Arkiv

Autonomously navigating the real world: lessons from the PG&E outage

autonomously-navigating-the-real-world:-lessons-from-the-pg&e-outage

At Waymo, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted driver. We know trust is built through consistent behavior over time—earned through every mile we drive and every interaction we have with the community. This past Saturday, as a widespread PG&E outage cut power to nearly one-third of San Francisco, our service was put […]

Could lockfiles just be SBOMs?

Every package manager has its own lockfile format. Gemfile.lock, package-lock.json, yarn.lock, Cargo.lock, poetry.lock, composer.lock, go.sum. They all record roughly the same information: which packages were installed, at what versions, with what checksums, from where. Lockfiles are SBOMs. Meanwhile, the security world has been pushing CycloneDX and SPDX as standardized formats for describing software components. Lockfiles […]

Is Northern Virginia Still the Least Reliable AWS Region?

is-northern-virginia-still-the-least-reliable-aws-region?

Table of content This updated analysis is based on StatusGator outage data collected from January 1 to December 9, 2025. We decided to review our AWS analysis of outages in 2022 due to several new AWS incidents, especially another widely discussed AWS outage in us-east-1 (N. Virginia) that occurred on October 20, 2025. We’ve expanded […]

Microspeak: North Star – The Old New Thing (2015)

microspeak:-north-star-–-the-old-new-thing-(2015)

I noted it in the interview with the Defrag Tools show, but I’ll make a proper Microspeak for it. Today’s term is North star. This term rose quickly to prominence in October 2015. My research suggests that it had been simmering below the surface for about a year. For example, here’s an isolated citation from […]

Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

texas-app-store-age-verification-law-blocked-by-federal-judge

A Texas federal judge today blocked an App Store age verification law that was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026, which means Apple may not have to support the changes after all. The Texas ‌App Store‌ Accountability Act (SB2420) requires Apple and other app marketplaces to confirm user age when a person […]

X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents

x-ray:-a-python-library-for-finding-bad-redactions-in-pdf-documents

x-ray is a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents. At Free Law Project, we collect millions of PDFs. An ongoing problem is that people fail to properly redact things. Instead of doing it the right way, they just draw a black rectangle or a black highlight on top of black text and […]

Some Epstein file redactions are being undone with hacks

some-epstein-file-redactions-are-being-undone-with-hacks

People examining documents released by the Department of Justice in the Jeffrey Epstein case discovered that some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file. Un-redacted text from these documents began circulating through social media on Monday evening. An exhibit in […]

HTTP Caching, a Refresher

http-caching,-a-refresher

Published Dec 22, 2025 This is a reading of RFC 9111 (2022), the latest iteration of the HTTP Caching standard. It defines the Cache-Control HTTP header as a way to prescribe how caches should store and reuse HTTP responses, with regards to not just the browser cache, but to any other intermediary caches, such as […]

Terrence Malick’s Disciples

terrence-malick’s-disciples

Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood Paul Mescal in Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao, 2025. Photo by Bruno Engler, courtesy Paramount Pictures In the winter of 2024, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross released Nickel Boys, a masterful adaptation of a novel by Colson Whitehead. In a fragmentary, impressionistic style, the […]