- FTDI’s Windows driver update deliberately “bricked” counterfeit FT232 USB-serial chips by rewriting their product ID to 0000, sparking discussion on supply-chain trust and the ethics of vendor counter-measures.  
- Tesseract OCR on video-captured book pages produced unusable output; the group converged on a workflow of converting frames to TIFF, OpenCV adaptive-thresholding, cropping, and improving lighting, with a sample image at http://imgur.com/yVG6fAx.  
- libsnark (https://github.com/scipr-lab/libsnark) was introduced as a C++ library for generating zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proofs, flagged as a tool for privacy-preserving computation.  
- A grassroots open-source Ebola countermeasure initiative (www.ebola.si) was announced, aiming to leverage a claimed BSL-4 collaboration in Spain; participants debated whether Ebola’s exponential urban growth in 2014 justifies prioritizing it over influenza.  
- The feasibility of a 50 TB distributed archive of the entire scholarly literature was debated, including BitTorrent seeding, proof-of-storage altcoins, legal risks under U.S. library-only-one-digital-copy rules, and the “millennial science ark” of pre-2000 papers as an attainable first milestone.  
- Aaron Swartz’s legacy was invoked via gmaxwell’s 33 GB JSTOR torrent (18,592 papers) still circulating on TPB, cited as an early radical-open-access act.  
- A DIY sweat-electrolyte sensing project explored real-time sodium/potassium/magnesium quantification during endurance cycling using impedance spectroscopy and dialysis-tubing wicking to isolate fresh excretions.  
- Lattice’s $3 iCE40HX1K FPGA and $25 dev boards were highlighted as the current low-cost entry point for open-source FPGA experimentation, contrasting with proprietary synthesis toolchains.