Shopping Isn't Politics
Cory Doctorow argues that consumer choices are ineffective as political activism, critiquing the notion that shopping ethically can substitute for collective action and regulatory change to address systemic problems.
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A state-designed worm from 2005 called Fast16 sat undetected on VirusTotal for nearly a decade. It intercepted executable files at the kernel level and silently altered floating-point calculations in high-precision engineering software like LS-DYNA, which was used in Iran's nuclear weapons research. Unlike Stuxnet, Fast16 received little public attention for over twenty years.
Paul Graham reports that Y Combinator startups now have over 75% of their code written by AI, a threshold crossed at least one to two years ago. This parallels a similar transformation at Google, where AI-written code went from 0% to 75% in about two years.
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A supply chain attack has compromised the popular npm axios HTTP client library with 300 million weekly downloads. Malicious versions install a remote access trojan, though some users may have avoided infection through version pinning or older installations. Security experts warn this is a live compromise affecting one of npm's most depended-on packages.