Techrights

Links 25/11/2025: Iberia Data Breach and Apple Layoffs

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 25, 2025

GNOME bluefish

Contents

• LeftoversScienceCareer/EducationHardwareHealth/Nutrition/AgricultureProprietarySecurityPrivacy/SurveillanceConfidentiality Defence/AggressionTransparency/Investigative ReportingEnvironmentEnergy/TransportationWildlife/NatureOverpopulation FinanceAstroTurf/Lobbying/PoliticsFreedom of Information / Freedom of the PressDigital Restrictions (DRM)Monopolies/Monopsonies

* ### Leftovers

Vintage Everyday ☛ That Time Leonard Nimoy Met Jimi Hendrix in Cleveland, Ohio, 1968

The two cultural icons hit it off, chatting for hours. Hendrix was a devoted science fiction enthusiast and a fan of Star Trek, while Nimoy was a great admirer of Hendrix’s musical talent. Nimoy described Hendrix as“"charming,” “very nice,” and a “great, great artist.”According to Noel Redding, The Experience’s bassist who was also present, Nimoy later joined the band in their hotel room to “smoke a joint and commiserate over the utter boredom generated by press affairs.” The conversation reportedly continued until the early hours of the morning.

Doc Searls ☛ A New Era Begins

It’s not what we got from business-as-usual, which thought the Internet and everything that made it work was for them, and not for all of us. They saw us as mere users and consumers of their products and services, and not the independent and self-sovereign free agents the Internet and its protocols supported in the first places.Want evidence of the mentality involved? Listen to marketing folks calling us “targets,” to “acquire,” herd through a “funnel,” and then “manage,” “control,” and “lock in” as if we were slaves or cattle.

Artyom Bologov ☛ Towards Better Word

Armenian has 39 letters And even some more if you take some historic ones. (My favorite one is ‘ԱՒ’, doing a sound in between ‘A’ and ‘W’.) It’s a lot. With such an amount, even the language as phonetically diverse as Armenian… has some letters unused. Well, not unused, but rare. Some almost exclusively allocated to represent loan word sounds, like English soft ‘p’ or plain ‘o’ (The letters in question are ‘Փ’ and ‘Օ’.)I don’t find that bad or worthy of a language reform. More than anything, I’m ready to embrace this diversity. (However hard learning Armenian alphabet and phonetics was.)I find it more surprising that some languages don’t do that. Toki Pona is extremely minimalist in its sound set, which might be good for a conlang. But it’s terrible for loan words. And loan words are an important way to extend the language, almost for free. I realize that this is not a goal for Toki Pona, but the problem is there. Inflexibility when exposed to other languages.Now where am I getting with that… Right! Text editing!

Seth Godin ☛ Marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead

The thing is, these aren’t marketing secrets. They’re marketing choices.Instead of making average stuff for average people, the Grateful Dead decided to focus on the people who wanted to get on the bus.

Pete Brown ☛ Self-hosting sucks, pt. CDLXXXII

One of my current annoyances is that after I moved my Raspberry Pi off the shelf in my office closet in preparation for some renovation work, it is refusing to pick up an IP address from the network.I moved it to a new location, plugged it back in to the switch and turned it on, and nothing—won’t respond to pings or ssh connections, and does not show up on my router’s list of attached devices.

Stefano Marinelli ☛ Why I (still) love Linux - IT Notes

I know, this title might come as a surprise to many. Or perhaps, for those who truly know me, it won’t. I am not a fanboy. The BSDs and the illumos distributions generally follow an approach to design and development that aligns more closely with the way I think, not to mention the wonderful communities around them, but that does not mean I do not use and appreciate other solutions. I usually publish articles about how much I love the BSDs or illumos distributions, but today I want to talk about Linux (or, better, GNU/Linux) and why, despite everything, it still holds a place in my heart. This will be the first in a series of articles where I’ll discuss other operating systems.

Science

Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: The Little Theorems

Last week we had a talk by Purdue philosophy professor Eamon Duede Tail Novelty, Knowledge Collapse, and Useful Frictions in Science. In part of the talk he argued that if AI makes writing technical papers easier, researchers will write up small results that they wouldn't have bothered with before. He thought having a swarm of minor result papers was a bad thing but I'm less sure. Let's get the little results out there. We'll sort them out later, probably with the same AI that helped write them in the first place.

Career/Education

J Kenneth King ☛ Avoid Interview Prep Courses

The job market for programmers in 2025 is a nightmare. The number of open positions fell precipitously in 2023 and has mostly remained stagnant. Meanwhile layoffs both public and quiet continue to dump applicants on the market. It’s an uncertain time for programmers who are used to having a bit of job security.And in uncertain times there is money to be made.There is a certain brand of programming influencer that is geared up to sell you a course that will help you crack that coding interview and land your dream job with that comfortable six-figure income and sweet benefits. They’ve been borrowing engagement-farming tactics from the manosphere to get their content promoted by the recommendation algorithms on various video streaming sites.

Jan Lukas Else ☛ Closing one chapter

Today marked my last full working day (tomorrow I will just hand back in the equipment) at my current employer in the automotive industry. Next Monday, I will start a new job in another domain.

Harvard University ☛ Girls fell further behind in math during, after pandemic

Sean Reardon, a renowned sociologist of education and inequality at Stanford, brought one such pattern to campus last week: Girls’ math scores suffered more than boys’ during and after the pandemic, and lower-income girls now face steeper “gender gaps” in math than do those in more affluent communities, all for reasons that are less than completely clear.

Hardware

PC World ☛ RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices

Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.

The Verge ☛ RAM prices are so out of control that stores are selling it like lobster

“Costs are fluctuating daily as manufacturers and distributors adjust to limited supply and high demand,” reads a message posted in the store’s display case, as spotted by Steve Lin. “Because of this, we can’t display fixed prices at this time.”

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Vintage Everyday ☛ In 1948, Mr. Cig, the Mascot, Handed Out Free Cigarettes to Patients at Hospitals in England

This practice declined after the 1960s as scientific evidence mounted, showing the harmful effects of smoking, leading to major public health campaigns against smoking and its ban in many places.

Proprietary

The Register UK ☛ FCC guts Salt Typhoon telco rules despite espionage risk

The rollback follows what the Commission describes as months of "extensive, urgent, and coordinated" cooperation from carriers following the Salt Typhoon discovery. In its announcement [PDF], the FCC claims that providers have already stepped up access controls, improved incident response, and generally become more attentive to cyber risks – less thanks to the rule itself and more due to what the agency frames as a voluntary clean-up effort after the intrusions.

Krebs On Security ☛ Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet?

On the surface, the Superbox media streaming devices for sale at retailers like BestBuy and Walmart may seem like a steal: They offer unlimited access to more than 2,200 pay-per-view and streaming services like Netflix, ESPN and Hulu, all for a one-time fee of around $400. But security experts warn these TV boxes require intrusive software that forces the user’s network to relay Internet traffic for others, traffic that is often tied to cybercrime activity such as advertising fraud and account takeovers.

Howard Oakley ☛ Convert text between file formats, including webarchives

textutil is one of the older command tools, and was introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger twenty years ago. Despite that, it remains one of the most underused in modern macOS. It works by tapping into the macOS text system, using any of the following nine formats: [...]

Bryce Wray ☛ From Pages to Workers (again): revisited

Earlier this year, I had some things to say about a Cloudflare announcement concerning its Cloudflare Workers (CFW) platform and, more to the points I was making, the Cloudflare Pages (CFP) product on which this site had lived for a good while. It now turns out that I may have misunderstood things at the time, so this post is my attempt to fix things somewhat.

Security Week ☛ Spanish Airline Iberia Notifies Customers of Data Breach

It should also be noted that Iberia sent out notifications roughly one week after a threat actor boasted on a [cracking] forum about having stolen roughly 77 gigabytes of data from the airline’s systems.The [cracker] claimed to have stolen ISO 27001 and ITAR-classified information, technical aircraft documentation, engine data, and various other internal documents.

Nicolas Magand ☛ Praise the Backup

Well, that was a fun weekend. I have spent half of my time reinstalling MacOS Sequoia, and trying to get it back the way it was, while trying to avoid losing important files.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

University of Michigan ☛ UMich instructors navigate AI-based violations of academic integrity

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, English lecturer Lauren Gwin said LSA instructors are encouraged to complete an online report sent to the Office of Student Academic Affairs for cases of academic misconduct. However, not all instructors prefer to complete the reports, instead opting to deal with AI-related misconduct in other ways.“Some people will bring students in, suspecting AI and automatically fail them on the assignment,” Gwin said. “Other instructors will not bring students in, but will just fail them. Some instructors will take everything to (SAA). Other instructors will perhaps even allow them a rewrite for the assignment. There’s a wide variety of ways in which people deal with AI usage in the classroom.”

The Register UK ☛ Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing

Let's not get started on how you maintain a code base that no human has ever understood when your tools are constantly mutating. If there aren't many production apps under the low/no-code banner after 30 years, the prospects for vibe coding are dim indeed. Even if vibe coding fulfills its most basic function, of quickly producing a prototype model to explore ideas, it will hit the principle that prototypes can't be killed, instead mutating into monsters. Once something looks functional, the pressure from outside to build on it immediately is usually immense. That's bad enough in any environment, but the vibe really won't dig it, man.

Pivot to AI ☛ Don’t cite the Adversarial Poetry vs AI paper — it’s chatbot-made marketing ‘science’

Unfortunately, the paper has serious problems. Specifically, all the scientific process heavy lifting they should have got a human to do … they just used chatbots!I mean, they don’t seem to have written the text of the paper with a chatbot, I’ll give ’em that. But they did do the actual procedure with chatbots: [...]

Greg Morris ☛ 90% Synthetic

We are building a web filled with nothing but noise. A digital landfill of synthetic garbage that exists for no other reason than to be consumed by other bots to generate more garbage. The Dead Internet Theory isn't a theory anymore; it's a progress bar, and it's loading faster than we thought.

Benedict Evans ☛ AI, networks and Mechanical Turks

Any consumer internet system with critical mass becomes, in part, a Mechanical Turk. It looks at what the users do and draws conclusions from that. Amazon knows that if you bought X, you might buy Y, because it's seen what lots of people buy and saw that if they buy X, they're likely to buy Y. Google's dominance of search is based in part on seeing what people search for, and what they click on and what they search for next.

Social Control Media

Press Gazette ☛ Gamified news app secures $100k funding boost

Gamified app Newsreel, aimed at encouraging young people to develop news habits, has secured $100,000 investment from the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media Group.Over the past year, the company has launched its app in colleges and libraries across the US.

Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

Bitdefender ☛ Operation Endgame disrupts Rhadamanthys information-stealing malware

International cybercrime-fighting agencies, co-ordinated by Europol, took down over 1000 servers and seized 20 domains earlier this month as part of Operation Endgame 3.0.Their target? Three major malware platforms: the infostealer known as Rhadamanthys, the VenomRAT remote access trojan, and the Elysium botnet.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

The Register UK ☛ Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

The COVID-19 lockdown meant a surge in remote work, and the trend toward remote and hybrid workplaces has persisted long after the pandemic receded. That has changed the nature of workplace management as well. Bosses can't check for butts in seats or look over their employees' shoulders in the office to make sure they're working instead of having a LAN party. So they've turned to software tools to fill the gap.So-called “bossware” lets managers keep a close eye on employees' activity, tracking everything from knowledge workers’ website visits to the gait and facial expressions of those involved in more physical activities.

The Record ☛ UK privacy regulator has seen ‘collapse in enforcement activity,’ rights coalition says

More than 70 civil liberties advocacy groups, academics and legal experts are calling for an investigation into a “collapse in enforcement activity” by the United Kingdom’s principal data protection regulator.The group’s letter to Chi Onwurah, who chairs Parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, contends that the Information Commissioner’s Office is plagued by deep “structural failures.”

Confidentiality

Tor ☛ Counter Galois Onion: Improved encryption for Tor circuit traffic | The Tor Project

The algorithm in question is Tor's relay encryption. While Tor uses the standard TLS protocol for communication between relays, and between clients and relays, it needs a specialized algorithm for encrypting user data as it traverses multiple relays in a circuit.1That's the relay encryption algorithm. The client shares a symmetric key with each relay on its circuit, and encrypts an outgoing message, or "relay cell" with each one of those keys. Each relay can remove a single layer of encryption, until the client's cell reaches the exit relay.

Defence/Aggression

Common Dreams ☛ Further | Quiet, Piggy | Opinion

Over the last bungled weeks of a shambolic presidency that's transmuted America into ugly chaos, the wannabe king has suffered enough losses - electoral, legal, political, economic - some observers argue he's finally losing his mystifying "air of impenetrability," with polls showing him underwater on every issue, including immigration. As U.S. consumer sentiment falls over 7 points to record lows - thanks disastrous tariffs! - he has a lame 26% approval rating on the cost of living, 76% of Fox viewers say the economy is bad, and even cult members shopping for the holidays are reportedly starting to notice the dissonance between his gold ballroom and their unaffordable "groceries," even if he did invent the elegant word. Hell, they might even spot the idiocy of a guy who recently revealed he had an MRI, insisted it had "the best result," but when asked if it was for his brain raved, "I have no idea what they analyzed, but whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well."

The Record ☛ [Crackers] knock out systems at Moscow-run postal operator in occupied Ukraine

Donbas Post, which operates in the Russian-controlled parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, said the incident affected its corporate network, web platform and email systems. The company had restricted access to several services to contain the breach and was working to restore operations.

Site36 ☛ Donkeys from Gaza welcomed, but no children: Only animals “evacuated” to Germany

Through an Israeli animal welfare organisation, donkeys are being evacuated from Gaza. Injured children, however, remain blocked by the German government despite offers of assistance by some cities. Eight donkeys from the Gaza Strip have found a new home in Germany.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Jacobin Magazine ☛ You Can’t Just Wish Away Jeffrey Epstein’s Israel Ties

After Benjamin Netanyahu bizarrely tweeted a Jacobin story about Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak last week, Israeli politicos are denouncing us as antisemitic conspiracy theorists — without engaging with what’s in the story.

Environment

Omicron Limited ☛ Contrails are a major driver of aviation's climate impact, study shows

In the Nature Communications article "The social costs of aviation CO₂ and contrail cirrus," researchers Daniel Johansson, Christian Azar, Susanne Pettersson, Thomas Sterner, Marc E. J. Stettler and Roger Teoh demonstrate that both CO₂ emissions and contrail formation contribute materially to aviation's climate impact—and that the associated societal costs differ substantially depending on weather patterns and routing decisions.

The Verge ☛ UN climate negotiations burned up and then fizzled out

Sure, that was wishful thinking — particularly as waves of inward-looking nationalist sentiment around the world threaten global cooperation on issues like climate change. The conference ultimately closed with another round of promises to do something about it later, and pleas for countries not to turn their backs on the process.

Energy/Transportation

James G ☛ Snowy morning

On the train — the warm, bright train — I was delighted by how many people there were, each one bracing the snow to be here. I felt less lonely, and smiled to myself. I carried a smile with me as I started my journey for the day, as well as crystals of snow that lay in my hair.

Wildlife/Nature

The Revelator ☛ Strategic ‘Matchmaking’ Protects the World’s Smallest and Rarest Wild Pig

Smithsonian Magazine ☛ This ‘Feisty’ Asian Elephant at the National Zoo Is Pregnant. She May Birth the First Calf Born There in Nearly 25 Years

With fewer than 50,000 Asian elephants estimated to be remaining in the wild, the Smithsonian’s announcement gives hope to those working to preserve the endangered species

Overpopulation

Hamilton Nolan ☛ America Is Becoming Dallas

Will Rogers once said that “Fort Worth is where the West begins and Dallas is where the East peters out.” Today, that quote wouldn’t make much sense. The distinction between the two places has been erased by the yawning expansion of the Dallas metroplex. You can use different names if it makes you feel better, but zoom out on a map of that ample concrete blot on Northeast Texas and you will see the truth. From Forth Worth to Garland, from Denton to Waxahachie, from Arlington to Mckinney, it’s all Dallas. If your town is not part of Dallas yet, just wait.

Finance

Google rolls out voluntary buyouts for UK staff [Ed: New name for mass layoffs]

Google has introduced voluntary buyouts for UK staff as part of its broader restructuring linked to AI priorities. Google, which employs over 7,000 people in the UK, said severance terms will depend on tenure. The company maintains it is still hiring for critical positions even as it offers employees the option to leave amid ongoing organisational realignment.

GeekWire ☛ Verizon layoffs impact 168 workers in Washington state

Verizon is laying off approximately 168 employees in Washington state, including analysts, engineers and retail workers.The layoffs were disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state’s Employment Security Department. The jobs are slated to end Jan. 23.“Verizon is consolidating and restructuring its operations to maximize the utilization of company facilities and resources,” Eboni Gregoire, Verizon’s director of HR operations, said in a WARN letter.Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that New York-based Verizon was planning to cut 15,000 workers, primarily through layoffs. That includes shifting about 200 of its stores into franchised outlets, which removes employees from the telecom’s payroll.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

The Register UK ☛ Apple peels away some sales staff in small layoff

Apple, which unlike its Big Tech peers has not made substantial job cuts, is reportedly in the process of eliminating several dozen positions in its sales organization.

Burkhard Stubert ☛ How Pre-2028 Products Might Avoid the Cyber Resilience Act

If a product is placed on the EU market before 11 December 2027 and is subject to a substantial modification after that date, it must satisfy all the rules of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) from the modification date onwards (Article 69.2). If we scrutinise this article, we detect its vulnerabilities. The definition of substantial modification is circular and hence largely void. Article 69.2 might even violate our constitutional right that law must not be applied retroactively.

Bruce Schneier ☛ IACR Nullifies Election Because of Lost Decryption Key

The International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key.

Matthew Brunelle ☛ Finally Actually (Hopefully) Learning Rust

I have started and stop learning Rust more times than I care to admit. This time, I'm actually being more thoughtful about how I approach learning it: exercise and project based books like Rustlings and Command-line Rust for deliberate practice.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

The Dissenter ☛ FBI Allegedly Targeted Filipino American Journalist Who Is Now In ICE Detention

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

Chuck Carroll ☛ A Reminder on the Realities of Digital Purchases

Some background: I prefer to buy DRM-free music so that I can play it on any device I choose and with any music program I wish to, which is why I absolutely adore Bandcamp. They provide not only legitimate DRM free music, but also make your purchases available in a variety of formats including FLAC, MP3, OGG, etc. From the artist side, they only take a 15% of the sale price while the rest goes directly to the artists. From my side, I get high quality DRM-free music without having to feel guilty about pirating. Everyone is a winner. Unfortunately, Bandcamp (and the artist) can renege on the deal whenever they wish.