected, Stage Manager is still fighting me, and passkeys are almost here.

August 8, 2022·3 min read

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A Fake IT Text Message Is All It Took

Twilio disclosed today that a fake IT text message was all it took to phish employee credentials and get at customer data. A look at why the boring attacks keep working, and why I'm finally ditching SMS codes on my own accounts.

August 7, 2022·4 min read

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Google Pushes Back the Cookie Apocalypse, Again

Google pushed the third-party cookie phaseout in Chrome back again, this time to late 2024. A rundown of why, plus why I don't quite believe the new date either.

July 28, 2022·4 min read

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Make Instagram Instagram Again

Instagram's push toward a TikTok-style algorithmic feed sparked a very online backlash this week, complete with Kardashian-approved protest graphics and a sudden BeReal obsession.

July 26, 2022·4 min read

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The Cloud Has No AC

A record UK heat wave took down parts of Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud's London data centers this week, and it's a good reminder that "the cloud" is just a building with a thermostat.

July 20, 2022·4 min read

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Netflix Beat the (Very Low) Bar

Netflix's Q2 losses came in lower than feared, thanks partly to Stranger Things 4 — but the real story is the ad tier and password-sharing crackdown quietly taking shape underneath it.

July 19, 2022·4 min read

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Making My Own Version of the JWST Carina Nebula Photo

I downloaded the raw JWST data from MAST and tried to make my own version of the Carina Nebula photo. It did not go as smoothly as I expected.

July 18, 2022·4 min read

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The Webb Images Everyone's Sharing Aren't the Interesting Part

NASA's first full James Webb images went public this morning, and the raw data landed in the public archive right alongside them — which is the part actually worth paying attention to.

July 12, 2022·4 min read

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Webb's First Deep Field, and a Website That Couldn't Handle It

NASA and the White House released the first full-color James Webb Space Telescope image last night, and I spent twenty minutes fighting NASA's own website just to download the full-res version.

July 11, 2022·4 min read

TechpadinTutorials

Two Weeks of Letting Copilot Finish My Sentences

A holiday-weekend writeup on two weeks of actually using GitHub Copilot since it left preview and went generally available, warts and all.

July 3, 2022·4 min read

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Copilot Isn't Free Anymore

GitHub Copilot left preview and got a price tag this week ($10/month, free for students and OSS maintainers) - some notes on nine months of free access, the bugs it quietly hands you, and the licensing argument that isn't going away.

June 24, 2022·4 min read