🎂 Happy 79th birthday to the Association for Computing Machinery. On this day in 1947, seventy-eight people squeezed into a room at Columbia to found it, and the invitation said the goal was advancing machinery for "computing, reasoning, and other handling of information." Reasoning. In 1947. Before the transistor was even a product. Those people argued about whether a machine could think using gear that weighed several tons and ran on vacuum tubes, and 79 years later we are having the same argument with nicer fonts. This week: your TV is an informant, a cyberattack ate a company's fiscal year, and Linux is taking out 55,000 lines of trash.

Also, if you haven't heard, despite how often we've talked about it, we're on LinkedIn, where we remain one of maybe nine accounts not posting "what my sourdough starter taught me about Series B fundraising." Follow us and give your feed a rest.

Your television has a second job you never hired it for. Almost every major smart TV ships with automatic content recognition switched on, which means it fingerprints whatever's on screen every few seconds and sends the sample off to be matched against a database. Cable, streaming apps, over-the-air broadcast, the Blu-ray you paid real money to own, the console your kid is monopolizing. All logged, all passed to ad partners.

This is not hypothetical. In 2017, the FTC and New Jersey hit Vizio with a $2.2 million settlement over ACR running on 11 million sets without consent, and regulators found the company was collecting as many as 100 billion data points a day, then bolting on household details like income and marital status before selling it along.

The off switch exists. It's just buried four menus deep and named something forgettable. Samsung calls it Viewing Information Services. LG calls it Live Plus. Vizio calls it Viewing Data. Sony files it under Samba Interactive TV. Kill them, and nothing breaks. Apps still work, picture still works, and your TV returns to being furniture with a screen.

Boston Scientific told the SEC on Tuesday that last month's intrusion will have a "material impact" on both its third quarter and its full year, and that it likely will not hit the sales growth or earnings guidance it published back in July. One unnamed attacker, one rewritten financial forecast.

The company caught unauthorized activity on its network on August 25 and pulled systems offline to contain it, which took out the applications that process and ship customer orders. Distribution centers are mostly back to normal volume, sterilization sites are running, and manufacturing has restarted at most locations worldwide. Some systems are still down, and nobody will put a date on full recovery.

The unsettling part: two weeks in, Boston Scientific still has not said how the attackers got in, whether ransomware was involved, who was responsible, or whether any data walked out the door. No crew has claimed credit. The full damage report lands with Q3 earnings on October 28, meaning the board finds out in matching Halloween costumes that a nine-figure forecast gap came down to somebody's password being their dog's name and a number.

Arnd Bergmann sent out 13 patches on Tuesday that delete more than 55,000 lines of kernel code and Device Tree files, all of it support for 32-bit ARM platforms that Linux 7.3 already marked deprecated. The condemned list includes SA1100, Footbridge, RISCPC, Orion, OMAP24xx, i.MX31, LPC18xx, a few STM32 microcontrollers, and a stack of legacy PXA board files. Hundreds of orphaned drivers get swept out behind them.

The rationale is boring and correct. This code turned into a tax on everyone else, blocking cleanups and new features for hardware people actually own. The odds of anyone booting a mainline 2026 kernel on an OMAP24xx sit somewhere between slim and zero.

Bergmann is leaning toward Linux 7.5 rather than 7.4 to keep dependencies simple and land after this year's LTS release. It also gives any remaining holdouts a few months to file an emotional appeal on behalf of their Footbridge.

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Chip reporting in. This week: orphaned permissions, VMware asking sensible questions about SQL, and FileZilla discovering the definition of insanity in real time.

That is the week. Go switch off ACR on your TV, patch your Magento box, and pour one out for the Footbridge platform: gone, briefly mourned, mostly never remembered. Three very different stories, one shared moral: the defaults are not on your side. They never were. Go read a menu you have been ignoring.