Google's Vice President of Devices and Services, Shakil Barkat, all but confirmed in an interview with 9to5 Google that its next Pixel phone would cost more than the Pixel 10. Considering the ongoing RAM supply issues due to the explosion of AI data centers, the rumored price hike is not a complete surprise. Companies from […]

TL;DR: We checked Halonyx — our self-hosted E2EE messenger implementing X3DH + Double Ratchet — against the EU's Chat Control, US EARN IT Act, India's IT Rules 2021, the UK's Online Safety Act + Investigatory Powers Act, and the UN Cybercrime Convention. Here's the honest answer for each. When you implement end-to-end encryption from scratch, you spend a lot of time thinking about cryptographic threat models. Key substitution attacks. OPK exhaustion. WebRTC IP leakage. The adversaries you model are largely technical. At some point, you have to model a different kind of adversary: the legal one. We built Halonyx — a self-hostable E2EE messenger implementing the Signal Protocol (X3DH key exchange, Double Ratchet, Safety Numbers, WebTorrent P2P file transfer). The server architecturally cannot read your messages — not by policy, but because it holds no decryption keys and no plaintext. We wrote a STRIDE threat model across 17 attack surfaces. We did not write a legal threat model. So we did. This is what we found across five jurisdictions. None of this is legal advice. All of it is current as of July 2026, in a policy landscape that is actively moving. Quick Architecture Recap Before the jurisdiction breakdown, a one-paragraph recap of what Halonyx actually does, because the architecture is what determines the legal exposure. The relay server stores and forwards only AES-256-GCM ciphertext. It holds no private keys, performs no cryptographic operations on behalf of users, and has no mechanism to identify message content or originators. User identity is a pseudonymous 256-bit USID — the server stores only SHA-256(USID) . Files transfer peer-to-peer via WebTorrent; the server receives only a magnet URI. This architecture — which we call Federated Relay Architecture (FRA) — is what creates the legal situation described below. 1. European Union — Chat Control / CSAR Current status: No conflict with anything currently in force. The EU's Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR),

One of the most confusing topics for beginners in Node.js isn't Express, APIs, or asynchronous programming—it's understanding where npm packages should be installed. When I started learning Node.js, I thought there were only two commands: npm install package-name and npm install -g package-name I knew they both installed packages, but I had no idea when to use which one . Eventually, I realized they solve two completely different problems. If you're learning Node.js, this article will save you from one of the most common beginner mistakes. First, What Does npm Actually Do? npm (Node Package Manager) is the package manager that comes with Node.js. It helps you: Install libraries Manage project dependencies Update packages Share your own packages Run project scripts Whenever you install a package, npm has to decide where to install it. That's where local and global installations come in. Local Installation (The Default) When you run: npm install express npm installs Express inside your current project . Your folder now looks something like this: my-project/ │ ├── node_modules/ ├── package.json ├── package-lock.json └── app.js It also adds Express to your package.json : { "dependencies" : { "express" : "^5.0.0" } } This means: Express belongs to this project. Anyone who clones your repository can simply run: npm install and npm installs everything automatically. That's exactly what you want for project dependencies. Why Local Installation Matters Imagine you're building an API. Your code contains: const express = require ( " express " ); Now imagine another developer clones your project. If Express was installed locally, they only need to run: npm install Everything works. If it wasn't, they'll see something like: Cannot find module 'express' because the dependency isn't part of the project. That's why libraries your application depends on should almost always be installed locally. Global Installation Now consider this command: npm install -g nodemon This installs node

After living in multiple countries around the world and working remotely, I discovered that the best working cultures are asynchronous ones. An asynchronous working culture is a model where team members collaborate and complete tasks on their own schedules, without needing to be online at the same time or respond instantly. This means employees can work when and where they please for maximum productivity, often times companies who have succesfully implemented async communication have teams with

Every five minutes or so, my entire Windows machine would drop off the network for a few seconds — not just WSL, the whole host. Browser tabs would stall, calls would drop, and it only happened while WSL2 was running. This is the story of finding that, plus the WSL memory-tuning landmines I hit right alongside it. The flapping The symptom was a host-wide network blip on a short, regular interval, correlated tightly with WSL2 being up. The cause: WSL2's default networking mode creates a virtual NAT switch on the Windows side, and on this machine that virtual switch was intermittently conflicting with the real network adapter — enough to cause the whole host to briefly renegotiate its connection. The fix was switching WSL2's networking mode entirely, via .wslconfig (on Windows, not inside the Linux filesystem): [wsl2] networkingMode = mirrored dnsTunneling = true autoProxy = true Mirrored networking makes the WSL2 interface share the host's actual network identity instead of sitting behind a separate virtual NAT switch. You can confirm it actually took effect (rather than just trusting the config file) by checking, from inside WSL after a full restart, that its network interface holds the same IP as the Windows host, that the default route points at the real LAN gateway rather than a private NAT range, and that loopback carries mirrored mode's marker address rather than a 172.x NAT address. If any of those don't match, the setting isn't actually active yet. Worth noting: this requires a reasonably recent WSL version and Windows build. If you're on an older one, mirrored mode may not be available at all. The memory landmines, found the hard way Separately — and this had actually caused full VM crashes, not just hangs, at one point — I'd been carrying a few .wslconfig settings that looked reasonable and were each, individually, a documented source of instability: An explicit kernelCommandLine override. Resizing swap past a few GB, which forces WSL to rebuild its virtual

SpaceX will likely attempt to catch Starship back at the launch pad on its next flight.

Related to this thread [1] which Jabber clients not only detect MitM tampering when a valid cert is used in the middle but is not the cert on the server, meaning an entity obtained a certificate, used it to MitM the connection and the client not only rejects this alternate valid certificate but also alerts the user to the MitM. XEP-0474 SASL SCRAM Downgrade Protection (Experimental) [2] Claude does not seem to know and I can't find any clarifying documentation, just lots of open issues. The purp

The UK MET office recently redesigned their site, adding a lot of additional whitespace, scrolling, and animations. This significantly reduced its usability for me, and left me wanting an ‘at a glance’ weather site. I made https://brolly.sh , a minimalist, plain text weather forecasting site. You can use it to view weather from around the world, with: 7 day forecast; Previous day log (so you can confirm it definitely was cooler / hotter / wetter / drier yesterday!); Hourly rain, wind, temperatur

Building your solar panel system with some extra capacity makes managing it a bit easier.

SpinWin is an open source menu bar app to visually rotate any individual window. You can rotate / spin as many as you want one by one. I was scrolling reels when one came on where the content creator suggested "turning the phone upside down" for a portion. I was sitting at my mac, and decided to see if I could find something that did this. To my surprise, nothing exists, so I decided to build it. Turns out macOS doesn't provide any public API to do anything like this, so I wound up using the Acc

A company spokesperson said that it's "still exploring all our options for the best approach."