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- [Runaway1956] Virtual machines and such
- [mcgrew] Success!
- [turgid] Solidarity
- [hubie] The Time a Division I Football Coach Wrote a Textbook
- [bzipitidoo] How copyright warped Earthsea
- [day of the dalek] Stay Thirsty, My Friends
- [khallow] Fighting crazy with more crazy?
- [istartedi] Forget the politics. Let's get back to our roots.
- [Spook brat] You are the militia: because I want to start a fight :^]
- [fliptop] How to teach an old dog new tricks
- [JoeMerchant] The Docapocalypse
- [Tork] I created a nebula fly-thru!
- [janrinok] They're Really Mocking The Truth
- [Gaaark] TACO TUESDAY!
- [kolie] Accidental Python Field Test (Why site_perl Rules the World)
Older Stuff
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Monday August 24 -
Sunday August 23- Amazon’s New Terms Of Service Bar Customers From Filing Class-Action Lawsuits (27)
- Planned US Data Centers Set to Produce 24M Cars’ Worth of Carbon Dioxide (18)
- Fairphone's Latest Repairable Phone is Going on Sale in the US (7)
- Hackers Tricked a Major Retailer's AI Shopping Bot to Do Something It Was Never Supposed to (1)
- Why Polylactide (PLA) 3D-Printing Plastic Is So Brittle (8)
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Saturday August 22- An AI Broke Snowflake's Code. Then Another AI Agent Exploited It (1)
- Several Technologies Predicted In Aliens (1986) (8)
- Almost Nobody Pays Attention to Web Standards Anymore (43)
- Inside Defcon, The Conference That Made Cybersecurity Noob-Friendly (4)
- Experts, Lawmakers Blast RFK Jr. for Destroying Healthcare Research - "Sabotage" (20)
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Friday August 21
Quick Links
And they looked absolutely ridiculous doing it:
Usain Bolt's 2009 world record for the 100-meter dash still remains unbroken at 9.58 seconds, but only if we're talking about humans. During the second annual World Humanoid Robot Games that kicked off in Beijing on Saturday, the Tiangong Ultra humanoid robot completed the 100-meter dash in 9.39 seconds during a preliminary heat. Developed by Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, the record-holding robot overtook Honor's Lightning robot, which completed the sprint in 9.47 seconds.
Despite the impressive finish times, don't expect these humanoid robots [1:23 Really funny. --Ed] to be used for any commercial purposes yet. After their sprints, they slammed directly into pads and some even required human assistance to be stretchered off the course. However, it's still a major improvement from last year's inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, where the Tiangong Ultra won the 100-meter dash in 21.5 seconds.
Aside from this Robot Olympics event, Beijing hosted a half-marathon for Chinese companies to show off the capabilities of their humanoid robots. The event had its fair share of crashes too, but Honor's Lightning robot managed to secure the gold medal with a finish time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds, which also surpassed another human record. The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing kicked off August 22 and will run until the 26, hosting thousands of robot participants competing in more than just track and field events, including soccer, table tennis and boxing.
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Florida Seeks Court Ruling To Officially Classify Sam Altman And ChatGPT As A 'Public Nuisance' — OpenAI Fights To Keep Lawsuit Away From A State Jury
OpenAI's brief cites three cases in which states sued platforms under state law, defendants removed, and federal judges sent them back: New Mexico v. Meta, California v. TikTok, and New Jersey v. Discord. OpenAI cites them only to show the judges declined to award fees because removal wasn't "objectively unreasonable." Florida's remand motion asks for fees regardless, arguing OpenAI removed for one reason: "delay."
The complaint's remaining counts cover negligence, gross negligence, strict liability for design defect and failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation, and public nuisance. It alleges ChatGPT's memory feature was on by default, the free tier has no age gate, the September 2025 parental controls require a voluntary account link, and GPT-4o's safety evaluation was compressed to one week to beat a Google launch.
The State seeks a permanent injunction on under-13 data collection and a finding that distributing ChatGPT in Florida is a public nuisance, demanding civil penalties of up to $10,000 per willful violation, which is double New Mexico's $5,000 cap. New Mexico's jury found 75,000 violations.
A footnote in every federal filing states that Altman "is not making a general appearance" and reserves a personal-jurisdiction defense. That defense sets up a motion to dismiss the CEO individually, no matter which court hears the case. Much of the record that Florida's case relies on is against Altman, including Greg Brockman's diary and Tasha McCauley's testimony about a "toxic culture of lying," which came out at the Musk v. Altman trial in May. A coalition of 42 state attorneys general subpoenaed OpenAI in June; none has filed a complaint yet.
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from the RIP:-80-is-a-very-unlucky-age-it-seems dept.
Tim Curry has died at age 80
The British actor was known for iconic roles like Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Pennywise.
Curry earned three Tony nominations and a Daytime Emmy and released three musical albums in his career
The British star got his start on stage in the West End, starring in the original London production of Hair in 1968 after attending Birmingham University. But according to the actor, he fudged his own experience to get a part in the show. "When asked if he had professional experience and an Equity card, Tim lied about both," his website reads. "By the time the producers found out the truth, they were sufficiently impressed with his talent and presence to sponsor him for his union membership."
In 2012, Curry suffered a major stroke and has used a wheelchair since. Curry, who never married and has no children, mostly pulled back on his acting career then, focusing instead on voiceover projects.
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- Breaking News
Most of what we know about the Earth's interior comes from observing seismic waves. These travel at somewhat different speeds depending on the details of the rock they're moving through—whether it's solid or semi-molten, how much water is present, whether it's fractured or solid material, and so on. Get enough data from enough seismic events, and you can start piecing together a picture of what's present at different depths below the surface.
In many cases, we can get this data from naturally occurring events like earthquakes. In others, we intentionally create waves using things like explosives, providing the opportunity to do imaging in specific areas without needing to wait for an earthquake. Now, a team of scientists at Penn State suggests there's a potential option that sits between waiting for an earthquake and triggering your own seismic event: thunderstorms.
Some of the energy carried by thunder enters the Earth's upper crust, triggering what are termed "thunderquakes." But, for various physical reasons, the seismic signals are extremely complex, making it difficult to extract clear signals from them. The Penn State team says it has finally constructed a model that can help make sense of this complexity and used it to reconstruct the terrain under the local campus.
Why are thunderquakes so hideously complex? It starts with the phenomenon that creates thunder in the first place. Lightning creates thunder by forming superheated bubbles of plasma along its path, creating a structure that has been compared to a string of beads. Each of those beads has the potential to generate an acoustic shock wave, leading to a chain of expanding shock waves that trace the lightning's path through the area, which is anything but a straight line. These waves also have the potential to interfere with each other as they expand. And, while these shock waves first hit the Earth at a single point, they rapidly expand from there, albeit with decreasing power.
Things don't get less complex once the Earth gets involved. The acoustic shock waves may strike soft soil, hard rock, various forms of human infrastructure, and so on, each of which will affect how energy gets transmitted. Some of the energy gets converted into what are called Rayleigh waves, where the energy is transmitted as a wave that moves along the Earth's surface. The rest go deeper, forming waves that may move through some combination of loose material or the underlying bedrock.
To extract information about the Earth's structure, you have to understand what the seismic waves from a thunderclap would normally look like. Which, to an extent, requires modeling all of the above processes. Since each thunderquake is going to be unique due to the different locations and conditions, this model is going to be, at best, an approximation. The fear that any approximation wouldn't be good enough to generate usable data probably kept people from trying to analyze thunderquakes sooner.
To get their approximation, the team started with a software package called SPECFEM3D Cartesian, which is dedicated to 3D reconstructions of seismic waves. Already, that choice necessitates a few compromises. For example, the software treats the atmosphere as a 3.6 km-thick homogeneous layer, even though the atmosphere near a thunderstorm is anything but. The model also updates events at a frequency that's slower than the waves moving through the Earth-air interface. So, to compensate for that, the researchers simply stretched the top 20 meters of Earth out to cover 200 meters.
These and other factors mean that there were plenty of reasons to think that the model wouldn't be sufficient to handle real-world data. So, the people who developed it tested it against the real world, using thunderstorms that passed by their campus.
One of the nicer discoveries in seismology has been the realization that the same fiber-optic cables that rush cat pics to your LAN can act as seismometers. And, conveniently, the Penn State campus has a 4 kilometer fiber line that has been set aside for seismic sensing running under the campus. And said campus happens to be located in a part of the US where summer thunderstorms are a regular occurrence.
Two years of data netted them 458 well-resolved thunderquakes, each of which was confirmed using records from the US's National Lightning Detection Network (something I had not realized existed). These quakes were characterized by multiple signals arriving from different altitudes, as you'd expect from a chain of beads reaching from clouds to the Earth's surface. Once the signals arrived at the Earth's surface, things happened quickly: "The impingement of each bubble onto the ground or environment generates a high-energy impulsive wavelet followed by a decaying wave train dominated by surface-wave content lasting one to two seconds."
From there, the signal spread out and started to interact with the features of the Earth under the campus. Using this data, the team identified four "weak zones," where seismic signals slow down as they interact with less rigid materials. These can include sediments, fractured rock, or areas with high water content. The Penn State campus happens to sit on a karst formation, where water has slowly altered limestone bedrock, potentially creating a variety of weak spots.
In these cases, the team was able to confirm that these four sites actually have something unusual going on there. This was done using a mixture of radar that measured surface deformation, engineering surveys, boreholes made at the sites, and independent seismic data.
All of which gives the researchers confidence that, despite all the approximations it required, their model is performing reconstructions that are sufficiently accurate to obtain informative seismic data. And the thunderquakes have a number of advantages, including their relative frequency in many areas of the globe, and the fact that they're best for reconstruction of the areas closest to the surface, which is where almost all of our infrastructure is located.
So, this definitely appears to be a case where we have a model that's wrong, but also useful.
Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeg8096 (About DOIs).
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Pause for a moment and listen. What do you hear? Chances are, somewhere in the background, is the ever-present hum of a road.
More than 4.2 million miles of public roads crisscross the lower 48 states—enough to reach the Moon and back almost nine times. This vast network of roads spiderwebs its way across the contiguous US, leaving only about 5 percent as an inventoried roadless area or wilderness.
Now, some of those last remaining lands free of roads are under threat from the Trump administration's proposed rollback of the 2001 Roadless Rule. That includes southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest, where eagles, bears, salmon, and many other species thrive in old-growth coastal forest along the Inside Passage.
In announcing its plan, the administration said rescinding the rule would remove prohibitions on road construction and logging on nearly 59 million acres of national forest, arguing that the rule slowed economic development. A 30-day public comment period on the formal proposal [PDF] starts once it is published in the Federal Register. Instructions on how to submit comments [PDF] are included in the proposal.
In Congress, another effort is underway to try to change the law through an amendment to the Wildfire Prevention Act. That change, if approved, would both remove the Roadless Rule and prevent the US Forest Service from reinstituting it in the future, despite overwhelming public support for the rule.
As ecologists who have spent decades studying wilderness and the animals and ecological functions that depend on undisturbed habitats, we believe it's important to understand that preserving roadless areas has value for environmental health, clean water, wildlife survival and people's own well-being.
The National Forest Roadless Area Conservation Policy, better known as the Roadless Rule, was issued in January 2001 by President Bill Clinton. It has had overwhelming public support and received more public comments than any other rule in history.
The rule prohibits road construction, maintenance and commercial timber harvest in inventoried roadless areas within the National Forest System. It applies to over 58 million acres across the country, excluding Idaho and Colorado, which have their own state-specific roadless rules. While most of these roadless areas are in the western states and Alaska, 38 total states as well as Puerto Rico host roadless areas.
The primary goal of the Roadless Rule is to maintain forest health and productivity for future generations. It also helps avoid exacerbating the US Forest Service's road maintenance backlog by not making new roads.
The Roadless Rule prohibits new road construction, with very limited exceptions, as well as commercial logging in designated roadless areas. It does not restrict other uses that are compatible with the management plan, such as hiking and mountain biking, or resource uses such as grazing livestock and working existing mining claims.
Beyond providing vital habitat for species and enabling healthy forests, the rule protects drinking water for the millions of Americans whose water flows from national forests. It also preserves high-quality recreation opportunities—hiking, camping, hunting, and fishing—that Americans cherish.
While roads can provide benefits, such as access to forests, they can also do ecological harm.
Roads enable invasive weeds to spread by being carried on vehicle tires and deposited in exposed soils, erode sediments into streams and fragment habitat that wildlife rely on. Vehicles directly kill and injure animals through collisions. They occasionally start fires, too. A recent study found that fires are more likely to start in areas with roads than in areas without.
Studies show that road noise displaces wildlife, increases stress, and can affect wildlife behavior patterns at distances of over a mile from the road.
And roads don't just cause problems for species on land. Most roads cross streams and rivers, which requires building a way for those waters to keep flowing under the road (structures called culverts). While culverts can be designed to allow fish to pass through and maintain ecological connections, they are rarely built to do so. This leads to declines in the health of fish populations and can leave some species locally extinct.
Inventoried roadless areas are among the most ecologically intact and wildest places left in the United States, yet—unlike Wilderness Areas and National Parks—there are no signs acknowledging their boundaries when you enter one.
Most are part of larger ecosystems, directly adjacent or ecologically connected to better known national parks and wilderness areas. Removing Roadless Rule protections would erode ecological buffers to these more famous protected lands.
For some species, roadless areas protect critical core habitat. For instance, over half the suitable habitat for relictual slender salamander, a critically imperiled species native to the Sierra Mountains of California, occurs in a roadless area. Nearly 40 percent of Mount Pinos, lodgepole chipmunk, an imperiled subspecies of the lodgepole chipmunk, also live in roadless areas in California.
Research shows that every formal roadless area provides habitat for at least two wildlife species of conservation concern – those facing risks to their long-term survival – with the median roadless area supporting 10 of these imperiled species. Some Arizona roadless areas contain habitat for up to 62 of these species.
Roadless areas also protect watersheds that supply drinking water to 47 million Americans.
Without this protection, these watersheds would still provide water, but their long-term health and hydrological sustainability could be compromised if roads block stream flow and increase sediments flowing into waterways. The result can be higher costs for water purification.
The Forest Service's own watershed health assessment, known as the Watershed Condition Framework, uses road density as a key indicator of conditions that can disrupt water quantity and quality.
The Trump administration's proposed rollback, expected to be formalized in 2026, would open these last wild places to development, fragmenting habitats that can never be restored.
The American public spoke loudly in 2001 when they supported the Roadless Rule. Two decades later, the public comments submitted on the rescission notice overwhelming opposed rolling back the rules, a Center for Western Priorities review found, reaffirming that US roadless forests remain as vital and valued as ever.
Protecting these areas is about promoting healthy ecosystems on public lands so they can provide hiking, hunting, and fishing opportunities for generations to come to enjoy the tranquility of being in nature.
Mariah Meek, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, Michigan State University and Travis Belote, Assistant Professor of Landscape Ecology, Montana State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Desktop CPU Shipments Crater 20% Amid High Component Costs, But AMD Gains Record Share Despite 'Ugly' Desktop Processor Market — Intel Floods Laptop Market With Millions Of CPUs
Excluding IoT, SoC, and embedded products, both AMD and Intel substantially increased CPU shipments sequentially, but AMD grew faster and gained unit share in every major segment, so the company now controls 30.7% of the overall x86 processor market, its highest share ever, according to Mercury Research. With IoT, console SoCs, and embedded CPUs included, AMD now controls 34.1% of the x86 processor market. Intel continues to lead, but AMD's growth is impressive.
"AMD's total unit shipments and total market share reached new record highs in the second quarter of 2026, with a sequential share gain of 0.7% and an on-year gain of 6.5%," McCarron said.
In general, the results for the quarter suggest that Intel's improved client CPU supply helped to meet demand from PC makers and led to a client PC market rebound, the company could not stop AMD's share gains.
During the quarter, AMD gained 1.8% QoQ and 2.7% YoY in unit share because declines in its shipments were considerably smaller than Intel's. So, while normally we say that AMD is gaining desktop share because of strong sales of its latest Ryzen CPUs, in this case AMD's success was driven by slower declines than rapid gains.
Mercury Research notes that its broad server share calculation somewhat disadvantages AMD because Intel's edge and networking processors are now reported within its Data Center and AI (DCAI) business, so in reality, AMD's unit share should be higher. If the comparison is narrowed to EPYC versus Xeon processors for servers, AMD's unit share reaches 46.4%, up a substantial 2.9% QoQ and 9.2% YoY, which puts AMD very close to Intel in the core data center CPU market. Meanwhile, if CPUs for edge and networking applications are ignored in Mercury's analysis, Intel's dollar share would increase considerably.
Mercury Research indicates that server CPU supply constraints could limit gains in Q3, but in Q4 sales of data center-grade processors will increase noticeably both compared to Q2 and Q3.
AMD's performance was stellar as it gained ground in every major segment even as Intel substantially improved processor availability. Despite improved availability of Intel client and data center processors, AMD still outgrew Intel and reached record overall and client CPU unit shares.
Desktop remained the major weak spot due to high component costs and generally lower demand as enthusiasts pulled in their purchases to 2025, greatly lowering sales of high-end hardware in 2026. Shipments of desktop x86 CPUs fell more than 20% YoY, whereas mobile and server volumes increased.
In core data center processors, AMD's EPYC share approached Intel’s Xeon share, which highlights how dramatically the competitive balance in the server market has shifted.
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In 2026, scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider ran experiments colliding lighter atomic nuclei—oxygen-16 with oxygen-16, and neon-20 with neon-20—at energies of 5.36 TeV per nucleon pair. The four main LHC experiments confirmed these lighter ions can produce quark-gluon plasma, the super-dense, ultra-hot state of matter that existed microseconds after the Big Bang.
What made this notable was what the collision debris revealed about nuclear structure. By analyzing how particles flowed outward after impact, physicists mapped patterns tied directly to the shapes of the incoming nuclei:
Oxygen-oxygen collisions produced radially symmetric particle flow, suggesting a more spherical, tetrahedral-like nucleus structure
Neon-neon collisions generated asymmetric, elongated flow patterns—indicating a bowling pin-shaped nucleus
"It is a bit like shining light on an object and seeing its shadow," explains researcher Emil Gorm Dahlbæk Nielsen from the Niels Bohr Institute. "You cannot see the object directly, but its shadow reveals its shape."
This work, published in Physical Review Letters, represents the first clear evidence that nuclear geometry drives anisotropic flow in light-ion collisions. Storage costs for this kind of data are massive—a single year of LHC collision data generates petabytes, which would run into millions of dollars in enterprise cloud storage alone. Every terabyte matters when you're paying for retention and redundancy across multiple backup systems.
"We have pushed the boundary for how small the atomic nuclei can be while still recreating this primordial matter," says You Zhou, who led the experiment at the Niels Bohr Institute. The team plans to test even lighter nuclei like helium-4 next, trying to pinpoint where the threshold drops too low to form quark-gluon plasma.
Sources:
https://phys.org/news/2026-08-big-bowling-pin-nuclei-universe.html
https://home.cern (CERN official coverage)
I.J. Abualrob et al, Physical Review Letters (2026)
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Dolly Parton has passed away.
Dolly Parton, the "Queen of Country" singing icon with a personality as bold as her signature blond coif and rhinestone-encrusted outfits, has died. She was 80 years old.
Parton's death was announced in a video message from her family on her social media pages and confirmed to USA TODAY.
[...] Her nephew Bryan Seaver announced the death of his aunt [...]
[...] My family and I have shared a lifetime of beautiful memories with Dolly, but so have you. She has always been on your television, your record player, your CD, and on your phone playlist becoming an extended part of your family, whether you liked it or not. Our family and the team she has entrusted with her legacy will work diligently to ensure her spirit will live with us for ever.
Dolly was a farmer, just like her daddy. He farmed the soil; she farmed songs and happiness. Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest.
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- Breaking News
Framework says it's replacing some out-of-warranty AMD mainboards.
A BIOS update for the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040-series processors is bricking the systems, multiple users have reported online.
Framework started shipping pre-built Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 computers and compatible motherboards in 2023. In June 2026, Framework released BIOS 3.20 for the devices. The update adds mainboard support for features, including a haptic touchpad and new speakers, for the higher-end Framework Laptop 13 Pro and fixes issues, including one "where the Battery Extender status was reported incorrectly following a reboot, hibernation, or shutdown after the timer had expired," per a post on Framework's forum from an employee.
Some users say that they installed the update successfully.
Numerous others, however, claim that the installation stalls, bricking the laptop.
"[T]he update process seems to have stalled," a Framework forum user named Sven posted in July. "What I see is a black screen and a progress bar with 2 dots and then the Framework logo. The progress bar is not moving for about 3 hours now. Also, I can't turn off the Framework using the power button, no matter how long I hold it down. Now the BIOS update is stuck, and I can not power down or reboot the machine."
Ars Technica contacted Framework, asking how many customers are affected. In a company statement, Framework said it has "received reports of a small percentage of Framework Laptop 13 7040 Series BIOS updates resulting in non-bootable boards." Framework is investigating the root cause of the issue, the statement said.
There are reports of users having problems with BIOS upgrades on Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 devices going back to at least March 2025.
After the most recent BIOS update, some users reported that Framework support told them they needed a new motherboard, but Framework wouldn't provide it for free because the customer was past warranty.
Framework's statement to Ars says:
... in addition to replacing in-warranty Mainboards, we are making exceptions for out-of-warranty replacements where we can confirm a stable-release BIOS update caused the board to become non-bootable.
Framework is also introducing a "Crisis Recovery Mode" BIOS functionality to enable a path for failed updates to be directly recoverable.
"Our latest Framework Desktop BIOS release includes this functionality, and we are actively bringing it to Framework Laptop 12, 13, and 16 in our upcoming BIOS release cycles for each," Framework said.
We won't be sure of the source of the problems until Framework provides more information. Blogger Guanzhong Chen, however, wrote a detailed blog post this week about their purported experience with their motherboard breaking and suggested the problem stems from "some bug with the software that caused it to display what appears to be random memory on the screen, especially when this has happened before to other people for other BIOS versions."
The software developer, who was ultimately able to flash the firmware onto their motherboard after a support representative reportedly told him to buy a new one, added:
"At the same time, it somehow flashes the BIOS slower in regular operation than a cheap 15 MHz programmer over pogo pins, which really makes you wonder what it's doing under the hood."
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The long legal battle over ownership of Linux is closer than ever to ending, after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn't valid, and that time has expired for further action.
This story starts in 1998 when IBM decided the world needed a single version of UNIX capable of running on multiple processor architectures. To make that happen, Big Blue allied with a company called the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) which made a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Intel and Sequent also signed up for the multi-architecture effort, called "Project Monterey."
The alliance didn't work, largely because Linux came along and delivered a *Nix that ran on multiple processors (and introduced a new way to develop software).
IBM decided to add some of the code developed during Project Monterey to Linux, leading SCO and its legal successors to claim they owned that code and therefore had some sort of legal claim over Linux.
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OPINION: DVD is one of those technologies that dominated for barely a generation yet left a permanent cultural mark. It made high-quality video cheap enough for mass distribution, popularized the TV series boxed set, and encouraged its gluttonous consequence: binge viewing. Streaming and capacious storage have since pushed optical media toward irrelevance. There may no longer be a box, but the boxed-set mentality remains, and we still binge like Roman emperors. It is a genuinely new way of absorbing large quantities of information.
Now it is time to recognize a further evolution: the bingeable tech conference. Streamed conferences are nothing new, but few reward being watched from beginning to end. They offer too many talks on too narrow a subject, too much marketing flimflam, or too much variation in quality. The Goldilocks zone of quality, range, relevance, and intelligence is rare, but worth seeking out. This July delivered a near-perfect example: Software Should Work 2026.
The name supplies the plot arc. Software Should Work is about reliability in its broadest sense, because reliable software requires much more than making code that runs. It encompasses abstraction and formal methods, managing complexity, making the most of tools and processes, individual innovation, team culture, and the nuts and bolts of telling computers what to do. In just 13 videos, SSW creates a widescreen, high-definition, thought-provoking picture of the field today. You can watch them in a day, and once you start, you may not want to stop.
It would be unseemly to give too many spoilers. In such a concise treatment of a multifaceted subject, the talks that grab you will depend on your own interests and experiences. Consider dependencies, part of the calculus of reliability. So far, so dry. But Richard Feldman's talk compares web stacks from 1996, 2006, and 2026, revealing what looks like an inexorable multiplication of abstractions and dependencies. He then compares eight contemporary language and runtime websites: TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Rust, Zig, Go, and Roc. The result is one of the more illuminating graphs you'll see this year.
Another thought-provoking contribution comes from Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, one of the corest of the core technologies in everyday use. On its face, his account of how a codebase evolves in response to changing test methods sounds dry. It is also a personal journey, full of highs and lows, illustrating how reliability depends not only on the interplay between code and test design, but also on human motivation, creativity, flexibility, and doggedness. There is no shortage of technical detail either.
This is why SSW 2026 works so well. Its speakers have deep experience of software reliability, but were free to choose their subjects. The resulting mix of opinions, experiences, and approaches ranges from the mathematics of formal analysis to the importance of daydreaming and the dangerous myth of the superhero engineer. Reports from the language wars, AI WTFery, and arguments over whether Nix partisanship is justified are all present, delivered by people working on the front lines.
Most importantly, the conference explores the culture of reliability and what it means to say that software works. It feels like a proper symposium: an exchange of ideas about something that touches every part of the digital world yet is rarely considered as a whole. Commercial pressures can work against practitioners and customers alike, while the lack of a common language and agreed standards makes good practice harder to defend. Without reliability, everything falls apart. How to teach it, and where the discipline goes next, remain stubbornly difficult questions.
SSW 2026 provides a splendid and much-needed focus on all of this. Its blend of narratives and subjects means there is always something you did not know you needed to see, accompanied by the pleasurable sense of time well spent. Curiosity is richly rewarded. If you see software reliability as an ongoing drama – and if you don't, how are you still here? – block out a bingeing window. Software should work, but so should conferences, and this one is well worth the popcorn.
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The Dead Internet Theory May Be Coming True, Pew Research Findings Show
Are you reading more text written by an AI bot? A Pew Research study published this week says it’s very likely.
That’s not breaking news if you’re aware of the Dead Internet Theory that dates back to 2021. CNET writer Trisha Jandoc dove into that theory last year, which basically says people believe the internet died 10 years ago in 2016 and that much of what we see online now is AI-generated.
There is some truth to that. Pew researchers scanned nearly half a million English webpages from the past five years using Common Crawl, a web archive. That dates back to before ChatGPT was made publicly available in November 2022. Researchers ran those pages through Open Pangram, an AI detection tool, to see if it was written or edited by AI. Then the researchers looked at a sample of 10,000 pages from last month to spot signs of AI-written content. They looked for phrases, words and language that are more common among AI bots than humans.
Researchers made it clear that AI detection models don’t always get it right. Sometimes they flag text written by humans as AI authorship and AI-written text as being written by a human.
Nonetheless, the study found that 10% of the samples “show significant signs of AI authorship.”
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As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value
[...] Over the past few months, a spate of Wisconsin towns and cities have withdrawn from Flock deals over privacy and trust concerns. As they did so, another issue revealed itself: With each city that leaves, the Flock network becomes less useful to the cities that remain. And cities are starting to notice.
Consider Dane County, which includes the city of Madison. It's one of the most populous counties in Wisconsin. It was also a significant Flock user, with a contract for 24 license plate cameras. But after complaints from citizens and privacy experts, the Dane County Board of Supervisors on April 16 voted to cut the $80,000 in county funding for Flock cameras and banned "further expenditures on the system."
"There are well-documented concerns about how this company operates and uses its technology to violate people's Fourth Amendment rights [against unreasonable searches]," said County Board Chair Patrick Miles. "The board's action supports protecting our community from a proven bad actor. We have full confidence in our Sheriff and deputies, and we are open to considering other companies that have stronger safeguards in place."
[...] Because much of Flock's value comes from access to cameras in other jurisdictions, the loss of Dane County and Monona meant Flock was suddenly less useful to nearby police departments. The town of McFarland, which neighbors Monona, announced on May 15 that it would not move forward with its plan to deploy Flock cameras "in light of a shrinking database in Dane County and input from residents."
"Once Dane County lost their funding for Flock, we lost about half of the potential camera network within Dane County," said McFarland Chief of Police Brian Redman in a statement. "I had to ask, 'Were we still going to get the return on our investment with that loss?' With the network being chipped away, that wasn't going to be the case."
[...] Public resistance was crucial to many of these decisions to de-Flock. Indeed, the broad backlash against Flock has grown so strong that the surveillance company last week announced mandatory new audit controls and lower default data retention periods for US users.
Flock now knows what Kaukauna and McFarland realized: The same "network effect" that helps build a business can also work in the other direction once customers start to flee.
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Malicious updates turned routine builds into a delivery system for infostealer malware:
Hackers slipped malware into several popular Rust packages this week, turning routine software builds into a route onto developers' machines.
The Rust Security Response Team disclosed the supply chain attack on Thursday after receiving a tip about a crate called proc-macro1. An investigation found that its build script fetched malware from a remote server.
The attack extended beyond a single dodgy crate. Someone had published a new version of arrayref, a legitimate and widely used Rust package, with proc-macro1 added as a dependency. The attacker had also yanked recent legitimate releases of arrayref, helping steer users toward the poisoned release.
The Rust team does not believe arrayref's maintainer was responsible. It suspects the developer's computer or credentials were compromised and locked the account while attempting to contact them. The attacker also published malicious versions of two other crates maintained by the same developer, internment and append-only-vec.
The poisoned releases weren't around for long. Arrayref 0.3.10 was available on crates.io for 86 minutes, internment 0.8.7 for 90 minutes, and append-only-vec 0.1.9 for 107 minutes before they were removed.
That's a narrow window, but arrayref is hardly some forgotten package gathering dust in the registry. Security firm Aikido, which separately analyzed the attack, puts arrayref at roughly 245 million lifetime downloads and append-only-vec at more than 4 million. However, those figures don't tell us how many developers pulled the malicious versions during the brief period they were live.
Aikido found that the attacker largely left the legitimate source code untouched, adding only a dependency on proc-macro1, a typosquat of the legitimate proc-macro2 package. The malicious code was tucked inside proc-macro1's build.rs file.
Cargo, Rust's package manager, runs build scripts during compilation. This allowed proc-macro1 to identify the operating system and processor architecture of the developer or build machine, download a matching payload, and execute it. Aikido found malware built for Linux, Windows, Intel Macs, and Apple Silicon Macs.
The second-stage payload was more than a simple downloader. Aikido found code targeting Chromium-based browser data, including profiles for Google Chrome, Brave, and Microsoft Edge, as well as browser extension storage used by cryptocurrency wallets. It also found functionality to establish persistence and receive commands from the attacker's server.
The Rust team also deleted proc-macro-en, aovine, arone, aronenao, and tinymember, warning that every version of those crates should be considered malicious. Developers have been urged to check their Cargo lockfiles and local registry caches for the affected packages.
Rust credits Nextron Systems' research team with initially discovering and reporting the attack. It has not said how the legitimate maintainer was compromised, how many developers downloaded the poisoned releases, or how many systems ultimately executed the payload.
The malicious packages may have lasted less than two hours on crates.io, but whoever was behind them chose a well-traveled route into developers' machines.
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Chinese safety regulators have cracked down on doors that don't open in a crash:
Tesla is facing a massive recall in China today. Chinese regulators are taking a stricter approach to safety, and the automaker now has to add warning labels to 2.98 million Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles in China that make it clearer how to open the rear doors in the case of an emergency that causes the car to lose power.
As we learned earlier this year, Chinese regulators are getting more serious about the recent trend of electronically controlled car doors; a growing number of crashes have had fatal consequences when the occupants have been trapped in burning cars. Starting next year, new rules give specific dimensions for handles that must be followed by all newly approved vehicles. But cars that have already been on sale for some time, like the Models 3 and Y, are grandfathered in, at least until the end of 2028.
But China wants Tesla to do something about the nearly 3 million cars already on its roads. It is requiring the automaker to add warning labels to the car interiors—something that will require physical access to the car. Additionally, Tesla will push out a software update that automatically lowers all the cars’ windows in the event of a collision.
Tesla is also facing a second Chinese recall, this one only affecting 2.74 million cars. These require new software for their driver monitoring system, which currently only uses a torque sensor on the steering wheel to determine if the driver is holding the wheel and remaining engaged in the task of driving. Now, the update will leverage the interior camera in the Models 3 and Y to track the driver’s gaze instead.
However, Electrek has previously reported that Chinese Tesla owners have been able to defeat the cabin driver monitoring system—which it has rolled out to customers with its more advanced partially automated driving system—by mounting a doll’s head in front of the camera.
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