Bonus Drop #90 (2025-07-13): A Very Utilitarian Drop

The weekend Bonus Drop features three useful resources: urltomarkdown, which converts web pages to Markdown; utiluti, providing command-line control for app associations; and Small Utilities, offering various helpful scripts for tasks like media conversion and file management.

http://dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev/2025/07/13/bonus-drop-90-2025-07-13-a-very-utilitarian-drop/

🎞️ A developer managed to reverse pixelation in video using FFmpeg, GIMP and edge detection - no AI involved.

By analyzing motion and edges across frames, they could reconstruct original content from blurred areas.

It’s a reminder: pixelation is visual, not secure.

🛠️ Code & demo: https://github.com/KoKuToru/de-pixelate_gaV-O6NPWrI

#infosec #opensource #ffmpeg #linux #osint #devtools #technews

This post fully captures why I 💙 MCP servers so much (as noted, it has nothing to do with "AI").

https://worksonmymachine.substack.com/p/mcp-an-accidentally-universal-plugin

Sigh. I'm still so bothered by that "chatgpt rots your brain" paper BECAUSE it correctly positions some of the compelling questions we have about LLM usage but then does us all a disservice in its approach, pushy interpretation, and inappropriate or misleading framing of brain evidence and measurement of human problem-solving, imo

I am asking myself: what studies would *I* design to evaluate people's usage of LLMs in keeping with learning science and without neurohype?

Watching Microsoft’s robots telling Microsoft’s other robots that they need to agree to Microsoft CLAs in between Microsoft’s developers begging Microsoft’s robots to actually understand the problems they’re trying to fix in Microsoft's platform code on Microsoft's version-control website is kind of amazing.

This is definitely the future Terry Gilliam promised us.

When Signal was designed, our threat model was protecting the communications of civil society, journalists, just regular citizens ...

The threat model of military operations & sharing your hate of Europeans was not what Signal was designed for. Ephemeral messages and cryptographic deniability are not fit for communications that require accountability.
But I appreciate their effort to make government more efficient by adding journalists to the chat instead of requiring to go through FOIA.

Mozilla CEO made around 7 million USD last year, but hosting bills are pending. Now, they updated the ToS, and you can't watch p0rn, or your data will be sold, or they no longer care about the orignal mission, etc. Once again, we see C-suits lose their grip on reality. As long as they are getting paid in millions, software projects can go to /dev/null. It is like they want to ruin the project on purpose. There is no other explanation I can think of. Can you?

#opensource #firefox #mozilla