Talking a lot on the CISO Series about software bill of materials, or SBOMs, as a way to get more visibility into the software supply chain. Interesting to see a bit of that same concept applied to AI models. SBOMs suffer from a lack of quality and standardization, and I’m not sure putting something similar on a blockchain changes that.

CNET was one of the foundational sites for me in my early interneting. It had high-volume and high-quality articles across the tech landscape. It was early to web video (even when my dial-up did not allow me to enjoy it without an hour long buffering session) and podcasts. I learned how to build a PC from one of their videos and solved a lot of tech support challenges.

But in the 2010s it largely fell out of my browsing habits. The home page, once a place of discovery, was bloated with pop-up videos. I’d read a few articles of note in my RSS feed but much more frequently looked at other options. The Verge, among many other sites, once derided for using “bloggers,” now turning out top tier journalism in CNET’s nadir.

The struggles of CNET under CBS Interactive ownership aren’t anything new. Essentially I like the work from a lot of their staff, but it became packaged in an increasingly unpalatable site. But one thing CNET offered that no other site could touch is their long track record of coverage. Internet Archive has captures of the site back to 1996. That’s an incredible resource and a proud legacy.

However that is getting increasingly difficult to access. I recently tried to look up past winners of “Best of CES” awards. These used to be handled by CNET, before being handed to Engadget in the early-2010s. This came after the site took back an award from Dish because CBS was suing it.. But there doesn’t appear to be a comprehensive list of winners by year, either from CNET, Engadget or the CTA.

So I decided to put that list together, just for my own edification. Engadget doesn’t have a great search, but it’s usable enough. However I noticed on CNET that there is no search box anymore. It’s not at the top of the page or in the footer. It doesn’t appear on the site map. cnet.com/search goes to a 404 page. When did this happen?

I assumed the loss of search must have happened when the site launched a big redesign in 2022. Or maybe when Red Ventures bought the company in 2020. Oddly, the death of search at the company followed neither of those milestones, at least directly.

After some digging on the Wayback Machine, I found that the search icon disappeared from the top of CNET’s homepage way back on May 24, 2019. This didn’t actually kill search, just made it invisible from the front page, the search page was still online and seemingly functional. The actual loss of search functionality came much later, under Red Venture’s ownership. The search page started returning 404 pages as of November 15, 2022. The Wayback Machine only indexed the page twice since then, with the same result.

It’s not too surprising CNET turned off search. It’s the same site that also planned to delete archives to improve it’s SEO. While it might be easy to get nostalgic in CNET’s place in tech media history, clearly that’s not a priority for its current ownership.

Maybe there still is search at CNET, but it is completely obscured to someone actively looking for it. I even tried creating an account on the site, which seemingly doesn’t do anything. I didn’t even get an account confirmation email. But it didn’t reveal search to me. If I missed it, please let me know.

Interestingly, CNET France, CNET Japan, and CNET Korea all feature search on the top of their homepages. CNET Germany redirects to ZDNet.

Glad to see Samsung guaranteeing seven years of OS updates on it’s latest Galaxy flagship phones. It’s still at a slight disadvantage to Pixel and iPhones in that these OS updates won’t be day of release (I think). But it means the biggest Android OEM is taking away one of Apple’s biggest advantages. Now let’s bring these kind of updates to their more affordable phones.

Troy Hunt just added a new data breach to Have I Been Pwned that includes 33% unique email addresses, ones that haven’t been indexed on the site before. A good reminder that HIBP is an amazing service for the community and to get friends and relatives to sign up for email alerts. Guess how I found out about this new leak…

Yamaha just announced an interesting little groovebox, the SEQTRAK. It’s billed as an OP-Z competitor, and I get it based on looks. I love that it comes in fun colors and has plenty of encoders (knobs). Little sad no velocity sensitive buttons but that’s par for the course. It’s got a good selection of effects, and supports stereo samples, but initial look that the sequencer might be a little basic compared to what you can get on the Elektron Model series.

Need to see how the companion app looks, I always assume that means the device doesn’t stand up on it’s own as well. If nothing else, the UI will either require attaching the phone app or a lot of button combos to remember. Biggest difference with the OP-Z is there’s no ability to integrate this into modular arrangements. That required an expansion module for CV control on the OP-Z, but still a notable capability.

Overall it looks really fun and at the $400 launch price, damn competitive. At that price it’s just a little more expensive than Teenage Engineering’s recent hit, the KO2 sampler. The SEQTRAK gives you dedicated synth engines, a mixer, per-track and master effects, and way more sampling memory for about $100 more. It’s probably still as much of a synth mom/dad musical curiosity than serious music making tool. But as an avowed member of that class, I’m glad there are more options at better price points. If nothing else I trust Yamaha’s product QC way more than Teenage Engineering at this point.

The Internet Archive is always kind of amazing. Just a 50TB free upload with no notice and everyone can access it.

Thank you health insurance. The cost of a visit is either a bargain or on average.

On the one hand, the external eye thing is still deeply unsettling as presented in all Apple marketing. On the other hand, maybe it’s like mixed reality litmus test. If you’re on board for that, you’re down for anything.

Recently I switched from TinyLetter (RIP) to WordPress Newsletters. Only regret so far is that I lost my published back catalog of newsletters. But just for media handling alone I’m glad I made the switch. TinyLetter couldn’t do things like rotate an image in the app. Turns out WordPress is good :)

I really though Apple would announce plans to offer in-store demos ahead of the launch to further build hype. I’m sure in-store experiences will be a big part of the launch plans, but was hoping to get a look a little earlier.

Every once in a while, I’m tempted to log into my Nextdoor account.

It’s kind of crazy that given the VR boom Meta saw in the pandemic that Microsoft couldn’t make any play with Windows Mixed Reality. But given that we’re just seeing usable color passthrough in the Quest lineup, not all that surprising. I’ve loved the idea of the HoloLens, but given they never really allowed consumer sales, they clearly knew the execution wasn’t there. Very interesting timing to see Apple’s big mixed reality bet coming in the next few months.

A lot of times when dealing with complicated systems, it’s easy to get to a “turtles all the way down” point. What’s interesting with a lot of AI conversations right now is we’re watching ourselves stack the turtles.

I found myself stacking turtles reading this article about the impact of Amazon’s AI summaries on product sales. Basically sellers say these summaries over index on negativity. So I can see the utility in Amazon making these product review summaries, but also how this could really hurt a seller. But because there will be no way to scale any kind of human curation of these summaries, the next inevitable step will be to have an LLM review these summaries for overly negative content. Which then will require this ever spiraling series of LLM review because we are setting up systems that cannot scale to human curation. Turtles are now stacked. It’s supremely bizarre to see this happen in real time.

Just 14 million people with social security numbers and banking information exposed. It’s crazy how numb we are to this reality now. Like no one in my social circles will have this on their radar. And I don’t blame them because next week another MOVEit victim will have millions of people’s medical data exposed.

So I was recently on DTNS talking about migrating away from TinyLetter.

One thing I forgot to mention, I found a way to export the content of newsletters! TinyLetter lets you easily export your subscriber lists, but otherwise you can only export the record of each newsletter being sent (time, date, title), but not content. Turns out you’re a wget command away. Tried it and it worked beautifully to back up over five years of newsletters.

TL;DR on the migration, ended up going with WordPress.

Patreon showing some middle child energy here

My small (ha) issue with Micro Blog: I want my posts on my site to have titles, but if I add one, it only posts the title and the link to social feeds. I find it a lot more engaging to share the first part of the post. I guess I could just edit to add a title after, but that’s kludgy.

We’ve reached the point of 90s nostalgia that I’m shocked when there’s something from the era has escaped the capitalistic urge to sell the memory back to me. One random toy/gadget recently popped back into mind and it seemingly will remain in the dustbin of the 90s, the humble Yak Bak. This was a solid state voice recorder that let you play back a short recording. The later models added effects and had build-in sounds. Much like the low end samplers of the era, you were required to put fart sounds on them.

I think the ads at the time tried to play off the novelty of the tape recorder from Home Alone 2. I got one for Christmas as a kid and was both fascinated by it and never quite knew what to do with it. One of those gadgets they can sort of make look cool in the commercials but ends up in a junk drawer.

However I recently had the urge to acquire one for my son. He loves when audio gets cut off when you’re turning off the TV or music. He thinks its hilarious and will repeat it for days on end. So he might actually get some enjoyment out of the short recordings from a vintage Yak Bak.

Sadly I was surprised to see that the Yak Bak revival has never come to pass. There were surprisingly few models on eBay and not even a ghost brand to sell me a Alibaba knock-off could be found online. I can completely see why. Even when I had one in the 90s, I knew the voice recorded in Windows 95 did the same thing much better. When you have a voice memo app on every phone, it’s hard to make a nostalgia case for the Yak Bak.

So Yak Bak, I only sort of mildly liked you back in the 90s, and now you’re a utility phone app. So I guess I should give my son an old tape dictaphone instead.

Amazon re-released a Fire TV Cube as an AWS thin client. It costs $199, while you can pick up a Fire TV Cube for $109. While I’m sure there’s some cost of developing a new software stack for enterprises, this says much more to me about how the consuming-facing platform is subsidized by ads.

Replying to a text with a voice memo is a profound breach of the social contract

Teenage engineering has justifiably gotten flack for creating designer audio gear that is ridiculously expensive for what it does. Their recent Field series saw them a long way from the entry level price point of Pocket Operators. Glad to see them making something much more approachable with their new EP-133.

One, it looks awesome, like a Famicom meets a Speak and Spell. But more importantly, for a $300 sampler, it seems to check a lot of boxes. Stereo sampling, lots of effects (including for external sources), velocity sensitive pads, deep sequencer, not completely crippled I/O, there’s a lot to love!

Now it’s Teenage Engineering, so there will assuredly be a weird UI, frustrating limitations (64MB of sample memory to start), and likely quality control issues. But it’s way cheaper than the SP-404, which is I’m guessing its main competition. Nice to see them making functional things that I can actually afford (that isn’t a weird wooden chorus).

The Verge published a nice piece talking with TE co-founder David Eriksson with some more thoughts on how they designed it. Hopefully we’ll see some other Pocket Operators “upgraded” to the EP lineup. Would love to see a dedicated drum machine with this form factor.

I though this would seen Altman start a new venture and then Microsoft eventually acquire it. But they must have given him a Scrooge McDuck vault of money to hire him directly

My son got this from the school library and I hope he gets the series

I am evidently a podcast hoarder

I’ve been using Artifact as kind of a recreational news reader. I don’t like it for breaking stuff but it’s pretty good for lighter fare. But I’ve been completely spoiled by its clickbait headline rewriting feature. It’s changed the way I engage with that type of content.