SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

This project uses a clever hashing trick to fit over half a million blocked domains into just 4MB of flash memory:

Firmware Uses Only Around 50KB Of RAM And Can Answer Blocked Lookups In 10 Milliseconds

How cheap can you build a hardware-based ad-blocking DNS filter? "Free," if you're willing to salvage some used hardware that's being thrown away. What if you aren't so lucky? In the era of the RAMageddon, even a Raspberry Pi will cost you a couple hundred bucks. But you know, you don't even need something that powerful. In fact, you can use a $5 microcontroller to build a fully functional ad-blocking filter with over 500,000 domains blocked and around 10ms latency.

We know that's possible because Egyptian full-stack developer ZedAxis (@M-Abozaid on GitHub) has already built one. Using an ESP32-C3 "SuperMini" board, he's created a backup DNS for his home network that still provides ad blocking. His primary router is a Pi-hole, which is a Raspberry Pi running specialized software to manage DHCP addressing and DNS resolution with integrated ad-blocking. The SuperMini serves as a backup when the Pi-Hole is rebooting or otherwise unavailable.

Instead, the ESP32-C3 used by ZedAxis has just 400KB of RAM, and 4MB of flash memory. With these limited specifications, he wasn't able to store a plaintext blocklist of any real size; it's simply too much data. So, he did what any enterprising hacker would do: he started hashing the data to reduce its size. Using 40-bit FNV-1a hashes, because 32-bit would give too many collisions and 64-bit wastes too much space, he can store some 537,000 domains in the flash memory of the device.

mrpg writes:

Great apes may have been laughing with a similar rhythm to modern humans for over 15 million years:

Great apes may have been laughing with a similar rhythm to modern humans for over 15 million years, a University of Warwick study reveals, providing an unexpected clue to how human speech evolved.

All living great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans - laugh. But until now, it has been unclear how our laughter may have changed over millions of years of evolution, and how it might relate to the evolution of our speech.

In a new Communications Biology study, Warwick researchers analysed laughter recordings from four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos, four chimpanzees, and four humans. Across 140 laughter sequences, they found the same pattern: all species produce laughter with evenly spaced rhythmic intervals between successive sounds.

The researchers propose this basic rhythmic laughing structure was already present in a shared common ancestor 15 million years ago and has remained remarkably conserved with all living great apes and humans still showing the same underlying pattern in their laughter.

[...] However, while the basic rhythm stayed constant between species, the researchers did find that human laughter has become faster, more variable, and has gained sophisticated context-dependent control over time.

Of the great apes, humans alone have the ability to control when and how they laugh depending on context: an uncontrollable laugh when tickled differs sharply from a polite laugh in a meeting, a nervous laugh after a mistake, or the infectious laughter that spreads through a group of friends. The same underlying rhythm, shaped by conscious control to communicate different emotions and intentions.

The findings of this study suggest that throughout great ape evolution, our ancestors gradually developed greater control over the timing of their vocalisations, including laughter – showing a fundamental building block of speech.

Submitted from ScienceDaily

Journal Reference: De Gregorio, C., Davila-Ross, M. & Lameira, A.R. Rhythm and timing in laughter reveal that human vocal plasticity falls on a hominid continuum. Commun Biol 9, 824 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-026-10499-z

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

'Operation Muck And Load' Has Published 700 Malicious Modules Since January:

Supply-chain security firm Socket has published research findings describing a Go module that posed as a DNS and subdomain scanner while acting as a first-stage Windows malware loader. The firm then traced it to a network of 222 GitHub repositories across 190 accounts. The module published its first version on January 24 this year and has since accumulated more than 1,200 versions, over 700 of them malicious. Socket tracks the campaign as "Operation Muck and Load" and reported the module to the Go security team, which blocked it from the Go module proxy.

[...] The module's main.go launches a hidden PowerShell command that downloads content from muckcoding.com, decodes it with certutil, and runs the result with execution-policy bypass. Socket describes the decoded script as a multi-layer loader using Base64 encoding and XOR decryption, with a Turkish-language comment in one layer that translates to "run directly, no other step is needed."

Rather than hardcoding a payload URL, the resolver retrieves text from public platforms, searches it for the marker string "LastW," then decrypts the trailing blob with a hardcoded key to recover the actual download location. Primary dead drops include Pastebin and a paste service called Rlim, with fallbacks across YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, Google Docs, and GitCode. If defenders remove one paste or block the final archive URL, the actor can update the resolver content without touching the first-stage loader.

The resolved URL points to a password-protected 7-Zip archive hosted as a GitHub release asset. The loader extracts it into a directory named to resemble a legitimate Microsoft Photos install and launches Microsoft.exe from that path with a hidden window. Decoded payload stages map to AsyncRAT, Quasar, and Remcos-style RAT detections alongside infostealer behavior.

mrpg writes:

The Coldest "Stars" in the Galaxy Might Actually Be Alien Megastructures:

Ever since physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the concept in 1960, the "Dyson sphere" has been the holy grail of techno-signature hunters. A highly advanced civilization could build a "sphere" (or, in our more modern understanding, a "swarm" of smaller components) around their host star to harvest its entire energy output. We know, in theory at least, that such a swarm could exist - but what would it actually look like if we were able to observe one? A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv, and soon to be published in Universe from Amirnezam Amiri of the University of Arkansas digs into that question - and in the process discloses the types of stars that are the most likely to find them around.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of those types is a Red Dwarf. The most abundant type of stars in the Milky Way, they burn through their nuclear fuel incredibly slowly making them extremely long lived. With estimated lives in the trillions of years - far longer than the current lifetime of the universe - they are also relatively small compared to our own Sun. A Dyson swarm could be built around 0.05 to 0.3 AU away from its surface, with relatively low cost of material.

White dwarfs are arguably even better for material costs, and represent the second type of star that it's worth tracking. These are compact, dead remnants of stars like our Sun, which have shrunk down to have incredibly small radii - around 1% of their original star. In this scenario, a Dyson swarm could be built just a few million kilometers away from the surface of the star, alleviating much of the engineering challenge of build a supermassive structure around a larger star. They also radiate energy steadily for billions of years, essentially creating an effective long-lived power source.

But what would stars surrounded by such megastructures actually look like? Astronomers typically use a tool called the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram to classify stars based on their temperature and luminosity. However, since a Dyson sphere would block all of a star's natural light, it would completely change where on the diagram it would fall. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so the sphere itself would have to emit the exact same amount of radiation away from itself as the star is putting into it. It just does it in the form of heat, or infrared light instead. So a Dyson sphere can really be thought of as a shell that absorbs a star's light, does something useful with that energy, and then emits it as heat.

mrpg writes:

The 27th Debian Conference is in Santa Fe, Argentina, Monday July 20th to Saturday July 25th 2026. Some of the planned talks:

• Free as in Burned Out: who really pays for Open Source Software
• Is it even possible to build a truly universal system installer?
• Debian in Disaster + Security Incidents
• You Too Can Fix That Bug on That Weird Architecture
• Debian in the Classroom - Episode III: The Students Strike Back (with code)

DebConf is the annual conference for Debian contributors and users interested in improving Debian. Previous Debian conferences have featured speakers and attendees from all around the world. The last DebConf, DebConf25, took place in Brest, France and was attended by 443 participants from 51 countries.

Original Submission

hopdevil writes:

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

Are companies actually seeing massive productivity gains from their AI adoption? Does any of this sordid affair make sense?

This should be an easy question, but it is surprisingly hard to get a straight answer to it. Executives that tell the press that their company has gone insane will quickly find themselves removed from their positions. Employees who are honest will find themselves fired in short-order, or "randomly" selected for a round of layoffs. In fact, it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space – boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants – to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects. Many publicly traded companies are putting out announcements about their AI productivity gains when I know for a fact that the businesses have done nothing other than purchase Copilot licenses and declare victory.

Yet we need to know if these projects are panning out – if the total focus on AI as a core tenet of business strategy is succeeding at a reasonable rate, then a discussion about the relative risk and reward is warranted.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Under Helsinki, there is a network of over 5,500 bomb shelters capable of sheltering nearly a million people in the event of a nuclear attack or Russian invasion. The shelters are equipped with autonomous systems and are used in peacetime as sports complexes:

Finland has built an underground network beneath Helsinki capable of sheltering nearly one million people. Let that sink in. Nearly one million people. This is not a handful of bomb shelters scattered throughout the city, but rather an underground city stretching beneath the capital, consisting of more than 5,500 reinforced shelters connected by tunnels carved directly into solid granite. They can be converted from civilian use into military-grade protection in as little as 72 hours.

Engineered to withstand explosions, chemical attacks, biological threats, radiation, and the collapse of the world above. The shelters contain independent power systems, water supplies, communications networks, hospitals, sanitation, filtration systems, and enough infrastructure to sustain life if the surface becomes uninhabitable. During peacetime, they function as swimming pools, hockey arenas, churches, sports centers, parking garages, and shopping facilities.

[...] Finland is not building these shelters because of some passing political disagreement with Moscow. The country shares an 830-mile border with Russia and has never forgotten the Winter War. Unlike much of Europe, Finland never embraced the fantasy that major wars had become impossible. While politicians across Europe dismantled civil defense, reduced their militaries, and diverted spending toward every fashionable political cause imaginable, Finland kept digging.

Today, nearly 4.8 million shelter spaces exist for a nation of just 5.6 million people. Very few countries on Earth have anything remotely comparable. That means Finland has spent generations preparing to keep the overwhelming majority of its population alive during the unthinkable. Governments do not invest on that scale because they expect peace.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

NTP server that traveled back in time caused massive Aussie mobile outage

Australian telco Telstra has revealed the cause of the recent incident that caused widespread connectivity problems across its mobile networks, inculding outages to Australia's 000 emergency services line, plus outages to electronic payments services and transport networks.

[...] The outage did happen because once the NTP server came online it reset its clocks to the year 2006.

The server then did what NTP servers do: publish that time to myriad other machines across the network.

Once those machines received the incorrect time, other kit on the Telstra network compared digital certificates and decided something dodgy was going on – so denied connections.

[...] That wasn't the end of the matter, because as valid time information rippled across the network, some equipment didn't close IP sessions. Customer devices therefore couldn't reconnect to the network unless rebooted.

[..] The carrier has done the usual thing by promising to conduct deep and lengthy self-reflection, submit itself to further flagellation at more inquiries, co-operate with a probe by the relevant regulator, and to do what it takes to prevent similar incidents.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2213160/ev-battery-lifespan-longer-than-expert-estimations/

For all the technological advancements they promise, EVs haven't entirely convinced people about their batteries. Many people may assume they wear down as fast as the units in phones do, which seems like a valid fear at first considering how pricey batteries are to replace. However, they have turned out to be well capable of lasting as long as the cars themselves. Recent research has proven that the industry has been setting its battery lifespan numbers way too low — by a huge margin, too.

A Wall Street Journal report from July has laid out how far off the early predictions were. It cited figures by Recurrent, which found that an electric car — even after five years of use — still retained 95% of its driving range. That's impressive, and it gets even more so when the actual claims by EV makers are taken into account. One example is Tesla, which for most of its cars, promises the battery will stay above 70% of its original capacity for eight years. However, if the Recurrent report is anything to go by, the degradation is a lot slower, so the promise looks rather humble.

Take one particular 2016 Tesla Model S 90D that has spent nearly a decade serving as a UK airport taxi as an example. As reported by InsideEVs, the car had racked up around 430,000 miles on its original battery and motors. Yet through it all, it only lost about 65 miles of range. Some back of the napkin math later, you'd arrive at a battery capacity of roughly 78% at the time.

A big reason estimates have been so off is apparently because lab tests have been roughing up batteries a little too much. Research coming out of Stanford in 2024 put 92 lithium-ion batteries through their paces for over two years. They found that real-world driving is actually a lot easier on the batteries. All that stopping, starting, and staying parked for hours actually helps the cells recover.

Taking all this into account, they concluded that most batteries could last up to a whopping 40% longer than previously thought. The lead researcher went as far as saying that the industry had been testing those poor batteries wrong. One of the lead authors even noted that something like hard acceleration – a huge power drainer and therefore also long assumed to be rough on a pack — seemed to actually slow the wear a bit rather than speed it up.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

You can't tighten the timings either, apparently:

Homegrown DDR5 memory from China, manufactured by ChangXing Memory Technologies, has been making the rounds lately as more and more vendors start legitimizing it. However, new testing from overclocker Safedisk, shared by Uniko's Hardware, purportedly shows that it actually carries inferior performance compared to similar options from SK Hynix, alongside significant variance in the silicon between different batches.

CXMT began producing DDR5 in late 2025 despite lacking any cutting-edge EUV lithography tools. Fast forward to today, and reports of the company matching Micron's memory capacity by this year are now floating around. If true, China would become the second-largest memory maker in the world. At such scale, it's no wonder that many companies in China have already started sourcing CXMT-made RAM to fill the gap in the consumer market.

Throughout 2026, we've seen motherboard manufacturers verify CXMT's DDR5 with official BIOS optimizations that allow it to run beyond 8,000 MT/s at this point. OEMs such as Dell and HP are using CXMT RAM in their region-bound systems, and even proper PC hardware companies like Corsair are using CXMT modules. Lexar, Kingbank, Netac, Asgard, Gloaway and more are also producing retail DDR5 kits with CXMT chips.

As such, the testing features a Kingbank 48GB (2x24) DDR5-6000 kit running at CL36 and found several weaknesses despite successfully achieving an 8,600 MT/s overclock at CL44. The first revelation is that CXMT modules don't scale with voltage, meaning you can't just increase voltage in hopes of achieving higher clocks. CXMT's DDR5 apparently doesn't respond well to tuning sub-timings either, forcing you to remain stuck with baseline CAS latency (or higher, like in this case).

Overall, if Asus' testing is to be believed, it serves as counterprogramming against the popular narrative forming around China as the savior of consumer interests. CXMT's strength lies in the fact that it doesn't have to cater to opulent AI clients as much as the Big Three, which reduces opportunity cost, allowing CXMT to produce more DDR5 memory. That doesn't mean it would be cheaper, though, or at least no evidence has suggested that so far.

mrpg writes:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260713084918.htm

Archaeologists working at the ancient Egyptian site of Oxyrhynchus have made a remarkable discovery: a papyrus containing a passage from Homer's Iliad was found inside a Roman-era mummy dating back about 1,600 years. Researchers say it is the first known case in archaeological history in which a Greek literary text was intentionally incorporated into the mummification process.

The find was made by the Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission, directed by Maite Mascort and Esther Pons through the Institute of Ancient Near East Studies (IPOA) at the University of Barcelona. It comes from Al Bahnasa, the modern town located at the site of ancient Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

During excavations conducted between November and December 2025, a team led by Núria Castellano uncovered a Roman-era mummy in Tomb 65 of Sector 22. Resting on the mummy's abdomen was a papyrus that had been deliberately placed there as part of the embalming ritual.

The mission had previously discovered Greek papyri positioned in similar ways during earlier excavations. However, those texts were consistently magical or ritual in nature. This is the first time a literary work, specifically Homer's Iliad, has been identified in that role.

The papyrus underwent detailed study during a second research campaign held in January and February 2026. Conservator Margalida Munar, papyrologist Leah Mascia, and Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, professor in the Department of Classical, Romance and Semitic Languages, classical philologist, and director of the Oxyrhynchus project, examined the fragile document.

Using Leah Mascia's reading of the text, Professor Adiego determined that the fragment comes from the "Catalogue of Ships" in Book II of Homer's Iliad. This well-known section lists the Greek forces preparing for the Trojan War and is considered one of the best-known passages in Western literature.

Professor Adiego explains: "This is not the first time we have found Greek papyri, bundled, sealed, and incorporated into the mummification process, but until now, their content was mainly magical. Furthermore, it is worth noting that, since the late 19th century, a huge number of papyri have been discovered at Oxyrhynchus, including Greek literary texts of great importance, but the real novelty is finding a literary papyrus in a funerary context."

Linus Torvalds Puts His Foot Down, Tells Anti-AI Programmers To 'Fork It'

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it/

Many people hate AI. They don't trust it a bit. Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, isn't one of them. Torvalds thinks AI can be quite useful for programming and maintenance. Indeed, AI is explicitly approved for use in the Linux kernel. 

However, that didn't stop some people from wondering if AI should be used in Linux development. For example, the Zig language project has adopted strict policies against AI-generated code. 

To those who'd like to see Linux take a similar stance, Torvalds recently replied on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), that if you can't support using AI in the Linux kernel, you "can do the open-source thing and fork it."

He's not joking. Torvalds also wrote, "I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer."

Why? Because "AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that 'clearly' even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today."

As Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux stable kernel, told me earlier this year, "Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality." But then, he continued, "the world switched. Now we have real reports. All open-source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real."

Other open-source developers and maintainers agree. Starting with the 2026 frontier models, such as Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8, AI programming is vastly improved. As Torvalds continued, "There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but 'is it useful?' is no longer one of those questions."

That said, Torvalds knows full well that AI is far from perfect. "Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool …  But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do."

No, concluded Torvalds, "The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side." Therefore, while Torvalds won't force anyone to use AI, "I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it."

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/07/hundreds-rally-at-bethesda-hq-to-protest-xbox-layoffs-and-ars-was-there/

Hundreds of Bethesda Game Studios and Zenimax Online Studios employees and their supporters braved nearly 100° F temperatures to protest sweeping layoffs across Xbox during a lunchtime rally in front of parent company Zenimax's headquarters today. The rally was one of five today organized by Zenimax Workers United and its parent union, the Communication Workers of America, at offices across Texas, California, and Montreal.

Attendees held up signs with messages like "Layoffs... layoffs never change"
[...]
Chief among the union's demands is that Microsoft return to the bargaining table and resume contract negotiations with the remaining uncontracted members of Bethesda Game Studios (after reaching a separate agreement with QA testers last year that included guaranteed severance for laid-off employees). "We had... a reduction in force proposal on the table for months, and they ignored it," Hahn said.
[...]
In response to a request for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "We respect our employees' right to make their voices heard, and we recognize that this is a difficult time for many. We reached out to the union on July 6 to begin effects bargaining and are committed to that process. We remain focused on supporting impacted employees through this transition while positioning the organization for long-term strength."
[...]
In announcing the layoffs last week, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said the move was necessary to restructure a business that is "not healthy" and is operating at margins well below the competition. "These changes are about a bigger future for Xbox, not a smaller one, Sharma said.
[...]
Following a round of layoffs last year, Bethesda employees said they were still shocked at the depth and breadth of the job losses in this latest round, which affected hundreds of Maryland employees. Juniper Dowell, whose five-year tenure as a quality assurance tester ended with last week's layoffs, told Ars that the reduced workforce continuing work on franchises like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls would be akin to "trying to sing with half a choir or a band with a drummer missing."
[...]
System Designer Mandy Parker, whose position was not affected by the latest round of layoffs, told Ars, "It's hard to be creative, it's hard to be able to tell stories when we're worried about people next to us and ourselves." Parker also pushed back against the Microsoft narrative that these latest layoffs were focused heavily on reducing redundant layers of middle management, saying she wasn't aware of any middle managers let go in her office. "These folks [being laid off in quality assurance], they don't make a lot of money," Parker said. "They're taking home pizzas from our cafeteria, for their kids to eat, to help them. We don't get the big Microsoft money."
[...]
Union organizers said fans should go to the Xbox Player Voice forums to express their support for the developers of the games they love.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://goughlui.com/2026/07/09/teardown-a-generic-7-port-usb-3-0-hub-that-wasnt/

The recent end-of-financial-year sales were rather interesting – I found myself spending a lot more time browsing AliExpress than I did Amazon or eBay this year which is something I wouldn't have envisioned in the past. I suppose the deals offered by the others just weren't that good. While AliExpress was dangling cashbacks and coupons, I decided to make the most of it and buy some things that I needed.

I felt like a USB 3.0 hub with a nice number of ports would be a good thing to aim for. After all, who doesn't need more USB 3.0 ports nowadays? But alas, while I thought the world of hubs have long advanced far enough to mean that even your average product would be decent – I didn't expect to receive what I received ...

Original Submission

darkfeline writes:

"Mathematicians are challenging the idea that dark energy is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. In a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, mathematicians from the University of California, Davis, provide mathematical proof that instabilities inherent in the Einstein-Euler equations imply that the current model of the expanding universe is not viable. The Einstein-Euler equations are a union of general relativity and fluid dynamics equations used to model astronomical phenomena such as galaxies, black holes and cosmic expansion."

https://www.ucdavis.edu/blog/taking-dark-energy-out-equation

Basically, mathematicians provide an explanation for accelerated universe expansion that doesn't require fudging our equations with magical energy so that it fits our data.

Original Submission