- A partial solar eclipse on Thursday October 23 (today), visible from most of North America.
- October 23 is also Mole Day. (10^23)
- Utah Teapots in the Sky
- Generative 3d Printing with Processing
- The Bezier Game
- Things that coincidentally happen to look like cellular automata: tiny mushrooms
- Sculptural electronics
- Peppytides: a 3D printed molecular peptite construction set, where you can build your own proteins!
- avremu: An AVR Emulator written in pure LaTeX. (FAQ includes “Are you insane?”)
- How the carrot became orange
- Computational design of mechanical automata
- Hoverboard patent
- Bad precedent: FTDI, makers of USB-serial interface ICs, have updated their drivers to brick counterfeit devices.
The mad FTDI thing has apparently been undone:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/windows-update-drivers-bricking-usb-serial-chips-beloved-of-hardware-hackers/
“Yesterday FTDI removed two driver versions from Windows Update. Our engineering team is engaging with FTDI to prevent these problems with their future driver updates via Windows Update.”
I have every sympathy with not wanting to support counterfeit products but bricking them is destruction of property and was never going to fly.
We are watching this with interest. I think that FTDI overstepped common sense right to vigilante justice, failing to think through the consequences of it.
With you 100% there – it would be one thing detecting fakes and refusing to operate with them. Bricking them is a step too far.
You can’t go to a street market, pull all the pirate DVDs off the shelves and burn them, even if you are the copyright holder. I can’t see how this could be anything but illegal.
I have a feeling FTDI will feel quite a backlash on this. And possibly MS too for distributing it with a Windows update. They are going to be unhappy about that.
@Windell: I agree.