DATE ARCHIVE
2026-09-15
Articles published on 2026-09-15.
ZuckOff Can Spot Nearby Smart Glasses—But Not Whether They Are Recording
ZuckOff is a free phone app that matches Bluetooth identifiers and manufacturer data against known smart-glasses signatures. It can estimate rough proximity, but it cannot identify the wearer or confirm that a camera is active.
Why Dividing by Depth Makes 3D Look Instant
A simple depth-division rule captures the core of perspective projection: as a point moves farther from the camera, its horizontal and vertical screen positions move closer to the vanishing point. A fuller camera pipeline wraps that step in transformations that handle orientation, field of view, clipping, and screen mapping.
The engineering behind the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve: salt‑cavern storage
The United States stores emergency crude oil in underground salt caverns carved from salt domes along the Gulf Coast. This design provides a combined authorized capacity of roughly 714 million barrels at a cost of about $3.50 per barrel—far below the $15‑$18 per barrel for aboveground tanks—while positioning the reserve near refineries and marine terminals for rapid delivery during supply disruptions.
Running Git on object storage, if you rebuild the packfile format
A new open-source project shows that Git can run on top of object storage instead of a local filesystem — but only if Git's packfile and index formats are reimagined, because the ones Git ships with are built around disk seeks and memory-mapped reads rather than HTTP range requests.
Michal Zalewski's 'The Secret Life of Circuits' Ships: A Hands-On Electronics Reference for Engineers and Hobbyists
After more than a year in development, Michal Zalewski's illustrated guide to electronic circuit design is now shipping from No Starch Press. The 472-page full-color hardcover builds intuition from physics upward, covering semiconductors, analog building blocks, digital logic, microcontrollers, and PCB design — with nearly 300 hand-drawn diagrams and workbench photographs.
CSS-Tricks Goes Dark Again Under DigitalOcean Ownership
CSS-Tricks, a long-running web development publication, is inactive for a second time since its 2022 acquisition by DigitalOcean. Editor Geoff Graham says recent invoices went unpaid and he can no longer afford to work without a contract, while DigitalOcean has not communicated about the site's future — even as the company pledged $3 million to a project led by David Heinemeier Hansson and cut smaller monthly support to GNOME and Flathub.
25 Years After 9/11: The Shift from Targeted to Mass Surveillance and Its Constitutional Costs
Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue that a quarter-century of mass surveillance—begun as a counterterrorism measure after September 11—has expanded far beyond its original justification, eroding Fourth and First Amendment protections while enabling routine abuse by both government agencies and private companies. The essay traces how programs initially framed as narrow national-security tools became standard law-enforcement practice, fed by a pipeline of commercially collected data, and calls for a serious cost-benefit reckoning.