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ZKPs (as well as C2PA and similar user attestation systems) are quite literally a DRM scheme for the web, fraught with all the usual control and accessibility issues while still being relatively easy to circumvent by a sufficiently motivated and funded actor. Given the huge number of shady companies that run "phone farms" for purposes ranging from social media spam to Spotify royalty farming, I doubt they would even put a dent on this kind of automated abuse. They would however be very effective at locking every Linux and GrapheneOS user out of the internet.

I like to call this phenomenon "reverse compression", or occasionally "depression". It's even lossy and subject to generational loss.

The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).

Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.

A particularly worrying trend that keeps spreading is the one of restricting significant amounts of (often non-financial) functionality to the apps only, gated behind your phone passing device integrity checks, in what seems to be a poorly thought out attempt at blocking all forms of scraping and automation (AI or not). The worst offender right now is probably Twitter, which alongside the recent Nitter cease-and-desist now appears to require client integrity on all logged out access.

The FeliCa NFC standard made its way into more than just transit cards in Japan. One notable user is the Amusement IC network, which lets you quickly log into arcade games across multiple manufacturers using a single card. Some implementations (Konami's e-amusement most notably) even go as far as to allow any FeliCa-compatible card or device to be linked to a profile, including transit cards, phones (with no app required!) and certain models of Sony Bluetooth earbuds which use FeliCa for quick pairing.

If C2PA and similar signature systems ever become a meaningful authenticity signal, they will create huge incentives for someone (potentially a state actor) to hack at least one camera in order to sign images of arbitrary provenance with its private keys. This will in turn inevitably lead to the same game of cat-and-mouse we have seen play out with video DRM schemes, where keys are regularly extracted from exploitable devices and used to decrypt as much content as possible before the device gets blacklisted entirely (harming all legitimate owners in the process).

The article does not make it particularly clear, but the malware in question is delivered through official first-party OTA updates on cheap Chinese aftermarket head units that happen to run Android. It cannot self-propagate to any Android-based head unit, nor does it affect Android Auto which is a "dumb" screen mirroring protocol with the bulk of the software running on the connected phone rather than the head unit. This seems to be a very similar situation to that of cheap generic Android TV streaming boxes, which often come pre-infected from the factory with residential proxies and other malware as well; most of the infrastructure is likely shared.

It's even funnier when you realize that not too long ago a decent chunk of the software industry did have to deal with the realities of having to press CDs, print boxes and ship them to retailers in time for the holiday season. The idea that you can ship a half-baked product directly to your end users, charge for it and promise it will get better over time (but only if you manage to secure enough VC funding in the meantime) is a relatively new invention.

RISC-V is in many aspects just legally-distinct-MIPS, from the base instruction set all the way up to how certain extensions introduce kludges that are very reminiscent of later MIPS additions. While I do somewhat agree on the fact it was a huge missed opportunity to improve upon MIPS's technical flaws in order to realistically compete against the likes of ARMv8, we still have to keep in mind that the primary driving force behind RISC-V is and has always been fixing the legal flaws instead.

There is indeed plenty of value to be had from a standardized (if poorly) PlayStation-1-era instruction set you can safely implement in silicon with no risk of a zombie company husk coming after you, especially in the ASIC space where (as Dmitry himself recognized) anything is better than an 8051 core you need a copy of Keil C51 and a lot of patience to write code for. Even if you end up having to add custom extensions, it still is a much better starting point than coming up with your own bespoke ISA, building a toolchain around it and convincing potential customers that your proprietary architecture is worth the effort to deal with over another vendor's licensed Cortex-M cores with full GCC and LLVM support.