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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/kremlin-backed-hackers-exploit-critical-windows-vulnerability-reported-by-the-nsa/

Kremlin-backed hackers have been exploiting a critical Microsoft vulnerability for four years in attacks that targeted a vast array of organizations with a previously undocumented tool, the software maker disclosed Monday.

When Microsoft patched the vulnerability in October 2022—at least two years after it came under attack by the Russian hackers—the company made no mention that it was under active exploitation. As of publication, the company's advisory still made no mention of the in-the-wild targeting.

[...] On Monday, Microsoft revealed that a hacking group tracked under the name Forest Blizzard has been exploiting CVE-2022-38028 since at least June 2020—and possibly as early as April 2019. The threat group—which is also tracked under names including APT28, Sednit, Sofacy, GRU Unit 26165, and Fancy Bear—has been linked by the US and the UK governments to Unit 26165 of the Main Intelligence Directorate, a Russian military intelligence arm better known as the GRU.

Since as early as April 2019, Forest Blizzard has been exploiting CVE-2022-38028 in attacks that, once system privileges are acquired, use a previously undocumented tool that Microsoft calls GooseEgg. The post-exploitation malware elevates privileges within a compromised system and goes on to provide a simple interface for installing additional pieces of malware that also run with system privileges. This additional malware, which includes credential stealers and tools for moving laterally through a compromised network, can be customized for each target.

[...] People administering Windows machines should ensure that the fix for CVE-2022-38028 has been installed, as well as the fix for CVE-2021-34527, the tracking designation for a previous critical zero-day that came under mass attack in 2021.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted 3-2 on Tuesday to ban noncompete agreements that prevent tens of millions of employees from working for competitors or starting a competing business after they leave a job:

From fast food workers to CEOs, the FTC estimates 18 percent of the U.S. workforce is covered by noncompete agreements — about 30 million people.

The final rule would ban new noncompete agreements for all workers and require companies to let current and past employees know they won't enforce them. Companies will also have to throw out existing noncompete agreements for most employees, although in a change from the original proposal, the agreements may remain in effect for senior executives.

[...] The new rule is slated to go into effect in 120 days after it's published in the Federal Register. But its future is uncertain, as pro-business groups opposing the rule are expected to take legal action to block its implementation.

[...] The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest pro-business lobbying group in the country, has said it will sue to block the rule.

Previously: Is This the End of Non-Compete Contracts?

Original Submission

quietus writes:

Remember graphene, the single-atom-thick material nobody has managed to bring to production scale (yet)?

Problem with graphene -- and other 2D materials -- is that their atoms have always tended to cluster together to make nanoparticles instead. Instead of a clean sheet of material, you'll get a 3D blob, and a mournful look at the Star Trek poster on your lab wall.

Now scientists have managed to make such a 2D, single-atom, layer, using a fairly simple technique. This opens up the possibility of having a valid candidate for mass production.

The new technique was discovered through the well-honed scientific process of trying (and failing) to do something else. In this case, the investigators started out with a material containing atomic monolayers of silicon sandwiched between titanium carbide. The researchers' aim was to coat this electrically conductive ceramic with a thin layer of gold, at a high temperature, to make a contact. (Maybe someone of the team had plumbing problems at home.)

To their surprise, instead of a nice golden coat they ended up with intercalation, where one material in a layered structure is replaced by another. In this case, the silicon atoms were replaced with gold atoms. Some smart-ass noted that this meant they effectively had a 2D layer of gold atoms sandwiched in between layers of something else. Maybe, if we remove the titanium carbide?

How they got the idea is not clarified (an iaido practitioner in the ranks, one presumes), but the team turned to an etching technique used by ancient Japanese blacksmiths. While the process immediately showed promise, the researchers said that finding the exact formula involved months of trial and error, but no limbs were lost.

In the end, what was crucial was the solution and duration of application of the reagent (Murakami's etch) used, as well as complete darkness. That's because light hitting Murakami's reagent can produce cyanide, which dissolves gold. When trying to create a 2D gold sheet, having it dissolve is clearly an unwanted result.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Rotary engines (also known as Wankel engines and Wankel rotary engines) are quite different from piston or "reciprocating" engines. One of the distinguishing features is that they don't need valves to operate. That's to say, the Wankel rotary engine design doesn't have valves — but quite a few rotary engine designs have incorporated them. Both rotary engines and piston engines utilize internal combustion and share the same phases of intake, compression, power, and exhaust. But beyond this similarity, they are very different in design and operation.

The work done by a rotary engine doesn't need to be converted into rotational motive power for use by propellers or transmission, as is the case with piston engines. As a result, they are considered more efficient by some metrics and require fewer moving parts to function. The first rotary engines were primarily used for aircraft during World War I, but the design was abandoned due to flaws and inefficiencies.

In 1954, German engineer Felix Wankel invented a new design for an automobile rotary engine for the German car and bike company NSU. After prototype testing by NSU in the following years, they entered into an agreement with Japanese company Mazda to develop Wankel rotary engines for its cars. The first Mazda cars with rotary engines were launched in Japan in the 1960s before crossing the Pacific to America in 1971. Remaining one of the few companies that stuck with the rotary engine design, Mazda has, over the years, developed some of the most innovative engines of this type.

These engines create power by combusting a mixture of compressed air and fuel within a chamber or cylinder, translating the displacement of the rotor or piston into motion. Wankel rotary engines feature an equilateral triangular rotor with convex edges in an ovaloid chamber or rotor housing (the shape is an epitrochoid where the long sides of a symmetrical oval have two curves like a slight figure eight).

As the triangular rotor moves through the chamber, all three of its apexes are in constant contact with the housing (thanks to rotary engine apex seals), creating three gas volumes that are isolated by the rotor. There are two ports on the same side of the figure eight housing, with the top one for intake of fuel and air and the bottom one for the exhaust of combusted gases. Intake can be assisted by a supercharger pushing air into the chamber, while exhaust can be assisted by a turbocharger pulling air out of the chamber.

As the leading edge of the rotor passes the intake port, it creates a vacuum, inducing (or pulling) air and fuel into the chamber. The rotor's motion then compresses the air and fuel, lit by a spark plug (two in Mazda's design), further propelling the rotor along its path and sending the combusted gases out of the exhaust port. The rotor is attached to an eccentric output shaft (containing lobes not on the center of the shaft) via a gear, and as it rotates, the shaft produces a torque that's used to turn the transmission.

So far, we've explained the most basic Wankel rotary engine, but Mazda — the company that popularized it — has developed several variations over the years. One improvement included a concave pocket on each of the three convex edges of the rotor, which increased the amount of volume within the epitrochoid housing.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft this week demoed VASA–1, a framework for creating videos of people talking from a still image, audio sample, and text script, and claims – rightly – it's too dangerous to be released to the public.

These AI-generated videos, in which people can be convincingly animated to speak scripted words in a cloned voice, are just the sort of thing the US Federal Trade Commission warned about last month, after previously proposing a rule to prevent AI technology from being used for impersonation fraud.

Microsoft's team acknowledge as much in their announcement, which explains the technology is not being released due to ethical considerations. They insist that they're presenting research for generating virtual interactive characters and not for impersonating anyone. As such, there's no product or API planned.

"Our research focuses on generating visual affective skills for virtual AI avatars, aiming for positive applications," the Redmond boffins state. "It is not intended to create content that is used to mislead or deceive.

"However, like other related content generation techniques, it could still potentially be misused for impersonating humans. We are opposed to any behavior to create misleading or harmful contents of real persons, and are interested in applying our technique for advancing forgery detection."

Kevin Surace, Chair of Token, a biometric authentication biz, and frequent speaker on generative AI, told The Register in an email that while there have been prior technology demonstrations of faces animated from a still frame and cloned voice file, Microsoft's demonstration reflects the state of the art.

"The implications for personalizing emails and other business mass communication is fabulous," he opined. "Even animating older pictures as well. To some extent this is just fun and to another it has solid business applications we will all use in the coming months and years."

upstart writes:

The universe may be dominated by particles that break causality and move faster than light, new paper suggests:

Could the cosmos be dominated by particles that move faster than the speed of light? This model of the universe agrees surprisingly well with observations, a pair of physicists has discovered.

In a new paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed, the physicists propose that our universe is dominated by tachyons — a hypothetical kind of particle that always moves faster than light. Tachyons almost certainly don't exist; going faster than light violates everything we know about the causal flow of time from past to future. But the hypothetical particles are still interesting to physicists because of the small chance that even our most closely held notions, like causality, might be wrong.

The researchers suggest that tachyons might be the true identity of dark matter, the mysterious form of matter that makes up most of the mass of almost every single galaxy in the universe, outweighing normal matter 5 to 1. Astronomers and physicists alike currently do not know what dark matter is made of, so they are free to cook up all manner of ideas —– because, after all, sometimes a far-out idea is right, and even if it's wrong, it can help us on the path to a better understanding.

The researchers calculate that an expanding universe filled with tachyons can initially slow down in its expansion before reaccelerating. Our universe is currently in an accelerating phase, driven by a phenomenon known as dark energy, so this tachyon cosmological model can potentially explain both dark energy and dark matter at the same time.

To test this idea, the physicists applied their model to observations of Type Ia supernovae, a kind of stellar explosion that allows cosmologists to build a relationship between distance and the expansion rate of the universe. It was through Type Ia supernovae that astronomers in the late 1990s first discovered that the universe's expansion rate is accelerating.

JoeMerchant writes:

Braarudosphaera bigelowii is a species of algae, a coastal coccolithophore in the fossil record going back 100 million years. It has recently been found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, can't normally do: "fixing" nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.

Nitrogen is a key nutrient, and normally plants and algae get theirs through symbiotic relationships with bacteria that remain separate. At first it was thought that B. bigelowii had hooked up this kind of situation with a bacterium called UCYN-A, but on closer inspection, scientists discovered that the two have gotten far more intimate.

In one recent study, a team found that the size ratio between the algae and UCYN-A stays similar across different related species of the algae. Their growth appears to be controlled by the exchange of nutrients, leading to linked metabolisms.

"That's exactly what happens with organelles," said Jonathan Zehr, an author of the studies. "If you look at the mitochondria and the chloroplast, it's the same thing: they scale with the cell."

In a follow-up study, the team and other collaborators used a powerful X-ray imaging technique to view the interior of the living algae cells. This revealed that the replication and cell division was synchronized between the host and symbiote – more evidence of primary endosymbiosis at work.

And finally, the team compared the proteins of isolated UCYN-A to those inside the algal cells. They found that the isolated bacterium can only produce about half of the proteins it needs, relying on the algal host to provide the rest.

"That's one of the hallmarks of something moving from an endosymbiont to an organelle," said Zehr. "They start throwing away pieces of DNA, and their genomes get smaller and smaller, and they start depending on the mother cell for those gene products – or the protein itself – to be transported into the cell."

Altogether, the team says this indicates UCYN-A is a full organelle, which is given the name of nitroplast. It appears that this began to evolve around 100 million years ago, which sounds like an incredibly long time but is a blink of an eye compared to mitochondria and chloroplasts.

The researchers plan to continue studying nitroplasts, to find out if they're present in other cells and what effects they may have. One possible benefit is that it could give scientists a new avenue to incorporate nitrogen-fixing into plants to grow better crops.

-----
Hopefully this behavior has been going on for tens of millions of years, if this is a newer development it could become a significant evolutionary advantage - radically changing the biome in a short time.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

The EU is at it again -- with unleashing a new raft of legislation upon world+donkey.

Maybe some of the colored tape bureaucrats are avid readers of Soylentnews, as this time they got top management in their crosshairs.

EU members need to implement the directive into national law by January 16, next year (2025). Full text of the directive here, interesting reviews here and here, and a link to the EU's wider Cybersecurity Strategy (which also involves security of hardware and software products) here.

The culprit of service is the second generation of the EU's Cybersecurity Directive (NIS2). The new legislation widely extends its scope to nearly any company with more than 50 employees and €10M+ in yearly revenue. On top of that, the number of industrial sectors which are deemed essential in terms of critical infrastructure doubles from 6 to 12, including ICT service management, government institutions, post and courier services, manufacturing companies, the food-processing industry, waste water management, space companies, research organisations and the chemical industry as a whole. Suppliers to these companies can also fall under the new regulation.

In practice, national centers for cybersecurity will be responsible to execute cybersecurity checks through audits and/or unannounced security scans. If the target company neglects their recommendations, it risks heavy fines: at least 2 percent of worldwide revenue up to a maximum of €10 million for companies with more than 250 employees, or more than €50 million yearly revenue. Smaller companies risk at least 1.4 percent of yearly revenue with a maximum of €7 million.

These fines cannot just be classified under company expenses, though. Under the new regulation, CEOs and board members are obligated to follow cybersecurity training, and to sign off on all cybersecurity measures. They are deemed personally responsible, and run the risk of being barred temporarily from similar roles, and -- most importantly -- of having to pay the resulting fine out of their own pocket, not through the company.

Original Submission

damnbunni writes:

https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/end-of-life-for-z80-cpu-and-peripherals-announced/

Zilog To End Standalone Sales Of The Legendary Z80 CPU

Zilog's parent company Littelfuse has notified customers and distributors that it's end of life for the good ol' Z80. In a End of Life / Last Time Buy notification (https://www.mouser.com/PCN/Littelfuse_PCN_Z84C00.pdf ) they state:

"Please be advised that our Wafer Foundry Manufacturer will be discontinuing support for the Z80 product and other product lines."

You can place a final order up until 6/14, if you need to stock up on Z80s.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

End of an Era: End-Of-Life for the Venerable Zilog Z80

Production of some models of Z80 processor – the chip that helped spark the PC boom of the 1980s – will cease in June 2024 after an all-too-brief 48 years.

The Z80 debuted in 1976, using a 4-micron process. Readers will doubtless be aware that some modern silicon is made on a 4-nanometer process – meaning elements are 1,000 times smaller than those etched into a Z80.

Zilog will accept orders for the device until June 14, 2024. After that, it's the end for the eight-bit CPU – or at least the ZC8400 range. Zilog appears to still make the Z180 and eZ80 – successors that added lots of whistles and bells and are often packaged into SoCs.

The original Z80 packed just 8,500 transistors and chugged along at 2.5Mhz, but that was enough to power lots of fun stuff – helped by the fact that it was compatible with Intel's 8080 processor and sold at a cheaper price.

The Sinclair ZX range was perhaps the most famous application of the Z80, using it to power affordable and accessible machines that introduced many Register readers (and writers) to tech. The chip also found its way into arcade games such as Pac Man, and early Roland synthesizers.

But Zilog was overtaken by Intel in the PC market, and by the 1990s decided to focus on microcontrollers instead. The Z80 was one of its key offerings, and over the years was adapted and enhanced: we even spotted a new variant of the chip in 2016!

That sort of upgrade helped the processor and its heirs to hold on in some consumer-facing applications such as graphing calculators like the TI-84 Plus CE. But it mostly disappeared into industrial kit, where it hummed along reliably and offered developers a tried-and-true target for their code.

Perhaps someone will place a giant order for ZC8400s to hoard them, so that those committed to the platform can continue to get kit – a plausible scenario given the likelihood the processor retains a hidden-but-critical role in defense or some legacy tech that will persist for decades.

Or perhaps there's one last batch of ZX Spectrums to be made!

See also:

• https://www.techspot.com/news/102684-zilog-discontinuing-z80-microprocessor-after-almost-50-years.html
• https://www.mouser.com/PCN/Littelfuse_PCN_Z84C00.pdf

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

US Air Force successfully tests AI-controlled fighter jet in dogfight against human pilots:

In what has been hailed as a milestone moment for artificial intelligence's use in the military, the US Air Force has announced that it successfully tested a modified, AI-controlled fighter jet in a dogfight against human pilots last year.

The US Air Force Test Pilot School and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) first started testing a Lockheed Martin X-62A VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft) fitted with AI software back in December 2022, part of the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program. Able to mimic the performance characteristics of other aircraft, the X-62A was flown for by the AI for over 17 hours.

DARPA revealed on Thursday that in September 2023, the X-62A carried out the first successful AI versus human within-visual-range engagements, also known as a dogfight.

The AI dogfights paired the X-62A VISTA against manned F-16 aircraft in the skies above Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California. After initial flight safety was built up using defensive maneuvers, the aircraft switched to offensive high-aspect nose-to-nose engagements where they approached within 2,000 feet of each other at 1,200 miles per hour. It isn't revealed which side won the simulated battle.

[...] In addition to its autonomous flight capabilities, the X-62A VISTA, a modified F-16, also features a high-resolution camera, a compact size, lightweight construction, and is versatile enough to be used for a wide range of applications, including scientific research, surveillance, recon, environmental monitoring, and emergency response.

Could Air Force pilots be yet another profession that is eventually threatened by AI? The 2020 AlphaDogfight Trials, a three-day competition designed to demonstrate advanced algorithms capable of dogfighting (using VR simulations), saw an experienced F-16 Air Force pilot lose 5-0 to the AI agent. DARPA said the machine performed aggressive and precise maneuvers that the human pilot could not match.

DARPA says that the X-62A VISTA will continue to serve a variety of customers for research while providing key academic lessons for the next generation of test leaders.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/linus-torvalds-reiterates-his-tabs-versus-spaces-stance-with-a-kernel-trap/

Anybody can contribute to the Linux kernel, but any person's commit suggestion can become the subject of the kernel's master and namesake, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is famously not overly committed to niceness, though he has been working on it since 2018. You can see glimpses of this newer, less curse-laden approach in how Torvalds recently addressed a commit with which he vehemently disagreed. It involves tabs.
[...]
By attempting to smooth over one tiny part of the kernel so that a parsing tool could see a space character as a delineating whitespace, Prasad Pandit inadvertently spurred a robust rebuttal:

It wasn't clear what tool it was, but let's make sure it gets fixed. Because if you can't parse tabs as whitespace, you should not be parsing the kernel Kconfig files.

In fact, let's make such breakage more obvious than some esoteric ftrace record size option. If you can't parse tabs, you can't have page sizes.

Yes, tab-vs-space confusion is sadly a traditional Unix thing, and 'make' is famous for being broken in this regard. But no, that does not mean that it's ok.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Interstellar debuted in late 2014, and features a star-studded cast including Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, John Lithgow, and Matt Damon. It is set in a near dystopian future where humans have more or less destroyed Earth and are on the hunt for a new home elsewhere in the cosmos.

The flick earned an impressive $731 million at the box office during its first run a decade ago opposite a budget of just $165 million, and earned a score of 73 percent on Rotten Tomatoes versus a more favorable audience score of 86 percent.

Theatrical re-releases have been commonplace in Hollywood over the past few years and can be traced back to the Covid era. During the pandemic, film production halted worldwide and the theater industry nearly sank. Attendance at AMC theaters in the US fell 96.8 percent in Q3 2020 compared to the previous year. Movies that were already complete saw on-demand releases at home.

[...] Interstellar will return to theaters on September 27, and will be shown on 70mm Imax and digital screens.

Did you see it the first time? Would you want to see it, or see it again, in the theater rather than just stream it?

Original Submission

acid andy writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-dennett-dead-at-82/

World-renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.

"He was a towering figure in philosophy and in particular in the philosophy of AI," roboticist Rodney Brooks (MIT, emeritus) wrote on X, bemoaning that he'd never replied to Dennett's last email from 30 days ago. "Now we have only memories of him."

Dennett's many books, while dense, nonetheless sold very well and were hugely influential, and he was a distinguished speaker in great demand. His 2003 TED talk, "The Illusion of Consciousness," garnered more than 4 million views. While he gained particular prominence as a leader of the "New Atheist" movement of the early 2000s—colorfully dubbed one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism" alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—that was never his primary focus, merely a natural extension of his more central philosophical concerns.

"Dan Dennett was the embodiment of a natural philosopher—someone who was brilliant at the careful conceptual analysis that characterizes the best philosophy, while caring deeply about what science has to teach us about the natural world," Johns Hopkins University physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll told Ars. "At the same time, he was the model of a publicly engaged academic, someone who wrote substantive books that anyone could read and who had a real impact on the wider world. People like that are incredibly rare and precious, and his passing is a real loss."

Dennett was a confirmed compatibilist on the fiercely debated subject of free will, meaning that he saw no conflict between philosophical determinism and free will. "Our only notable divergence was on the question of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of 'free,' whereas I just agreed that 'will' exists, but maintained that there is no freedom in it," Hoftstadter recalled.

I initially came across Dennett's writings in his book The Mind's I which he wrote with Douglas Hofstader including texts from other authors. It was when I first started to dip my toes into the philosopy of mind. He brings up some fascinating ideas from a rational perspective which always provoke a lot of thought and discussion.

Due to my being in the same philosophical camp as Dennett's great rival David Chalmers, I tend to side with those who called Denett's book, Consciousness Explained, Consciousness Avoided (Dennett actually wrote an epilogue in response to this accusation). This is because, as I understand it, Dennett has always strived to explain consciousness using only axioms derived directly from accepted science, which means it all starts and ends with a third person perspective. Dennett always raised some interesting counterarguments to other philosophers that attempted to discuss the really interesting first person phenomena of consciousness, so whether you agree with him or not, he represented a key school of thought in modern philosophy.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/thousands-complain-about-prime-videos-wrong-titles-lost-episodes-other-errors/

Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon's Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren't the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider's examination of leaked "internal documents" brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.

Insider didn't publish the documents but said they show that "60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors," such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.
[...]
Following Insider's report, however, Quartz reported that an unnamed source it described as "familiar with the matter" said the documents were out of date, despite Insider claiming that the leaked reports included data from 2023. Quartz's source also claimed that customer engagement was not affected,

Ars Technica reached out to Amazon for comment but didn't hear back in time for publication. The company told Insider that "catalogue quality is an ongoing priority" and that Amazon takes "it seriously and work[s] relentlessly alongside our global partners and dedicated internal teams to continuously improve the overall customer experience."
[...]
Beyond Prime Video, users have underscored similar inaccuracies within the past year on rival services, like Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix. A former White Collar executive producer pointed out that the show's episodes were mislabeled and out of order on Netflix earlier this month. Inaccurate content catalogs appear more widespread if you go back two years or more. Some video streamers (like (Disney and Netflix) have pages explaining how to report such problems.
[...]
Insider said it spoke with an anonymous person involved with Prime Video library who described the inaccuracies as "extremely sloppy mistakes" that have affected Prime Video for years.
[...]
Streaming is in a cable-like rut, and subscribers are ditching their services faster than ever. That puts more pressure on streaming platforms to elevate the user experience (not just prices), including getting the basics right.

Improving behind-the-scenes tech and practices that benefit user experiences and user interfaces is something streaming companies may need to prioritize.
[...]
As people watch the cost of streaming rise, subscribers' standards are entitled to rise, too. Accurate titles and descriptions are just some of their expectations.

Original Submission

Mojibake Tengu writes:

Michael Larabel of Phoronix informs us:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Autodafe-0.2-Released

Autodafe 0.2 Released For Freeing Your Project From Autotools

Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides "tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools."

Autodafe works to convert an Autotools build recipe into a bare makefile that "can be read and modified by humans." The Autodafe's README explains:

        "This project collects resources for converting an autotools build recipe to a bare makefile that can be read and modified by humans.
        ...
        The principal tool, makemake, reduces a generated Makefile to an equivalent form suitable for human modification and with internal automake cruft removed. It is intended to be used with ifdex(1) to enable severing a project from its autotools build recipe, leaving a bare Makefile in place. A HOWTO describing a conversion workflow for an entire project is included.

        One other tool is planned but not yet implemented."

Those wishing to learn more about ESR's Autodafe project can do so via GitLab.
https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe

ESR additionally added on Twitter/X:

        "Release 0.2 of my autotools killer. It's ready for use on projects buiilding binaries or static libraries. Shared libraries is a more difficult problem and will gate the 1.0 release."

This is one way to work away from Autotools for those not wishing to join the Meson bandwagon or going to another build system outright.

This project intrigues me. It brings sanity to GNU. I consider Unix M4 (core macro language of Autotools) inferior even as a macro language.
I am used to craft a Makefile for my projects by hand, for decades. Having a humanized Makefile for fancy projects of others seems nice to me.

Useful links on project's GitLab:
De-Autoconfiscation HOWTO .
https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe/-/blob/master/de-autoconfiscation.adoc

makemake manual page
https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe/-/blob/master/makemake.adoc

Hacker's Guide to Autodafe
https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe/-/blob/master/hacking.adoc

The project logo is the astrological symbol for planet Makemake, a Kuiper belt object 136472
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makemake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makemake#/media/File:Makemake_symbol_(bold).svg

Original Submission