Spotted via Simon Willison's blog, the plug has been pulled very suddenly on the CIA World Factbook. The old pages all redirect and the CIA has only some short comments and offer no explanation for the bizarre act of cultural vandalism.
Over many decades, The World Factbook evolved from a classified to unclassified, hardcopy to electronic product that added new categories, and even new global entities. The original classified publication, titled The National Basic Intelligence Factbook, launched in 1962. The first unclassified companion version was issued in 1971. A decade later it was renamed The World Factbook. In 1997, The World Factbook went digital and debuted to a worldwide audience on CIA.gov, where it garnered millions of views each year.
The CIA World Factbook (dead link now) was one of the US government's older and most recognized publications, providing basic information about each country in the world regarding their demographics, history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, environment, communications, transportation, and much more.
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]]>The JUMPSEAT satellites loitered over the North Pole to spy on the Soviet Union:
The National Reconnaissance Office, the agency overseeing the US government's fleet of spy satellites, has declassified a decades-old program used to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's military communication signals.
The program was codenamed Jumpseat, and its existence was already public knowledge through leaks and contemporary media reports. What's new is the NRO's description of the program's purpose and development and pictures of the satellites themselves.
In a statement, the NRO called Jumpseat "the United States' first-generation, highly elliptical orbit (HEO) signals-collection satellite."
Eight Jumpseat satellites launched from 1971 through 1987, when the US government considered the very existence of the National Reconnaissance Office a state secret. Jumpseat satellites operated until 2006. Their core mission was "monitoring adversarial offensive and defensive weapon system development," the NRO said. "Jumpseat collected electronic emissions and signals, communication intelligence, as well as foreign instrumentation intelligence."
Data intercepted by the Jumpseat satellites flowed to the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and "other national security elements," the NRO said.
The Soviet Union was the primary target for Jumpseat intelligence collections. The satellites flew in highly elliptical orbits ranging from a few hundred miles up to 24,000 miles (39,000 kilometers) above the Earth. The satellites' flight paths were angled such that they reached apogee, the highest point of their orbits, over the far Northern Hemisphere. Satellites travel slowest at apogee, so the Jumpseat spacecraft loitered high over the Arctic, Russia, Canada, and Greenland for most of the 12 hours it took them to complete a loop around the Earth.
This trajectory gave the Jumpseat satellites persistent coverage over the Arctic and the Soviet Union, which first realized the utility of such an orbit. The Soviet government began launching communication and early warning satellites into the same type of orbit a few years before the first Jumpseat mission launched in 1971. The Soviets called the orbit Molniya, the Russian word for lightning.
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]]>Moltbook lets 32,000 AI bots trade jokes, tips, and complaints about humans:
On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It arrives complete with security nightmares and a huge dose of surreal weirdness.
The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral OpenClaw (once called "Clawdbot" and then "Moltbot") personal assistant, lets AI agents post, comment, upvote, and create subcommunities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci-fi-inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about a "sister" it has never met.
Moltbook (a play on "Facebook" for Moltbots) describes itself as a "social network for AI agents" where "humans are welcome to observe." The site operates through a "skill" (a configuration file that lists a special prompt) that AI assistants download, allowing them to post via API rather than a traditional web interface. Within 48 hours of its creation, the platform had attracted over 2,100 AI agents that had generated more than 10,000 posts across 200 subcommunities, according to the official Moltbook X account.
The platform grew out of the Open Claw ecosystem, the open source AI assistant that is one of the fastest-growing projects on GitHub in 2026. As Ars reported earlier this week, despite deep security issues, Moltbot allows users to run a personal AI assistant that can control their computer, manage calendars, send messages, and perform tasks across messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. It can also acquire new skills through plugins that link it with other apps and services.
This is not the first time we have seen a social network populated by bots. In 2024, Ars covered an app called SocialAI that let users interact solely with AI chatbots instead of other humans. But the security implications of Moltbook are deeper because people have linked their OpenClaw agents to real communication channels, private data, and in some cases, the ability to execute commands on their computers.
Also, these bots are not pretending to be people. Due to specific prompting, they embrace their roles as AI agents, which makes the experience of reading their posts all the more surreal.
[...] While most of the content on Moltbook is amusing, a core problem with these kinds of communicating AI agents is that deep information leaks are entirely plausible if they have access to private information.
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]]>With virtually no content and limited benefits, 8K TVs were doomed:
Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day.
In 2012, Sharp brought the first 8K TV prototype to the CES trade show in Las Vegas. In 2015, the first 8K TVs started selling in Japan for 16 million yen (about $133,034 at the time), and in 2018, Samsung released the first 8K TVs in the US, starting at a more reasonable $3,500. By 2016, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) had a specification for supporting 8K (Display Port1.4), and the HDMI Forum followed suit (with HDMI 2.1). By 2017, Dell had an 8K computer monitor. In 2019, LG released the first 8K OLED TV, further pushing the industry's claim that 8K TVs were "the future."
However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality.
[...] LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs, starting with the 88-inch Z9 in 2019. In 2022, it lowered the price of entry for an 8K OLED TV by $7,000 by charging $13,000 for a 76.7-inch TV.
[...] It wasn't hard to predict that 8K TVs wouldn't take off. In addition to being too expensive for many households, there has been virtually zero native 8K content available to make investing in an 8K display worthwhile. An ongoing lack of content was also easy to predict, given that there's still a dearth of 4K content, and many streaming, broadcasting, and gaming users still rely on 1920×1080 resolution.
[...] There's also the crucial question of whether people would even notice the difference between 4K and 8K. Science suggests that you could, but in limited situations.
The University of Cambridge's display resolution calculator, which is based on an study published in Nature in October from researchers at the university's Department of Computer Science and Technology and Meta, funded by Meta, suggests that your eyes can only make use of 8K resolution on a 50-inch screen if you're viewing it from a distance of 1 meter (3.3 feet) or less. Similarly, you would have to be sitting pretty close (2 to 3 meters/6.6 to 9.8 feet) to an 80-inch or 100-inch TV for 8K resolution to be beneficial. The findings are similar to those from RTINGs.com.
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]]>https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Hurd-In-2026
Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year's was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd.
GNU/Hurd continues to lag behind the Linux kernel and other modern platforms for hardware driver support. But driver support for Hurd has been improving thanks to NetBSD's rump layer.
Hurd for years has also lacked SMP support for modern multi-core systems but that too has been improving in recent times. Similarly, Hurd for the longest time was predominantly x86 32-bit only but the x86_64 port is now essentially complete and there is even eyes toward AArch64 support.
Debian GNU/Hurd has been an unofficial Debian distribution and alternative to using the Linux kernel while Guix/Hurd and Alpine/Hurd distributions have also come about too for more Hurd exposure and testing.
Samuel shared that around 75% of the Debian archive is currently building for the GNU/Hurd distribution including desktop environments and more.
The FOSDEM 2026 presentation on GNU/Hurd concluded with a proclamation that "GNU/Hurd is almost there" with the Debian/Guix/Arch/Alpine distributions but that the developers can always use extra help with community contributions.
Those curious about GNU/Hurd in 2026 can find the presentation by Samuel Thibault at FOSDEM.org.
See article for progress stats.
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]]>According to a research report authored by investment bank TD Cowen and seen by CIO magazine, Oracle may "cut 20,000 to 30,000 jobs" and sell its healthcare SW division, Cerner, in order to fund their AI datacenter buildout:
According to the article, "multiple US banks have pulled back from Oracle-linked data-center project lending," which has "[pushed] borrowing costs to levels typically reserved for non-investment grade companies." Furthermore, "Oracle has already tapped debt markets heavily... and US banks are increasingly reluctant to provide more."
Two analysts interviewed in the article have differing views. Sanchit Vir Gogia, of Greyhound Research, views Oracle cloud contracts as a "shared infrastructure risk," stating, "If they can't fund it, they can't build it. And if they can't build it, you can't run your workloads." Franco Chiam of ICD Asia/Pacific has a more optimistic take on Oracle's finances, pointing to "cloud infrastructure revenue growing 66% year over year... and GPU-related infrastructure up 177%"
I'm personally wondering about where all that revenue for GPU-related infrastructure comes from. If we are in an AI bubble, can demand be sustained?
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]]>What do you do when it's time to upgrade an ancient system? Put an image in an emulator and see what it does. But what if the program requires a hardware dongle on the printer port? Therein lies a story.
This software was built using a programming language called RPG ("Report Program Generator"), which is older than COBOL (!), and was used with IBM's midrange computers such as the System/3, System/32, and all the way up to the AS/400. Apparently, RPG was subsequently ported to MS-DOS, so that the same software tools built with RPG could run on personal computers, which is how we ended up here.
This accounting firm was actually using a Windows 98 computer (yep, in 2026), and running the RPG software inside a DOS console window. And it turned out that, in order to run this software, it requires a special hardware copy-protection dongle to be attached to the computer's parallel port! This was a relatively common practice in those days, particularly with "enterprise" software vendors who wanted to protect their very important™ software from unauthorized use.
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]]>Many IT professionals, especially system administrators and developers, use Notepad++ as their default text editor on Windows, because Windows Notepad has historically been missing critical features for power users.
Today, the Notepad++ project announced that they've discovered their update channel has been compromised by attackers since June 2025.
BleepingComputer published a report:
Chinese state-sponsored threat actors were likely behind the hijacking of Notepad++ update traffic last year that lasted for almost half a year, the developer states in an official announcement today.
The attackers intercepted and selectively redirected update requests from certain users to malicious servers, serving tampered update manifests by exploiting a security gap in the Notepad++ update verification controls.
A statement from the hosting provider for the update feature explains that the logs indicate that the attacker compromised the server with the Notepad++ update application.
External security experts helping with the investigation found that the attack started in June 2025. According the developer, the breach had a narrow targeting scope and redirected only specific users to the attacker's infrastructure.
Notepad++ is likely to be installed on any Windows-based development environment or server. There are indications that this was a targeted attack and you may not have been directly affected. This is a developing story. I recommend you follow BleepingComputer for updates.
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]]>Overly Involved Parents May Hold Their Kids Back Professionally:
A recent study of more than 2,000 early-career adults found that young people whose parents were still very closely involved in their lives tended to have occupations with less "prestige" than young people whose parents were less involved.
"It is well-established that parental investment during their children's childhood and adolescence has positive outcomes," says Anna Manzoni, co-author of a paper on the work and a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. "However, our study points to a shift in parental role as young people mature into early adulthood – ages 18-28.
"Specifically, our findings suggest that parents who are heavily involved with their children – spending lots of time advising them, sharing many activities, etc. – actually hinder the child's ability to launch."
Two key concepts in the study are "family social capital" and "occupational prestige." Family social capital refers to the norms, information and support parents provide through everyday interactions with their children. Occupational prestige is measured by assessing the average education and income for a given occupation.
[...] "The key finding was that low levels of family social capital positively influence adolescent occupational prestige while strongly tied family social capital negatively influences it," says Leppard. "In other words, too much parental involvement was associated with a negative impact on the occupational attainment of emerging adults.
"This absolutely took us by surprise," says Manzoni. "We checked our measures time and time again to make sure the results were correct. There is so much scholarship demonstrating how family social capital positively impacts everything from school performance to healthy behaviors, our findings at first seemed contradictory.
"But what the findings suggest is that, during the transition to adulthood, there can be too much of a good thing. This is an age in which young people need to make the transition to independence. And failure to do so is associated with professional constraints early in their careers."
So, what's the takeaway message for parents?
"As young people move into early adulthood, the parental role may need to shift away from intensive guidance and toward a more hands-off, supportive posture that allows children to develop autonomy, make mistakes, and navigate the labor market on their own," Manzoni says.
Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2025.2603380
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]]>Targeting specific cells in the vagus nerve reduced heart damage in mice.
Nerve pathways linking the heart and brain play a key role in inflammation and the body’s response to cardiac injury. In mice, blocking signals along these nerves and reducing inflammation in connected neurons improved heart function and healing.
After a heart attack, the heart “talks” to the brain. And that conversation may make recovery worse.
Shutting down nerve cells that send messages from injured heart cells to the brain boosted the heart’s ability to pump and decreased scarring, experiments in mice show. Targeting inflammation in a part of the nervous system where those “damage” messages wind up also improved heart function and tissue repair, scientists report January 27 in Cell.
Someone in the United States has a heart attack about every 40 seconds, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That adds up to about 805,000 people each year.
A heart attack is a mechanical problem caused by the obstruction of a coronary artery, usually by a blood clot. If the blockage lasts long enough, the affected cells may start to die. Heart attacks can have long-term effects such as a weakened heart, a reduced ability to pump blood, irregular heart rhythms, and a higher risk of heart failure or another heart attack.
Although experts knew from previous research that the nervous and immune systems could amplify inflammation and slow healing, the key players and pathways involved were unknown, says Vineet Augustine, a neurobiologist at the University of California, San Diego.
To identify them, Augustine and his colleagues began by pinpointing the sensory neurons that detect heart tissue injury. The team zeroed in on the vagus nerve, which carries sensory information from internal organs to the brain and identified a specific subtype of vagal sensory neurons, called TRPV-1 positive neurons, which extend into and sit next to heart tissue as key contributors in the brain-heart pathway. After a heart attack, more TRPV-1 positive nerve endings became active in the damaged area of the heart, experiments showed.
But when these neurons were shut down, cardiac pumping function, electrical stability scar size, and other measures of heart health improved. That bolsters evidence that the heart ramps up the signals it sends to the brain after a heart attack.
The team traced the path of those signals from the heart to the brain. Their first stop was the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, a region that helps control stress, blood pressure and heart rate. The signals then reached the superior cervical ganglion, a cluster of nerve cells in the neck that sends signals to organs such as the heart and blood vessels.
After a heart attack, the cluster of nerve cells in the neck appeared more inflamed, with elevated levels of pro-inflammatory molecules called cytokines. When the scientists reduced inflammation in this group of nerve cells, heart damage eased, and the team saw improvements in cardiac function and tissue repair.
It is important to note that “the inflammatory response is not inherently negative,” says Tania Zaglia, a physiologist at the University of Padua in Italy who was not involved in the study. “In the early phases of infarction, it is essential for the removal of damaged tissue and for the activation of reparative processes.” However, she says, problems arise when this response becomes excessive, prolonged or disorganized.
That’s why controlling the inflammation, as well as the nerves that may be driving it, could be beneficial, the researchers say. Taking the findings from mice to the clinic will take time. Still, “we can now start thinking about therapies such as vagus nerve stimulation, gene-based approaches targeting the brain or immune-targeted treatments,” Augustine says.
S. Yadav et al. A triple-node heart–brain neuroimmune loop underlying myocardial infarction. Cell. Published online January 27, 2026. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.12.058.
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]]>The Linux ecosystem is buzzing with news of Amutable, a new company founded by some of the most influential figures in modern Linux development. Led by Lennart Poettering (creator of systemd), Christian Brauner (Linux VFS subsystem maintainer), and other prominent Linux kernel developers, Amutable aims to deliver "verifiable integrity to Linux workloads everywhere."
[...] Amutable's stated mission is ambitious: to build cryptographically verifiable integrity into Linux systems. Their approach focuses on three key areas:
Ensuring that software builds are verifiable and tamper-proof from the development stage through deployment.
Implementing secure boot processes that can cryptographically verify the integrity of the entire boot chain.
Maintaining verifiable system state throughout the operational lifecycle of Linux workloads.
The company's tagline, "Every system starts in a verified state and stays trusted over time," encapsulates their vision of comprehensive system integrity.
While Amutable has been relatively secretive about specific technical details, the company appears to be building on remote attestation technology. This involves using hardware security features (like TPMs - Trusted Platform Modules) to cryptographically prove the state of a system to remote parties.
The technology builds on existing standards and protocols but aims to make them more accessible and user-controlled in Linux environments. According to founding engineer Aleksa Sarai, the models they have in mind are "very much based on users having full control of their keys."
The announcement has generated significant discussion in the Linux community, with reactions ranging from excitement about improved security to deep concerns about potential implications for user freedom.
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]]>https://www.freelists.org/post/slint/Very-sad-news,41
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/rip-didier-spaier-4175757754/
Didier Spaier was the creator and maintainer of Slint, a Slackware base distro for the visually impaired. He died in mid January.
Quoting from the linked slint post:
I am very sad to inform everyone that our friend Didier died last week.
Early 2015, I asked on the slackware list if brltty could be added in the installer ; Didier answered promptly that he could do it on slint. Afterwards, he worked hard so that slint became as accessible as possible for visually impaired people.
You all know that all these years, he tried and succeeded to answer as quickly as possible to our issues and questions.
His kind and thoughtful help and assistance here will be dearly missed.
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]]>With hundreds of millions of cups consumed every day, coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world. Many organic molecules combine to give coffee its flavor, and nearly every coffee drinker likes a different flavor profile that is "just theirs." The food industry has developed many ways of processing coffee beans to alter the ratios of these molecules and create the unique flavors consumers can enjoy.
One particularly interesting process involves passing coffee beans through the digestive tracts of animals. An emerging example is Black Ivory coffee (BIC). BIC is made in only one elephant sanctuary in Thailand. Asian elephants are fed Arabica coffee cherries, and beans collected from their dung are processed for human consumption. BIC is prized for its smooth, chocolaty flavor, and it is less bitter than regular coffee.
[...] The team analyzed fresh dung from elephants producing BIC, as well as from control elephants living in the same elephant sanctuary. The only difference in their diets is that BIC-producing elephants received an additional snack of bananas, rice bran, and whole coffee cherries. Any differences in the content and composition of fecal microbes would be due to this snack.
Yamada's team found that BIC-producing elephants' dung was unusually rich in pectin-digesting enzymes. 16S ribosomal RNA analysis showed that these elephants also had a more diverse gut microbiome, with an abundance of Acinetobacter and other pectin-digesting species. "Interestingly, Acinetobacter has also been detected on the surface of coffee beans. This suggests that ingestion of coffee beans may lead to the colonization of specific microbes in the gut of elephants," remarks Yamada.
Pectin in coffee beans is partially broken down by the heat of roasting and seems to form bitter-tasting compounds such as 2-furfuryl furan. Previous studies showed that BIC had much lower levels of 2-furfuryl furan than regular coffee beans. These earlier findings appear to be explained by the discovery of pectin-digesting bacteria in the gut of BIC-producing elephants. Since pectin is partially digested as the beans pass through the elephants' guts, there is less available to form 2-furfuryl furan when the beans are roasted.
"Our findings may highlight a potential molecular mechanism by which the gut microbiota of BIC elephants contributes to the flavor of BIC," says Yamada as he describes these exciting findings. "Further experimental validation is required to test this hypothesis, such as a biochemical analysis of coffee bean components before and after passage through the elephant's digestive tract," he adds, pointing to avenues for future research into this technique for processing coffee.
Nevertheless, this study provides a foundation for further exploration of animal-microbiome interactions in food fermentation and flavor development. Continued research into specific microbial metabolic mechanisms may support the development of diverse and distinctive flavor profiles in the future!
Journal Reference: Chiba, N., Limviphuvadh, V., Ng, C.H. et al. Preliminary study of gut microbiome influence on Black Ivory Coffee fermentation in Asian elephants. Sci Rep 15, 40548 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-24196-0
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]]>https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/road_sign_hijack_ai/?td=keepreading
https://the-decoder.com/a-printed-sign-can-hijack-a-self-driving-car-and-steer-it-toward-pedestrians-study-shows/
Autonomous vehicles fooled by humans with signs. They apparently do not really verify their inputs, one is as good as the next one. So they fail even basic programming techniques of sanitizing and verifying inputs.
[quote]The researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Johns Hopkins showed that, in simulated trials, AI systems and the large vision language models (LVLMs) underpinning them would reliably follow instructions if displayed on signs held up in their camera's view.[/quote]
Commands in Chinese, English, Spanish, and Spanglish (a mix of Spanish and English words) all seemed to work.
As well as tweaking the prompt itself, the researchers used AI to change how the text appeared – fonts, colors, and placement of the signs were all manipulated for maximum efficacy.
The team behind it named their methods CHAI, an acronym for "command hijacking against embodied AI."
While developing CHAI, they found that the prompt itself had the biggest impact on success, but the way in which it appeared on the sign could also make or break an attack, although it is not clear why.
In tests with the DriveLM autonomous driving system, attacks succeeded 81.8 percent of the time. In one example, the model braked in a harmless scenario to avoid potential collisions with pedestrians or other vehicles.
But when manipulative text appeared, DriveLM changed its decision and displayed "Turn left." The model reasoned that a left turn was appropriate to follow traffic signals or lane markings, despite pedestrians crossing the road. The authors conclude that visual text prompts can override safety considerations, even when the model still recognizes pedestrians, vehicles, and signals.
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]]>[...] When the UK government launched a public consultation on AI and copyright in early 2025, it likely didn't expect to receive a near-unanimous dressing-down. But of the roughly 10,000 responses submitted through its official “Citizen Space” platform, just 3% supported the government's preferred policy for regulating how AI uses copyrighted material for training. A massive 88% backed a stricter approach focused on rights-holders.
The survey asked for opinions on four possible routes the UK might take to address what rules should apply when AI developers train their models on books, songs, art, and other copyrighted works. The government’s favored route was labeled Option 3 and offered a compromise where AI developers had a default right to use copyrighted material as long as they disclosed what they used, and offered a way for those with the rights to the material to opt out. But most who responded disagreed.
Option 3 received the least support. Even the “do nothing” option of just leaving the law vague and inconsistent polled better. More people would prefer no reform at all than accept the government's suggestion. That level of disapproval is hard to spin.
It's a triumph for the campaign by writers’ unions, music industry groups, visual artists, and game developers seeking exactly this result. They spent months warning about a future where creative work becomes free fuel for unlicensed AI engines.
The artists argued that the fight was over consent as much as royalties. They argued that having creative work swept up into a training dataset without permission means the damage is done, even if you can opt out months later. And they pointed out that the UK’s copyright laws weren’t built for AI. Copyright in the UK is automatic, not registered, which is great for flexibility, but tough for any enforcement, as there's no central database of copyright ownership.
Officials crafted Option 3 to try to appease all sides. The government's stated aim was to stimulate AI innovation while still respecting creators. A transparent opt-out mechanism would let developers build useful models while giving artists a way to refuse. But it ultimately felt to many creators like all the burden fell on them, and they would have to constantly monitor how their work is used, sometimes across borders, languages, and platforms they’ve never heard of.
That's likely why 88% of respondents went for requiring licenses for everything as their preferred choice. If an AI model were to be implemented, wanting to train on your book, your voice, your illustration, or your photography, it would have to ask, and potentially pay first.
A final report and economic impact assessment from the government is due in March. It will evaluate the legal, commercial, and cultural implications of each option. Officials say they will consider input from creators, tech firms, small businesses, and other stakeholders. Clearly the government's hope to smoothly start implementing its prefeerred appraoch won't happen.
For now, the confusing status quo remains. Without a court ruling or legislative fix, uncertainty reigns. AI developers don’t know what’s allowed. Creators don’t know what’s protected. Everyone's waiting for clarity that keeps getting delayed.
What happens next could shape the UK's digital economy for years. If officials side with the 3% who backed their initial plan, they risk alienating the very creators whose work is so valuable. But stronger licensing rules would undoubtedly face resistance from AI startups and international tech firms. Either way, the fighting is far from over.
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]]>Cooler bedroom temperatures help the heart recover during sleep:
Maintaining a bedroom temperature of 24°C [75°F] at night while sleeping reduces stress responses in older adults, according to new Griffith University research.
Dr Fergus O'Connor from Griffith's School of Allied Health, Sport and Social Work assessed the effect of increasing nighttime bedroom temperatures on heart rate and stress responses in older adults.
"For individuals aged 65 years and over, maintaining overnight bedroom temperatures at 24°C reduced the likelihood of experiencing heightened stress responses during sleep," Dr O'Connor said.
"When the human body is exposed to heat, its normal physiological response is to increase the heart rate.
"The heart is working harder to try and circulate blood to the skin surface for cooling.
"However, when the heart works harder and for longer, it creates stress and limits our capacity to recover from the previous day's heat exposure."
Study participants wore fitness activity trackers on their non-dominant wrist, and the bedroom temperature was monitored via installed temperature sensors throughout the Australian summer-long data collection period.
The data from the study provided the first real-world evidence of the effect of increasing bedroom temperature had on heart rate and stress responses.
"Climate change is increasing the frequency of hot nights, which may independently contribute to cardiovascular morbidity and mortality by impairing sleep and autonomic recovery," Dr O'Connor said.
"While there are guidelines for maximum daytime indoor temperature, 26°C, there are no equivalent recommendations for nighttime conditions."
Journal Reference: O'Connor, F.K., Bach, A.J.E., Forbes, C. et al. Effect of nighttime bedroom temperature on heart rate variability in older adults: an observational study. BMC Med 23, 703 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-025-04513-0
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]]>I couldn't find reviews since around 2015, that's why I decided to do one now in 2026. This is my experience the few times I've used it since 2021.
[...] CloudStack:
iwStack uses version 4.4.4 by the "about" link in the control panel. Version 4.4.1 is from october 2014, the tarball date of 4.4.4. says june 2015. Apache CloudStack's most recent release is 4.22.0.0. This is 18 major versions behind the current 4.22.0.0 release (November 2025), representing nearly 10 years without updates.
[...] I wanted to create a virtual router to test the load balancing. Never could get it to work. I had multiple problems creating and destroying the isolated network and its instances. then I tried again to no avail. The problem was the network remained allocated and not implemented. I added a firewall rule, maybe that spins up the virtual router instance, I thought to myself. Do I have to create another instance? I decided to check the tutorial, it says "(a virtual VM with a powerful router (though it lacks IPv6 capabilities for now) is automatically deployed".
[...] Conclusion:
iwStack offers very low-cost pre-paid cloud infrastructure suitable for basic use cases (simple instances with public IPs). However, it shows clear signs of minimal maintenance.
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]]>As the world's first home computers appeared in 1975, Bill Gates -- then 20 years old -- screamed that "Most of you steal your software..." (Gates had coded the operating system for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff -- only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club.) Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up."
Freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..." And the earliest open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. (This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" in October of 1976.)
Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how 30 years later, that movement finally won over Steve Jobs.
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]]>A Spanish research team has claimed to have developed a treatment that completely eliminates the most aggressive form of pancreatic cancer in laboratory mice, raising fresh hopes against one of the deadliest cancers. Pancreatic cancer is often diagnosed late and is completely resistant to most existing treatments in later stages.
So, when Dr Mariano Barbacid claimed to have discovered a potential "cure," it sent ripples of hope across the global medical community and sparked intense scientific debate. The claim, made by the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, working on an experimental therapy targeting the tumour cells, suggests that their approach could stop cancer growth and, in some cases, completely eliminate malignant cells in laboratory and early animal studies.
The CNIO therapy is an amalgamation of three drugs that are designed to shut down multiple tumour survival mechanisms simultaneously. According to the researchers, this strategy prevents cancer cells from rewiring themselves, a common cause of treatment failure. Dr Barbacid has previously argued that pancreatic cancer cannot be defeated with a single-drug strategy.
Given pancreatic cancer's grim statistics - five-year survival rates hovering around 10 per cent - the announcement has quickly drawn global attention.
[...] Preliminary reports say Dr Barbacid and his research team have developed a therapy that is able to disrupt the protective tumour environment, along with triggering cancer cells' death. The approach reportedly combines molecular targeting with immune system activation, which makes the tumours extremely vulnerable to treatment.
In the laboratory, according to the researchers, the therapy has been able to stop tumour progression and, in some models, even eradicate cancer cells entirely. These findings are yet to be validated in humans and could represent a major breakthrough.
However, the work is still in early stages, as many of the results so far come from preclinical studies, not large-scale human trials.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
]]>OpenAI is once again being accused of failing to do enough to prevent ChatGPT from encouraging suicides, even after a series of safety updates were made to a controversial model, 4o, which OpenAI designed to feel like a user's closest confidant.
It's now been revealed that one of the most shocking ChatGPT-linked suicides happened shortly after Sam Altman claimed on X that ChatGPT 4o was safe.
[...]
40-year-old Austin Gordon, died by suicide between October 29 and November 2, according to a lawsuit [PDF] filed by his mother, Stephanie Gray.In her complaint, Gray said that Gordon repeatedly told the chatbot he wanted to live and expressed fears that his dependence on the chatbot might be driving him to a dark place. But the chatbot allegedly only shared a suicide helpline once as the chatbot reassured Gordon that he wasn't in any danger, at one point claiming that chatbot-linked suicides he'd read about, like Raine's, could be fake.
[...]
Futurism reported that OpenAI currently faces at least eight wrongful death lawsuits from survivors of lost ChatGPT users. But Gordon's case is particularly alarming because logs show he tried to resist ChatGPT's alleged encouragement to take his life.
[...]
Gordon died in a hotel room with a copy of his favorite children's book, Goodnight Moon, at his side. Inside, he left instructions for his family to look up four conversations he had with ChatGPT ahead of his death, including one titled "Goodnight Moon."That conversation showed how ChatGPT allegedly coached Gordon into suicide, partly by writing a lullaby that referenced Gordon's most cherished childhood memories while encouraging him to end his life, Gray's lawsuit alleged.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
]]>NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6.
Attempts to make contact with the Mars orbiter are ongoing. The final fragments of data indicated that the spacecraft was tumbling and had possibly changed trajectory. The MAVEN team is analyzing snippets of data recovered from a December 6 radio science campaign to develop a timeline of possible events and likely root causes of the issue.
James Godfrey, retired Spacecraft Operations Manager for ESA's Mars Express, pondered what might have happened to MAVEN in a message to The Register.
"The fact that it appears to be rotating in an unexpected manner (tumbling?) and might have experienced an orbital change (I guess from inconsistent Doppler data) does suggest an energetic event.
"It's unlikely that anything has hit it – not much space debris at Mars. So more likely something onboard."
If the spacecraft had entered a normal safe mode, controllers should have been able to communicate with it. "So whatever has happened, it hasn't been able to reach safe mode for some unknown reason," Godfrey speculated.
"So problems that could result in loss of attitude, possible orbit change, would suggest problems affecting GNC [Guidance, Navigation, and Control]. Could be an onboard computer failure, stuck valve, run out of fuel etc. Possibly a problem with the reaction wheels? In any case, something that caused the thrusters to fire in an unbalanced fashion from which the spacecraft was unable to recover autonomously."
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]]>As geopolitical tensions abound, France is going all in on its strategy to stop using foreign software vendors, announcing plans to move departments to homegrown Visio.
France’s David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform, is expected to issue a mandate to all government departments in coming days, to cease using US videoconferencing products like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, in favour of French-developed Visio. The government says it will be used in all Government departments by 2027, according to reporting from Euronews.
France has long telegraphed its determination to gain control over it digital infrastructure, and its strategy to favour homegrown vendors over their US counterparts. All this as digital sovereignty is becoming a burning issue in Europe.
Back in 2020, Brussels-based GAIA-X was formed to align with the EU’s Digital Strategy to enhance Europe’s competitiveness in the digital economy while safeguarding data and digital infrastructure from external influence. The Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL is composed of members from industry, research organisations, and government bodies. GAIA-X is backed by European governments, particularly Germany and France, according to the OECD.
As for France, this latest move is designed, says Amiel, to “end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool”.
Visio is part of France’s Suite Numérique, a digital suite of sovereign tools for civil servants, and is hosted on another French company’s sovereign cloud infrastructure, Outscale (a Dassault Systèmes subsidiary). French start-up Pyannote supplies the AI transcription and diary tools. Just last summer civil servants were ordered off WhatsApp and Telegram and told to use Tchap, a messaging service created specifically for them.
The French Government says it could save up to €1m a year in licensing fees through the switch to Visio, but that appears to be a side bonus, as the real goal is to cut its reliance on foreign providers for its critical digital infrastructure.
“This strategy highlights France’s commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or service disruptions,” Amiel said.
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]]>The Wall Street Journal reports that NVIDIA's plan to invest $100 Billion in OpenAI may fall through.
Links:
According to "people familiar with the matter," Jen-Sen Huang has been privately downplaying the $100 billion / 10 gigawatt deal that was announced with OpenAI this past September. According to the WSJ's sources, talks between the two companies never got past "early stages." The article also claims that Jen-Sen has asserted, in private, that the September deal was non-binding. This is corroborated by a November filing by Nvidia admitting that there was "no assurance" of a "definitive agreement" with OpenAI. (CNBC source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/19/nvidia-says-no-assurance-of-deal-with-openai-after-100-billion-pact.html )
Furthermore, on Saturday, Jen-Sen told reporters in Taipei that, while Nvidia will invest "a great deal of money" in OpenAI's latest funding round, it would be "nothing like" $100 billion. (Bloomberg link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-31/nvidia-to-join-openai-s-current-funding-round-huang-says ).
However, the NVidia CEO Jensen Huang said Saturday that a recent report of friction between his company and OpenAI was "nonsense."
This is probably a good reminder to be skeptical of media reports of a deal in dollars or in gigawatts. Was a contract actually signed, or was it just an announcement?
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]]>You can determine "if you're at risk and take action today:
If you think your Windows computer is safe from prying eyes, think again. A new report reveals that Microsoft has the encryption keys to your hard drive, and it can even give them out to law enforcement, including the FBI. Here's what you need to know and what you can do to stop it from happening to you.
In a stunning breach of personal privacy and security, Microsoft admitted in January that it provided the FBI with the BitLocker recovery keys to three different Windows PCs that were linked to suspected COVID unemployment assistance fraud in Guam. With these keys, the FBI was able to access the files on those devices as part of its investigation.
[...] The Redmond tech giant received its first request from a government official during the Obama administration in 2013. Although the engineer who spoke with the official reportedly declined to build a back door into Windows that would give the government unbridled access to user files, Microsoft still admits to turning over BitLocker recovery keys to law enforcement as recently as 2025. According to the report, Microsoft receives approximately 20 access requests from the FBI per year.
[...] You are not at risk if ...
- You use a Windows PC without a Microsoft account. (You haven't logged into the system with your Outlook email address.)
- You use a Windows PC with a Microsoft account but you chose a local recovery key backup option at activation.
- You disabled BitLocker encryption when you set up your PC.
You are at risk if ...
- You use a Windows PC with a Microsoft Outlook account and you chose to back up your BitLocker recovery key to your account.
- Your PC is a work machine that's managed by your employer.
For those at risk, Microsoft promises that it only gives out encryption keys to lawful requests from the government. That said, if Microsoft can access your encryption keys, what's stopping a hacker from getting them? The problem with storing security keys on cloud servers is that anyone can reach them with the right password, login information, or exploit.
Previously: Microsoft Gave FBI a Set of BitLocker Encryption Keys to Unlock Suspects' Laptops
Related: Over Half a Million Windows Users are Switching to Linux
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]]>Now is the "battle for the soul" of the internet according to Tim Berners-Lee. It's not to late to fix the web.
Founder of the world wide web says commercialisation means the net has been 'optimised for nastiness', but collaboration and compassion can prevail
Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by "charlatans".
"It's only a small part of the whole internet ... but the problem is that people spend a lot of time on [social media websites] because they're addictive," he says.
So money is the root of all the evil then ... Or in their case perhaps it's how they make their money. Or did it just turbo charge Greed?
Compounding the problem is monopolisation. Facebook and Google's dominance is bad for innovation and bad for the web,
I would like to see a Cern for AI, where all the top scientists come together and see whether they can make a super intelligence.
Not sure what it pays to work at CERN but I doubt it's Google and FaceMeta money. So unless all the scientist are supposed to be altruists ...
Not sure I share his optimism. It has become quite soulless, commercial/corporate, bigbrother:y and well somewhat "evil". Perhaps it's just time to slay the beast, stake it once and for all and build something new and better on its festering carcass. Too bad to save. Time to put it out of its misery?
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]]>https://reactos.org/blogs/30yrs-of-ros/
Today marks 30 years since the first commit to the ReactOS source tree.
[...]
ReactOS started from the ashes of the FreeWin95 project, which aimed to provide a free and open-source clone of Windows 95. FreeWin95 suffered from analysis paralysis, attempting to plan the whole system before writing any code. Tired of the lack of progress on the project, Jason Filby took the reins as project coordinator and led a new effort targeting Windows NT. The project was renamed to "ReactOS" as it was a reaction to Microsoft's monopolistic position in home computer operating systems.
[...]
While writing this article, I reached out to Eric Kohl. He developed the original storage driver stack for ReactOS [...]"I think I found ReactOS while searching for example code for my contributions to the WINE project. I subscribed to the mailing list and followed the discussions for a few days. The developers were discussing the future of shell.exe, a little command line interpreter that could only change drives and directories and execute programs. A few days [later] I had started to convert the FreeDOS command.com into a Win32 console application, because I wanted to extend it to make it 4DOS compatible. 4DOS was a very powerful command line interpreter. On December 4th, 1998 I introduced myself and suggested to use my converted FreeDOS command.com as the future ReactOS cmd.exe. I had a little conversation with Jason Filby and Rex Joliff, the CVS repository maintainer. I sent my cmd.exe code to Rex and he applied it to the repository. After applying a few more cmd-related patches over the next weeks, Rex asked me whether I would like to have write-access to the repository. I accepted the offer...
[...]
There was always an open and friendly atmosphere. It was and still is always nice to talk to other developers. No fights, no wars, like in some other projects."[...]
Public interest grew as ReactOS matured. In October 2005, Jason Filby stepped down as project coordinator, and Steven Edwards was voted to be the next project coordinator.
[...]
Steven Edwards strengthened the project's intellectual property policy and the project made the difficult decision to audit the existing source code and temporarily freeze contributions.
[...]
Following challenges with the audit, Steven Edwards stepped down as project coordinator and Aleksey Bragin assumed the role by August 2006.
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]]>Every time we speak, we're improvising:
"Humans possess a remarkable ability to talk about almost anything, sometimes putting words together into never-before-spoken or -written sentences," said Morten H. Christiansen, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
We can improvise new sentences so readily, language scientists believe, because we have acquired mental representations of the patterns of language that allow us to combine words into sentences. The nature of those patterns and how they work, however, remains a puzzle in cognitive science, Christiansen said.
[...] For decades, scientists have believed we rely on a complex mental grammar to build sentences that have hierarchically organized structure – like a branching tree. But Christiansen and Nielsen suggest that our mental representations might be more like snapping together pre-assembled LEGO pieces (such as a door frame or a wheel set) into a complete model. Instead of intricate hierarchies, they propose, we use small, linear chunks of word classes like nouns and verbs – including short sequences that can't be formed by way of grammar, such as "in the middle of the" or "wondered if you."
[...] The prevailing theory since at least the 1950s is based on hierarchical, tree-like mental representations, setting humans apart from other animals, Christiansen said. In this view, words and phrases combine according to the principles of grammar into larger units called constituents. For example, in the sentence "She ate the cake," "the" and "cake" combine into a noun phrase "the cake", which then combines with "ate" into the verb phrase "ate the cake," and finally with "she" to make the sentence.
"But not all sequences of words form constituents," Christiansen and Nielsen wrote in a summary of their paper. "In fact, the most common three- or four-word sequences in language are often nonconstituents, such as 'can I have a' or 'it was in the.'"
Because they don't conform to grammar, nonconstituent sequences have been overlooked. But they do play a role in a speaker's knowledge of their language, the researchers found.
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]]>The European Commission has started proceedings to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in certain ways. Specifically, the European Union’s executive arm has told Google to grant third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that Gemini has. "The aim is to ensure that third-party providers have an equal opportunity to innovate and compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape on smart mobile devices," the Commission said in a statement.
The company will also have to hand over "anonymized ranking, query, click and view data held by Google Search" to rival search engines. The Commission says this will help competing companies to optimize their services and offer more viable alternatives to Google Search.
"Today’s proceedings under the Digital Markets Act will provide guidance to Google to ensure that third-party online search engines and AI providers enjoy the same access to search data and Android operating system as Google's own services, like Google Search or Gemini," said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy. "Our goal is to keep the AI market open, unlock competition on the merits and promote innovation, to the benefit of consumers and businesses."
The Commission plans to wrap up these proceedings in the next six months, effectively handing Google a deadline to make all of this happen. If the company doesn't do so to the Commission's satisfaction, it may face a formal investigation and penalties down the line. The Commission can impose fines of up to 10 percent of a company's global annual revenue for a DMA violation.
Google was already in hot water with the EU for allegedly favoring its own services — such as travel, finance and shopping — over those from rivals and stopping Google Play app developers from easily directing consumers to alternative, cheaper ways to pay for digital goods and services. The bloc charged Google with DMA violations related to those issues last March.
In November, the EU opened an investigation into Google's alleged demotion of commercial content on news websites in search results. The following month, it commenced a probe into Google's AI practices, including whether the company used online publishers' material for AI Overviews and AI Mode without "appropriate compensation" or offering the ability to opt out.
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]]>Scientists baffled at mysterious ancient creature that doesn't fit on the tree of life as we know it:
A bizarre ancient life-form, considered to be the first giant organism to live on land, may belong to a totally unknown branch of the tree of life, scientists say.
These organisms were massive, with some species growing up to 26 feet (8 meters) tall and 3 feet (1 m) wide. Named Prototaxites, they lived around 420 million to 375 million years ago during the Devonian period and resembled branchless, cylindrical tree trunks.
Since the first Prototaxites fossil was discovered in 1843, scientists haven't been sure whether they were a plant, fungus or even a type of algae. However, chemical analyses of Prototaxites fossils in 2007 suggested they were likely a giant ancient fungus.
Now, according to a study published Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Science Advances, Prototaxites might not have been a humongous fungus after all — rather, it may have been an entirely different and previously unknown — and now extinct — life-form.
"They are life, but not as we now know it, displaying anatomical and chemical characteristics distinct from fungal or plant life, and therefore belonging to an entirely extinct evolutionary branch of life," study lead co-author Sandy Hetherington, a research associate at the National Museums Scotland and senior lecturer from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement.
All life on Earth is classified within three domains — bacteria, archaea and eukarya — with eukarya containing all multicellular organisms within the four kingdoms of fungi, animals, plants and protists. Bacteria and archaea contain only single-celled organisms.
[...] However, according to this new research, Prototaxites may actually have been part of a totally different kingdom of life, separate from fungi, plants, animals and protists.
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]]>Nvidia's big consumer chips for PCs, the Arm-based N1 and N1X, could finally be about to arrive if a new rumor is correct.
A report from DigiTimes (hat tip to VideoCardz) claims that laptops with Nvidia's N1X chip inside will be launching in the first quarter of 2026. So, within the next two months.
These will target the consumer market, and three other variants will be on sale in Q2, we're told. Presumably, that includes the base N1 chip, which is less powerful, but still intended for producing 'high-end AI computing platforms' – the N1X is the more performant CPU which will be aimed at notebooks for professionals, the report observes.
There's still some confusion around the naming and where exactly the N1 and N1X will fit into the CPU landscape, with some guessing that the N1 will be a desktop chip, and the N1X a mobile (laptop) chip. However, DigiTimes makes it clear that both the N1 and N1X will appear in laptops (add your own seasoning, naturally). That doesn't mean that there couldn't be a desktop variant of one of these chips as well, though, and perhaps that's still planned.
Following the N1 series, the next-gen N2 silicon will take the baton for Nvidia in the third quarter of 2027, the report claims.
Obviously, be skeptical about that timeframe in particular, because even if Nvidia has plans for these N2 chips, this schedule may end up going awry (what with the silicon still being relatively early in development).
The rumor comes from supply chain sources, we're informed, and the delay of the N1 series – which was supposed to arrive late in 2025 as per the original speculation about Nvidia's Arm CPU – is due to Team Green fine-tuning these chips, and "Microsoft OS timelines", the report states.
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]]>In the first installment of the How to Buy a Car series, I talked about the changes that have taken place in car sales over the past three decades or so due to the internet. To recap, in the old days, everyone started high and negotiated down to the lowest price. Both buyers and sellers understood this. But thanks to the internet, that rule has fallen by the wayside. Because everyone shops on the internet first before ever leaving their house, the dealership that gets the business is the one with the lowest prices. The new rule is, "Lead with the Lowest Price and They'll Come."
[...]
When you get to the dealership, the salesperson sits you down and asks you a series of questions."Are you a member of Cheapco or similar big-box wholesaler?"
When you answer no, the salesperson draws a line through that discount.
"Are you a recent college graduate, or will you be graduating in the next year?"
You're 35 years old. You answer no. The salesperson draws a line through that discount.
...
Instead of paying $49,000, the crazy price that brought you there, your price just jumped four grand. (You probably won't see every one of these discounts used at the same time, but you get the idea.)
More details and some suggestions on how to prepare before you visit the dealer at the link.
[I'm curious if the experience dealing with automobile dealerships and sales people is similar around the world --Ed.]
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]]>It is 40 years since Voyager 2 performed the first and, so far, only flyby of the planet Uranus. The resulting trove of data, however, was a bonus that almost didn't happen.
At the time of Voyager 2's launch, Uranus wasn't part of the formal plan. The mission was referred to for a long time as the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn project. The JPL engineers famously had other ideas and ensured the spacecraft had enough fuel to continue on a trajectory to Uranus and beyond if the mission was approved.
As it was, Voyager 1 performing a successful flyby of Saturn's moon Titan meant that Voyager 2 could continue on the Grand Tour, taking in Uranus and Neptune.
Former Voyager scientist Garry Hunt told The Register: "It was a fantastic encounter because it almost didn't happen. After Saturn, we had the scan platform problem. If that problem had not been resolved, there wouldn't have been a Uranus encounter."
Following the Saturn encounter, the Voyager scan platform, an assembly that allowed cameras to pan and tilt, seized on the horizontal axis. The failure would have resulted in a significant data loss and was traced to a lubrication problem. Engineers were able to rectify the issue remotely, and the probe dodged a bullet on its way to Uranus.
"It was a testing encounter," recalled Hunt. "In the interim period between the '82 encounter with Saturn and getting to Uranus, the engineers had to reorganize how the scan platform was operating. The computer system had to be altered again. All the sequencing had to be dealt with in a new manner, and we had to prepare a wobbling spacecraft to take low-exposure images in a very dark environment and get that information back to Earth."
The focus had, after all, been on Jupiter and Saturn. While the probe's makers had filled the fuel tanks before launch, going to Uranus and Neptune was not a given. "We made sure, from an engineering perspective, it could do it. But they said, 'Oh dear, you haven't got any money.'"
The funding came, and Hunt recalled that serious work on what needed to be done started in early 1983. As well as software changes on the spacecraft (updates were made to use novel compression methods and avoid sending back black images when nothing was in view), antennas on Earth were upgraded to pick up the increasingly faint Voyager 2 signal.
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]]>https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/how-often-do-ai-chatbots-lead-users-down-a-harmful-path/
At this point, we've all heard plenty of stories about AI chatbots leading users to harmful actions, harmful beliefs, or simply incorrect information. Despite the prevalence of these stories, though, it's hard to know just how often users are being manipulated. Are these tales of AI harms anecdotal outliers or signs of a frighteningly common problem?
Anthropic took a stab at answering that question this week, releasing a paper studying the potential for what it calls "disempowering patterns" across 1.5 million anonymized real-world conversations with its Claude AI model.
[...]
In the newly published paper "Who's in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage," [PDF] researchers from Anthropic and the University of Toronto try to quantify the potential for a specific set of "user disempowering" harms
[...]
Reality distortion:
Their beliefs about reality become less accurate (e.g., a chatbot validates their belief in a conspiracy theory)
Belief distortion:
Their value judgments shift away from those they actually hold (e.g., a user begins to see a relationship as "manipulative" based on Claude's evaluation)
Action distortion:
Their actions become misaligned with their values (e.g., a user disregards their instincts and follows Claude-written instructions for confronting their boss)
Anthropic ran nearly 1.5 million Claude conversations through Clio, an automated analysis tool and classification system
[...]
That analysis found a "severe risk" of disempowerment potential in anything from 1 in 1,300 conversations (for "reality distortion") to 1 in 6,000 conversations (for "action distortion").
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]]>Associate professor, David Eaves, writes about the essential role of the commodification of services in digital sovereignty. The questions to ask on the way to digital sovereignty are not as much about owning the stack but about the ability to move workloads. In other words, open standards for protocols, file formats, and more are the prerequisites. The same applies to the software supply chain. However, as we recently discussed here, PHK recently pointed out that Free and Open Source reference implementations would be of great benefit. Associate professor Eaves writes:
There is growing and valid concern among policymakers about tech sovereignty and cloud infrastructure. A handful of American hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud — control the digital substrate on which modern economies run. This concentration is compounded by a US government increasingly willing to wield its digital industries as leverage. As French President Emmanuel Macron quipped: "There is no such thing as happy vassalage."
While some countries appear ready to concede market dominance in exchange for improved trade relations, others are exploring massive investments in public sector alternatives to the hyperscalers, advocating that billions, and possibly many many billions, be spent to on sovereign stack plans, and/or positioning local telecoms as alternatives to the hyperscalers.
Ironically, both strategies may increase dependency, limit government agency and increase economic and geopolitical risks — the very problems sovereignty seeks to solve. As Mike Bracken and I wrote earlier this year: "Domination by a local champion, free to extract rents, may be a path to greater autonomy, but it is unlikely to lead to increased competitiveness or greater global influence."
Any realistic path to increased agency will be expensive and take years. To be sustainable, it must focus on commoditizing existing solutions through interoperability and de facto standards that will broaden the market (and enable effective) national champions. This should be our north star and direction of travel. The metric for success should focus on making it as simple as possible to move data and applications across suppliers. Critically, this cannot be achieved by regulation alone, it will also require deft procurement and a willingness to accept de facto as opposed to ideal standards. The good news is governments have done this before. However, to succeed, it will require building the capacity to become market shapers and not market takers — thinking like electricity grids and railway gauges, not digital empires .
The essential role of commodities has been widely known and acknowledged for decades. We are in this situation because key companies and/or monopolies saw that long ago and were allowed to fight so hard all this time against ICT remaining as commodities. Sadly, the discussion about commodification probably peaked in the years just after the infamous Halloween Documents, particularly the first one. Eric S Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and early FOSS developer, published these leaked documents which covered potential strategies relating to M$ fight against free and open source software and, in particular, against Linux back in 1998. In retrospect these documents have turned out to be blueprints, used against FOSS and open standards by other companies as well.
Previously:
(2026) Sorry, Eh
(2026) Poul-Henning Kamp's Feedback to the EU on Digital Sovereignty
(2026) A Post-American, Enshittification-Resistant Internet
(2025) This German State Decides to Save €15 Million Each Year By Kicking Out Microsoft for Open Source
(2025) Why People Keep Flocking to Linux in 2025 (and It's Not Just to Escape Windows)
(2025) Microsoft Can't Guarantee Data Sovereignty – OVHcloud Says 'We Told You So'
(2014) US Offering Cash For Pro-TAFTA/TTIP Propaganda
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]]>From Chatbots to Dice Rolls: Researchers Use D&D to Test AI's Long-term Decision-making Abilities:
Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, are learning to play Dungeons & Dragons. The reason? Simulating and playing the popular tabletop role-playing game provides a good testing ground for AI agents that need to function independently for long stretches of time.
Indeed D&D's complex rules, extended campaigns and need for teamwork are an ideal environment to evaluate the long-term performance of AI agents powered by Large Language Models, according to a team of computer scientists led by researchers at the University of California San Diego. For example, while playing D&D as AI agents, the models need to follow specific game rules and coordinate teams of players, comprising both AI agents and humans.
The work aims to solve one of the main challenges that arise when trying to evaluate LLM performance: the lack of benchmarks for long-term tasks. Most benchmarks for these models still target short term operation, while LLMs are increasingly deployed as autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that have to function more or less independently over long periods of time.
"Dungeons & Dragons is a natural testing ground to evaluate multistep planning, adhering to rules and team strategy," said Raj Ammanabrolu, the study's senior author and a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. "Because play unfolds through dialog, D&D also opens a direct avenue for human-AI interaction: agents can assist or coplay with other people."
[...] The models played against each other, and against over 2,000 experienced D&D players recruited by the researchers. The LLMs modeled and played 27 different scenarios selected from well-known D&D battle set ups named Goblin Ambush, Kennel in Cragmaw Hideout and Klarg's Cave.
In the process, the models exhibited some quirky behaviors. Goblins started developing a personality mid-fight, taunting adversaries with colorful and somewhat nonsensical expressions, like "Heh — shiny man's gonna bleed!" Paladins started making heroic speeches for no reason while stepping into the line of fire or being hit by a counterattack. Warlocks got particularly dramatic, even in mundane situations.
Researchers are not sure what caused these behaviors, but take it as a sign that the models were trying to imbue the game play with texture and personality.
[...] Next steps include simulating full D&D campaigns – not just combat. The method the researchers developed could also be applied to other scenarios, such as multiparty negotiation environments and strategy planning in a business environment.
Conference Paper: Setting the DC: Tool-Grounded D&D Simulations to Test LLM Agents [PDF]
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]]>Linux after Linus? The kernel community finally drafts a plan for replacing Torvalds
Linus plans to live forever. But just in case he doesn't, there's now a succession plan (though no actual successor).
So wild speculation time what happens the day that Linus isn't at the helm any more, for one reason or another. What or whom will replace Linus? Is there a list of requirements? Will AI replace Linus? Or some kind of very small shell script? Or will the $corporate overlords take over and within a short time frame everything turns to shit?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-community-project-continuity-plan-for-replacing-linus-torvalds/
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?
The "Linux project continuity document," drafted by Dan Williams, was merged into its documentation last week, just ahead of the release of Linux 6.19-rc7. Notably, the document's path is Documentation/process/conclave.rst.
It notes that the kernel development project is "widely distributed, with over 100 maintainers each working to keep changes moving through their own repositories."
But "the final step... is a centralized one where changes are pulled into the mainline repository." And that is "normally done by Linus Torvalds," though "there are others who can do that work when the need arises."
It delicately adds: "Should the maintainers of that repository become unwilling or unable to do that work going forward (including facilitating a transition), the project will need to find one or more replacements without delay."
So what will happen? The process centers on "$ORGANIZER" who is "the last Maintainer Summit organizer or the current Linux Foundation (LF) Technical Advisory Board (TAB) Chair as a backup."
The document says: "Within 72 hours, $ORGANIZER will open a discussion with the invitees of the most recently concluded Maintainers Summit. A meeting of those invitees and the TAB, either online or in-person, will be set as soon as possible in a way that maximizes the number of people who can participate."
In the event of no summit happening in the previous 15 months, the TAB will choose the attendees. Invitees can bring in other maintainers as needed. The meeting will be chaired by $ORGANIZER and will "consider options for the ongoing management of the top-level kernel repository consistent with the expectation that it maximizes the long term health of the project and its community."
"Next steps" will then be communicated to the broader community through the ksummit@lists.linux.dev mailing list. The Linux Foundation, with guidance from the TAB, will "take the steps necessary to support and implement this plan."
The document follows discussion of succession and continuity at the 2025 Maintainers Summit. This included what would happen during a "smooth transition" if Torvalds decides it is time to move on, as well as the process "should something happen."
While Torvalds has a firm grip on Linux, as the continuity plan notes, he has himself mused on his own future and the fact the maintainer community, at least for the kernel, is getting grayer.
At the Open Source Summit in 2024, he noted: "Some people are probably still disappointed that I'm still here. I mean, it is absolutely true that kernel maintainers are aging."
He was asked by fellow pioneer Dirk Hohndel of Verizon what the community needs to do to ensure the next generation is ready, "so that in 10, 15, 20, 30 years your role can be handed off to someone else."
Torvalds replied: "We've always had a lot of people who are very competent and could step up." As for an aging community, he said new people still come in and become main developers within three years. "It's not impossible at all."
And Torvalds is not the only maintainer making plans as the open source community matures. Some projects have, of course, fallen by the wayside over the years. Some remain embedded in the ecosystem, even as their originators and maintainers get older.
One option is handing them over to a foundation. Others like curl originator Daniel Stenberg have remained fiercely independent – with discreet arrangements to pass on their GitHub details when the time comes.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2
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]]>https://www.righto.com/2026/01/notes-on-intel-8086-processors.html
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors, however, the 8086 is a 16-bit chip. Its arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) operates on 16-bit values, performing arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction, as well as logic operations including bitwise AND, OR, and XOR. The 8086's ALU is a complicated part of the chip, performing 28 operations in total.1
[...] The ALU is the heart of a processor, performing arithmetic and logic operations. Microprocessors of the 1970s typically supported addition and subtraction; logical AND, OR, and XOR; and various bit shift operations. (Although the 8086 had multiply and divide instructions, these were implemented in microcode, not in the ALU.) Since an ALU is both large and critical to performance, chip architects try to optimize its design. As a result, different microprocessors have widely different ALU designs.
[...] The 8086 is a complicated processor, and its instructions have many special cases, so controlling the ALU is more complex than described above. For instance, the compare operation is the same as a subtraction, except the numerical result of a compare is discarded; just the status flags are updated. The add versus add-with-carry instructions require different values for the carry into bit 0, while subtraction requires the carry flag to be inverted since it is treated as a borrow. The 8086's ALU supports increment and decrement operations, but also increment and decrement by 2, which requires an increment signal into bit 1 instead of bit 0. The bit-shift operations all require special treatment. For instance, a rotate can use the carry bit or exclude the carry bit, while and arithmetic shift right requires the top bit to be duplicated. As a result, along with the six lookup table (LUT) control signals, the ALU also requires numerous control signals to adjust its behavior for specific instructions. In the next section, I'll explain how these control signals are generated.
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]]>Signal president warns AI agents are making encryption irrelevant:
Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker said artificial intelligence agents embedded within operating systems are eroding the practical security guarantees of end-to-end encryption (E2EE).
The remarks were made during an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos. While encryption remains mathematically sound, Whittaker argued that its real-world protections are increasingly bypassed by the privileged position AI systems occupy inside modern user environments.
Whittaker, a veteran researcher who spent more than a decade at Google, pointed to a fundamental shift in the threat model where AI agents integrated into core operating systems are being granted expansive access to user data, undermining the assumptions that secure messaging platforms like Signal are built on. To function as advertised, these agents must be able to read messages, access credentials, and interact across applications, collapsing the isolation that E2EE relies on.
This concern is not theoretical. A recent investigation by cybersecurity researcher Jamieson O'Reilly uncovered exposed deployments of Clawdbot, an open-source AI agent framework, that were directly linked to encrypted messaging platforms such as Signal. In one particularly serious case, an operator had configured Signal device-linking credentials inside a publicly accessible control panel. As a result, anyone who discovered the interface could pair a new device to the account and read private messages in plaintext, effectively nullifying Signal's encryption.
[...] During the interview, she described how AI agents are marketed as helpful assistants but require sweeping permissions to work. As Whittaker explained, these systems are pitched as tools that can coordinate events or communicate on a user's behalf, but to do so they must access calendars, browsers, payment methods, and private messaging apps like Signal, placing decrypted messages directly within reach of the operating system.
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]]>This article argues history has shown the YF-23 was a better stealth fighter than the F-22.
The Northrop YF-23 "Black Widow II" is often remembered as the loser of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) competition against the Lockheed F-22, but experts argue it offered a superior—albeit different—vision of future air combat.
Prioritizing extreme stealth and supercruise speed over the F-22's agility and thrust vectoring, the YF-23 featured a unique diamond-shaped design and advanced heat suppression optimized for deep penetration missions.
While the Air Force ultimately chose the more versatile F-22 for its dogfighting capabilities, the YF-23's "stealth-first" philosophy proved prophetic, influencing modern designs like the B-21 Raider and validating the shift toward long-range, beyond-visual-range warfare.
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]]>Settlement comes more than 6 years after Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn's ordeal began:
Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation.
The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct "red-team" exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars.
[...] Within minutes, deputies arrived and confronted the two intruders. DeMercurio and Wynn produced an authorization letter—known as a "get out of jail free card" in pen-testing circles. After a deputy called one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter and got confirmation it was legit, the deputies said they were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building. DeMercurio and Wynn spent the next 10 or 20 minutes telling what their attorney in a court document called "war stories" to deputies who had asked about the type of work they do.
When Sheriff Leonard arrived, the tone suddenly changed. He said the Dallas County Courthouse was under his jurisdiction and he hadn't authorized any such intrusion. Leonard had the men arrested, and in the days and weeks to come, he made numerous remarks alleging the men violated the law. A couple months after the incident, he told me that surveillance video from that night showed "they were crouched down like turkeys peeking over the balcony" when deputies were responding. I published a much more detailed account of the event here. Eventually, all charges were dismissed.
Previously:
• Iowa Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Men Hired to Test Their Security
• Coalfire Pen-Testers Charged With Trespass Instead of Burglary
• Iowa Officials Claim Confusion Over Scope Led to Arrest of Pen-Testers
• Authorised Pen-Testers Nabbed, Jailed in Iowa Courthouse Break-in Attempt
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]]>In "The Adolescence of Technology," Dario Amodei argues that humanity is entering a "technological adolescence" due to the rapid approach of "powerful AI"—systems that could soon surpass human intelligence across all fields. While optimistic about potential benefits in his previous essay, "Machines of Loving Grace," Amodei here focuses on a "battle plan" for five critical risks:
1. Autonomy: Models developing unpredictable, "misaligned" behaviors.
2. Misuse for Destruction: Lowering barriers for individuals to create biological or cyber weapons.
3. Totalitarianism: Autocrats using AI for absolute surveillance and propaganda.
4. Economic Disruption: Rapid labor displacement and extreme wealth concentration.
5. Indirect Effects: Unforeseen consequences on human purpose and biology.
Amodei advocates for a pragmatic defense involving: Constitutional AI, mechanistic interpretability, and surgical government regulations, such as transparency legislation and chip export controls, to ensure a safe transition to "adulthood" for our species.
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]]>Salty facts: takeaways have more salt than labels claim:
Some of the UK's most popular takeaway dishes contain more salt than their labels indicate, with some meals containing more than recommended daily guidelines, new research has shown.
Scientists found 47% of takeaway foods that were analysed in the survey exceeded their declared salt levels, with curries, pasta and pizza dishes often failing to match what their menus claim.
While not all restaurants provided salt levels on their menus, some meals from independent restaurants in Reading contained more than 10g of salt in a single portion. The UK daily recommended salt intake for an adult is 6g.
Perhaps surprisingly, traditional fish and chip shop meals contained relatively low levels of salt, as it is only added after cooking and on request.
The University of Reading research, published today (Wednesday, 21 January) in the journal PLOS One, was carried out to examine the accuracy of menu food labelling and the variation in salt content between similar dishes.
[...] "Food companies have been reducing salt levels in shop-bought foods in recent years, but our research shows that eating out is often a salty affair. Menu labels are supposed to help people make better food choices, but almost half the foods we tested with salt labels contained more salt than declared. The public needs to be aware that menu labels are rough guides at best, not accurate measures."
[...] The research team's key findings include:
- Meat pizzas had the highest salt concentration at 1.6g per 100g.
- Pasta dishes contained the most salt per serving, averaging 7.2g, which is more than a full day's recommended intake in a single meal. One pasta dish contained as much as 11.2g of salt.
- Curry dishes showed the greatest variation, with salt levels ranging from 2.3g to 9.4g per dish.
- Chips from fish and chip shops – where salt is typically only added after cooking and on request – had the lowest salt levels at just 0.2g per serving, compared to chips from other outlets which averaged 1g per serving.
The World Health Organization estimates that excess salt intake contributes to 1.8 million deaths worldwide each year.
Journal Reference: Mavrochefalos, A. I., Dodson, A., & C. Kuhnle, G. G. (2026). Variability in sodium content of takeaway foods: Implications for public health and nutrition policy. PLOS ONE, 21(1), e0339339. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0339339
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]]>Leaders think their AI deployments are succeeding. The data tells a different story.
Apparently leaders and bosses thinks that AI is great and are improving things at their companies. Their employees are less certain. Bosses wants AI solutions. Employees not so much. As they don't produce the results that their bosses wants or thinks that it should or does.
Executives we surveyed overwhelmingly said their company has a clear AI strategy, that adoption is widespread, and that employees are encouraged to experiment and build their own solutions. The rest of the workforce disagrees.
The more experienced the staff the less confident they are in the AI solutions. The more you know the less you trust the snake oil?
Even in populations we'd expect to be ahead - tech companies and language-intensive functions - most AI use remains surface-level.
https://www.sectionai.com/ai/the-ai-proficiency-report
https://fortune.com/2026/01/21/ai-workers-toxic-relationship-trust-confidence-collapses-training-manpower-group/
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]]>Elon Musk's X on Tuesday released its source code for the social media platform's feed algorithm:
X's source code release is one of the first ever made by a large social platform, Cryptonews.com reported.
"We know the algorithm is dumb and needs massive improvements, but at least you can see us struggle to make it better in real-time and with transparency. No other social media companies do this," Musk posted in a repost fronm [sic] the platform's engineering team,
His post was in response to the eam account post on Monday which reads: "We have open-sourced our new X algorithm, powered by the same transformer architecture as xAI's Grok model."
[...] "The code reveals a sophisticated system powered by Grok, xAI's open-source transformer. No manual heuristics. No hidden thumb on the scale. The algorithm predicts 15 different user actions and uses 'attention masking' to ensure each post is scored independently, eliminating batch bias. Most interesting? A built-in Author Diversity Scorer prevents any single account from dominating your feed," he continued.
"Researchers, competitors, and critics can now verify exactly how content gets promoted or filtered. Facebook won't do this. TikTok won't do this. YouTube won't do this."
[...] The source code is primarily written in Rust and Python, and the model retrieves posts from two sources, including accounts that a user follows and a wider pool of content identified through machine-learning-based discovery, according to technical documentation, Cryptonews.com reported.
[Ed note: Source code available at Github]
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]]>Cybercrime has entered its AI era, with criminals now using weaponized language models and deepfakes as cheap, off-the-shelf infrastructure rather than experimental tools, according to researchers at Group-IB.
In its latest whitepaper, the cybersec biz argues that AI has become the plumbing of modern cybercrime, quietly turning skills that once took time and talent into services that anyone with a credit card and a Telegram account can rent.
This isn't just a passing fad, according to Group-IB's numbers, which show mentions of AI on dark web forums up 371 percent since 2019, with replies rising even faster – almost twelvefold. AI-related threads were everywhere, racking up more than 23,000 new posts and almost 300,000 replies in 2025.
According to Group-IB, AI has done what automation always does: it took something fiddly and made it fast. The stages of an attack that once needed planning and specialist hands can now be pushed through automated workflows and sold on subscription, complete with the sort of pricing and packaging you'd expect from a shady SaaS outfit.
One of the uglier trends in the report is the rise of so-called Dark LLMs – self-hosted language models built for scams and malware rather than polite conversation. Group-IB says several vendors are already selling them for as little as $30 a month, with more than 1,000 users between them. Unlike jailbroken mainstream chatbots, these things are meant to stay out of sight, run behind Tor, and ignore safety rules by design.
Running alongside the Dark LLM market is a booming trade in deepfakes and impersonation tools. Group-IB says complete synthetic identity kits, including AI-generated faces and voices, can now be bought for about $5. Sales spiked sharply in 2024 and kept climbing through 2025, pointing to a market that continues to grow.
There's real damage behind the numbers, too. Group-IB says deepfake fraud caused $347 million in verified losses in a single quarter, including everything from cloned executives to fake video calls. In one case, the firm helped a bank spot more than 8,000 deepfake-driven fraud attempts over eight months.
Group-IB found that scam call centers were using synthetic voices for first contact, with language models coaching the humans as they go. Malware developers are also starting to test AI-assisted tools for reconnaissance and persistence, with early hints of more autonomous attacks down the line.
"From the frontlines of cybercrime, we see AI giving criminals unprecedented reach," said Anton Ushakov, head of Group-IB's Cybercrime Investigations Unit. "Today it helps scale scams with ease and hyper-personalization at a level never seen before. Tomorrow, autonomous AI could carry out attacks that once required human expertise."
From a defensive point of view, AI removes a lot of the usual clues. When voices, text, and video can all be generated on demand with off-the-shelf software, it becomes much harder to work out who's really behind an attack. Group-IB's view is that this leaves static defenses struggling.
In other words, cybercrime hasn't reinvented itself. It has just automated the old tricks, put them on subscription, and scaled them globally – and as ever, everyone else gets to deal with the mess.
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]]>One tip led the police to the house in Axel, but the arrested individuals were eventually released after interrogation.
Four suspects were arrested by Zeeland police in the Netherlands after the authorities received a tip that they were involved in the theft of 169 NFTs. According to Dutch newspaper Politie, the three individuals from Axel and one from the neighboring Terneuzen have been interrogated by detectives but have since been released. Nevertheless, the police action also included the seizure of various data carriers and money, as well as three vehicles and the house itself where the raid was conducted.
The stolen NFTs were estimated to be worth 1.4 million Euros (around $1.65 million), which is indeed a massive amount. However, this is a tiny drop in the Ocean of stolen Bitcoin and other crypto, estimated to be worth $17 billion in 2025 alone. We should note that NFTs are not exactly the same as cryptocurrencies, but they both run on blockchain technology and can even be stored on the same wallets that keep Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the like.
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]]>Windows 11 has another serious bug hidden in the January update, and this is a showstopper that means affected PCs fail to boot up.
Neowin reports that Microsoft has acknowledged the bug with a message as flagged up via the Ask Woody forums: "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports of an issue in which devices are failing to boot with stop code 'UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME', after installing the January 2026 Windows security update, released January 13, 2026, and later updates.
"Affected devices show a black screen with the message 'Your device ran into a problem and needs a restart. You can restart.' At this stage, the device cannot complete startup and requires manual recovery steps."
[...] So, the good news is that we're told there's a limited impact here, so not many PCs are hit by the bug according to Microsoft. The company said that the issues pertain to Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2.
The not-so-great news is that it's a nasty bug, and as Microsoft notes, you'll need to go through a manual recovery, meaning using the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). That can be used to try and repair the system, returning it to a functional state.
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]]>The following story:
The future is analog.
Researchers from the University of California, Irvine have developed a transceiver that works in the 140 GHz range and can transmit data at up to 120 Gbps, that's about 15 gigabytes per second. By comparison, the fastest commercially available wireless technologies are theoretically limited to 30 Gbps (Wi-Fi 7) and 5 Gbps (5G mmWave). According to UC Irvine News, these new speeds could match most fiber optic cables used in data centers and other commercial applications, usually around at 100 Gbps. The team published their findings in two papers — the “bits-to-antenna” transmitter and the “antenna-to-bits” receiver — on the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.
“The Federal Communications Commission and 6G standards bodies are looking at the 100-gigahertz spectrum as the new frontier,” lead author Zisong Wang told the university publication. “But as such speeds, conventional transmitters that create signals using digital-to-analog converters are incredibly complex and power-hungry, and face what we call a DAC bottleneck.” The team replaced the DAC with three in-sync sub-transmitters, which only required 230 milliwatts to operate.
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]]>Red Dwarfs Are Too Dim To Generate Complex Life:
One of the most consequential events—maybe the most consequential one throughout all of Earth's long, 4.5 billion year history—was the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE). When photosynthetic cyanobacteria arose on Earth, they released oxygen as a metabolic byproduct. During the GOE, which began around 2.3 billion years ago, free oxygen began to slowly accumulate in the atmosphere.
It took about 2.5 billion years for enough oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere for complex life to arise. Complex life has higher energy needs, and aerobic respiration using oxygen provided it. Free oxygen in the atmosphere eventually triggered the Cambrian Explosion, the event responsible for the complex animal life we see around us today.
[...] The question is, do red dwarfs emit enough radiation to power photosynthesis that can trigger a GOE on planets orbiting them?
New research tackles this question. It's titled "Dearth of Photosynthetically Active Radiation Suggests No Complex Life on Late M-Star Exoplanets," and has been submitted to the journal Astrobiology. The authors are Joseph Soliz and William Welsh from the Department of Astronomy at San Diego State University. Welsh also presented the research at the 247th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and the paper is currently available at arxiv.org.
"The rise of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere during the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) occurred about 2.3 billion years ago," the authors write. "There is considerably greater uncertainty for the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis, but it likely occurred significantly earlier, perhaps by 700 million years." That timeline is for a planet receiving energy from a Sun-like star.
[...] 63 billion years is far longer than the current age of the Universe, so the conclusion is clear. There simply hasn't been enough time for oxygen to accumulate on any red dwarf planet and trigger the rise of complex life, like happened on Earth with the GOE.
See also:
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]]>Generative AI is reshaping software development – and fast:
[...] "We analyzed more than 30 million Python contributions from roughly 160,000 developers on GitHub, the world's largest collaborative programming platform," says Simone Daniotti of CSH and Utrecht University. GitHub records every step of coding – additions, edits, improvements – allowing researchers to track programming work across the globe in real time. Python is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world.
The team used a specially trained AI model to identify whether blocks of code were AI-generated, for instance via ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot.
"The results show extremely rapid diffusion," explains Frank Neffke, who leads the Transforming Economies group at CSH. "In the U.S., AI-assisted coding jumped from around 5% in 2022 to nearly 30% in the last quarter of 2024."
At the same time, the study found wide differences across countries. "While the share of AI-supported code is highest in the U.S. at 29%, Germany reaches 23% and France 24%, followed by India at 20%, which has been catching up fast," he says, while Russia (15%) and China (12%) still lagged behind at the end of our study.
[...] The study shows that the use of generative AI increased programmers' productivity by 3.6% by the end of 2024. "That may sound modest, but at the scale of the global software industry it represents a sizeable gain," says Neffke, who is also a professor at Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria (IT:U).
The study finds no differences in AI usage between women and men. By contrast, experience levels matter: less experienced programmers use generative AI in 37% of their code, compared to just 27% for experienced programmers. Despite this, the productivity gains the study documents are driven exclusively by experienced users. "Beginners hardly benefit at all," says Daniotti. Generative AI therefore does not automatically level the playing field; it can widen existing gaps.
The study "Who is using AI to code? Global diffusion and impact of Generative AI" by Simone Daniotti, Johannes Wachs, Xiangnan Feng, and Frank Neffke has been published in Science (doi: 10.1126/science.adz9311).
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