thewayne | Recent Entries

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels have been held in Boston, as a parody of the Nobel Prizes, doling out mock prizes for curious and weird research. One of the things they do is the winners do a 24/7 lecture: explain their work in 24 seconds, and again in 7 words. They used to give a cash prize of like 10,000,000 (some strange foreign currency that when converted is like $50US), but I don't see mention of it.

Well, the 2026 ceremony will be held in Switzerland, details to be announced.

Last year, four of the ten winners did not attend because of the customs and immigration policies of the U.S. government. Because of the fear that the situation will only get worse, it was decided to take the ceremony overseas and eliminate that friction.

The web site for the Ig Nobels, at the Journal for Improbable Research. ignobel.org also redirects here:
https://improbable.com/ig/

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/ig-nobels-ceremony-moves-to-europe-over-security-concerns/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/03/10/1540242/ig-nobels-ceremony-moves-to-europe-indefinitely-citing-us-safety-concerns

Stryker is a global firm with facilities in 79 countries and over $25 billion in revenue. And a group that calls themselves Handala claims to have infiltrated them and launched a wiper attack after exfiltrating data. They used Microsoft's Intune service to execute remote wipe commands against any device that is running Outlook.

50 gigabytes of data. POOF. Now we shall see how good of a data/disaster recovery plan and whether they've practiced it.

Among Stryker's lines of business were providing supplies to hospitals, and also transmitting EKG data from field paramedics to hospitals. Supply ordering is unavailable with their systems down, and hospitals are disconnecting the non-working EKG link for fear of the wiper getting into their system.

Handala's published claim of responsibility calls Stryker a 'Zionist-rooted corporation', apparently they bought an Israel-based medtech company a few years ago.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/03/iran-backed-hackers-claim-wiper-attack-on-medtech-firm-stryker/

The Swiss canton of Basel-Stadt had an election. And the election included some evoting, a system being piloted to help people to vote who are living abroad or who are disabled.

Guess what!

THREE USB sticks supplied with decrypt keys failed to work, and 2,048 ballots could not be counted. The ballots are too small a number to affect any results as they represent less than 4% of the votes cast.

Basel-Stadt election officials have delayed announcing election results, and an investigation has been begun.

Gee, if only they'd also written the keys down on CDs or DVDs. Oh, wait! Computers don't have optical media drives anymore. And it's not really best practices to send decrypt keys via email or cloud services.

NEVER EVER EVER treat USB sticks as permanent media! If you copy a file onto one to move it to another computer, copy it off ASAP! They will fail, and at the worst possible moment. I carry a 512 gig USB stick on my key ring, it's very cool with both USB-C and USB-A ends on it: very useful. But if it fails some day - AND I EXPECT IT TO - not a big deal.

Now, let's talk about the number of ballots that can't be decrypted: 2,048. This is a very curious number to report, because it's a very important number in computers: it's a power of two. Computers only know two numbers: zero and one. Everything is based on binary powers of two: 1, 2, 4, 8, etc. 2048 is 2 to the 11th power. It suggests that this may not be a problem with the USB keys, but rather with the encryption software itself. The implication that I got from the Register article was that the USB keys could be read, but the decrypt key didn't work. Keys usually have built-in checksum, which is a mathematical computation that ensures that the info that you're storing hasn't been tampered with. It's just like your credit card numbers: you can instantly verify that it's a valid credit card number (and it's actually a pretty cool formula, you can look it up). You recompute the checksum, preferably comparing it to a second copy, and it tells you if the key has been tampered with. The article didn't go into this detail.

So let's talk about integer overflow! Every piece of information is represented, ultimately, in binary. Am 8-bit binary number - a byte - can hold a maximum value of 255. That's all eight bits turned on: 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 128. What happens when you add one to that number? The obvious answer is that it becomes 256, but that can't happen. It's one byte, eight bits. To represent 256, you need nine bits, we only have eight. You now have an overflow situation. Sometimes the byte flips to -255, sometimes the program just flat-out crashes. You can't say with certainty without more information: what language was used, what compiler, etc.

A problem with some computers was that an overflow could cause the program to write into memory that was not supposed to be accessible to it, which could potentially cause a computer crash. The fun stuff was when hackers figured out how to make programs READ memory where they weren't supposed to: this allowed them into areas that the operating system programmers didn't anticipate and allowed the lifting of system passwords and all sorts of fun stuff! But that was in the past, operating systems are somewhat better designed now.

One VERY famous example of integer overflow was the Sid Meier's game Civilization and Nuclear Gandhi. In the game, as in life, Gandhi as a country's leader, was a peaceful guy and not militarily aggressive. In the game's code, there was a hostility counter, which was a small integer, I don't remember how big it was, let's say it was four bits, for a maximum value of 15 (1+2+4+8). 15 was maximum peaceful civilization. -15 was maximum war state, 'gonna nuke your ass' mentality. The programmers forgot to do a bounds check on that variable, and if India was at 15, and something increased it by 1, rather than ignoring the increase since they were already at Nirvana, it overflowed to -15 and they went total rage-monster and started throwing nukes at all their neighbors. Nuclear Gandhi.

Encryption programs are REALLY complicated! With 2048 being a binary power of two, it's quite possible that there is some sort of subtle bug lurking in the encryption code that didn't show in testing that's preventing the decrypt keys from working, and that it's not actually failed USB keys.

But still, my advice holds: do not trust USB keys for permanent - or critical! - storage.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/11/swiss_evote_usb_snafu/

https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/03/11/1953224/swiss-e-voting-pilot-cant-count-2048-ballots-after-usb-keys-fail-to-decrypt-them

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."

Carl Sagan, A Demon-Haunted World, 1995

(A Demon-Haunted World was Sagan's penultimate book, he died in 1996 of pneumonia from a form of leukemia at the age of 62.)

If you have a local Staples, they may be having a clearance sale on them. I picked up a nice Staples-labeled chair for about half-off, took me about half an hour to assemble it. The instructions were excellent: Ikea-like, but included words. ;-) I was a little frustrated in that I didn't find the instructions until I'd pretty much emptied the box, they were in a plastic bag taped with the screw assortment (which is nicely segregated according to what step they are needed for) which was then taped to the box holding the pneumatic cylinder.

MUCH more comfortable than the wood dining table chair that I had been sitting on, it was absolutely horrible for my back! I should clear the floor a bit and slide my PC tower over a little to give the poodle a bit more room to get under the table. It's not a perfect chair, but for $160, it's awfully darn good!

At least at my Staples, they're clearing room to install a Party City, or some other silliness. Personally I think it's a bad idea, but hey, they didn't ask me.

The numbers are very indicative in multiple studies, but the mechanism is unclear.

The current vaccine is two-fold. There's the direct chicken pox vaccine to suppress that particular disease. A second adjuvant is designed to stimulate the immune system to provide a vigorous response if the chicken pox reactivates. It's believed that this adjuvant is acting as a strong anti-inflammatory and this might be reducing people contracting dementia.

The papers cited, from across several countries, all show interesting numbers. I'd like to see a meta-study to try to establish stronger numbers. Interestingly, women show the most benefit from this effect, but also are more likely to contract shingles and are more likely to develop dementia.

I saw another article recently that talked about people who get cancer rarely develop dementia, though I didn't dig into that one as I've had several relatives and friends with both, and it hit a little too close to home.

As always, no vaccine is absolute proof against a disease, these studies show a 5-20%+ reduction in the chance of developing dementia, not absolute resistance. Still, that's encouraging, and if the mechanism can be understood, it could lead to the development of a vaccine to further improve resistance against dementia.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/could-a-vaccine-prevent-dementia-shingles-shot-data-only-getting-stronger/

Naomi has licensed her work and it has borne fruit. A tabletop RPG has been produced by Magpie Games and has been released on Kickstarter. And is now fully funded! The campaign has 30 days to go, over 800 backers, and the $50,000 goal has exceeded $111,000!

You can get the digital-only edition for $29.

As a quick description, think the campaign against Napoleon - with dragons. Mainly from the British side. There's a good description on the KS page. The dragons speak and are very intelligent. There are several books in the series, I don't know how many as I kind of fell off the wagon.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/temeraire-the-roleplaying-game/

That's right, the highest court in the land blocked the tariffs in a 6-3 decision. Opposing the decision were - take a big guess - Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh.

There were a few problems. HIS use of tariffs were predicated on using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which a lower court declared did not give him the power to impose tariffs. Specifically, the law that created the act did not include the words "tariffs" or "duties" and that those powers did indeed lie in the House of Representatives and their specific control of the country's purse strings.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the ruling. From the NBC article: "The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope," Roberts wrote. But the Trump administration "points to no statute" in which Congress has previously said that the language in IEEPA could apply to tariffs, he added.

As such, "we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs," Roberts wrote.

The 1977 IEEPA has never been previously invoked, so there is no historical precedent to draw from.

To try and throw a bone to the President's supporters, Gorsuch said this:

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day."

Now, I think this is a fine thing to say. But I wonder how many of his followers will be able to parse the meaning of it?

In response to the ruling, a hissy fit was thrown, a certain toddler was heard saying that 'I don't need the IEEPA!' and set all tariffs to 10%, which is a great reduction for lots of countries and an increase for some.

Also from the NBC article: "The decision does not affect all of Trump's tariffs, leaving in place ones he imposed on steel and aluminum using different laws, for example. But it upends his tariffs in two categories. One is country-by-country or “reciprocal” tariffs, which range from 34% for China to a 10% baseline for the rest of the world. The other is a 25% tariff Trump imposed on some goods from Canada, China and Mexico for what the administration said was their failure to curb the flow of fentanyl."

It looks like the $175 billion that has been paid by importers could be subject to refunds, we'll see what happens. It's going to be a huge mess trying to pry that money out of the Treasury, regardless.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/supreme-court-blocks-trumps-emergency-tariffs-billions-in-refunds-may-be-owed/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-strikes-trumps-tariffs-major-blow-president-rcna244827

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/supreme-court-tells-trump-no-on-tariff-power-grab_n_6925ab7ae4b063285310b10f

This is the difference between the current administration in the USA and the rest of the world: this admin won't prosecute people who declare loyalty to the current junta.

Andrew was taken into custody early Thursday and held for 12 hours for questioning, then released. According to the latest release of The Trump-Epstein Files, Andrew gave confidential information to Epstein that was available to the Royal Family. There are also allegations that he made arrangements with Epstein to have a woman trafficked to the UK for him to have sex with.

While Andrew was stripped of his royal titles, he is still in the Royal Line of Succession, at #8. The UK would have to pass a law to remove him from that position. The King and rest of the royal family were not given advance notice of his arrest. Today is Andrew's 66th birthday.

He is the first royal in almost 400 years to be arrested and accused of a crime. Other royals have been accused of civil fines, such as speeding.

Virginia Giuffre sued Andrew in 2015, alleging that he raped her on three occasions when she was a teen. She took her own life last year. Her family welcomed news of the arrest.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/former-prince-andrew-arrested_n_6996e21de4b0cc086c708735

I started re-reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series in December as a distraction, but decided I needed a break. Hench was recommended to Russet a while back, and it sounded interesting. I was fortunate to be able to snag a copy in my ebook sales within the last week or so and read it.

The book follows perhaps about a year in the life of Anna, who at the beginning of the book is getting short-term jobs at a temp agency doing various jobs for supervillains. They're called Henches, doing things like filing, data entry, driving (bonus if you're a certified stunt driver), etc. Muscle roles are handled through a different agency and they are called Meat, and are paid more and get free medical - if you don't mind the medical care being provided by veterinarians and medical school dropouts and doctors who've lost their licenses.

Anna is excellent with spreadsheets and data analysis and lands a pretty good gig that looks like it might go long-term, maybe even permanent!, until a superhero casually back-hands her across a room and her leg gets multiple compound fractures. While she's recovering, she starts thinking about ways to add up the damage and lives lost that the "heroes" cause with such casual and callous disregard - and planning how to make them pay!

It was an excellent read, and I came very close to finishing it in a day. Had I only known that I had about four pages to go....

Anyway, interesting perspective on the hero/villain situation. The book contains a short story titled Meat, and a sequel to Hench is coming out in early May, titled Villain. I'm quite looking forward to it. I haven't pre-purchased it yet, but am thinking about it. The short story distorted the apparent page count of the main story, or I would have finished it in the same day that I started it.

I found it to be well-written and very engaging. She has an excellent style for illustrating area color of The Big East Coast City. Her descriptions of some of the violence, especially Anna's final revenge may be somewhat disturbing, but that's also the point of the book - it's intended to illustrate that full-power superhero/villain fights cause a lot of carnage, and bystanders are injured or killed in gruesome ways.

This is Natalie's first novel. She's previously written two books of poetry, one of which has won a prize. She's a Torontanian. I'd love to see some of her poetry, but those books are not available through the Apple Bookstore, I'll have to check other sources and see if I can get ahold of them.

EDIT: big shout-outs to the book being very inclusive on LGBT and neurodivergency. This is something that the author is very involved in.

People think Biden was a gaff-machine. His successor has proven that he's an imbecile, and his standby is little better.

While talking about the economy, a year into their reign, he uttered the above line at a stop in Toledo, Ohio.

Sorry, Captain Mascara. Your first year is largely coasting on the economy inherited from your predecessor. EXCEPT EVEN YOU GUYS MANAGED TO SCREW THAT UP. If your boss and you had done absolutely nothing, the economy would be ticking away quite nicely on all cylinders. Instead, you morons imposed tariffs to "bring back manufacturing" and we've lost 68,000 manufacturing jobs. That worked really well. You promised to lower grocery prices, then had to admit 'That's really hard, don't think we can do that.'

Bunch of utter morons.

But hey! One things going well: presidential graft is at an all-time high!

https://newrepublic.com/post/205567/jd-vance-compares-america-titanic

Moderna developed a new flu vaccine using RNA technology that was going to be the framework for a combined Covid/flu shot - a twofer. Which would be really nice as a lot of people still die from both flu and covid, getting both shots at the same time would literally be a real life-saver.

From the article: "Moderna said the move is inconsistent with previous feedback from the agency from before it submitted the application and started phase three trials on the shot, called mRNA-1010. The drugmaker said it has requested a meeting with the FDA to “understand the path forward.”

Moderna noted that the agency did not identify any specific safety or efficacy issues with the vaccine, but instead objected to the study design, despite previously approving it. The company added that the move won’t impact its 2026 financial guidance. (Moderna stock fell 7% in after-hours trading)

Moderna’s jab showed positive phase three data last year, meeting all of the trial goals. At the time, Moderna said the stand-alone flu shot was key to its efforts to advance a combination vaccine targeting both influenza and Covid-19."

What I absolutely love is that The Orange Idiot launched Project Warp Speed which spearheaded the development of RNA vaccines during Covid and saved untold lives, ignoring the irony of his quack treatment musings on live TV. This is an extension of that. And now people think that RNA vaccines reprogram their genes, and science is being overridden by what these idiots have done to the country.

I expect Moderna will just go to their European branch and have them give it to the EU vaccine review board, and tell the USA 'No vaccine for you!'

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/10/moderna-fda-flu-shot.html

https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/11/1219230/moderna-says-fda-refuses-to-review-its-application-for-experimental-flu-shot

I started collecting these decades ago. Amazing how apt many are and from people who have been dead decades, if not centuries.

* * * * *

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. -Frank Wilhoit

They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery. -They Live (movie), 1989

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. -- Ray Bradbury

The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray. -- Robert G. Ingersoll

We all live in a state of ambitious poverty. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis

Many more under the cut...
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This is a really great thing! The ACM is one of the premier organizations for computer science, and for them to open up their publication library to open access is an incredibly huge deal.

In their statement released in mid-December, they announced:
We are pleased to share an important milestone for our field. Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, more discoverable, and more reusable.

By transitioning to open access, ACM is supporting a publishing environment where:

Authors retain the intellectual property to their Work- All ACM authors retain the copyright to their published work while ACM remains committed to defending those Works against copyright and integrity related violations.
Published Work Will Benefit from Broader visibility and impact- Research will be freely available to anyone in the world, increasing readership, citations, and real-world application.
Students, educators, and researchers everywhere benefit- Whether at well-resourced institutions or in emerging research communities, everyone will have direct access to the full breadth of ACM-published work.
Innovation accelerates- Open access fosters collaboration, transparency, and cumulative progress, strengthening the advancement of computing as a discipline.

The world of research publication is tending towards increased lockdown and paywalls, plus corruption by AI slop. The ACM is fighting that by opening their doors and ensuring their authors maintain control of their IP. This is an incredibly cool thing!

There's a cool library tool that we use occasionally called Hathi Trust. They archive old material and they're a great reference place to find stuff. I was looking to borrow a book for one of our instructors, and Hathi had it online! You can download it! ONE PAGE AT A TIME. The book is 90 years old, in the public domain, and I can't find a free copy of it. So I literally started downloading it. One page at a time. I have the free time at work.

It costs $6,000 a year to become a member of Hathi. A YEAR. You have to be a pretty good-sized library to pay that, or have special needs to justify that outlay.

Fortunately my story has two happy endings. I was able to find a physical copy of the book, the United States Department of the Interior Library sent me a copy! But there's an even better ending. I was looking for something in our archive, sitting in the corner, pulling stuff down and buzzing through boxes. I happened to glance down and saw a three-ring binder in an area that I knew didn't contain what I was looking for. but the label on the binder caught my eye.

It was the same name as the book that the instructor had requested!

I pull the binder, and it was a facsimile of the book! So now I'll be able to scan the pages that I hadn't yet downloaded and assemble my own ebook! I had already assembled two sections of what I'd downloaded into ebooks: PDFs combined make HUGE ebooks!

Weirdest luck I've had in a long time. And no, it was not cataloged in our system.

https://dl.acm.org/openaccess

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/19/168225/acm-to-make-its-entire-digital-library-open-access-starting-january-2026

In 2022, the bill that funded NASA extended funding for the International Space Station to 2030, and that was it. NASA started researching ways to end the life of the ISS at that point, and decided that a controlled deorbit was the best bet: lower it to a planned orbit where the increased friction with Earth's atmosphere will eventually cause re-entry and for it to crash into the Pacific Ocean's "space graveyard". That way it's controlled and theoretically won't hit land, potentially causing some really significant damage. The station would be shut-down in 2030 and the deorbit burn would happen in 2031, I'm a little unclear when it would actually re-enter the atmosphere.

Well, that plan might end up being scratched because of an effort being led by California Democratic Representative George Whiteside.

He's on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (vice-ranking member) and on the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics (according to Wikipedia). His career has involved a lot of the space industry, and he's worked at NASA, but the roles seem to be in management and as a director. His Masters degree is in GIS and remote sensing, not in engineering.

He attached a rider to the new NASA funding bill, currently in committee, for them to study boosting the ISS to a parking orbit rather than deorbiting the thing. He thinks it can have a longer life.
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Amongst the things that I was purchasing was a set of replacement heads/brushes for my electric toothbrush.

The cashier rings them up and then, since it popped up on her register screen, ASKS ME IF I WANT THE PROTECTION PLAN FOR THEM.

WTF?!

We were both quite puzzled over that one. What exactly would a protection plan cover? If they wear out, I can get them replaced? THEY'RE EFFING DESIGNED TO WEAR OUT!

When I told it to Russet just now, she said 'Do they offer a protection plan on these paper plates?'

That would make just about as much sense.

The internal classified version was started in 1962 as The National Basic Intelligence Factbook. It was a resource that gave you very detailed information about countries around the world: form of government, economic information, population and make-up, etc. Very useful information. It went public in 1971 as the World Factbook and later joined the World Wide Web in 1997 in an unclassified version. It was available between '71 and '97 in print form and on CD.

And now it's gone. Any page for any country that you may have had linked now redirects to the closure notice. Everything's now inaccessible. Of course, you can still look into it via archive.org, but the information was updated regularly when the site was live, and it will now grow increasingly stale.

No reason given. The CIA was subject to the same chainsaw-trimming that most other government agencies were given courtesy of DOGE and the Muskbrats. We also have the intense administration's dislike of facts. Either or both could have contributed to its demise.

But with a little luck, in a possibly truthier future, it could be resurrected. There's no doubt that the CIA found the resource useful, so it may again become available to the public in a better tomorrow.

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-cia-stops-publishing-the-world-factbook-184419024.html

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/05/187252/cia-has-killed-off-the-world-factbook-after-six-decades

EDIT: added Slashdot link.

Sigh. And it happened in my state of New Mexico.

Raw milk is something that Robert FUCKING Kennedy Junior Mint advocates for, claiming it's healthy. It is decidedly not. It's swarming with pathogens that can be quite deadly which is why the death rate went down after pasteurization became a dairy industry standard practice.

So all together now: Hey, Hey, RFK: how many kids have you killed today!

The medical examiner can't directly tie the infant's death to the raw milk consumption of the mother except noting there's not many other places the child could have contracted listeria from.

What's worse, I just read today that women are now training for pregnancy like they train for doing a triathlon. Including the consumption of raw milk. Thus I expect this is just the first such report that we'll be seeing like this.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/newborns-death-spurs-raw-milk-warning-in-new-mexico/

On Tuesday, after suffering a day of blowback, Adobe rescinds its kill order and announces the program is going into maintenance mode. The original email sent to registered and paying users apparently said "We're contacting you to let you know that Adobe will be discontinuing Adobe Animate on March 1, 2026. As an existing Animate user, you may continue to use Animate, but please note that technical support will no longer be available after March 1, 2027."

Animate was, more or less, the successor to the Flash development package which was killed ages ago in favor of HTML 5. And apparently much more used than Adobe thought.

Reactions to the Monday announcement: ... were swift and angry on social media. "Adobe discontinuing Animate out of the blue is nuts," writes artist and animator Julia Glassman on BlueSky. "Many television productions, games, and all sorts of animated media still rely (on) Animate/Flash pipelines. They're all supposed to just...pivot to entirely new software and pipelines?!"

Animator Christopher Linoleum brought up how many big-name shows utilize the program: "Adobe Animate remains an industry standard for TV animation. Star Trek: Lower Decks was made in Animate. Haunted Hotel was made in Animate. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was made in Animate. And because you can't buy a permanent license anymore, it'll just be gone."

YIKES! So a pretty important program to the entertainment industry! The original kill date was announced as March 1, 2027. But a bigger problem was that apparently either cloud storage is required or a major component of the program, and that would be shut down at the same time, so users would lose all their assets and data! Remember, folks - all the cloud means is that it's somebody else's server. The "Cloud" isn't anything mystical, it's just someone's server.

After getting bombarded with hate and flamed to cinders, Adobe "... now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode going forward and that it has “no plans to discontinue or remove access” to the app. Animate will still receive “ongoing security and bug fixes” and will still be available for “both new and existing users,” but it won’t get new features."

There's one unmentioned problem. With no updates and it being in maintenance mode, it will eventually be bypassed by operating system changes. It may take 5-10 years or more, but it will happen. And it may become glitchy before it dies. Smart production houses are going to start looking for better alternatives now and start planning migrations and new work flows soon. Sadly, apparently Reddit threads say there's no real alternative for professional production. I'm not familiar with that field so I have no idea.

The article that I saw yesterday announcing the original kill order:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program/1100-6537851/

Adobe backing away:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/873621/adobe-animate-maintenance-mode-reverse-course

Slashdot mocking the back-off:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/0730222/adobe-actually-wont-discontinue-animate

EDIT: I should have checked Ars Technica. Their article on all this was quite informative, telling me that Animate is actually the original Flash, but renamed! I was unaware of this, I've never been involved in creating things with Flash.

Some comments in the Ars article had a very cogent observation: there's no AI assistant in Animate, and it's probably based on a very old code base, so it would be hard to retrofit it. Which means Adobe can't realistically increase its current price of $23/month. If they can't make more money from the product, kill it. Occam's Razor that's a pretty good guess.

And yes, people are already thinking Adobe cannot be trusted and are rethinking their production pipelines.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/adobe-reverses-decision-to-discontinue-animate-after-a-lot-of-confusion-and-angst/

It all depends on the quality of the chips. The problem is obvious when you think of it. Memory is stored in transistors as an electrical charge in NAND flash cells, and even though they're called non-volatile (unchanging), slowly that electrical charge will drain, and with it, your data.

From the article: "...the cheapest SSDs, say those with QLC NAND, can safely store data for about a year of being completely unpowered. More expensive TLC NAND can retain data for up to 3 years, while MLC and SLC NAND are good for 5 years and 10 years of unpowered storage, respectively.

The problem is that most consumer SSDs use only TLC or QLC NAND, so users who leave their SSDs unpowered for over a year are risking the integrity of their data. The reliability of QLC NAND has improved over the years, so you should probably consider 2–3 years of unpowered usage as the guardrails. Without power, the voltage stored in the NAND cells can be lost, either resulting in missing data or completely useless drives." (I'm not sure if there's an easy way to see what kind of NAND chips are being used by your drives short of third-party utilities)

The nefarious aspect of this problem is that it may not be apparent. You might mount up a disused drive and everything appears fine, then you try to load a document or photo or whatever, and find it's irredeemably corrupted. It rotted in the middle and there's little that can be done. Other forms of rot might hit the directory itself and will be quite obvious when you look at the disk in Explorer or the equivalent. Some types of damage can be recovered, some cannot be.

This problem doesn't just apply to solid state drives: they use the same tech as thumb drives and camera memory cards of all types. The bit about the drive becoming completely useless is interesting, but the article doesn't clarify the subject. I suspect they're talking about rot hitting the config area of the drive which could make it unusable.

The article also talks about the 3-2-1 Backup Rule. Simply put, it's 3 copies of data on at least 2 different storage media, with 1 copy stored off-site. If you have a locker or desk at work, or a safe deposit box, these can be ideal places to store a backup. A storage locker can also work if it isn't exposed to extremes of weather. If you don't have absolute control of where your backup is stored, then you might want to look into encrypting it.

Conventional hard drives are not failure-proof, but they will theoretically last longer and don't normally have rot problems like this. They can have problems with stiction, where the read/write heads don't retract properly and actually stick to the platter. That doesn't happen much anymore, they're pretty good at reserving enough energy so if they're powered off abruptly they'll still retract to their park zone.

https://www.xda-developers.com/your-unpowered-ssd-is-slowly-losing-your-data/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/25/1511242/unpowered-ssds-in-your-drawer-are-slowly-losing-data

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The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony leaves the USA
Iranian hacker group claims responsibility for wiping out medtech firm Stryker
Switzerland repeats evote failure of cryptography group in canton election
ALL HAIL THE GREAT PROPHET CARL!
If you're in the USA and needing a new office/computer chair....
The shingles vaccine may help prevent dementia
Naomi Novik's Temeraire stories get the Kickstarter TTRPG treatment!
The Supreme Court blocks the "Emergency" Tariffs!
Former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested in connection to the Trump-Epstein Files
I just finished a very interesting book: Hench, by Natalie Zina Walshchots
"You don't turn the Titanic around overnight." Thus spake the Vice-President.
Moderna says FDA refuses to review its application for experimental flu shot
Some quotes that I've gathered over the years about politics and stuff in general
The Association for Computing Machinery has made their entire publishing library open-access!
The ISS is scheduled to be deorbited in '31. A lawmaker wants to push it up to a higher orbit.
Out shopping this evening, and...
RIP: The CIA World Factbook
Infant dies of listeria after mother consumes raw milk during pregnancy
Adobe announces it's killing off the Animate software program Monday
Unpowered SSD drive? It may start losing data in 1-3 years.

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Recent Entries

The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony leaves the USA

Iranian hacker group claims responsibility for wiping out medtech firm Stryker

Switzerland repeats evote failure of cryptography group in canton election

ALL HAIL THE GREAT PROPHET CARL!

If you're in the USA and needing a new office/computer chair....

The shingles vaccine may help prevent dementia

Naomi Novik's Temeraire stories get the Kickstarter TTRPG treatment!

The Supreme Court blocks the "Emergency" Tariffs!

Former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested in connection to the Trump-Epstein Files

I just finished a very interesting book: Hench, by Natalie Zina Walshchots

"You don't turn the Titanic around overnight." Thus spake the Vice-President.

Moderna says FDA refuses to review its application for experimental flu shot

Some quotes that I've gathered over the years about politics and stuff in general

The Association for Computing Machinery has made their entire publishing library open-access!

The ISS is scheduled to be deorbited in '31. A lawmaker wants to push it up to a higher orbit.

Out shopping this evening, and...

RIP: The CIA World Factbook

Infant dies of listeria after mother consumes raw milk during pregnancy

Adobe announces it's killing off the Animate software program Monday

Unpowered SSD drive? It may start losing data in 1-3 years.