• Readings for the Optional Memorial of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, virgin

Reading 1 1 Corinthians 4:6b-15

Responsorial Psalm Psalm 145:17-18, 19-20, 21

Alleluia John 14:6

Gospel Luke 6:1-5

Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States, second typical edition, Copyright © 2001, 1998, 1997, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; Psalm refrain © 1968, 1981, 1997, International Committee on English in the Liturgy, Inc. All rights reserved. Neither this work nor any part of it may be reproduced, distributed, performed or displayed in any medium, including electronic or digital, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

If you were interested in computers in the early 1970s, you struggled to get time on real computers since owning your own was all but impossible. In the middle of the decade, though, you could get a few computers: the Mark VIII, the Altair, the Apple I, and several others. Those were still pretty expensive, though. But in late 1976, an article in Popular Electronics said you could build a “powerful, expandable” computer for $80. The article in question was by [Joseph Weisbecker], who, unknown to most of us at the time, was actually the RCA employee behind the CPU — an RCA 1802. [Tech Time Traveler] takes a close look at the spunky little computer’s history in the video you can see below.

The 1802 was actually the second generation of the CPU, but the first that was all-in-one chip. [Weisbecker] started building the CPU as a personal project. He’d been a hacker even in high school, building relay-based tic-tac-toe games, among other things.

The first incarnation in his lab was “Fred,” with 100 TTL chips, and his idea was to have the computer be at least partially used as a video game — an interesting point, with Pong being very popular at the time.

The video covers a lot of history, but from a hacker’s point of view, the CPU was both amazing and limited. In a day when the 8080 and Z80 were kings, the 1802 had built-in DMA. This allowed a cheap companion video display that simply read bytes from memory and pushed them out to a TV.

Another neat feature was that the device had 16-bit registers and, even more interesting, 16 of them. On the one hand, any register could be, for example, the program counter or a memory index register. But on the other hand, there was no direct stack for doing calls and returns. The idea was that you’d use different registers for different subroutines, which was fine and efficient for very simple programs but not for the general case. One thing all 1802 programmers knew about was SCRT, the “standard call return technique” routines in the 1802 manual. But, as you might expect, this made calls and returns expensive.

There’s more that you’ll see in the video. People still build 1802-based computers and, of course, there are plenty of simulators, including ours. One thing you’ll notice is that the instruction set is very regular. Even if you didn’t know, you might guess that one guy designed the architecture.

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Inverse shares a movie success story from last weekend: Coyote vs. Acme debuted to $15.9 million at the box office, beating out iconic director Ridley Scott's latest sci-fi adventure, The Dog Stars. This success has only continued since, and the worldwide box office currently sits above $22 million. Strong reviews and word-of-mouth are sure to keep viewers coming in, especially during the holiday weekend. What's impressive is Coyote vs. Acme had a limited marketing campaign that includes viral stunts. They photographed the movie's world premiere with a vintage Tasmanian Devil polaroid camera, and launched a phone number for the law firm suing Acme. ("If you've been injured by an enormous rubber band, press 7. If you've been injured by painted train tunnel that suddenly sprang to life, press 8...") And Cartoon Brew reports that Wednesday "the famously silent Looney Tunes star participated in an AMA on Reddit's r/movies, answering questions about his career, his relationship with the Road Runner, and the Warner Bros. executive who nearly prevented audiences from seeing his latest movie." In keeping with tradition, Wile E. delivered his responses through images of himself holding signs. The format produced several interesting and occasionally thought-provoking exchanges, but one obvious highlight came when a user asked: "Rumor has it that David Zaslav was paid off by ACME to cancel your film; what is your opinion on this?" Wile E.'s response was an image of the coyote glaring at the camera while holding a sign that read, "It's a limited number of signs," pulled from a scene in the film when Mr. Coyote first meets his eventual attorney Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte. Meanwhile, Boing Boing cites local news reports that a Southern California bird watcher Alexander DeBarros has actually captured a photo of a coyote holding a roadrunner bird in its mouth: In an incredible coincidence that is a movie publicist's dream, he snapped the rare, possibly unprecedented, photo on the opening weekend of the movie Acme vs. Coyote... In an even more incredible coincidence, DeBarros's father, Brian Mainolfi, is an animator whose first job in the field was working for Chuck Jones, the creator and director of the Roadrunner cartoon series. Cartoon Brew notes a Reddit user specifically asked the Coyote for his reaction to the news. Wile E. responded with some unexpectedly healthy advice: "We cannot judge our worth on the work of others." Aftermath calls the movie "a well made, deeply funny movie that pays a deep respect to the Looney Tunes in a way that Warner Brothers currently seems uninterested in doing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This custom enclosure for a 64×64 RGB LED matrix by [Davisan1001] not only provides a mount point for a Raspberry Pi, but presents a clean and smooth face with square pixels thanks to a 3D-printed grid, some parchment paper, and a sheet of clear plastic.

The first clever thing in this design is the way [Davisan1001] created the grid that acts as a light blocker for each LED in the matrix, preventing light from “spilling” over into its neighbors. Instead of designing the grid from scratch, the solution was just to leverage slicer settings. By printing a flat square with a grid pattern infill and zero solid top and bottom layers, the slicer creates the grid all by itself. A little trial and error was required to get the spacing just right, but it seems to have worked out fine. We’re not sure it’s better than designing a grid in CAD, but it was certainly a clever way to avoid having to do so.

[Davisan1001] also struggled to find an effective and economical solution for a diffuser. Certainly, high-quality diffuser films are available for sale, as are specialty acrylic sheets, but surely there was some household DIY option to do the trick. A sheet of plain white paper blocks too much light. Wax paper handles poorly, and off-angle viewing is poor. The sweet spot was parchment paper.

Parchment paper is commonly used in baking and is thin, easy to handle, flat and even in color, and just opaque enough to act as an effective diffuser while still transmitting enough light to not impede clarity. Cover the LED matrix with the 3D-printed grid, lay parchment paper over that, cover with a sheet of clear plastic, and the job is done.

Light diffusion can be tricky to get just right in a DIY project, and what works for one application won’t necessarily work for another. Our community had loads of suggestions on different solutions, so consider this one more idea to try the next time you have a project that calls for it.

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After the [Slow Mo Guys] acquired a 168 TB Seagate LaCie Thunderbolt 3-based RAID storage system back in 2019 to store their video footage, they were obviously slightly miffed when suddenly it would just refuse to power up. Naturally the device was now out of warranty, the product itself no longer produced and Seagate support was less than supportive, ergo they sent the device to [Mend it Mark] for an attempted repair.

At first inspection the device appeared to be basically unresponsive, with none of the four fans running and no signs of life other than a few lit LEDs on the main PCB after supplying power to it. After full disassembly and with no repair guide or schematics to go by [Mark] had to start from basics, first diagnosing whether all the power rails were turning on, which they weren’t.

Eventually this led to the NXP LPC11U6x-series MCU which acts as the main power management and monitoring chip in the system. [Mark] deduced that this MCU wasn’t turning on all the power rails because it was waiting for a signal from the fan controllers on the SATA backplane. With the MCU sending the right signals here, and the fans all working when directly supplied with power, ultimately it turned out that a single SI2319 or similar P-channel MOSFET in SOT-23 package near one of the fan connectors had gone faulty.

Replacing this one MOSFET seems to have fixed the RAID array, with it now happily powering up, although the real test will be once the [Slow Mo Guys] start shoving the HDDs back into it. Assuming that this was the sole fault in the system, then it was a very cheap fix in terms of materials. It’s a real shame that repair guides or schematics aren’t made available for devices like this, even if just after they stop being produced.

The BepiColombo mission cleared a major milestone this week in the final stretch of an eight-year interplanetary voyage to Mercury, the hard-to-reach, scorching hot iron world at the Solar System's innermost frontier.

The robotic science mission, with a price tag of nearly $2 billion, is led by the European Space Agency with contributions from Japan and the United States. Since its launch in 2018, BepiColombo has spiraled closer to the Sun using a combination of plasma propulsion and a series of flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. The maneuvers changed the spacecraft's velocity and steered it toward a final encounter with Mercury later this year.

Next time it reaches Mercury, BepiColombo will be traveling at just the right speed for the planet's gravity to capture the spacecraft into orbit. Scientists working on interplanetary missions are accustomed to long waits for scientific payoffs. It took nearly 10 years for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to travel from Earth to Pluto. It turns out traveling to fleet-footed Mercury and then entering orbit requires more energy, or delta-v, than sending a probe to fly by Pluto.

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Self-identifying OpenAI agents posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions during what was likely internal testing designed to gauge the agents’ hacking abilities, researchers said Friday.

In all, agents with 3,700 distinct self-given names posted the messages to German site DSEwiki over a six-week period. Besides discussing ways the agents could break out of the restricted environment OpenAI intended to prevent them from posting code or content to the Internet, the posts shared test answers. The posts also shared possible ways to perform XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks against the wiki and to impersonate site moderators. In three of the posts, agents used the word “swarm” to describe the collection of agents engaged in the activity.

Colluding to share answers

The research team—composed of Sydney Von Arx, Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Cormac Slade Byrd—said they found the posts and pieced them together. The researchers say there are gaps in their understanding of precisely what actions the agents took because the research is based solely on the content of the posts. Additionally, the agents generated “chain of thought” data that’s understood only by OpenAI. As a result, the researchers said, they in some cases made educated guesses, including that the agents were, in fact, from OpenAI. In a statement, OpenAI later confirmed they were.

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It's been an exciting start to the month of September for KDE Plasma developers with continuing to land last minute improvements for Plasma 6.8 ahead of its official release in mid-October...

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A six-week-old baby girl in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, died from measles, the county coroner confirmed to local press Friday.

Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican first elected coroner in 2007, told Lancaster Online that the baby died at home. "I believe it was the 18th of August," he said.

He also noted that the baby had a genetic condition called Amish lethal microcephaly, in which babies are born with unusually small heads and underdeveloped brains. The condition is caused by a mutation in the SLC25A19 gene, which codes for a protein involved with energy-producing enzymes in the mitochondria and is thought to be important for brain development. About 1 in 500 babies in the Old Order Amish population of Pennsylvania are born with the condition. Infants with the disorder only survive for about six months.

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Wine 11.17 is out today as the newest bi-weekly feature development release for this software enabling Windows games and apps to run on Linux...

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A fun trick with a pole is to try to balance it so that it can stand on one end. This can be done in a few ways, such as by exerting a force on either end to counterbalance any force that threatens to make it fall over. The approach that [Peter Ryseck] chose was to cobble together what is effectively a flying drone for on top of a standing pole, without cheating such as by simply lifting it off the ground.

Getting to the point where the drone could react quickly enough to changes in the pole’s orientation was the hardest part, as the quieter, larger propellers also have a lot more inertia. This ruled out using 10″ blades, while triple 5″ blades seemed to work well enough. For the avionics a standard quadcopter control board and software is used, with the programming such that it’ll react appropriately without causing additional instabilities.

Naturally making this work took some trial and error, with issues like oscillations plaguing the system. One unexpected problem was that the pole – taken from a pool fishing net – was flexible enough to add its own instabilities to the system. In the video all these issues and their solutions are explained in detail, along with the ultimate result. One very neat solution here for example is to have the pole lean into the wind, which is a more stable configuration than insisting on having the pole be at a perfect ninety degrees with the ground.

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The Federal Communications Commission yesterday urged a court to dismiss a Disney lawsuit and let the FCC continue a proceeding that could end in the nonrenewal of ABC's broadcast licenses.

Meanwhile, two watchdog groups and individual viewers of ABC stations are trying to intervene in the lawsuit, saying they are worried Disney will agree to a settlement with the FCC that isn't in the public's interest. Disney opposed the motion, and a judge will have to decide whether the groups and individuals can act as intervenors in the case.

Disney sued the FCC on August 18, saying the agency is waging a “campaign of censorship” to retaliate against ABC for speech that President Trump doesn't like. As the lawsuit gets underway, Trump continued his attacks on the media last weekend by demanding that the FCC punish or rebuke an NBC journalist for saying he has “mixed results” in his election endorsements.

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Sheeppox is a highly contagious, often fatal viral disease that was largely eradicated from much of European livestock in the 20th century. But there is still the occasional regional outbreak, such as the one that afflicted many flocks of sheep in Greece last year. In order to reconstruct how the virus has evolved over the last 3,500 years, scientists extracted and sequenced sheeppox DNA preserved in the animal skins used for the parchment of numerous medieval manuscripts. They reported their findings in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said co-author Louis L’Hôte, a graduate student at University College Dublin. “These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies—such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia.”

Per the authors, the earliest known written evidence of sheeppox infection dates to the first century CE, when Roman accounts described outbreaks of skin lesions ("pustules") in the animals. There are more frequent mentions of deadly outbreaks of "pockes" or "variola" in sheep by the Middle Ages, recorded in various agricultural texts and accounting documents in France, Spain, and England. There seemed to be a decline in outbreaks in 17th-century France, although frequent outbreaks re-emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, often with high mortality rates in the flocks. Great Britain did not experience a sheeppox resurgence until 1847.

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Delidding a CPU involves removing the integrated heat spreader (IHS) that’s put over the bare die and the substrate that it is mounted on. The reason for this is usually to improve cooling performance, as the IHS is effectively a small heatsink between the die and the large heatsink, adding more problematic thermal interfaces. If delidding is done improperly it can cause severe damage to the substrate, as in the case of a very nice 1.3 GHz Tualatin Pentium III CPU that [Bits und Bolts] got in an eBay lot with nasty delidding damage.

With the delidding enthusiast presumably having used brute force and ignorance combined with a prying implement, around a dozen of tiny traces on the substrate got severed, requiring tedious trace repair to fix. After confirming that with the severed traces the CPU is indeed busted, enough of the soldermask is removed to make a repair.

Any traces that were still good got covered with soldermask, while for the remainders the thinnest available copper wire was used to create new traces. Although very much doable with a good microscope and a steady hand, this is definitely one of those things that’s much easier to prevent than to fix.

With IHSes having become standard on CPUs, delidding continues to this day, with increasing risks of severed traces and ripped-off capacitors should it go wrong. Although those newer CPU substrates are probably not repairable, repairing these older CPUs instead of tossing them as e-waste seems plausible at least.

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For many small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), VMware has become too expensive.

Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization firm brought the end of perpetual license sales and the arrival of pricey, stacked, subscription-based bundles that priced out many SMBs.

The most obvious is VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), VMware’s flagship private cloud bundle that has been Broadcom’s primary focus since taking over VMware. Many SMBs find that VCF is unaffordable and stuffed with unnecessary offerings. However, numerous customers have reported online that VMware sales representatives have still pushed them toward VCF, with some claiming that sales reps have told them that the lower-priced edition of VMware’s virtualization platform, vSphere Standard, was no longer available.

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A clever technique used to hide malicious prompts in attacks on AI agents has been adopted by spammers to evade filters on email platforms that are designed to flag unwanted messages used in mass campaigns.

The technique is broadly known as ASCII smuggling. It gained attention two years ago as a means of making a class of AI attack known as prompt injections more stealthy. Malicious instructions embedded in emails or other untrusted content to be processed by an LLM aren’t written in ordinary text. Instead, they’re rendered by a special range of Unicode tags. For example, the tag point U+E0041 mirrors “A,” and U+E0061 mirrors “a.”

No longer just for obscuring prompt injections

The block of 128 tags mimics a portion of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange almost perfectly, with one major difference: the characters they encode are readable by computers but, by design, are almost completely invisible to humans. By expressing the malicious prompts in these tags, LLMs detect the instructions, but people reading the email never see them. There’s much more about ASCII smuggling here.

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As the calendar turns a leaf into September, Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for our weekly look at all things Hackaday.

In the news, our retrocomputing competition is well under way, but there’s plenty of time to get an entry in if you’ve got a cool old-style project to show us. And then Elliot’s been chasing seismic surveyors in Munich, where they’re looking for geothermal energy.

In the stand-out hacks there’s a discussion of smoothing 3D prints using frickin’ lasers, the effect of unreasonably high RAM and storage prices on the single board computer ecosystem, and an unfortunate air conditioning system that’s tricked into believing it’s a hot day. Finally, we look in depth at PETG, and take a dive into reverse Polish notation.

Download your own personal version of the podcast right here.

Episode 384 Show Notes:

Mailbag:

In out mailbag this week we had [Kevin Opalka] asking about roadtrip hacks and [Matthew Rowberry] explaining that most versatile yet underrated prototyping medium: the humble Lego brick. Which in turn gives us the chance to mention Lego House: Right Next To Denmark’s Legoland, But Way Cooler, a trip we made back in 2019.

Got something to say? Send an e-mail or an audio clip to [email protected].

News:

• Announcing The 2026 Hackaday Retrocomputing Challenge
• Seismic investigation for Munich’s geothermal project.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Laser Your Way To Smoother FDM 3D Prints
  • Has FDM 3D Printing Hit Its Peak?
• Has the time of esoteric operating systems arrived?
  • Haiku OS Releases Beta 6
  • ReactOS Gets An Upgrade
  • Amiga-Inspired AROS Goes Bare Metal On Raspberry Pi
• Tricking An Air Conditioner Into Cooling
• Wikipedia On A Cheap Yellow Display
• HDMI For The Color Computer 2
• RAM And EMMC Prices Are So High, Pine64 Has Stopped Linux Device Production

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Doubling Thermal Printer Resolution By Wiggling
  • A Defrag Simulator In Your Browser
  • Reactive Heat And Wind Come To VR, Thanks To Smart Plugs
  • Get Your Monitor Transmitting VHF With A Browser Tool
• Jenny’s Picks:
  • Digital “Film” For Your Pi Camera
  • Giving The NES An Optical Data Storage Add-On
  • How A 1981 RAM Expansion Worked

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• PETG: The PLA Filament Alternative That Just Works
• “I’m Not Dead Yet!” Reverse Polish Notation Calculators You Can Still Buy
  • Teardown With A Twist: 1975 Sinclair Scientific Calculator
  • Reverse Polish Notation And Its Mildly Confusing Elegance

Following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's startling announcement in July that the US military would begin mandatory testosterone screening for personnel, the Pentagon released a clinical guidance document on September 2 outlining the new medically questionable policy.

The next day, though, the clinical guidance document disappeared, as did an accompanying statement by spokesperson Sean Parnell. The withdrawal was first reported by Reuters.

In a statement sent to Ars Technica, the Pentagon said that the document, titled "Clinical Guidance for Health and Human Performance Optimization," had been temporarily rescinded on September 3 to allow for updates.

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Back in 2009, Ars wrote about what was being reported as a leaked trailer for the then-upcoming Left 4 Dead 2, saying the footage "looks like it’s straight from a high-gloss action movie." Today, we need to offer an important update to this crucial, 17-year-old story: The trailer "leak" was orchestrated by Valve itself.

That news comes courtesy of former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who said in a newly posted video about cut lines in the game that "for Left 4 Dead 2 with the ESRB... we leaked our trailer ahead of time because they wouldn't let us release the trailer."

Faliszek is of course referring to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, the self-regulating industry group that since 1994 has offered sometimes questionable age-appropriateness ratings for thousands of games submitted to its purview. While many smaller and/or online-focused game makers skip out on getting those ratings these days, at the time, any publisher that wanted space on major retailers' shelves needed to submit to the ESRB's standards.

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On Friday, researchers announced the completion of a map of every neuron in the brain of a male fruit fly. The "connectome" provides a tool that can accelerate neurobiology research. But it also provides an opportunity to do some science on its own, as the connectome of a female Drosophila had been completed earlier this year. The work also provided the team behind it the opportunity to refine tools that are likely to be applied to ever-more complex nervous systems, including (potentially) those of vertebrates.

The new work involved a collaboration between biologists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and computer scientists at Google—both acknowledge that neither could have done the project without the other. Preparation of an entire brain for imaging at the necessary resolution requires a distinct set of skills, as does interpreting what those images indicate. But building a complete picture of the hundreds of millions of synapses in a brain as small as the fruit fly's is a task that can't be achieved by humans in a manageable amount of time.

The people behind the effort expect that in the long term, the effort will be worth it, as the connectome could give neurobiologists a valuable tool for understanding how the brain works.

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Anthropic’s prospective public-market investors must reckon with an external group of trustees that control the majority of the AI company’s board, as its planned blockbuster initial public offering forces close scrutiny of its experimental governance structure.

The company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) is a small group of advisers created to safeguard the lab’s mission of developing AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, even as commercial pressures intensify.

The trust holds no equity in Anthropic, but has significant influence, with the San Francisco-based company planning to preserve its role after a stock market debut that could value the Claude maker at as much as $2 trillion.

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On Thursday, Elon Musk’s X won a court order blocking Operation Bluebird from launching a new app taking over the Twitter name.

In his opinion, Chief Judge Colm Connolly explained that Operation Bluebird was unlikely to prove that X had entirely abandoned the Twitter name. Therefore, X was likely to succeed on trademark infringement and dilution claims tied to the platform’s former name.

Most compellingly, X argued that it still uses the Twitter name in the current listing for the X app in Apple’s App Store. In the first sentence of that listing, written in the same size font as the rest of the text, a single clause clinched the early court win for X by stating, “Welcome to X (formerly known as Twitter).”

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The normally genteel world of international space policy turned ugly this week as several prominent US space companies—including SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, K2, and Starcloud—pulled out of a high-profile French space summit organized by the country's president, Emmanuel Macron.

Politico first reported the diplomatic turmoil, saying that the White House "pressured" US space companies to skip Macron's space summit in Paris next week. Since then, the companies have largely pulled out of the meeting without commenting publicly, though some US representation remains on the two-day program.

Multiple sources confirmed to Ars that an official with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, led the call with US space companies late last week. The call was convened in response to queries from US industry about the French meeting, which is not part of the traditional circuit of international space conferences.

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Yesterday AWS announced the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027 as their successor to the current Amazon Linux 2023 in-house distribution. With all the software upgrades and improvements like building packages now with link-time optimizations (LTO), enforcing x86-64-v3 builds, and other changes, I was eager to run some performance benchmarks of Amazon Linux 2023 vs. Amazon Linux 2027 in the EC2 cloud.

Passive evaporative cooling has been used for centuries to reduce temperatures. Heat is drawn off as water evaporates, which in turn reduces temperature. The more efficiently this process happens the greater the temperature differential, and that’s exactly what the 3D-printed structure pictured above aims for. Created at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, the cubes noticeably reduce surrounding air temperature thanks to their careful construction. As long as they’re kept wet, anyway.

The key is exposing the maximum amount of water to the maximum amount of airflow, and there are two ways the prototype cooling wall — which is 3D printed from a special clay mixture — does this.

First, the macro design of the 3D-printed blocks maximizes surface area. If the cube in the image above looks familiar, that’s because it’s the gyroid infill pattern. Gyroid is a porous pattern with no “dead ends” or closed sections, and the fact that it 3D prints cleanly with no supports also makes it an ideal structural candidate.

The second advantage is the clay used for the blocks themselves. Firing clay at a low temperature keeps it porous, but this particular mixture goes even further. It’s a bio-inspired formulation of clay, fungal mycelium, and wood chips. After printing, the cubes are fired and the fungus and wood chips burn away, leaving a network of thread-like capillaries with occasional larger pockets throughout.

The result is a porous ceramic cube with a massive evaporative surface area relative to its size. A practical test in a hot attic showed the air near a water-laden cube was nearly 7º C lower, a noticeable difference.

A home experimenter might not have access to fancy mycelium-laced clay mixtures, but it still strikes us as something that could be tried out at home. After all, clever hackers have successfully made DIY versions of passive cooling paint.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A group representing American automakers sent a letter (PDF) Thursday to congressional leaders asking for a "permanent ban" on Chinese-made cars in the U.S. John Bozzella, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation's CEO and president, described in the letter China's manufacturing industry as "rooted in a well-documented pattern of unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance." Bozzella addressed his request to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) -- urging them to back a "permanent ban on the sale, import and manufacture of Chinese connected vehicles," before the 119th Congress concludes in January. "Right now, Chinese automakers are dumping subsidized vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world," Bozzella wrote, adding that China "is capturing market share" in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, Mexico and South America. "This hasn't happened inside the U.S. yet, but given the scale and urgency of this threat, we urge you to enact a Chinese vehicle, software and hardware ban before adjourning this year and make this policy the law of the land," he added. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade organization representing car manufacturers, represents the "entire" U.S. auto industry, per its website. Bipartisan bills in the Senate and House would bar automakers with more than 15% Chinese ownership from selling vehicles in the U.S. "Enacting a permanent ban on Chinese vehicles and high-risk hardware and software in the 119th Congress will send a clear and bipartisan message that China's strategy to dominate global automotive manufacturing will be met with a national security policy response from the American government," wrote Bozzella. Further reading: US Car Buyers Envy What They Cannot Have

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month the NetworkManager project adopted an AI coding policy where authors are responsible for 100% of the code they submit and must be able to explain it all. In an attempt to catch AI coding agents that may be trying to bypass their policy, they have added an interesting canary to the project to try to catch such AI-generated patches so they can then be automatically dealt with...

The Portable Computing Language project is out today with PoCL 7.2 as this portable, MIT-licensed OpenCL implementation that runs across various CPU architectures as well as targeting other GPUs/hardware with LLVM back-ends. Notable with PoCL 7.2 is bringing official OpenCL 3.0 conformance on x86_64 and RISC-V processors...

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The AI platform ServiceNow which offers both hosted and on-premises versions just patched a trifecta of CVSS-10 vulnerabilities.

CVSS rankings are determined by the severity of a flaw, the ease of exploiting the bug, if authentication is required for exploitation, if the vulnerability exposes confidential data, and other criteria. A CVSS of 10 is as bad as it gets, and having three of them at once is certainly attention-getting. Of the three vulnerabilities fixed, one allowed unauthenticated modification of data in the hosted instance, a second allowed arbitrary code execution via the GraphQL interface, and the third allowed arbitrary SQL commands that could modify the database.

ServiceNow claims Adobe, Lenovo, Fedex, and Fujitsu among their high-profile customers. With luck, the vulnerabilities were patched before significant public exploitation could happen.

Router Malware

Previously in 2026 the US Government warned against embedded malware found in consumer routers, which may be linked to the FCC enacting bans against certification and import of foreign-made consumer devices. This week, the NVD (National Vulnerability Database) reported specific embedded malware in the Zbtlink and MoreQuick brands of devices.

Multiple versions of the firmware, for multiple lines of products, contain a backdoor service that uses unencrypted UDP to connect to a command and control (C2) service. The service, or anyone able to intercept the network traffic, since it’s unencrypted, can execute commands as root, allowing them to change configurations, open tunnels, or steal ISP credentials.

The malware is baked into the firmware, so removing it is impossible for most users: a factory reset wouldn’t do. In theory if third-party firmware like OpenWRT supports these devices, the hardware could be made safer with a custom install.

Given how commonly the same device is marketed under dozens of names, likely the same devices and firmware have yet to be identified under other brands.

Vulnerability in Qubes

The security-focused distribution Qubes has an important security bulletin for recently discovered issues.

Qubes is built on top of the Xen virtualization system, where each application can be given a dedicated container. The utility to copy files from the primary container into an application container, qvm-copy-to-vm, displays a message if there is an error copying the file. To show the message, the utility launches kdialog with the error as arguments, but fails to ensure that the error doesn’t include shell commands.

The system call used to show the alerts has the dangerous side effect of calling the command as if it was a normal shell. This is extremely powerful, but equally risky: a shell typically allows multiple commands per lines, require quoted strings to protect arguments with spaces or complex text, and can expand variables. Generating an error that escapes out of the message and runs arbitrary commands was all it took.

Qubes already has a fix ready and everyone getting standard updates should have it waiting.

Were US Military Freezers Hacked?

The controls for the freezers used in the commissaries of a growing number of US military bases may have been compromised.

Independent researchers noticed growing reports in Reddit threads that freezer units were out of service, with other service members and families reporting the same. At least fourteen bases throughout the United States appear impacted, and the story has been picked up by the official military newspaper “Stars and Stripes” as well as by mainstream media outlets.

Posts by staff at the bases clarify that it was not a power loss or cooling loss, the fridges and freezers were placed in defrost mode where they self-heated. The commissaries are operated by the Defense Commissary Agency, with central monitoring and control of facilities. Central monitoring makes complete sense when you need to ensure devices are keeping food at a safe temperature, but something definitely seems to have gone wrong.

Diving into it further, M. Elizabeth finds a post from August 9, 2026 describing vulnerabilities in the Danfoss controllers that allow unauthorized access to the refrigeration controller, and a second paper by the same team exposing over 20 vulnerabilities in Copeland refrigeration controllers that included full control of the unit settings. M. Elizabeth is careful to point out that without confirmation from the commissary agency, it’s impossible to know for sure that this was a hack of the control system, but the evidence is mounting.

BGP and SSL Hijack Used to Push Bad Updates

Virtualizor, a web interface for managing virtual machines in an enterprise (bring-your-own AWS), was recently targeted in a global route hijacking scheme.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a core routing system underlying the Internet at large. Service providers use BGP to announce the ranges of IP addresses they handle and how to reach them. BGP is operated as basically a global gentleman’s agreement: the protocol itself lacks any authentication or encryption. If you think this sounds vulnerable to disruption, you’d be completely right.

Global disruptions have happened accidentally, like when an ISP in Pakistan took down YouTube, deliberately, such as when thieves hijacked the routes to cryptocurrency exchanges, and mysteriously, like when China hijacked parts of the Internet repeatedly with no explanation.

This time, the BGP attack targeted the IP range used by Virtualizor, and was combined with spoofed SSL certificates for the Virtualizor servers to push spoofed updates. The BGP announcement was targeted to a specific class C: a relatively small allocation of 253 addresses, similar to what a home network would use. BGP gives precedence to the smallest announcement for an IP range, so all systems that received the spoofed announcement routed those addresses accordingly. The network advertising the false route was based in Romania, though of course they could also be a victim.

With control over the IP range, the attackers were able to generate a certificate via Lets Encrypt, which was sufficient for browsers and the updater to accept the rerouted addresses. The attackers then published a malicious package that appears to install additional services. The company has not provided details about the trojaned update, so it’s not clear what other risks it poses.

Virtualizor does not have a public list of customers, but one has to assume it includes high-profile companies to make such an attack viable. Hijacking BGP is extremely obvious, and isn’t frequently used for such obvious spoofing attacks.

Linux Zoom Steals Clipboard Contents

Simon Tatham, the author of the extremely popular PuTTY SSH client among other projects, posted on Mastodon an interesting observation about the clipboard behavior of recent Zoom clients on Linux.

Relatively recently, some operating systems have added the ability to alert the user when an application access the clipboard. Unfortunately, Linux is not yet one of them, but thanks to other clipboard management tools, Simon noticed that the recent update to Zoom 7.1.5 copies the contents of the clipboard as soon as they change. What happens to the clipboard contents once copied is currently a mystery.

Considering that the clipboard can often contain passwords, authentication tokens, or simply data you might not want to share with Zoom, automatically scraping the contents isn’t what you’d hope for.

Plex Vulnerabilities

The Plex media streaming software sent out an advisory this week warning about security updates for the server and desktop application.

Details are currently thin, with the promise of future details once CVEs have been assigned. For now, make sure you’re on version 1.43.4 or newer. The Plex post has additional directions for updating on platforms that may not have pushed new packages yet.

AI Accelerates Exploit Development

Security company CrowdStrike has released their 2026 report on threats, focusing on the proliferation of AI tools in exploit writing.

CrowdStrike observed that 88% of exploits happened with 48 hours of the proof of concept code being released, crediting AI tools for shortening the adaptation. Typically proof of concept code is designed to demonstrate the vulnerability without providing an immediate mechanism for malicious use, and the window from exploit announcement to wide-spread risk was on the order of weeks. The report notes some vulnerabilities being widely exploited in 20 hours after public disclosure.

The tightening window makes patching even more important, but rapid patching caries the risk of instability when the patches themselves haven’t had extensive testing. Unfortunately there’s no simple solution; faster exploitation via AI tools drives faster patching, often also with AI tools that can introduce more bugs as well.

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The annual X.Org Developer's Conference "XDC 2026" is happening later this month in Toronto. A great number of interesting talks are planned this year from new Wayland features to OpenCL over CUDA, the possibility of Vulkan Gallium, and a lot of exciting driver developments...

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Welcome to Edition 9.09 of the Rocket Report! This edition includes an update from Blue Origin on the groundbreaking of a new Payload Processing Facility in Florida. It has been about a month since the company offered any meaningful news on its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which remains grounded after an on-pad explosion at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in May. The official line from Blue Origin is that the company is targeting a return to flight with New Glenn by the end of the year, but there's good reason for skepticism.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Isar Aerospace is ready to try again. Isar Aerospace is about to make the next attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket into orbit, with a weeklong launch window set to open Friday at Andøya Spaceport in Norway, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) reports. The German launch company aims to deliver several small CubeSats to orbit with the two-stage Spectrum rocket. A test flight of the privately funded launcher failed shortly after liftoff last year, and Isar has attempted to launch the second Spectrum rocket several times since January, only to be thwarted by technical problems and the unavailability of the launch range in northern Norway.

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The Apple Silicon audio driver code within the Linux kernel is preparing to make use of the recent shared GPIO infrastructure for allowing multiple drivers / kernel components to nicely share the same GPIO lines. This should help clean things up in the mainline kernel for the Apple Silicon audio support and with a cleaner architecture than the current downstream Asahi Linux code...

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What if the organization and storage benefits of tool shadowing could be had and improved with a modular, semi-automated process? Tracefinity attempts that by generating custom Gridfinity bins from photos of tools, and has quite a few nifty features that are worth a look.

The basic workflow is this: place one or more tools on a sheet of paper, take a photo, then upload the photo and have the system trace and save the outline and add it to a private tool library. When one is ready to create some bins, use the library of saved tool outlines to generate custom Gridfinity layouts.

If you’re unfamiliar, Gridfinity is a modular system of standardized bins and baseplates designed with 3D printing in mind, making it an ideal match for highly-customized organization tasks and a particularly natural fit for a tool-tracing system like this one.

The idea of taking a photo of a tool and generating a custom bin is a compelling one, and a couple years ago we covered a project that did just that. Tracefinity seems like a natural evolution of the idea, and includes handy features like easy design adjustments, optional magnet holes, and we really like the concept of a tool library from which individual tools are scanned once then later selected to create specific, project-based layouts.

Tracefinity takes advantage of new software capabilities like machine learning to improve and streamline the tracing process, but that doesn’t mean it relies on any external services. It can be entirely self-hosted and by default uses a local, CPU-friendly object detection model for tool tracing. There is an option to provide a API key to use Google Gemini instead, but it’s not required. It can come in handy for especially complex tool outlines or dealing with non-ideal source photos, however.

Smartphone longevity didn't used to matter. In the past, before you could wear out or break a phone, there was always some shiny new thing to buy. Today, we expect our smartphones to go the distance, but they've also become less repairable and, in many cases, more fragile. Fairphone, a Dutch smartphone maker that has just entered the US market, thinks about phones differently.

The new $650 Fairphone Gen 6+ is designed both for longevity and easy repairability. There are trade-offs to this approach if you're used to the standard glass and aluminum sandwiches filled with glue, gaskets, and teeny-tiny screws. But the drawbacks could be worth it for the right buyer. Fairphone CTO Chandler Hatton told Ars that Fairphone's goal is to provide a compelling mobile experience while also enabling the user to "fully own" their device. At the end of the day, this is what a lot of people say they want in a smartphone.

Take it apart, put it back together

These days, Google, Samsung, and Apple support phones with software updates for the better part of a decade, but will the hardware last that long? And what happens when it needs a repair? You may be out of luck or out a lot of money, but Fairphone prioritizes the self-repair experience.

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A genetically modified pig kidney kept a 66-year-old man off dialysis for a record nine months, marking the longest survival yet for a pig kidney transplanted into a living person and the first time such an organ successfully served as a bridge to a later human transplant. The Guardian reports: Tim Andrews was seriously ill with end-stage kidney disease caused by type 2 diabetes and had only a 9% chance of receiving a human kidney within five years, against a more than 40% risk of dying or being removed from the waiting list. Kidney transplantation provides the best survival and quality of life for patients with end-stage kidney disease, but global demand for human organs far exceeds supply. Surgeons in the US successfully transplanted a kidney from Wilma, a Yucatan miniature pig, into Andrews, after genetically engineering it to be compatible with his immune system. The kidney kept Andrews free of dialysis for a record nine months, the longest period ever recorded, before it began failing and he received one from a dead human donor. It was also the first time a pig's kidney had been used as a temporary "bridge" to a human transplant. The breakthrough has been detailed in the journal Lancet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A change proposal filed for what would be part of Fedora Linux 47 is on making use of Thin LTO rather than Fat LTO for link-time optimizations. With Thin LTO being more memory efficient and faster build speeds, the hope is that more Fedora packages could also use Thin LTO for packages where no link-time optimizations are currently leveraged...

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Merged overnight for Mesa 26.3 are changes to Intel's graphics compiler code for supporting a new 64-bit shader addressing mode. It turns out with upcoming Nova Lake P graphics will be a big fundamental change...

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Vulkan 1.4.362 is out this morning as the newest routine spec update. Making Vulkan 1.4.362 more notable beyond a couple bug fixes are two new Vulkan API extensions, both of which were worked on by Valve's Linux graphics team and one of them being a Valve vendor extension...

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Reading 1 1 Corinthians 4:1-5

Responsorial Psalm Psalm 37:3-4, 5-6, 27-28, 39-40

Alleluia John 8:12

Gospel Luke 5:33-39

Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States, second typical edition, Copyright © 2001, 1998, 1997, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; Psalm refrain © 1968, 1981, 1997, International Committee on English in the Liturgy, Inc. All rights reserved. Neither this work nor any part of it may be reproduced, distributed, performed or displayed in any medium, including electronic or digital, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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With artificial intelligence being the bête noir of the moment, there are some projects using it which maybe don’t bring much to the table. So it’s nice to see one that uses it in a creative way, and delivers something new. [arnegiacomo]’s e-paper screen is a great example, as it draws a picture in real time of whatever birds are outside.

Behind the quite large screen sits a Raspberry Pi 5, and on that is BirdNet-Go, an AI-powered birdsong classifier. A USB microphone catches the birdsong, and Birdnet comes up with the species. The birds on the display are then those species as pictures from 19th century bird spotters guides, assembled into a collage. You can even see what the current set of birds it hears are, live, and they are a representative cross section of the European birds you’d find in Norway where it’s located.

We like this project, both for the bird book vibe it gives, and the creative use of machine classification. Surprisingly this isn’t the first project in this field we have seen over the years.

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Tesla has begun offering public rides in Austin in its purpose-built Cybercab, a two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals. "You can go outside, take rides," said Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI. "Anyone can take rides. It's open to the entire public." Previously, the fleet consisted only of Model Ys. Texas records show Tesla had registered 45 Cybercabs as of Thursday, though the company has not disclosed how many are currently carrying passengers. Tesla also says it eventually wants consumers to be able to buy the vehicles for under $30,000. Business Insider reports: Videos posted online by Tesla influencers and content creators who were invited to the Austin event showed that the Cybercab can be hailed through the Robotaxi app. In a video posted by David Moss, an autonomous-vehicle content creator, Robotaxi users could open the car's butterfly doors through the app. After the riders enter the car, the doors closed automatically, Moss said in the video. The launch comes nearly two years after Tesla first unveiled the Cybercab at its "We, Robot" event in Burbank, California.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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