SoylentNews

hubie writes:

A study introduces an innovative framework for translating biomolecular data from archaeological materials into scent recreations:

Recent advances in biomolecular archaeology have revealed that ancient objects can retain the molecular fingerprints of past aromatic practices. These molecules provide unprecedented insight into ancient perfumery, medicine, ritual, and daily life.

In a new publication, an interdisciplinary research team led by archaeo-chemist Barbara Huber (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Tübingen), shows how museums can use this molecular evidence to engage audiences with the sensory worlds of the past. The team combined their expertise to create a new workflow for converting biomolecular data into accessible, visitor-ready olfactory recreations.

"This research represents a significant shift in how scientific results can be shared beyond academic publications," explains Huber.

The process began with a briefing, prepared by Huber in collaboration with scent-based storytelling consultant Sofia Collette Ehrich, establishing a crucial link between scientific data and perfumery practice. Building on this foundation, perfumer Carole Calvez developed a series of formulations that translated ancient chemical signatures into a scent suitable for museum environments. Calvez emphasizes that this is not a simple act of replication.

"The real challenge lies in imagining the scent as a whole," she explains. "Biomolecular data provide essential clues, but the perfumer must translate chemical information into a complete and coherent olfactory experience that evokes the complexity of the original material, rather than just its individual components."

To demonstrate, the team developed two formats for presenting ancient scents in public settings. Using The Scent of the Afterlife, a recreation of the aromas that accompanied the ancient Egyptian mummification process, they created a portable scented card and a fixed scent diffusion station integrated into exhibition design.

[...] "The scent station transformed how visitors understood embalming," curator Steffen Terp Laursen observes. "Smell added an emotional and sensory depth that text labels alone could never provide."

This work demonstrates how molecular traces of the past can be transformed into meaningful cultural experiences.

"We hope to offer museums compelling new tools for bringing visitors closer to past environments and practices via sensory interpretation and engagement," Sofia Collette Ehrich concludes.

Journal Reference: Huber, B., Hammann, S., Loeben, C.E. et al. Biomolecular characterization of 3500-year-old ancient Egyptian mummification balms from the Valley of the Kings. Sci Rep 13, 12477 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-39393-y

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A state bill is a glimpse of how corporations are limiting people's ability to make their own fixes and upgrades:

Right-to-repair efforts are gaining headway in the US. A lot of that movement has been led by state legislation in Colorado.

Since 2022, Colorado has passed bills giving users the tools, instructions, and legal capabilities to fix or upgrade their own wheelchairs, agricultural farming equipment, and consumer electronics. Similar efforts have rippled out through the country, where repair bills have been introduced in every US state and passed in eight of them.

"Colorado has the broadest repair rights in the country," says Danny Katz, executive director CoPIRG, the Colorado branch of the consumer advocate group Pirg. "We should be proud of leading the way."

Manufacturers tend to be less supportive of right-to-repair efforts, as corporations stand to make more money charging for tools, replacement parts, and repair services than if they were to just let people fix things on their own. Some companies have begrudgingly agreed to make their products more repairable. Some have started actively pushing back against new laws intended to enable that.

At Friday's hearing of the Colorado Senate Business, Labor, and Technology committee, lawmakers voted unanimously to move Colorado state bill SB26-090—titled Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair—out of committee and into the state senate and house for a vote.

The bill modifies Colorado's Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment act, which was passed in 2024 and went into effect in January 2026. While the protections secured by that act are wide, the new SB26-090 bill aims to "exempt information technology equipment that is intended for use in critical infrastructure from Colorado's consumer right to repair laws."

The bill is supported by tech manufacturers like Cisco and IBM, according to lobbying disclosures. These are companies that have vested interests in manufacturing things like routers, server equipment, and computers and stand to profit if they can control who fixes their products and the tools, components, and software used to make those upgrades and repairs. They also cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to the tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad actors to use those methods for nefarious means. (This is a common argument manufacturers make when opposing right-to-repair laws.)

"IBM supports right-to-repair policies that empower consumers while protecting cybersecurity, intellectual property, and critical infrastructure," wrote an IBM spokesperson in an email to WIRED. "Given the critical and often sensitive nature of enterprise-level products, any legislation should be clearly scoped to consumer devices."

Cisco did not respond to WIRED's request for comment, but in the hearing a Cisco representative said, "Cisco supports SB-90. While it appreciates the arguments offered in favor of the right to repair, not all digital technology devices are equal."

During the hearing, more than a dozen repair advocates spoke from organizations like Pirg, the Repair Association, and iFixit opposing the bill. YouTuber and repair advocate Louis Rossmann was there [videos not reviewed -Ed]. The main problem, repair advocates say, is that the bill deliberately uses vague language to make the case for controlling who can fix their products.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://gizmodo.com/sperm-whales-speak-with-their-own-unique-alphabet-scientists-found-they-even-have-vowels-2000746968

Sperm whales: They’re just like us. An international team of researchers, including marine biologists and linguists, reports that it has detected signs of a “highly complex” phonetic alphabet in the calls of sperm whales—including “vowels” deployed in patterns akin to their use in human languages like Mandarin, Latin, and Slovenian.

The scientists described the whale calls as one of the “closest parallels” to human phonetic speech patterns of “any analysed animal communication system,” according to their new study, published Wednesday in the UK’s Royal Society journal Proceedings B. The research builds on years of deep machine learning analysis of sperm whale calls, organized by the nonprofit Project CETI (short for “Cetacean Translation Initiative,” but a playful allusion to SETI, the “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”).

Project CETI, you may recall, is the same group that recently released footage showing adult sperm whales collaborating as doulas to help one of their own give birth. That research, along with CETI’s linguistic efforts, has focused on a community of sperm whales living off the coast of Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean.

“On the surface, [sperm whale calls] sound like this alien, ocean intelligence that has nothing to do with us,” as the new study’s lead author Gašper Beguš, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Scientific American.

“But when you actually look at it closely,” he said, “you realize, ‘Oh, we’re way more similar.’”

Sperm whales spend only a fleeting amount of time near the ocean’s surface—about ten minutes every hour—in between 50 minute bouts of deep-sea dives hunting for squid, their preferred wild caught meal. Fortunately, for Beguš and his colleagues, the surface acts almost like a watercooler where these sperm whales can take a break and trade notes.

The team’s new research worked with recordings of whale vocalizations collected between 2014 and 2018 by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, which captured conversational series of short clicks, termed codas, communicated between whales usually at very close range, head to head. The CETI team’s prior research used generative adversarial networks (GANs)—machine learning models that can pull patterns out of preexisting datasets—to help them identify sperm whale vowels and vowel combos, called diphthongs, that led to them to dig deeper into whale phonics.

“GANs can discover words and meaningful structure,” Beguš noted in a press statement in November 2025. “We still need human researchers to analyze the details, but they help us look in a specific direction.”

owl writes:

https://bravenewteams.substack.com/p/the-friction-we-forgot

The sales pitch for automating routine work has a pleasing moral clarity. Machines will take the drudgery, humans will do the meaningful bits, and everyone will go home earlier. Few executives wish to defend bureaucracy. Fewer still want to explain why the weekly report exists at all. "Agentic" systems, now able to draft, schedule, reconcile and summarise, promise to do away with the tedious.

The promise rests on a quiet assumption - that routine work is a clean substrate. A set of repeatable steps, stable enough to be lifted from humans and installed in software, like moving from paper invoices to an ERP system. Yet in most organisations "routine" is not the same as "well-defined". It is simply familiar.

Look closely at what passes for routine and one sees something else entirely - a museum of exceptions. The spreadsheet is not tedious because it is trivial; it is tedious because it is doing the job of a broken system. The weekly deck is not a reporting tool; it is an insurance policy against internal misalignment. The procurement workflow is less a sequence of rational gates than a compromise between risk-aversion, politics and habit.

Humans have been hiding this from themselves for decades. They do so by being quietly competent.

In most firms the appearance of smoothness is purchased by people - often the most junior ones - who supply what the process does not. The analyst notices that "active user" changed definition three months ago and silently adjusts the calculation. The paralegal spots a clause that is technically compliant but commercially disastrous and flags it in plain English. The assistant knows that "final" does not mean final and schedules slack into a timeline nobody admits contains slack. The account manager has learned which customer complaint to treat as a siren and which as background noise.

These are not rare flourishes of craftsmanship. They are the operating system.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Total Solar Eclipse Led to Seismic Quiet for Cities Within its Path:

A seismic hush fell over U.S. and Canadian cities that were in the "path of totality" during the 8 April 2024 total solar eclipse, according to new research presented at the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting.

Johns Hopkins University seismologist and planetary scientist Benjamin Fernando was in an Ohio city when the eclipse occurred "and I noticed that all of a sudden everything went really quiet," he recalled. "So I was curious as to whether that was going to be replicated in the seismic data."

Seismic noise caused by human activity can come from construction and mining activity, crowded concerts or sporting events and the traffic of the daily commute—any activity we produce that causes the ground to shake.

After analyzing seismic noise levels across April 2024 from several hundred seismic stations, Fernando found a clear pattern of urban seismic quiet on the darkened day. First, noise levels peaked slightly before the start of totality began in a city. Noise levels then faded significantly as the sun was completely obscured by the moon. Finally, noise rose again to slightly higher than average levels for the month.

The pattern was only visible in cities, not rural areas, that were directly in the path of totality. The data did not record a hush in cities that were even slightly out of the path of totality, Fernando said. "For example, in New York it was 97% totality, but nothing changed."

The findings suggest that cities in the path of totality experienced the eclipse as a cultural event that was significant enough to disrupt the rhythms of normal life and were also places with enough ground-shaking daily activity to be noticeable when it faded away.

Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 created one of the most famous cases of global seismic quiet related to human inactivity, dropping anthropogenic seismic noise by 50% between March and May of that year.

The new study could also help dispel the myth that the alignment of the sun, moon and Earth during an eclipse increases seismic activity, Fernando suggested.

"Folks for whatever reason sometimes push the narrative that eclipses cause earthquakes," he said. "That's definitely not the case, and this is another demonstration of that."

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

A Fresh Scar on the Moon: Newly Discovered Crater Reveals Recent Impact:

The Moon is constantly being bombarded by traveling space rocks, its surface recording each collision in the form of craters that never fade in the absence of wind or surface water. Most lunar craters that we know of date back millions, if not billions, of years, making evidence of a recent impact a rare glimpse into a process that is shaping the Moon today.

Scientists identified a new crater on the Moon that formed in the late spring of 2024, revealing the violent aftermath of a recent collision on the lunar surface. Using images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnoissance Orbiter (LRO), the team behind the discovery analyzed changes before and after the impact to study the rare event.

The findings were presented at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Sciences Meeting in March, and can help scientists better understand how craters form on the Moon and elsewhere in the solar system.

The newly discovered crater measures around 738 feet (225 meters) across the lunar surface. That makes it the largest impact crater to have formed during NASA's LRO 17-year-mission. The previous record holder was a 229 feet wide (70 meters) crater, which was discovered in 2013 by comparing before and after images of the same region on the lunar surface.

This fresh scar on the Moon is more than three times as wide. An impact this scale is extremely rare, taking place once every 139 years, according to the researchers behind the discovery. The crater stretches approximately 140 feet deep (43 meters), and is shaped like a funnel with steep walls. Surrounding it are massive blocks of rock that were ejected from the impact, with the largest one measuring at 42 feet (13 meters).

By observing the images captured by LRO, the team was able to observe the direction of the debris and pinpoint where the impact originated from. The space rock may have arrived from the south-southwest direction, traveling fast enough to puncture through the surface and spray a trail of debris northward.

The team also noticed unusually dark material that resembles glass-like rocks inside the crater, which may have been melted by the heat from the impact before instantly solidifying. The melted rocks are an indication of large amounts of energy released upon impact.

NASA's LRO has been orbiting the Moon for 17 years, mapping the lunar surface in detail to aid future missions. During the duration of its mission, the probe has identified hundreds of newly formed craters on the Moon.

LRO's extensive dataset revealed that the Moon is being hit twice as often as previously thought. In 2014, the probe itself survived an impact from a tiny meteoroid as it was capturing images of the lunar surface.

Prior to this recent discovery, LRO images identified a 72-foot-wide (22-meter-wide) impact crater in November 2025, which may have formed sometime between December 2009 and December 2012.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/europol-launches-operation-poweroff-warns-75-000-ddos-users-and-takes-down-53-domains

Europol announced that together with 21 national law enforcement agencies, it launched Operation PowerOFF which, besides the four arrests, also led to the takedown of 53 domains and the issuing of 25 search warrants.

“By seizing these infrastructures, authorities were able to hinder these criminal operations and prevent further damage to victims,” Europol added.

On the confiscated hardware, the police found information on three million criminal user accounts, which led to a series of coordinated actions across the globe.

In the next stage of the campaign, Europol is warning DDoS-for-hire customers to stop what they’re doing or face the consequences. It apparently said 75,000 warning emails, and placed ads on search engines to target people searching for DDoS-for-hire tools on Google.

More than 100 URLs advertising DDoS-for-hire services were removed from search engine results, and warning messages were sent on blockchains criminals use to make illegal payments.

To launch a distributed denial of service attack, a cybercriminal must have access to hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices. Those offering these services usually first compromise poorly protected hardware, such as home routers, smart TVs, DVRs, and different smart home appliances, with malware.

This malware gives them the necessary access, which they later streamline by creating a simple dashboard. Then, they rent access to the dashboard, effectively facilitating cybercrime.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://hackaday.com/2026/03/29/soviet-cds-and-cd-players-existed-and-they-were-strange/

Until the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990 you'd be forgiven as a proud Soviet citizen for thinking that the USSR's technology was on par with the decadent West. After the Iron Curtain lifted it became however quite clear how outdated especially consumer electronics were in the USSR, with technologies like digital audio CDs and their players being one good point of comparison. In a recent video by a railways/retro tech YouTube channel we get a look at one of the earliest Soviet CD players.

A good overall summary of how CD technology slowly developed in the Soviet Union despite limitations can be found in this 2025 article by [Artur Netsvetaev]. Soviet technology was characterized mostly by glossy announcements and promises of 'imminent' serial production prior to a slow fading into obscurity. Soviet engineers had come up with the Luch-001 digital audio player in 1979, using glass discs. More prototypes followed, but with no means for mass-production and Soviet bureaucracy getting in the way, these efforts died during the 1980s.

During the 1980s CD players were produced in Soviet Estonia in small batches, using Philips internals to create the Estonia LP-010. Eventually sanctions on the USSR would strangle these efforts, however. Thus it wouldn't be until 1991 that the Vega PKD-122 would become the first mass-produced CD player, with one example featured in this video.

The video helpfully includes a teardown of the player after a rundown of its controls and playback demonstration, so that we can ogle its internals. This system uses mostly localized components, with imported components like the VF display and processors gradually getting replaced over time. The DAC and optical-mechanical assembly would still be imported from Japan until 1995 when the factory went bankrupt.

This difference between the imported and localized part is captured succinctly in the video with the comparison to Berlin in 1999, in that you can clearly see the difference between East and West. The CD mechanism is produced by Sanyo, with a Sanyo DAC IC on the mainboard. The power supply, display and logic board (using Soviet TTL ICs) are all Soviet-produced. A sticker inside the case identifies this unit as having been produced in 1994.

Amusingly, the front buttons are directly coupled into the mainboard without ESD protection, which means that in a Siberian winter with practically zero relative humidity inside you'd often fry the mainboard by merely using these buttons.

After this exploration the video goes on to explain how Soviet CD production began in the 1989, using imported technology and know-how. This factory was set up in Moscow, using outdated West-German CD pressing equipment and makes for a whole fascinating topic by itself.

Finally, the video explores the CD player's manual and how to program the player, as well as how to obtain your own Soviet CD player. Interestingly, a former employee of the old factory has taken over the warehouse and set up a web shop selling new old stock as well as repaired units and replacement parts.

Original Submission

Chinese carmaker patents voice-controlled 'in-vehicle toilet'

AnonTechie writes:

Chinese carmaker Seres has been granted a patent for what it calls an "in-vehicle toilet" that slides under a passenger's seat for visits to the loo while on the road. The feature is meant to "satisfy users' toilet needs on long journeys, while camping or while staying in the car", engineers wrote in Seres' patent filing in China on 10 April.

Seres, based in the south-west city of Chongqing, has not announced any cars that have toilets and it is uncertain if any will be made. Chinese electric vehicles have become increasingly packed with unconventional features, like built-in massage seats, karaoke systems and a fridge, to stand out in a highly competitive market. The patent filing shows Seres' plans for an onboard toilet that slides out from the bottom of a passenger's seat with a push or through voice-activated commands. The loo will come with a fan and exhaust pipe to channel odours out of the car, according to the filing on China's intellectual property administration seen by the BBC. Waste is collected in a tank that has to be emptied manually. The toilet also features a rotating heating element that evaporates urine and dries other waste.

When not in use, the toilet is concealed beneath the seat, making full use of the space inside a car without requiring more room.

[Source]: BBC

Pooping in your car

looorg writes:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/a-chinese-automaker-just-filed-a-patent-for-car-seats-with-a-hidden-loo/
https://www.autoblog.com/news/chinese-automaker-patents-slide-out-toilet-built-into-car-seat
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/start-up-toilet-function-chinese-automaker-patents-voice-activated-in-car-toilet

When nature calls and you are stuck in your car. No more holding it in. Just go in the car. In a hidden toilet.

A Chinese automaker has patented a toilet concealed beneath a sliding car seat that can be operated using voice commands, according to a government database.

Electric vehicle company Seres received patent approval for its mobile latrine earlier in April, public records show.

The on-the-go lavatory can be accessed manually through pushing the seat back, as well as through the voice command "start up toilet function".

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

"c0lo" writes:

In the face of rampant AI, is 'data poisoning' a new form of civil disobedience?:

[...] Acts of AI resistance range from social sanctions and boycotts, to strikes, protests, public outcry and lawsuits. Driving these acts are perceived threats to jobs, ethics, safety, democracy and sovereignty, and the environment.

AI is also described as an existential risk to creative industries, including music, fiction and film. In the United Kingdom, generative AI has been characterised as an "industrial scale theft" that threatens a £124.6 billion (A$237bn) creative sector and more than 2.4 million jobs.

People have long used civil disobedience to address social injustices. Famously, Rosa Parks' refusal to sit at the back of a bus in Alabama led to a 13-month bus boycott by tens of thousands of Black residents. It only ended when racial segregation on public transport was deemed unconstitutional in the United States.

Acts of sabotage have also long been central to collective action against injustice. In fights for labour rights, workers have employed diverse tactics to reduce efficiency and productivity. This has ranged from hotel workers putting salt in sugar bowls to farm workers breaking machinery.

Data poisoning can be viewed as a modern version of these historic actions.

[...] Data poisoning means deliberately inserting misleading, biased, or nonsensical content into the data AI models learn from, to make their outputs worse. Only 250 poisoned documents in a dataset could compromise outputs across AI models of any size.

There are various ways to poison data. Some require highly technical skills, others are accessible to anyone with an internet connection – if their text or images are used as training data.

Researchers have developed several data poisoning tools that exploit the vulnerabilities of AI models. Glaze and Nightshade enable artists to make poisoned visual images that can't be used as training data. The tool CoProtector defends against the exploitation of open source code repositories like Github. Monash University and the Australian Federal Police have created Silverer, enabling social media users to doctor personal images to prevent them from being used in deepfakes.

But you don't need a tool or advanced skills to affect AI. Simply creating websites with factitious information, making jokes in Reddit, feeding models their own outputs, or editing Wikipedia can poison data.

Data poisoning is commonly presented as a dangerous act perpetrated by "cyber criminals" or "malicious actors". But what if it's used to protect human rights?

Is data poisoning legal? Is it ethical?

Legal obligations related to data poisoning are often directed to AI developers and organisations. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act requires that appropriate measures are adopted to prevent and detect data poisoning.

The legal status of AI data poisoning by individual users is less clear. Criminal penalties may apply under US or UK computer fraud and misuse laws. Interference with an AI model would also likely breach the terms of service of AI companies.

If AI data poisoning is unlawful, questions could still be asked about its ethical status. Philosophers have long recognised that civil disobedience can be justifiable in circumstances where legally sanctioned practices produce serious injustice.

---

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.iqiipi.com/the-quiet-colossus.html

On Ada, the language that the Department of Defense built, the industry ignored, and every modern language quietly became

There is a language that made generics a first-class, standardised feature of a widely deployed systems language, formalised the package, built concurrency into the specification rather than the library, mandated the separation of interface from implementation, and introduced range-constrained types, discriminated unions, and a model of task communication that Go would arrive at, independently and by a different route, thirty years later. Successive revisions added protected objects, compile-time null exclusion, and language-level contracts. It is a language that Rust spent a decade converging toward from one direction while Python converged toward it from another, and that C# has been approximating, feature by feature, for the better part of two decades. It is a language that the industry has consistently described as verbose, arcane, and irrelevant. It is also, with a directness that embarrasses the usual story of software progress, the language that anticipated — with unusual precision — the safety features every modern language is now trying to acquire.

Ada is not famous. It is not the subject of enthusiastic conference talks or breathless blog posts. It does not have a charismatic founder who gives keynotes about the philosophy of programming, and it does not have a community that writes frameworks or publishes packages with clever names. What it has is a formal standard that has been revised four times since 1983; a presence in the software of many major commercial aircraft and avionics systems; a set of design decisions made under government contract in the late 1970s that the rest of the industry has spent forty years independently rediscovering; and a reputation, among the programmers who know it at all, as the language that says no — the language whose compiler enforces legality, visibility, typing, and a degree of safety checking that most languages leave to convention or tooling, that makes the programmer name what they mean, that treats ambiguity as an error rather than a feature. These qualities were, for a long time, considered its weaknesses. They are, on examination, the precise qualities that every language currently described as modern is attempting to acquire.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers quantified how much user behavior is impacted by the biases in content produced by large language models:

Customers are 32% more likely to buy a product after reading a review summary generated by a chatbot than after reading the original review written by a human. That's because large language models introduce bias, in this case a positive framing, in summaries. That, in turn, affects users' behavior.

These are the findings of the first study to show evidence that cognitive biases introduced by large language models, or LLMs, have real consequences on users' decision making, said computer scientists at the University of California San Diego. To the researchers' knowledge, it's also the first study to quantitatively measure that impact.

Researchers found that LLM-generated summaries changed the sentiments of the reviews they summarized in 26.5% of cases. They also found that LLMs hallucinated 60% of the time when answering user questions, if the answers were not part of the original training data used in the study. The hallucinations happened when the LLMs answered questions about news items, either real or fake, which could be easily fact checked. "This consistently low accuracy highlights a critical limitation: the persistent inability to reliably differentiate fact from fabrication," the researchers write.

How does bias creep into LLM output? The models tend to rely on the beginning of the text they summarize, leaving out the nuances that appear further down. LLMs also become less reliable when confronted with data outside of their training model.

To test how the LLMs' biases influenced user decisions, researchers chose examples with extreme framing changes (e.g., negative to positive) and recruited 70 people to read either original reviews or LLM-generated summaries to different products, such as headsets, headlamps and radios. Participants who read the LLM summaries said they would buy the products in 84% of cases, as opposed to 52% of participants who read the original reviews.

"We did not expect how big the impact of the summaries would be," said Abeer Alessa, the paper's first author, who completed the work while a master's student in computer science at UC San Diego. "Our tests were set in a low-stakes scenario. But in a high-stakes setting, the impact could be much more extreme."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Russia is engaging in 'reckless behavior':

The Swedish government accused Pro-Russian hackers of trying to knock one of Sweden’s thermal power plants offline.

The thermal power plant involved in the attack was not named, but Bohlin added the attack was stopped “due to a built-in protection mechanism.”

Russia has been accused of multiple attacks against European critical infrastructure, with attacks growing more frequent since the outbreak of war with Ukraine in February 2022.

In the January before the invasion of Ukraine, a large-scale attack launched by members of Russia’s Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU) that targeted government agencies and infrastructure as a precursor to the main invasion.

Russia’s GRU has also been accused of launching widespread campaigns to infiltrate Western critical infrastructure since 2021, likely with the intention of maintaining persistence until the perfect time to strike.

More recently, researchers found links between an attack that attempted to shut down Poland’s energy system and a Russia-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) group.

But Russia strikes far further than Europe, and has been spotted probing US critical infrastructure for vulnerabilities, including attacks against American water treatment facilities, the US Federal Court Filing System, and a campaign that saw the email accounts of officials working across several US federal agencies breached.

Via TechCrunch

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-two-motorola-transistors-became-the-worlds-default-npns/

Registered by Motorola in 1962 and the mid-1960s, the 2N2222 and 2N3904 outlasted thousands of rivals through process innovation, cheap packaging, and a JEDEC numbering system that turned them into multi-sourced commodities.

More than 60 years after Motorola Semiconductor first registered them with the EIA, the 2N2222 and 2N3904 are still in volume production from at least half a dozen manufacturers, still stocked by every major distributor, and still the default NPN small-signal transistors used in hobby projects, university labs, and U.S. military supply chains.

Almost every other discrete transistor introduced in the same window has long since vanished. The two parts that survived did so not because they were technically superior to their rivals, but because of decisions Motorola made about how to manufacture, package, and license them.

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

I've noticed 2 broad groups of people: those who can troubleshoot problems, and those who don't know where to start. I'm in the former group, my wife was firmly in the latter even though she was smarter than me.

Math forces you to think logically, and use seemingly disparate chunks of information to solve a problem.

Mathematics is one of the few disciplines that can genuinely rewire how you think. Not just about numbers, but about logic, patterns, uncertainty, and the hidden structure underneath everyday life.

The books on this list are not traditional textbooks. They are intellectual workouts that demand active participation. Most people buy them with the best intentions and never get past the first few chapters. If you can read them and understand what they teach, they will sharpen your thinking across multiple areas of life.

[Ed. question: Which of these have you read, and which have you started, but didn't finish?]

Original Submission