“The biggest risk is data escape.”

Eric Ingebretsen, chief commercial officer at SK TES, an IT asset disposition provider, tells me this early on during a tour of a 128,000-square-foot facility in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He will restate this a few times.

A big part of this site’s pitch to its clients, including the “hyperscale” customers with gigantic data centers nearby, is that each device is labeled, tracked, and inventoried for its drives—both obvious and hidden—and is either securely wiped or destroyed. The process, commonly called ITAD, is used by larger businesses, especially when they upgrade fleets of servers or workers’ devices. ITAD providers ensure all the old gear is wiped clean, then resold, repurposed, recycled, or destroyed.

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31 years ago FreeBSD was first released. But here in 2025, searches for the Unix-like FreeBSD OS keep increasing on Google, notes the official FreeBSD blog — and it’s at least a two-year trend. Yet after talking to some businesses using (or interested in using) FreeBSD, they sometimes found that because FreeBSD isn’t talked about as much, “people think it’s dying. This is a clear example of the availability heuristic.

The availability heuristic is a fascinating mental shortcut. It’s how product names become verbs and household names. To ‘Google’ [search], to ‘Hoover’ [vacuum], to ‘Zoom’ . They reached a certain tipping point that there was no need to do any more thinking. One just googles , or zooms .

These days, building internet services doesn’t require much thought about the underlying systems. With containers and cloud platforms, development has moved far from the hardware. Operating systems aren’t top of mind — so people default to what’s familiar. And when they do think about the OS, it’s usually Linux. But sitting there, quietly powering masses of the internet, without saying boo to a goose, is FreeBSD. And the companies using it? They’re not talking about it. Why? Because they don’t have to. The simple fact that dawned on me is FreeBSD’s gift to us all, yet Achilles heel to itself, is its license.
Unlike the GPL, which requires you to share derivative works, the BSD license doesn’t. You can take FreeBSD code, build on it, and never give anything back. This makes it a great foundation for products — but it also means there’s little reason for companies to return their contributions… [W]e’d like to appeal to companies using FreeBSD. Talk to us about your use case… We, the FreeBSD Foundation, can be the glue between industry and software and hardware vendors alike.

In the meantime, stay tuned to this blog and the YouTube channel. We have some fantastic content coming up, featuring solutions built on top of FreeBSD and showcasing modern laptops for daily use.

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It’s America’s biggest box office for a Memorial Day weekend ever, reports Variety.

And it’s been more than a decade since this many Americans went to see a movie during a three-day weekend…

Families turned out in force for Disney’s live-action “Lilo & Stitch” remake, which collected a blockbuster $145.5 million in its opening weekend and an estimated $183 million through Monday… Meanwhile, older audiences showed up to watch Paramount and Skydance’s “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” which earned a series-best $63 million over the weekend and an estimated $77 million through Monday’s holiday. This eighth installment just narrowly beat 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” ($61 million) to score the top debut of the 29-year-old franchise…

Thanks to effective counterprogramming — and a huge assist by holdovers like “Final Destination Bloodlines,” “Thunderbolts*” and “Sinners” — this weekend delivered the best collective Memorial Day weekend haul with $322 million… Cinema operators are rejoicing because Memorial Day is the official launch to summer movie season, which is the most profitable stretch for the movie business. (Historically, the four-month period has accounted for $4 billion, or around 40% of the annual box office.)

It’s a huge improvement from last year, which started with a whimper rather than a bang as “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “Garfield” led the holiday’s worst showing in three decades with $132 million collectively. “Every film on the release calendar for the rest of the summer is going to benefit from the momentum created over this monumental record-breaking Memorial weekend in theaters,” says senior Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian.
But the top-earning movie of the year so far is A Minecraft Movie, which has apparently brought in over $940 million.
Meanwhile, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is one of the most expensive films of all time, according to the article, costing $400 million as Tom Cruise and the movie’s director “worked through a pandemic and two strikes, all while grappling with inflation.” Though the film received a high “A-” grade on CinemaScore, a movie industry analyst tells Variety that the unexpectedly high production costs means the movie “will be lucky to break-even.”

Fun fact: A quarter of a century ago, CmdrTaco reviewed a new movie called Mission: Impossible 2, calling it “a fun movie,” but “no Gladiator” and sort of a “James Bond for Dummies” movie.

“The ‘Plot’ is really just an excuse to show us lots of explosions, car/motorcycle/helicoptor chases…”

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Earlier this month app developer Guilherme Rambo had a warning for iPhone users:

If you try to send an audio message using the Messages app to someone who’s also using the Messages app, and that message happens to include the name “Dave and Buster’s”, the message will never be received.
In case you’re wondering, “Dave and Buster’s” is the name of a sports bar and restaurant in the United States… [T]he recipient will only see the “dot dot dot” animation for several seconds, and it will then eventually disappear. They will never get the audio message.
“The issue was first spotted on the podcast Search Engine…” according to an article in Fortune:

Rambo’s explanation of the curiosity goes like this.

“When you send an audio message using the Messages app, the message includes a transcription of the audio. If you happen to pronounce the name ‘Dave and Buster’s’ as someone would normally pronounce it, almost like it’s a single word, the transcription engine on iOS will recognize the brand name and correctly write it as ‘Dave & Buster’s’ (with an ampersand),” he begins. So far, so good.” [But ampersands have special meaning in HTML/XHTML…] And, as MacRumors puts it: “The parsing error triggers Apple’s BlastDoor Messages feature that protects users from malicious messages that might rely on problematic parsing, so ultimately, the audio message fails to send.”
To solve the mystery, Rambo “plugged the recipient device into my Mac and captured the logs right after the device received the problematic message.” Their final thoughts…

Since BlastDoor was designed to thwart hacking attempts, which frequently rely on faulty data parsing, it immediately stops what it’s doing and just fails. That’s what causes the message to get stuck in the “dot dot dot” state, which eventually times out, and the message just disappears. On the surface, this does sound like it could be used to “hack” someone’s iPhone via a bad audio message transcription, but in reality what this bug demonstrates is that Apple’s BlastDoor mechanism is working as designed.

Many bad parsers would probably accept the incorrectly-formatted XHTML, but that sort of leniency when parsing data formats is often what ends up causing security issues. By being pedantic about the formatting, BlastDoor is protecting the recipient from an exploit that would abuse that type of issue.

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