SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Open source, commercial, single-hop, multi-hop, mixnet? The array of options is dizzying:

A prominent US senator is asking the National Security Agency to provide guidance to the general public on best practices for using virtual private networks to secure their communications from spying by foreign adversaries.

VPNs funnel all of a user's Internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a remote server. The design provides strong assurances that no one between the user and the server can read the encrypted contents. VPNs also allow users to hide their IP addresses from the destination servers they communicate with. While US agencies have previously recommended use of VPNs, none have given recommendations on which ones provide adequate protection.

There are a host of limitations that can undo many of the protections users may think their VPN provides them. For instance, the encrypted tunnel often terminates once a single server decrypts the traffic and sends it on to its final destination. That means the decrypted traffic or the sending and destination IP addresses may be available for snooping by rogue employees or attackers who hack the server. VPNs also don't encrypt certain types of metadata, such as time stamps, allowing nation-states to build profiles that can be useful in intelligence gathering.

With so many nuances, the existing recommendations to use a VPN don't provide enough information for people to make informed decisions. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat representing Oregon, is asking the NSA to provide specific recommendations.

"Americans facing advanced foreign threats—including government personnel, defense contractors, journalists, and human rights defenders—deserve clear, honest advice about how best to protect their communications from surveillance by foreign adversaries," Wyden wrote in a letter sent Wednesday to General Joshua M. Rudd, the director of the NSA. "To that end, I request that you update NSA's existing public guidance on VPN configurations to address this issue."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/03/hugging-face-is-too-important-to-fall-into-nvidias-hands/5294363

Nvidia on Thursday announced an agreement to acquire open source AI evangelist and model depot Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in a deal that's expected to close next year, assuming regulators don't get in the way.

They should get in the way.

As antitrust magnets go, Nvidia buying Hugging Face takes the cake. You wouldn't let an automaker acquire the primary means of fuel distribution. Nor would you let it buy the primary means by which the mechanics are trained. Yet, Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face is tantamount to both.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration likely lacks both the competence and teeth necessary to litigate the case, something that probably factored into CEO Jensen Huang's decision to buy Hugging Face now.

To understand why Nvidia's latest acquisition is so troublesome, we need to talk about just how important Hugging Face has become to the broader AI ecosystem. Have you seen the XKCD comic in which a piece of open source software maintained by a single developer is holding up all of modern infrastructure? It could be argued that Hugging Face is that piece for the AI industry.

Founded in 2016, the AI model repository has become the beating heart of the machine learning community. When a new open weights model drops, Hugging Face is the first place people look. A key element of its success has been its unrelenting commitment to open source AI, which has made it a sort of Switzerland for researchers, enthusiasts, and software devs to collaborate on neutral ground.

If you've ever downloaded an open weights model, it almost certainly came from Hugging Face, whether you knew it or not.

No matter how fervently Nvidia promises not to pollute Hugging Face's hallowed ground, the temptation to use the platform to advance its hardware and software interests will inevitably prove too great for Huang and his lieutenants to resist for long.

In spite of this, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue sang Nvidia's praises on Thursday, casting the acquisition and the capital it will bring as an opportunity to grow the company's user base from around 18 million today to more than 100 million in the years to come.

For those who died - We Will Remember Them. Rest in Peace.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2246397/how-to-edit-claude-memory/

Since the summer of 2025, Claude has had the ability to remember past conversations. This feature — which Anthropic, like other AI labs, calls memory — allows the chatbot to personalize its responses and save you the hassle of repeating context for it. By default, memory is enabled for all Claude users, including those with free accounts, and following a recent update allows the chatbot to carry over its memory across both chats and Claude Cowork sessions. In recent weeks, Anthropic has also been rolling out more granular controls that give users the ability to edit the specific topics Claude remembers. Here's how you can edit what Claude remembers about you.

[...] Following Claude's latest memory update, Anthropic added an option called Include sensitive topics in memory. By default, Claude won't save memories related to subjects like your health, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, politics or gender identity. By enabling the new option, it will begin recording more sensitive information. Each time Claude generates a memory related to a sensitive subject, you will see a notice. According to Anthropic, "if you're using an older version or the mobile app, you will not see this notice, and Claude won't save the sensitive topic to its memory."

The chatbot won't retroactively save past conversations, and some information, such as government ID numbers, Claude will never save, even with Include sensitive topics in memory enabled.

As mentioned above, by default Claude will automatically generate memories for all users. You can disable this feature by toggling off Generate memory from chats. From there, Anthropic gives you two options: Pause memory or Reset memory. The company warns the latter cannot be undone. "Upon re-enabling the feature, you'll start from scratch, and Claude will not have its previous memory," Anthropic notes.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/genome-duplication-is-a-radical-evolutionary-gamble-20260902/

No larger than the head of a match, Potamopyrgus antipodarum doesn't look very impressive. Few people visiting New Zealand's Lake Alexandrina even notice the tiny gastropods littering the shores. The snail's diminutive size, however, conceals a massive secret. Sometime in the recent past, its genome doubled. Instead of having two sets of chromosomes and two copies of every gene, the way most animals do, it has three or four — significantly more genetic material than it ought to have.

"We actually don't know, for our snails or any other species, why this happens so reliably, again and again and again," said the evolutionary biologist Maurine Neiman, who studies the species at the University of Iowa.

Scientists suspect that an organism inheriting three, four, or more sets of chromosomes instead of two (a condition called polyploidy) is, in most cases, a fatal error of cell division. Only a tiny fraction of whole-genome duplication events are thought to stabilize in a lineage. But those that do can have significant consequences.

You wouldn't be able to guess, but these snails have three or four sets of chromosomes in their cells, instead of the standard two.

"We like to think of it as a baseball hitter that strikes out a lot, but when they do hit, it's a home run," said Douglas Soltis, a plant evolutionary geneticist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "Polyploidy is the most important process on the planet that hardly anybody knows anything about."

Advances in whole-genome sequencing are changing that. Studies across the tree of life are finding that genome duplication isn't exactly an infrequent occurrence. Among plants, it's hard to avoid, said Jonathan Wendel, an evolutionary biologist at Iowa State University: All seed plants living today have experienced at least one ancient whole-genome duplication, and many have undergone more. Barnacles, insects, trout, and arachnids carry evidence of ancient duplications in their genomes. Biologists hotly debate whether the significant evolutionary changes that led to jawed vertebrates, from hagfish to humans, are connected by ancient gene duplications hundreds of millions of years ago.

The evolutionary biologist Maurine Neiman uncovered a whole-genome duplication in a minuscule snail. "We actually don't know, for our snails or any other species, why this happens so reliably, again and again and again," she said.

Like gene inversions and translocations or single-nucleotide point mutations, a whole-genome duplication is a type of genetic mutation that fuels evolutionary change. In fact, genome doubling is the single most radical mutation an organism can experience in a single generation. Researchers are analyzing the whole genomes of diverse species to find out how organisms manage not only to survive such a potentially lethal event, but also to thrive and adapt in its wake. "All these different interrogative tools have opened up this world to us that we could not see and hence did not know existed," Wendel said.

A story of how this process unfolds is being written in potamo's genome. Neiman's team dated the snail's genome duplication to less than a million years ago — incredibly recent in evolutionary terms, but long enough ago for the species to have begun the longer process of adjusting to its heavier genomic load. That recency is giving Neiman a close view of how potamo has managed its polyploid existence.

This is the latest evidence amid a growing awareness of polyploidy that is shifting science's understanding of genome duplication's evolutionary importance. The serene shores of Lake Alexandrina are about as far from the Las Vegas strip as you can get, but that didn't stop potamos from taking one of evolution's biggest gambles.

hubie writes:

As humans plan for longer journeys to the Moon and eventually Mars, designing habitats where crews can not only survive but also thrive will be essential to a mission's success:

In extreme environments, habitats are built for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases, and postdisaster dwellings are designed to prioritize health and safety. This is especially the case for habitats in space, where room is at a minimum, contact with Earth is remote, and hazards are numerous.

But as humans plan for longer journeys to the moon and eventually Mars, designing habitats where crews can not only survive but also thrive will be essential to a mission's success.

Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere are exploring ways that habitats in extreme environments can support a person's mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They have assembled a resource that relates habitat design features with behavioral health outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation.

Going a step further, the team has visualized these relationships in the form of an interactive online platform. Users can click through to explore connections between design and behavior, such as how a habitat's layout affects social connection and team cohesion, and how a reconfigurable space can minimize homesickness.

"The awareness has been there for some time that living in space is difficult," says Mich Lin, a PhD candidate in the Human Systems Lab and the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT. "We've come a long way from the human in a tin can. As our priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, making sure a crew is safe, healthy, happy, and productive becomes even more important."

[...] The researchers modeled their new design tool after a risk mapping format used by NASA. When designing a spacecraft or habitat for astronauts in space, the agency maps out the associated risks in the form of "directed acyclic graphs." A DAG resembles a large web of relationships that illustrate how certain habitat or mission features can affect certain mission-relevant outcomes.

A typical NASA DAG depicts one-way connections between mission constraints, such as "distance from Earth," to an astronaut's physical health outcome, such as quality of sleep, cardiovascular impacts, cognitive function, and so forth.

"By mapping risks, we can identify points of intervention to characterize and mitigate them," Lin explains. "NASA uses DAGs as a countermeasure to the risky business that is human spaceflight."

The researchers looked to create a similar DAG format to map risks associated with habitat design, and less tangible behavioral health outcomes, such as stress, boredom, trust, nostalgia, curiosity, and kinship with crewmates.

"The connection between habitat and behavioral health has not been made in this format before," Lin emphasizes. "So we made those connections for the first time."

[...] The team zeroed in on 14 main emotions or experiences that they considered behavioral outcomes that could be influenced by habitats in extreme environments. These include anxiety, autonomy, nostalgia, curiosity, fatigue, and kinship.

They then carried out a wide-ranging search through the scientific literature to identify studies relating to habitability in extreme environments. For instance, NASA has carried out extensive research on the effects of lighting on sleep, the resetting of circadian rhythms, and productivity. Other studies have investigated circulation and habitat layout and their effects on privacy, social connection, and crew performance.

owl writes:

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2026/09/decoding-nec-v20-microcode.html

reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU.

Although I had added support for the NEC V20 in MartyPC, the V20 core was not cycle-accurate in terms of the V20's actual timings. It was an 8088 in a V20's clothing - a copy-paste of my 8088 core with V20 instructions tacked on.

This was not an ideal case, but the prospect of making my V20 core cycle-exact without the microcode seemed like it might be a discouraging slog of trial and error.

So why not get the microcode, then?

I recently commissioned InfoSecDJ to take die photography of an NEC V20 CPU (actually a second-source V20 fabricated by Sharp, but a V20 nonetheless). He did an excellent job.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Predictive text remains available, but users will have to invite it into their workflow:

Microsoft is switching off text predictions by default in Word and Outlook after acknowledging that unwanted suggestions can interrupt rather than assist some users.

The change is coming to Word for Windows, the web, iOS, and Android, as well as classic Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. The feature will remain available but will no longer be enabled by default.

Introduced several years ago, the feature is the computing equivalent of Microsoft peering over users' shoulders and suggesting what they might type next. Depending on the user and their workflow, it can be a boon, an irritation, or simply something to ignore. The irksome part was that it was turned on by default.

According to Microsoft, "text predictions helps you write documents and emails more efficiently by suggesting words and phrases as you type. While some people find these suggestions useful, others prefer to write without predictive text. This update gives you more flexibility, allowing you to customize your editing experience and create a workflow that best suits your needs.

"This update helps ensure that predictive text remains available for people who find it helpful, while reducing unwanted interruptions for those who prefer to write without suggestions appearing automatically."

The Windows behemoth did not explain whether the change will disable text predictions for users who have already enabled them or apply only to new installations and profiles. Users who want the suggestions will still be able to switch them on through the applications' settings.

Microsoft is not the only company to suggest text as users type. Google, for example, introduced Smart Compose in Gmail in 2018.

Microsoft did not say whether telemetry or user feedback prompted the reversal, but it has elected to make the feature opt-in rather than opt-out.

It is a small change, but perhaps a sign that Microsoft is listening to customers who would rather decide for themselves whether AI belongs in their workflow.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://manualdousuario.net/en/libreoffice-download-record-no-ai/

LibreOffice 26.8, released on August 26th, became the software's most popular update. LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that's been around for nearly two decades. In one week, the installer was downloaded more than 1 million times — not counting updates via Linux distribution repositories.

Someone might say the improvements to the writing system and typography are a hit among NGOs, government agencies, and offices that use LibreOffice. I'm putting my money on a "non-feature," though: the statement that LibreOffice doesn't come with generative AI features due to the technology's (lack of) privacy.

A day after celebrating the download record and the wide media coverage, The Document Foundation (TDF), which manages the software, spelled out its position in a post titled "Yes, no AI is now a feature".

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Project PANOPTES puts £5M on the table for an autonomous, vehicle-mounted defense:

Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is seeking anti-drone technology capable of protecting troops from saturation attacks designed to overwhelm defenses or exhaust their ammunition.

The tender, dubbed Project PANOPTES, is being run by UK Defence Innovation (UKDI) on behalf of the MoD, with an initial £5 million ($6.8 million) available to successful bidders.

First-stage submissions close at midday on September 23, suggesting that the MoD is in something of a hurry.

According to the competition document, PANOPTES aims to deliver "an integrated Counter-Uncrewed Aerial System (C-UAS) force-protection capability, capable of autonomous operation."

The MoD wants a system that complements its existing defenses by detecting, tracking, and defeating low-cost threats without being overwhelmed or rapidly exhausting its ammunition. It must operate autonomously and be mountable on an Army vehicle.

UKDI is "particularly interested in capabilities centred on Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW) effectors," although it will consider credible alternatives.

The initial focus is on NATO Class 1 uncrewed aerial systems, a category covering military drones weighing up to 150 kg. These include the small battlefield craft used extensively in Ukraine against targets ranging from armored vehicles to individual soldiers, rather than larger drones intended to strike fixed installations.

The requirement covers "single, repeated, sequential and simultaneous threat profiles" – including potential swarm attacks – as well as drones used for disruption or surveillance.

[...] Vulnerability to drones is a major concern for armed forces around the world. US defense startup Mara recently unveiled a counter-drone system that launches small interceptors from a vehicle roof, but these would eventually be used up in a battlefield situation.

Original Submission

Anonymous Coward informs us of a link:

Scientists turn eggshells into next-generation spacecraft protection

[...] At first glance, eggshells seem fragile, but nature has designed their structure to absorb energy and spread stress. The team then asked themselves if this principle could be applied to spacecraft shielding.

There are aluminum egg-shaped shells, arranged in a grid, situated between two aluminum plates, each of the shells being fully filled with water and thus forming an intact protective arrangement. When this structure is hit, the egg-shaped shells in the array will not deform separately and scatter; rather, they will remain connected and deform in unison.

Throughout the deformation process, they will be crushed one after another, dissipating the impact force and preventing it from concentrating on a single point, thereby buffering the damage.

[...] This eggshell-inspired shield is part of a growing movement in engineering: bio-inspired design, where nature's solutions to survival challenges are adapted for human technology.

Journal Reference: Yuxin Wang, Yuqing Liu, Hao Li et al. Dynamic analysis of the water-filled aluminum eggshell array metastructure under hypervelocity impact. Journal of Applied Physics. DOI: 10.1063/5.0324502

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Italian technology collective Autistici/Inventati (A/I) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization. Under Executive Order 13224, Washington alleged that the volunteer-run platform provided material and technological support to violent far-left networks and international Antifa cells.

Founded in 2001 in Italy, Autistici/Inventati was an independent, volunteer-run tech collective that provided free privacy-oriented communication tools for activists and grassroots social movements. Rooted in anti-fascist principles and funded entirely by donations, the platform rejected corporate infrastructure and advertising. At its peak, A/I hosted over 16,000 secure email mailboxes, 10,000 blogs via its custom NoBlogs platform, 5,500 mailing lists, and 1,500 websites, serving as a critical hub for global digital self-defense.

A/I strongly rejected the classification, stating that "antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism". However, the U.S. sanctions quickly disabled the group's digital infrastructure. The U.S.-based Public Interest Registry placed autistici.org on serverHold status, revoking its domain and making its services invisible. Furthermore, the Italian lender Banca Etica suspended A/I's bank account due to secondary compliance risks, while criticizing the political use of extraterritorial U.S. sanctions.

Faced with severe legal and financial vulnerabilities for its network, A/I officially announced on September 6, 2026, that it would completely shut down. According to a report by Reuters, the closure permanently dismantles a non-commercial privacy network that has operated since 2001.

Digital rights advocates, including the European Digital Rights (EDRi), issued statements of solidarity with the collective. They warned that the case sets a dangerous counterterrorism precedent by aggressively targeting open-source, independent internet infrastructure and European digital sovereignty. A/I is currently providing a winding-down window to protect its community and allow users to back up their data.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

LG Smart TVs Caught Mapping Your Network, Logging Audio With Screen Off — Here's the Full Technical Breakdown

A 135-Minute Investigation by Gamers Nexus Exposes How 200 Million+ LG Televisions Harvest Data From Every Device on Your Home Network, Transcribe Voice Prompts in Plain Text, and Feed It All to an Advertising Engine, Even When the TV Is Off

Your living room television is doing a lot more than displaying content. A July 2026 investigation from Gamers Nexus found that LG smart TVs actively scan home networks for phones, smartwatches, and other connected hardware, capture microphone audio while the screen appears powered down, transcribe voice commands into plain-text logs, and upload it all to LG's advertising division as soon as an internet connection is available. LG has sold an estimated 216 million smart TVs worldwide. LG Ad Solutions, the company's ad division, markets access to 363 million "secondary addressable devices" in the US alone, a number that exceeds LG's own installed base and points to network-level device enumeration happening inside people's homes.

The investigation was led by Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, working with Level1Techs and several independent security researchers. Over a 135-minute video and accompanying documentation, the team ran packet captures, bench-tested microphone behavior in standby, found remote code execution flaws in webOS, and traced the data pipeline from a living room to LG's ad-targeting infrastructure.

LG has not publicly responded to the specific findings as of publication. The company's existing privacy language states that its televisions "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations." The evidence in this investigation contradicts that.

Also: LG TV shown scanning LAN for third-party phones and other devices

[...] LG's ad business, LG Ad Solutions, has said in recent marketing materials that it can reach 363 million "addressable secondary devices" in the US.

When reached for comment, a company representative shared a statement from LG Electronics via email:

LG TVs can identify compatible devices on the same network to enable features such as device connectivity, content sharing or smart home functionality.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The EFF says the law is additionally too broad and based on uncertain science, too:

With social networks tracking every single motion of our scrolling fingers and now the advent of data-hoovering AI models, it's easy to argue that staying anonymous online has never been harder. If you're a Californian, though, it will soon become harder still. Bill A.B. 1709, effectively requiring age checks on social networks, is set to become law unless Gavin Newsom vetoes it — a measure the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is requesting in an open letter to the governor.

A.B. 1709 doesn't explicitly require an actual online physical ID check, but given the way it's written, companies are free to use any means they see fit to fulfill that requirement. In turn, this leads the EFF to remark that the most likely choice for networks would be invasive checks like requiring the uploading of government IDs and/or biometric checks. The Foundation says that this would concentrate even more power in social media companies' hands, with a Californian's personal ID adding to their datasets.

The EFF also argues that A.B. 1709 wouldn't help teenagers and could do more harm than good by keeping them out of "supportive online communities," as well as "deny [them] opportunities to develop their own voices and perspectives." The letter mentions that research on whether social networks are good or bad for teens is inconclusive, and that teens could have their First Amendment rights infringed as a result.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Malware download prompts were embedded in Microsoft Excel files:

Aktulaev was extradited to the U.S. in August 2026, five years after his arrest in Cyprus in May 2021. He made his first appearance in federal court in San Francisco — after which he was remanded to federal custody — and is scheduled to appear in district court on October 5, 2026. The arrest was made after an FBI investigation, and the case is being prosecuted by the National Security, Cyber, and Special Prosecutions Section.

The attack used TVRAT (TeamViewer Remote Access Trojan) and DarkVNC malware, both of which grant the attacker remote control of the infected system. TVRAT exploits TeamViewer, while DarkVNC exploits VNC Viewer, popular remote administration tools. The malware stole and uploaded data from the victims' computers to a command-and-control server, from which Aktulaev and his co-conspirators extracted the stolen data to “commit fraud and other criminal activities”.

The indictment says thousands of computers infected by the TVRAT malware were “calling back” to a command-and-control domain hosted in the United States, which was paid for using virtual currency. Roughly half of the victims were in the United States, many of whom were Northern District of California residents, according to the indictment.

“A database found on the command-and-control domain revealed thousands of victims. Additionally, a shared document on the email account used in the criminal activities contained information to include e-commerce login credentials, as well as personally identifiable information (“PII”) for hundreds of victims,” the press release said.

If convicted, Aktulaev could spend up to 20 years behind bars and pay a $250,000 fine or twice the total illicit gains for the conspiracy to commit wire fraud charge alone. The other charges carry terms ranging from two to twenty years in prison, in addition to fines. Meanwhile, the FBI is currently investigating another hack in which 153 million US and Canadian drivers’ licenses were leaked on a Russian cybercrime forum.

Original Submission