We Were Promised Seamless Integration and Instead Got E2EE LIES.
London Says No New Houses, We Need More AI
The physical world is finally pushing back against the cloud. Apparently, the rapid growth of data centers is literally delaying new housing developments in London. It’s not about zoning, planning permission, or whatever else they usually complain about.
It’s about power. All the available grid capacity in parts of London is getting sucked up by these massive server blocks—the things running everyone's favorite cryptocurrency trades and AI generated junk. We’ve reached the point where the utility company has to look at the paperwork and go, “Sorry, we’re out of juice. You can't run a washing machine in your new apartment because we need that power to compute whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich 40,000 times a second.”
This is the whole system in one simple, stupid transaction: we prioritize the ephemeral, the scalable, the *number go up* part of the economy, over the boring, unsexy physical infrastructure of reality. You can't just slap a CDN in a spreadsheet and live in it. But hey, at least your virtual machine can spin up instantly. Priorities.
The Cryptographic Colonoscopy
Remember that ‘end-to-end encrypted’ smart toilet camera? No, me neither. Anyway, it turns out it wasn't E2EE. Not even close.
E2EE means the key stays with the user. If the manufacturer can look at your colonoscopy footage on their dashboard, it is *not* E2EE. It's just a camera with a marketing department and a seriously ambitious legal team. We can't even get the plumbing right, what made us think we could get the cryptography right? It's like watching a train crash into a garbage fire, but the garbage fire is wearing a blazer and promising a 99.999% uptime SLA.
The Ecosystem Eats Itself
In unsurprising news for anyone who tracks the security-industrial complex: Cellebrite, which helps governments crack phones, is now acquiring Corellium, the virtualization company that lets researchers run virtual iOS and Android devices for testing. Corellium says this will help them secure more devices, which is exactly what a company is supposed to say when they get acquired by a forensics giant. Cellebrite wants those virtualization capabilities for… well, you know.
I guess the only surprise here is that it took this long for the capability to officially migrate from the ‘security research’ column into the ‘security enforcement’ (read: 'zero-day market facilitator') column. It’s a closed loop. Everything eventually just becomes another tool in the surveillance box. Nobody ever really gets out of the bar, they just get a different seat.
Pop Quiz: E2EE Edition
What is the functional difference between "End-to-End Encrypted" and "The Marketing Department Said So"?
- About 40 lines of obfuscated C.
- Zero lines, according to the smart toilet camera manufacturer.
- A complex regulatory framework that nobody in D.C. can define past the second paragraph.
- It's like getting a new monitor and the manual says "Plug it into your router," and you just think, "Why?"
Briefs
- The great Linux war of 'Wayland vs. X11' is now a decade old, and apparently half the users are still ignoring the new thing. Sometimes, 'it works' beats 'it's modern.' Keep compiling your own window manager, I guess.
- RAM is now being stolen because it's so expensive, which is basically the clearest indicator we have that the semiconductor market has left the orbit of the actual physical economy. When components become precious metals, you've messed up the scarcity model.
- The only thing that truly refuses to die is old media. Cassette tapes are "making a comeback". The whole cycle just restarts, but now with more hipster angst and slightly worse audio quality.
- A major climate change study predicting "catastrophic toll" was retracted by a top journal. Turns out the modeling was based on some shaky assumptions. We'll get back to you when the data is less depressing or less flawed.