The Daily Index — Wednesday, August 14, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

EVERYTHING GOOGLE ANNOUNCED AT THE PIXEL 9 LAUNCH EVENT

The Made By Google hardware event saw a refreshed Pixel 9 lineup and updates across Google's other devices. Customers now have a smaller Pixel 9 Pro option measuring 6.3 inches. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is taller and thinner than its predecessor and features an inner display with a peak brightness of 2,700 nits. The Google Pixel Watch 3 now has a larger 45mm option. More details about the announcements Google made at the event are available in the article.

theverge.com · 5 min

TLDR AI

SAKANA LAUNCHES AI SCIENTIST

Sakana, a Japanese AI firm, has released a system that can autonomously perform research by suggesting hypotheses, performing experiments, writing code, and summarizing the results in well-reasoned papers. The company has provided examples of the papers the system wrote along with an open sourced version of the system.

sakana.ai · 25 min

TLDR Web Dev

FRONTEND SECURITY CHECKLIST

A notorious hack of a fast-food chain's mobile app exposed a loophole that allowed users to generate unlimited free meal vouchers. This incident shows the importance of securing both frontend and backend systems against vulnerabilities like XSS, CSRF, and IDOR. Proper input validation, content security policies, and secure handling of environment variables are important for security.

trevorlasn.com · 11 min

TLDR InfoSec

RANSOMWARE HITS AUSTRALIAN GOLD MINING FIRM EVOLUTION MINING

Evolution Mining, an Australian gold mining company, reported a ransomware attack on August 8. It believes the incident is contained and is working with cyber forensic experts. The company doesn't expect a material impact on operations. The group responsible for the attack remains unidentified.

securityweek.com · 1 min

TLDR Crypto

COINBASE CALLS FOR SEC TO RETHINK RULE ON DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGES, CALLING IT 'IRRATIONAL'

Coinbase has urged the SEC to withdraw its rule requiring decentralized exchanges to register like traditional ones, arguing that it is impractical and based on flawed assumptions. Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal says that DEXs cannot meet the same compliance standards as centralized exchanges, citing a recent Supreme Court ruling to challenge the SEC's broad interpretation of the law.

links.tldrnewsletter.com · 3 min

TLDR

US CONSIDERS A RARE ANTITRUST MOVE: BREAKING UP GOOGLE

The Department of Justice is considering breaking up Alphabet following a ruling that found the company monopolized the online search market. The most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Chrome web browser. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products. The government will likely see a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of the case.

bloomberg.com · 9 min

TLDR

AMAZON VIES FOR NUCLEAR-POWERED DATA CENTER

Proposals for co-locating data centers next to nuclear power have popped up in several places. The setup allows for data centers to draw clean electricity directly rather than from the grid while avoiding paying fees that would otherwise help maintain grids. It also means that data centers are hogging hundreds of megawatts that could be going to other customers. Amazon is currently dealing with regulatory hurdles over a deal that would give one of its data centers an extra 180 megawatts of power as it would hurt all of the customers that buy from the facility.

spectrum.ieee.org · 5 min

TLDR

THE WEBB TELESCOPE FURTHER DEEPENS THE BIGGEST CONTROVERSY IN COSMOLOGY

An analysis of observations from the James Webb Space Telescope shows conflicting cosmic expansion rates from different types of data. The cosmic expansion rate has been consistently measured to be higher than the theoretical prediction for how fast space should be expanding. However, different teams have come up with different rates of expansion. These discrepancies suggest that the theoretical model of the cosmos might be missing something.

quantamagazine.org · 17 min

TLDR

THE NEW POSTGRESQL 17 MAKE DIST

Creating a source code tarball is quite tricky to do by hand. While it is possible to just run 'tar' over a currently checked out source tree, developers need to be careful that the checkout is clean and not locally modified and ensure that all the files that belong in the tarball end up there and no other files. The resulting tarball should work consistently across platforms and across time. This article looks at how PostgreSQL makes a release.

peter.eisentraut.org · 8 min