doire | Network

Random link: We Were the Scenery (2025), a 15-minute documentary about the experiences of two of the background extras in Apocalypse Now (1979). It's written and produced by their child.

Coincidentally, Piecework magazine's newsletter recently had a link to a short essay on Hmong story cloths and the US NE---same cluster of ruptures, different segment.

Aditi Rao's review of Spinney's Proto and Scappettone's Poetry after Barbarism asserts mildly that "both books mobilize language, and the prospect of translingual communication, as their objects of study, with markedly different political ambitions and veneers," but there's so much thought and care amongst the review's remarks that I can't summarize. The review's title is "Against Babel: or, How to Talk to Strangers."

kaberett

Today's frivolous low-stakes question is: if following a recipe, to what extent do you consider "mixed lettuces", "mixed greens", and "mixed leaf salad" synonymous?

siderea

This was it. This was the week that America admitted America is going fascist – which is to say has gone fascist, i.e. has had its government seized by fascists with broad fascist support for imposing fascism which it is now doing with zeal, i.e. has an acute case of fulminant fascism.

I've been watching this bear down on us for a half a century, so it's slightly dizzying to finally have everybody else come into alignment. One of the basic exigencies of my life has been moving through the world being reasonably certain of a bunch of things that I knew the vast majority of my fellows thought were insane to believe. Over the last ten years, more and more people have been noticing, "what are we doing in this handbasket and where is it going?" but – as evidenced by the behavior of the DNC over the last year – it's taken the secret police gunning Americans down in the streets (since I started writing this: and throwing flashbang grenades at or into (reports vary) passing cars carrying little kids) for the greater liberal mass to come around.

Obviously, it would have been nicer for the realization It Could Happen Here to have not required It Happening Here to be the conclusive rebuttal of their pathological skepticism. But one of my favorite sayings is, "There's three kinds. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves," (Will Rogers) and this is why. Clearly America needed to piss on the electric fence for itself. I try to be philosophical about it.

I just felt, if only for myself and posterity, I should note this long-in-coming nation-wide realization has finally been attained.

I'm not getting too carried away, though. It's hard to be too jubilant when the problem that brought us here is still very much with us, by which I don't mean the fascism itself, I mean the terrible mentality on "my" "side" that causes that pathological skepticism and other catastrophic thinking faults that brought us to this pass and lead to the fascists getting away, quite literally, with murder.

js_thrill

I wanted more books about people exploring dangerous and mysterious alien spaceships! And I found some! This one was well written, and an engaging read, but I did wind up feeling like it answered too many questions and wrapped things up too neatly for good cosmic horror. I want them to end with me having some degree of feeling unsettled and pondering things.

This has more explicit gore/body-horror than Ship of Fools did, in case anyone is seeking/avoiding such things.

i would give this 4 stars

siderea

This is blackly hilarious and absolutely worth a read.

Leftist journalist Laura Jedeed showed up at an ICE recruiting events to do scope it out and write about what she found. What happened next is... eye widening.

2026 Jan 13: Slate: "You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof." [Paywall defeater] by Laura Jedeed:

At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.

The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.

In short, I figured—at least back then—that my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICE’s application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.

[...]

I completely missed the email when it came. I’d kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I’d grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.

“Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,” the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I’d need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: “If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.”

As I mentioned, I’d missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.

And that might have been where this all ended—an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox—if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. “Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process,” it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) “Please complete your required pre-employment drug test.”

The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadn’t smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, I’d waste a small piece of ICE’s gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me I’d failed.

Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.

Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.

According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”

I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”

By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.

Click through to read the whole thing.

js_thrill

Today's song: Fresh Cherries in Trinidad

Watch on YouTube

I did not enjoy listening to this song! I think maybe a version without the ding ding ding duh duh duh ding ding of the casio keyboard would be good, but I was not a fan of this version.

The titular Trinidad turns out to be a town in California.

Current Music: Fresh Cherries in Trinidad — The Mountain Goats

mrissa

P.F. Chisholm, A Suspicion of Silver. Ninth in its mystery series, set late in the reign of Elizabeth I/in the middle of when James I and VI was still just James VI. I don't recommend starting it here, because there was a moment when I wailed, "no, not [name]!" when you won't have a very strong sense of that character from just this book. Pretty satisfying for where it is in its series, though, still enjoying. Especially as they have returned to the north, which I like much better.

Joan Coggin, Who Killed the Curate?. A light British mid-century mystery, first in its series and I'm looking forward to reading more. If you were asked to predict what a book published in 1944 with this title would be like, you would have this book absolutely bang on the nose, so if you read that title and went "ooh fun," go get it, and if you read that title and thought "oh gawd not another of those," you're not wrong either. I am very much in the "ooh fun" camp.

Matt Collins with Roo Lewis, Forest: A Journey Through Wild and Magnificent Landscapes. Photos and essays about forests, not entirely aided by its printer printing it a little toward the sepia throughout. Still a relaxing book if you are a Nice Books About Nice Trees fan, which I am.

John Darnielle, This Year: A Book of Days (365 Songs Annotated). When I first saw John Darnielle/The Mountain Goats live, I recognized him. I don't mean that I knew him before, I mean that I taught a lot of people like him physics labs once upon a time: people who had seen a lot of shit and now would like to learn some nice things about quantum mechanics please. Anyway this book was fun and interesting and confirmed that Darnielle is exactly who you'd think he was from listening to the Mountain Goats all this time.

Nadia Davids, Cape Fever. A short mildly speculative novel about a servant girl in Cape Town navigating life with a controlling and unpleasant employer. Beautifully written and gentle in places you might not have thought possible. Looking forward to whatever else Davids does.

Djuna, Counterweight. Weird space elevator novella (novel? very short one if so) in a highly corporate Ruritanian world with strong Korean cultural influences (no surprise as this is in translation from Korean). I think this slipped by a lot of SFF people and maybe shouldn't have.

Margaret Frazer, This World's Eternity. Kindle. I continue to dislike the short stories that result from Frazer trying to write Shakespeare's version of historical figures rather than what she thinks they would actually have been like. Does that mean I'll stop reading these? Hmm, I think there's only one left.

Drew Harvell, The Ocean's Menagerie: How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life. If you like the subgenre There's Weird Stuff In The Ocean, which I do, this is a really good one of those. Gosh is there weird stuff in the ocean. Very satisfying.

Rupert Latimer, Murder After Christmas. Another light British murder mystery from 1944, another that is basically exactly what you think it is. What a shame he didn't have the chance to write a lot more.

Wen-Yi Lee, When They Burned the Butterfly. Gritty and compelling, small gods and teenage girl gangs in 1970s Singapore. Singular and great. Highly recommended.

Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older, eds., We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope. There's some really lovely stuff in here, and a wide variety of voices. Basically this is what you would want this kind of anthology to be.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. I don't pick your subtitles, authors. You and your editors are doing that. So when you claim to be a history of sex and Christianity...that is an expectation you have set. And when you don't include the Copts or the Nestorians or nearly anything about the Greek or Russian Orthodox folks and then you get to the 18th and 19th centuries and sail past the Shakers and the free love Christian communes...it is not my fault that I grumble that your book is in no way a history of sex and Christianity, you're the one that claimed it was that and then really wanted to do a history of semi-normative Western Christian sex among dominant populations. What a disappointment.

Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Spells and The Lost Words (reread). I accidentally got both of these instead of just one, but they're both brief and poetic about nature vocabulary, a good time without being a big commitment.

Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. This is one of those broad-concept pieces of nonfiction, with burial mounds but also mycorrhizal networks. MacFarlane's prose is always readable, and this is a good time.

David Narrett, The Cherokees: In War and At Peace, 1670-1840. And again: I did not choose your subtitle, neighbor. So when you claim that your history goes through 1840...and then everything after 1796 is packed into a really brief epilogue...and I mean, what could have happened to the Cherokees after 1796 but before 1840, surely it couldn't be [checks notes] oh, one of the major events in their history as a people, sure, no, what difference could that make. Seriously, I absolutely get not wanting to write about the Trail of Tears. But then don't tell people you're writing about the Trail of Tears. Honestly, 1670-1800, who could quibble with that. But in this compressed epilogue there are paragraphs admonishing us not to forget about...people we have not learned about in this book and will have some trouble learning about elsewhere because Cherokee histories are not thick on the ground. Not as disappointing as the MacCulloch, but still disappointing.

Tim Palmer, The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. I found this to be a comfort read, which I think a lot of people won't if they haven't already gone through things like disproving hidden variables as a source of quantum uncertainty. But it'll still be interesting--maybe more so--and the stuff he worked on about climate physics is great.

Henry Reece, The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic. If you want a general history, that's the Alice Hunt book I read last fortnight. This is a more specifically focused work about the last approximately two years, the bit between Cromwell's death and the Restoration. Also really well done, also interesting, but doing a different thing. You'll probably get more out of this if you have a solid grasp on the general shape of the period first.

Randy Ribay, The Reckoning of Roku. As regular readers can attest, I mostly don't read media tie-ins--mostly just not interested. But F.C. Yee's Avatar: the Last Airbender work was really good, so I thought, all right, why not give their next author a chance. I'm glad I did. This is a fun YA fantasy novel that would probably work even if you didn't know the Avatar universe but will be even better if you do.

Madeleine E. Robins, The Doxie's Penalty. Fourth in a series of mysteries, but it's written so that you could easily start here. Well-written, well-plotted, generally enjoyable. I was thinking of rereading the earlier volumes of the series, and I'm now more, not less, motivated to do so.

Georgia Summers, The Bookshop Below. I feel like the cover of this was attempting to sell it as a cozy. It is not a cozy. It is a fantasy novel that is centered on books and bookshops, but it is about as cozy as, oh, say, Ink Blood Sister Scribe in that direction. And this is good, not everything with books in it is drama-free, look at our current lives for example. Sometimes it's nice to have a fantasy adventure that acknowledges the importance of story in our lives, and this is one of those times.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lives of Bitter Rain. This is not a novella. It is a set of vignettes of backstory from a particular character in this series. It does not hang together except that, sure, I'm willing to buy that these things happened in this order. I like this series--it was not unpleasant reading--but do not go in expecting more than what it is.

Iida Turpeinen, Beasts of the Sea. A slim novel in translation from Finnish, spanning several eras of attitudes toward natural history in general and the Steller's sea cow in specific. Vivid and moving.

Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. The nation in question is the US, in case you were wondering. This was a generally quite good book about the middle of the 19th century in the US, except of course that that's a pretty big and eventful topic, so all sorts of things are going to have to get left out. But she did her very best to hit the high spots culturally as well as politically, so overall it was the most satisfying bug crusher I've read so far this year.

violsva

In the spirit of enjoying the process more than the product, I've been picking up an old hobby this month: collecting alphabets.

I was feeling a bit nostalgic for language learning in December, and I thought that in January I might study Arabic or Mandarin, since I already have textbooks for those, and maybe I should try to keep up my French ... and then I watched Kpop Demon Hunters.

In university I taught myself Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, because it's really cool. It was invented by King Sejong in 1443 specifically so that peasants could learn to read without having to learn Chinese characters.

한글 (Hangeul) doesn't look like an alphabet if you're used to western ones, but each of the character blocks is actually made up of separable letters. So (simplification) ㅂ is b or p, and 비빔밥 is bibimbap, and you can see ㅂ in four places in that word, three times at the beginning of a syllable (upper left) and once at the end.

The thing is, my goal is not actually to learn Korean. If I wanted to be able to have a conversation or watch a movie in Korean, I would need to take a class so I could actually hear it spoken and make sure I was pronouncing the sounds correctly and practice using it with real human beings. It's awkward having both an interest in languages and social anxiety.

If I had done that in university, I might have remembered the alphabet over the intervening 15 years, instead of forgetting 90% of it because all I used it for is sounding out signs.

But I like being able to sound out words, even if I never pick up the vocabulary properly. It makes me feel like I am part of a multicultural society. So I got a Korean textbook from the library, and I'm going through it focusing on learning to read, but also finding out interesting things about Korean language and culture as I go. (Two sets of numbers!)

I thought I still had Korean flashcards I'd made in university, but it turns out they're actually from when I tried to learn Arabic. When I think I've gotten what I can from this book maybe I'll try Arabic again.

About this time last year I read a book on statistics and then one on combinatorics, making notes and doing the math exercises. They didn't stick as much as I hoped they would, but I enjoyed studying them anyway.

troyswann

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: Depressed

jesuswasbatman

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

hamsterwoman

Some fannish catching up!

1)

fandomtrees still has 3 trees below the minimum number of 2 gifts, and is thus at risk of delaying reveals again (currently scheduled for Jan 17 reveals), with the decision on delaying to be made the morning of 1/17. Needy trees are mastershield's Tree (f:astro boy, f:balan wonderland, f:kingdom hearts); kalloway's Tree (f:brave nine, f:crossovers, f:fire emblem, f:granblue fantasy, f:gundam, f:kingdom of heroes, f:super robot heroes) whoremoantreatments' Tree (f:advance wars, f:bleach, f:hypnosis mic, f:kuroko no basket, f:pokemon, f:tales of berseria, f:the world ends with you). (List kept updated here.) All of these are open to fic, and the minimum fill for fic is only 100 words, if anyone knows these fandoms and can help out.

(My tree has above the minimum number of gifts but is here, and I’m eager to see what’s on it :)

2) I should’ve mentioned this earlier, but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

lunasariel is hosting a sync read of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath in her DW here. Currently it’s her, me, and

cyanmnemosyne reading along, but contrary to the name, we don’t actually have to be all synched up to participate, so if (like me) you’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, or if you’ve read it already and want to follow our impressions as we make progress through it, come join! I am currently just past halfway,

lunasariel is 10-20 chapters ahead of me, and Cyan has just recently started. (And yes, my thoughts on this book are ~50% on the chemistry. Actual Periodic Table of Elements chemistry, I mean, not chemistry between characters, although I’m enjoying that too.)

3) Snowflake catch up!

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

The problem with doing Snowflake every year for the last, uh… 10 years, I guess? – is that for repeated questions like this, which are about ME as opposed to about my fandoms or projects or objects, which can accumulate it is much harder to come up with something new to say! Both of these questions fall under that category, and so were more challenging than most for me to answer. But let’s see if I can come up with something without repeating myself.

Challenge #7: LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

I do want to stick to fandom-related things I like about myself for this one, so, hm. Last time I answered this question seems to be in 2017 (and my things were “good fannish role model for my children”, “thorough and detailed in talking about what I’m reading/watching”, and “conscientious beta”) and the first time in 2016 (my answers were “good fannish baba/matchmaker”, "committed to fannish crack”, and “conscientious about fandom participation”) – and I do still feel those things are all applicable to me and I still like them. But I’ve done a bunch of new things in the last 9 years, from attending conventions to paying attention to the Hugos to signing up for Yuletide, so let me focus on those new things and see if I can extract three new things I like about myself fannishly from them.

( things I like about myself viz conventions, fanfic, and Hugos )

Challenge #8: Talk about your creative process.

This is another one I’ve done before, in 2019 and in 2015, but looking at even the 2019 one, I talked about fannish poetry and graphics, but not about fannish prose/fanfic. So clearly that’s what I should talk about, but what IS my process?

( Fanfic process )

adrian_turtle

Is anyone I know going to Arisia this weekend? I'm thinking of going for a day but haven't decided which day. Masking is the only way I feel safe going to this kind of event, but masking also makes it harder to make a long relaxed day of it because I can't go out to a restaurant with half a dozen friends for 90 minutes in the middle of the day. Even so, I'd like to see people if that's possible.

rachelmanija

In this engrossing historical novel, three storylines converge on a single target, a female Nazi nicknamed the Huntress. During the war, we follow Nina, one of the Soviet women who flew bomber runs and were known as the Night Witches. After the war, we follow Ian, a British war correspondent turned Nazi hunter, who has teamed up with Nina to hunt down the Huntress as Nina is one of the very few people who saw her face and survived. At the same time, in Boston, we follow Jordan, a young woman who wants to be a photographer and is suspicious of the beautiful German immigrant her father wants to marry...

In The Huntress, we often know what has happened or surely must happen, but not why or how; we know Nina somehow ended up facing off with the Huntress, but not how she got there or how she escaped; we know who Jordan's stepmom-to-be is and that she'll surely be unmasked eventually, but not how or when that'll happen or how the confrontation will go down. There's a lot of suspense but none of it depends on shocking twists, though there are some unexpected turns.

Nina and Jordan are very likable and compelling, especially Nina who is kind of a force of nature. It took me a while to warm up to Ian, but I did about halfway through. Nina's story is fascinating and I could have read a whole novel just about her and her all-female regiment, but I never minded switching back to Jordan as while her life is more ordinary, it's got this tense undercurrent of creeping horror as she and everyone around her are being gaslit and manipulated by a Nazi.

This is the kind of satisfying, engrossing historical novel that I think used to be more common, though this one probably has a lot more queerness than it would have had if it had been written in the 80s - a woman/woman relationship is central to the story, and there are multiple other queer characters. It has some nice funny moments and dialogue to leaven a generally serious story (Nina in particular can be hilarious), and there's some excellent set piece action scenes. If my description sounds good to you, you'll almost certainly enjoy it.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Quinn has written multiple historical novels, mostly set during or around WW2. This is the first I've read but it made me want to read more of hers.

Content notes: Wartime-typical violence, gaslighting, a child in danger. The Huntress murdered six children, but this scene does not appear on-page. There is no sexual assault and no scenes in concentration camps.

adrian_turtle

We went to the Boston rally against ICE last Saturday. One of my study partners asked afterwards if it made me fired up with solidarity, and inspired to resist more strongly? Not really. Not this time. But my presence made the crowd a bit bigger, and I hope a bigger crowd inspired others incrementally more.

I saw a kid near the T station, on the edge of the crowd, and heard her ask, "Mommy, what's ab abol abolish?" She was of an age to be fairly new to reading, so she had to sound out the word on the "Abolish ICE" signs. Her mother said abolishing was when you got rid of something completely by making a law against it, like the abolition of slavery. It made me wonder about little kids tagging along when when Bostonians marched for abolition in the 19th century.

umadoshi

As so often happens, I had several things I meant to post about and now they've mostly evaporated.

But I do know my tabs situation is staggering out of control. (Reliably over 1700 for at least the last couple of weeks.) Odds that I'll get to replying to all the posts I've read but opened in a tab to reply to later on...are currently very slim.

Have a link: Sarah Kurchak wrote about Heated Rivalry for TIME recently: "Heated Rivalry Handles Autism With Love, Care, and a Touch of Awkwardness".

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Dessa — Rothko (live for The Current)

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2026/01/16/make-banana-cry/

lsanderson

ICE ( Read more... )

Giving Trump the Nobel peace prize medal is ‘absurd’, say Norwegian politicians
US president criticised for accepting medal awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado
Miranda Bryant Nordic correspondent
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/16/maria-corina-machado-giving-trump-nobel-peace-prize-medal-absurd-say-norwegian-politicians

At the root of all our problems stands one travesty: politicians’ surrender to the super-rich
George Monbiot
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/16/super-rich-inequality-politicians-extreme-wealth ( Read more... )

thewayne

Sigh.

So in addition to memory, solid-state drives, high-end video cards, now they're eating up hard drives. Some drives up up 60% in THE LAST FOUR MONTHS, according to a report from a German news source.

From the article: "The trend is also visible in the U.S. A Seagate IronWolf drive with just 4TB capacity would have set you back $70 in early 2023; that drive is now $99. Similarly, the 8TB model is $199, when it would have been priced as low as $130 a couple of years ago. Western Digital's Red Plus alternative is now $175 for 8TB. The toughest blow of all? Seagate's iconic BarraCuda 24TB drive, which we've seen cost as little as $239 during sales events, now costs a whopping $499 on Amazon, and you'll be buying it from a third party. Newegg doesn't even have it in stock."

Apparently there is a knock-on effect of people now building PCs with DDR4 memory instead of the latest DDR5 because all of that memory is being gobbled up by AI. So now older motherboards are in higher demands? AI server boards are specialized beasts and aren't the same thing that you're going to put in your gaming rig.

Apparently the hard disk drives are used to store the bulk data for training AI models, then all the operations are carried out on SSD arrays for speed. Makes sense, from a computer operations standpoint.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/hard-drive-prices-have-surged-by-an-average-of-46-percent-since-september-iconic-24tb-seagate-barracuda-now-usd500-as-ai-claims-another-victim

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/16/1332213/hard-drive-prices-have-surged-by-an-average-of-46-since-september

thewayne

This is one specific manufacturer, WHIIL. Researchers found that the Bluetooth channel, used normally for configuring the wheelchair upon delivery and for service, was completely unsecure. No authentication, no certificates, no nothing.

The researchers were able to take complete control of the wheelchair, making it run at top speed (5 MPH) and sent it careening down stairs.

One comment on Bruce Schneier's blog commented about OpenBSD, a Unix fork that prides itself on being very secure. They do not support Bluetooth at all. When asked about it, they said that the Bluetooth stack cannot be secured. I'm surprised that something like a wheelchair interface isn't secured with just a panel and a USB cable. Simple controlled physical access. The scariest part is that they can now do Bluetooth well over half a mile, both send and receive - so theoretically hacks like this and transactions can be phished and the baddies are no where near you.

https://www.securityweek.com/researchers-expose-whill-wheelchair-safety-risks-via-remote-hacking/

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/hacking-wheelchairs-over-bluetooth.html

Profile

doire

February 2024

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18	19	20	21	22	23	24
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Page Summary

thistleingrey - some links
kaberett - you are all magnificently helpful - thank you <3
siderea - Well, we're finally here [me, pols]
js_thrill - The Last Astronaut (David Wellington)
siderea - Slipping on into ICE [curr ev, pols]
js_thrill - This Year 365 songs: January 16th
mrissa - Books read, early January
violsva - Collecting Alphabets
troyswann - I'm not qitting; I'm... yes, temporarily lying down
jesuswasbatman - Starfleet Academy ep 1: "Kids These Days"
hamsterwoman - Snowflake (days 7-8) and other fannish catching up
adrian_turtle - Arisia
rachelmanija - The Huntress, by Kate Quinn
adrian_turtle - Mommy, what's abolition?
umadoshi - A very insubstantial post, but hey, there's a Heated Rivalry link
chickenfeet - Make Banana Cry
lsanderson - 2026.01.16
thewayne - Thank you, AI data centers! Now conventional hard drive prices are up 46%!
thewayne - Security researchers hack electric wheelchair via Bluetooth

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Style: Classic for Refried Tablet by zvi and Aaron B. Russell

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