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hubie writes:

A unique record of medieval live comedy performance has been identified in a 15th-century manuscript:

The texts contain the earliest recorded use of 'red herring' in English, extremely rare forms of medieval literature, as well as a killer rabbit worthy of Monty Python. The discovery changes the way we should think about English comic culture between Chaucer and Shakespeare.

[...] Throughout the Middle Ages, minstrels travelled between fairs, taverns and baronial halls to entertain people with songs and stories.

Fictional minstrels are common in medieval literature but references to real-life performers are rare and fleeting. We have first names, payments, instruments played and occasionally locations, but until now virtually no evidence of their lives or work.

Dr James Wade, from the University of Cambridge's English Faculty and Girton College, came across the texts by accident while researching in the National Library of Scotland. He then had a "moment of epiphany" when he noticed the scribe had written:

'By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink.'

"It was an intriguing display of humour and it's rare for medieval scribes to share that much of their character," Wade says. That made him investigate how, where and why Heege had copied out the texts.

[...] This booklet contains three texts and Wade concludes that around the year 1480 Heege copied them from a now lost memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel performing near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border.

[...] "Most medieval poetry, song and storytelling has been lost", Wade says. "Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art. This is something else. It's mad and offensive, but just as valuable."

[...] Wade thinks the minstrel wrote part of his act down because its many nonsense sequences would have been extremely difficult to recall. "He didn't give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember," Wade says.

[...] The texts add to what we thought minstrels did. Fictional depictions suggest they performed ballads about Robin Hood, chivalric romances, adventure stories and songs about great battles.

"These texts are far more comedic and they serve up everything from the satirical, ironic, and nonsensical to the topical, interactive and meta-comedic. It's a comedy feast," Wade says.

[...] "People back then partied a lot more than we do today, so minstrels had plenty of opportunities to perform. They were really important figures in people's lives right across the social hierarchy. These texts give us a snapshot of medieval life being lived well."

Journal Reference:
J. Wade, Entertainments from a medieval minstrel's repertoire book [open], The Review of English Studies (2023). DOI: 10.1093/res/hgad053

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Climate change will make stomach bugs an even bigger problem, a new report has found. The study concludes that expected changes in temperature, precipitation, and humidity will make foodborne infections and toxins all the more common—at least in Germany. That said, other research has indicated that these increased risks will be seen globally as well.

The research is part of a special series by scientists in Germany looking at the regional health impacts on climate change. It was published earlier this June in the Journal of Health Monitoring. It’s a review of the literature and focuses on common foodborne illnesses caused by Salmonella, Campylobacter,and Vibrio bacteria, the parasites Cryptosporidium and Giardia, and other toxins produced by marine life.

Across the board, the researchers found evidence that all these infections and toxin poisonings will steadily increase in the years to come due to climate change, though for many varying reasons.

[...] Important as these warnings are, the authors of the current report say that it’s well past time to start taking action to mitigate these risks, both on a small and large scale.

“Our main recommendations for minimizing the health risk from foodborne infections and intoxications lie in the area of kitchen hygiene, which should always be applied when preparing food,” the scientists wrote. “This includes thorough handwashing and the use of fresh kitchen utensils after handling raw meat and fish, as well as avoidance of cross-contamination,” the authors wrote.

To which they added: “We also recommend the use of new technologies to track supply chains. Given a globalized food distribution network and the use of different processing and preservation techniques, it can be difficult to track a product’s supply chain to identify potential risks.”

Journal Reference:
Dietrich J, Hammerl JA, Johne A, Kappenstein, Loeffler C et al. (2023) Impact of climate change on foodborne infections and intoxications [open]. J Health Monit 8(S3): 78–92. DOI 10.25646/11403

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Last Friday, Illinois became one of the few states to pass an anti-doxxing law, making it possible for victims to sue attackers who "intentionally" publish their personally identifiable information with intent to harm or harass them. (Doxxing is sometimes spelled "doxing.")

The Civil Liability for Doxing Act, which takes effect on January 1, 2024, passed after a unanimous vote. It allows victims to recover damages and to request "a temporary restraining order, emergency order of protection, or preliminary or permanent injunction to restrain and prevent the disclosure or continued disclosure of a person's personally identifiable information or sensitive personal information."

It's the first law of its kind in the Midwest, the Daily Herald reported, and is part of a push by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to pass similar laws at the state and federal levels.

ADL's Midwest regional director, David Goldenberg, told the Daily Herald that ADL has seen doxxing become "over the past few years" an effective way of "weaponizing" the Internet. ADL has helped similar laws pass in Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.

[...] Illinois state representative Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz told the Daily Herald that she introduced the anti-doxxing law as "a way to hold accountable those who perpetuate hate online."

The law does not involve criminal charges but imposes civil liability on individuals who dox any Illinois residents. Actions can also be brought against individuals when "any element" of a doxxing offense occurs in the state.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Sick of paying through the nose for cable TV? Just cut the cord! For years, that was a mantra of gleeful cord-cutters looking to save on their favorite TV services. But after a seemingly endless series of streaming price hikes, cord-cutting costs are finally catching up to cable.

According to a recent analysis of streaming and cable TV prices conducted by the Financial Times (by way of 9to5Mac), subscripting to the top streaming services now cost more than the average price of a cable TV bundle.

Specifically, the analysis found that a “basket” of the most popular streaming services now costs $87 a month, up $10 from just a year ago. That’s more than the monthly cost for the typical cable bundle, which is $83 a month, the Financial Times reports.

[...] Why have streaming prices gone up so quickly? Because the streaming gold rush is over, and rather than looking for growth from the big streamers, Wall Street now wants to see profits.

Of course, those of us who cut the cord years ago probably won’t be in any rush to go back to Big Cable. But if you’re still looking to save money through cord-cutting, you’ll be better off investing in an over-the-air DVR than forking over for Netflix or Disney+.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

"Everywhere I came I got the impression that I was surrounded by people who were emitting, but not receiving. Narcissism, I thought, is a corruption of focus, a version of attention which is only directed towards yourself and your own ego."

(Stolen Focus, Johann Hari, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, 2022.)

How many subs should we publish on this site?

If we'd put on just a single story for each topic (software, hardware, news, science, security, politics and so on), and keep it on the frontpage for a week, would that work for you? If we'd publish hundred stories each day, would you start or continue commenting?

In short, can you think of a magic cast, in terms of number and frequency of stories, to lure an optimum number of people into posting here? If so, which would be the factors in your mathematical formula?

(Audio interviews for the quoted book, here).

Original Submission

[Note from the Moq Website: Moq (pronounced "Mock-you" or just "Mock") is the only mocking library for .NET developed from scratch to take full advantage of .NET lambda expressions that make it the most productive, type-safe and refactoring-friendly mocking library available. JR]

upstart writes:

Popular open source project Moq criticized for quietly collecting data:

Open source project Moq (pronounced "Mock") has drawn sharp criticism for quietly including a controversial dependency in its latest release.

Distributed on the NuGet software registry, Moq sees over 100,000 downloads on any given day, and has been downloaded over 476 million times over the course of its lifetime.

Moq's 4.20.0 release from this week quietly included another project, SponsorLink, which caused an uproar among open source software consumers, who likened the move to a breach of trust.

Seemingly an open-source project, SponsorLink is actually shipped on NuGet as closed source and contains obfuscated DLLs that collect hashes of user email addresses and send these to SponsorLink's CDN, raising privacy concerns.

Last week, one of Moq's owners, Daniel Cazzulino (kzu), who also maintains the SponsorLink project, added SponsorLink to Moq versions 4.20.0 and above.

This move sent shock waves across the open source ecosystem largely for two reasons—while Cazzulino has every right to change his project Moq, he did not notify the user base prior to bundling the dependency, and SponsorLink DLLs contain obfuscated code, making it is hard to reverse engineer, and not quite "open source."

"It seems that starting from version 4.20, SponsorLink is included," Germany-based software developer Georg Dangl reported referring to Moq's 4.20.0 release.

"This is a closed-source project, provided as a DLL with obfuscated code, which seems to at least scan local data (git config?) and sends the hashed email of the current developer to a cloud service."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

While rumbling over Mount Sharp on Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover found a strange crackled terrain.

These distinct patterns in dry mud, found over 100 million miles away in space, are a thrilling discovery for geologists. The cracks form a lattice of hexagons, signaling that the land has gone through intermittent spells of wetness and dryness. Many scientists credit these environmental shifts with prompting the chemical reactions needed to create microorganisms on Earth.

Of course, scientists have already found ample evidence that Mars could have supported life long ago. But these new geological findings are something quite different, experts say. They reveal the environmental conditions that could have allowed life to emerge on the Red Planet in the first place.

And to think this major breakthrough was all made possible by looking between the cracks — literally.

"This is the first tangible evidence we’ve seen that the ancient climate of Mars had such regular, Earth-like wet-dry cycles," said William Rapin of France’s Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in a statement. "But even more important is that wet-dry cycles are helpful — maybe even required — for the molecular evolution that could lead to life."

A team of researchers including lead author Rapin has published a paper in Nature describing how this peculiar mesh of cracks offers the first evidence of wet-dry cycles occurring on ancient Mars.

[...] "It’s pretty lucky of us to have a planet like Mars nearby that still holds a memory of the natural processes which may have led to life," Rapin said.

upstart writes:

Private jet owners have long waited for their flight information to be unavailable to the public, and Congress might grant them that:

Good news may be coming for Elon Musk and other uberwealthy folks with private jets. The FAA reauthorization bill, which was recently passed by the House, may soon block the public from learning about the flights people take on private jets, according to Axios. While it may be good news in the eyes of the rich, it's bad news for everyone else.

The Tesla, SpaceX and X (ugh) CEO has said in the past that people having access to their flight data can pose a security risk, but Axios asserts that the information has proven to be very useful for journalists and other researchers. This sort of tracking has always been part of public record, but until online flight trackers started taking off (I'm so sorry), it was sort of a pain in the ass for most people to learn who owned private planes and where they were going.

The outlet reports that a provision deep inside the five-year FAA reauthorization bill would require the agency to establish a process that would let jet owners request to keep their planes' registration numbers and other information private. That's lame as hell. The bill reportedly passed the House by a 351-69 (nice) vote in July, and now it must be reconciled with the Senate before President Biden can sign it.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/biology/plant-persephacin-fungal-pathogens/

While water lilies are perhaps most famous for starring in French impressionist artist Claude Monet's work, they may also have a molecular secret weapon that could help in our ongoing fight against fungal infections.

After viruses and bacteria, fungus is the most deadly pathogen and, much like bacteria, is adapting fast to be resistant to current medical interventions. While the official numbers show that around 8,000 Americans die from fungal infections each year, it's likely to be much higher, since many cases go undiagnosed and, as an 'opportunistic pathogen,' the microorganism can attack weakened immune systems for complex comorbidities.

[...] However, there's some good news. Scientists out of the University of Oklahoma (UO) may have found a molecule in a species of water lily or lotus that can fight off fungal infection.

Journal Reference:
Lin Du, et. al.Persephacin Is a Broad-Spectrum Antifungal Aureobasidin Metabolite That Overcomes Intrinsic Resistance in Aspergillus fumigatus, Journal of Natural Products, 2023 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.3c00382 )

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/homeland-security-details-how-teen-hackers-breached-some-of-the-biggest-targets/

A ragtag bunch of amateur hackers, many of them teenagers with little technical training, have been so adept at breaching large targets, including Microsoft, Okta, Nvidia, and Globant, that the federal government is studying their methods to get a better grounding in cybersecurity.

The group, known as Lapsus$, is a loosely organized group that employs hacking techniques that, while decidedly unsophisticated, have proved highly effective.
[...]
Rather than compromising infrastructure used to make various MFA services work, as more advanced groups do, a Lapsus$ leader last year described his approach to defeating MFA this way: "Call the employee 100 times at 1 am while he is trying to sleep, and he will more than likely accept it. Once the employee accepts the initial call, you can access the MFA enrollment portal and enroll another device."

On Thursday, the Homeland Security Department's Cyber Safety Review Board released a report that documented many of the most effective tactics in the Lapsus$ playbook and urged organizations to develop countermeasures to prevent them from succeeding.
[...]
The report contains a variety of recommendations. Key among them is moving to passwordless authentication systems, which presumably refer to passkeys, based on FIDO2. Like all FIDO2 offerings, passkeys are immune to all known credential phishing attacks because the standard requires the device that provides MFA to be no further than a few feet away from the device logging in.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After NASA’s Moon-faring, water-hunting probe faced an untimely demise before it was ever able to reach its final destination, mission scientists have officially declared that clogged propellant lines led to the mission’s failure.

SpaceNews reports that Celeste Smith and Nathan Cheek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced the finding during a presentation at the 37th Annual Small Satellite Conference earlier this week. Lunar Flashlight first began facing issues with blockages in three of of the four lines that provide propellant to its thrusters just three days after it launched in December 2022. The pair said that the blockages were likely caused by titanium particles that became loose as the spacecraft vibrated before and during launch, and that these thruster issues ultimately led to the death of the mission.

While Lunar Flashlight had its fair share of trouble, JPL and project collaborators at Georgia Tech were never ready to immediately give up on the probe. After the team began detecting trouble with Lunar Flashlight’s propellant lines, NASA took a new approach to push the probe into a high Earth orbit instead of the planned near-rectilinear halo orbit. There, Lunar Flashlight would still have a view of the Moon, but only through monthly flybys of the lunar South pole. All the while, NASA continued attempts to clear the propellant lines of debris.

[...] Lunar Flashlight was a briefcase-sized satellite fitted with an instrument called a four-laser reflectometer. With this device, the probe would have used lasers to scan the Moon’s surface in near-infrared wavelength in an attempt to find water ice hidden in the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions. Infrared wavelengths are absorbed by water, so data collected by Lunar Flashlight would be able to delineate water ice from lunar rocks and soil.

Previously: Recent NASA CubeSat Challenges

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.righto.com/2023/08/intel-8086-bus-hold.html

The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) revolutionized computing by founding the x86 architecture that continues to this day. One of the lesser-known features of the 8086 is the "hold" functionality, which allows an external device to temporarily take control of the system's bus. This feature was most important for supporting the 8087 math coprocessor chip, which was an option on the IBM PC; the 8087 used the bus hold so it could interact with the system without conflicting with the 8086 processor.

This blog post explains in detail how the bus hold feature is implemented in the processor's logic. (Be warned that this post is a detailed look at a somewhat obscure feature.) I've also found some apparently undocumented characteristics of the 8086's hold acknowledge circuitry, designed to make signal transition faster on the shared control lines.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/how-an-unpatched-microsoft-exchange-0-day-likely-caused-one-of-the-uks-biggest-hacks-ever/

It's looking more and more likely that a critical zero-day vulnerability that went unfixed for more than a month in Microsoft Exchange was the cause of one of the UK's biggest hacks ever—the breach of the country's Electoral Commission, which exposed data for as many as 40 million residents.

Electoral Commission officials disclosed the breach on Tuesday. They said that they discovered the intrusion last October when they found "suspicious activity" on their networks and that "hostile actors had first accessed the systems in August 2021." That means the attackers were in the network for 14 months before finally being driven out. The Commission waited nine months after that to notify the public.
[...]
Some online sleuthing independently done by TechCrunch reporter Zack Whittaker and researcher Kevin Beaumont suggests that a pair of critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server, which large organizations use to manage email accounts, was the cause.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Plastics and soaps tend to have little in common when it comes to texture, appearance, and, most importantly, how they are used. But there is a surprising connection between the two on a molecular level: The chemical structure of polyethylene—one of the most commonly used plastics in the world today—is strikingly similar to that of a fatty acid, which is used as a chemical precursor to soap. Both materials are made of long carbon chains, but fatty acids have an extra group of atoms at the end of the chain.

Guoliang "Greg" Liu, associate professor of chemistry in the Virginia Tech College of Science, had long felt this similarity implied that it should be possible to convert polyethylene into fatty acids—and with a few additional steps to the process—to produce soap. The challenge was how to break a long polyethylene chain into many short—but not too short—chains and how to do it efficiently. Liu believed there was the potential for a new upcycling method that could take low-value plastic waste and turn it into a high-value, useful commodity.

[...] With the help of Zhen Xu and Eric Munyaneza, two Ph.D. chemistry students in Liu's lab, Liu built a small, oven-like reactor where they could heat polyethylene in a process called temperature-gradient thermolysis.

At the bottom, the oven is at a high enough temperature to break the polymer chains, and at the top, the oven is cooled to a low enough temperature to stop any further breakdown. After the thermolysis, they gathered the residue—similar to cleaning soot from a chimney—and found that Liu's hunch had been right: It was composed of "short-chain polyethylene," or more precisely, waxes.

[...] "Our research demonstrates a new route for plastic upcycling without using novel catalysts or complex procedures. In this work, we have shown the potential of a tandem strategy for plastic recycling," said Xu, lead author on the paper. "This will enlighten people to develop more creative designs of upcycling procedures in the future."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Asus has released a new addition to its Tinker Board line of Arm-based single-board computer (SBC) systems, giving hobbyists and embedded developers another design option with a plethora of ports.

The Tinker Board range launched by by Asus in 2017, but while previous models have typically followed a similar form factor to the popular Raspberry Pi – slightly smaller than a playing card – the latest Tinker Board 3N series sports a larger 100 x 100mm (4 x 4in) footprint described by Asus as NUC-sized.

Like earlier models, the Tinker Board 3N is based on a system-on-chip (SoC) from Rockchip, in this case the RK3568 which features a quad-core Cortex-A55 CPU cluster plus a Mali-G52 GPU, while the board itself supports 2GB, 4GB or 8GB of LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X memory.

[...] Speaking of operating systems, Asus claims support for the Tinker Board 3N with Debian or Yocto Linux, plus Android. It also claims to support firmware over the air (FOTA) updates for both Android and Linux.

Asus says that Tinker Board 3N will be available in three versions "to meet diverse project requirements," comprising Tinker Board 3N PLUS, Tinker Board 3N and Tinker Board 3N LITE, but offers no information on what the differences between these models are.

[...] While most Tinker Boards are based on an Arm SoC, the previous model Asus released earlier this year was based on a RISC-V chip. The Tinker V has a 1GHz single-core Renesas RZ/Five processor with 1GB of DDR4 memory and supports Yocto and Debian Linux.

Asus and Intel also disclosed last month that they were in negotiations for Asus to take on the Intel NUC brand from Intel, following the chipmaker's decision to cease development of that product line.

Original Submission