Links December 2025

Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart who sems like one of the few conservative politicians I could respect and possibly even like [1]. It has some good insights about the problems with our current political environment.

The NY Times has an amusing article about the attempt to sell the solution to the CIA’s encrypted artwork [2].

Wired has an interesting article about computer face recognition systems failing on people with facial disabilities or scars [3]. This is a major accessibility issue potentially violating disability legislation and a demonstration of the problems of fully automating systems when there should be a human in the loop.

The October 2025 report from the Debian Reproducible Builds team is particularly interesting [4]. “kpcyrd forwarded a fascinating tidbit regarding so-called ninja and samurai build ordering, that uses data structures in which the pointer values returned from malloc are used to determine some order of execution” LOL

Louis Rossmann made an insightful youtube video about the moral case for piracy of software and media [5].

Louis Rossman made an insightful video about the way that Hyundai is circumventing Right to Repair laws to make repairs needlessly expensive [6]. Korean cars aren’t much good nowadays. Their prices keep increasing and the quality doesn’t.

Brian Krebs wrote an interesting article about how Google is taking legal action against SMS phishing crime groups [7]. We need more of this!

Josh Griffiths wrote an informative blog post about how YouTube is awful [8]. I really should investigate Peertube.

Louis Rossman made an informative YouTube video about Right to Repair and the US military, if even the US military is getting ripped off by this it’s a bigger problem than most people realise [9]. He also asks the rhetorical question of whether politicians are bought or whether it’s a “subscription model”.

Brian Krebs wrote an informative article about the US plans to ban TP Link devices, OpenWRT seems like a good option [10].

Brian Krebs wrote an informative article about “free streaming” Android TV boxes that act as hidden residential VPN proxies [11]. Also the “free streaming” violates copyright law.

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an interesting article about ways that AI is being used to strengthen democracy [12].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article about the incentives for making shitty goods and services and why we need legislation to protect consumers [13].

Linus Tech Tips has an interesting interview with Linus Torvalds [14].

Interesting video about the Kowloon Walled City [15]. It would be nice if a government deliberately created a hive city like that, the only example I know of is the Alaskan town in a single building.

David Brin wrote an insightful set of 3 blog posts about a Democratic American deal that could improve the situation there [16].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2czzxp77
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/22k6yo6s
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/29fg9ses
• [4] https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2025-10/
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAx3yCNomkg
• [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv9jAQ_MiK0
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/276qmbuh
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2bhp6sa2
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0LmjzXV7IA
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/22pgz36h
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2xveozvd
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2bjs4g2j
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/2bsh3wbt
• [14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA
• [15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoNclh1K_zY
• [16] https://tinyurl.com/29opfj43