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AnonTechie writes:

Norwegian military personnel discovered that rented Chinese-made cars automatically recorded and stored video footage during military exercises. The Norwegian newspaper DN reported the incident. The cars continued to be used throughout the exercises because few alternative vehicles were available. Norwegian outlet Nettavisen drew attention to the supplier's links to China's Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. The Norwegian Armed Forces use rental vehicles from First Rent A Car Norway AS, which operates under the Hertz brand, for daily activities, military exercises, and operational tasks.

[...] The military's use of modern civilian vehicles also raises separate security concerns. In its Risiko 2025 assessment, Norway's National Security Authority warned that a modern car can contain more than 200 electronic sensors. If external actors gain access to such data, they could use it for surveillance, tracking movements, or intelligence-gathering. In its National Threat Assessment 2026, Norway's counterintelligence service, the Police Security Service, stated that Chinese intelligence and security agencies had expanded their capacity to conduct operations in Norway, including in cyberspace and through human intelligence sources.

[Source]: NGO "MILITARNYI"

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

As someone who spent 3-4 years writing 8086 assembly code I'm getting a kick out of this.

Regardless of whether you're on Intel or AMD, the first instruction your CPU executes runs in a mode designed for the 16-bit Intel 8086, released in June 1978. This is called "real mode," and despite everything that has changed about processors since then, this part of the startup process has remained remarkably similar.

  Real mode, or real-address mode as Intel calls it, is the execution environment of the original 8086. Intel says that "To an 8086 program, a processor operating in real-address mode behaves like a high-speed 8086 processor." In this mode, registers are 16 bits wide, there's no memory protection and no paging, and memory is addressed by taking a 16-bit segment value, shifting it left by four bits, and adding a 16-bit offset to it. That gives you a 20-bit address and a nominal 1MB address space, which was plenty in 1978 and is tiny by any modern standard.

When an x86 processor powers up, or when its reset pin is asserted, its registers are set to a known state and the CPU goes into real mode. The reset table for Intel's current processors have the control register CR0 at 60000010h, meaning that protection is off and paging is off, and it's the same value used by AMD for its own chips as well. No matter how powerful your 64-bit CPU is, it's basically just a chip from 1978 at boot until it's told to switch out of it.

Original Submission

Major French Supermarket Chains Hit by Cyber

"Ingar" writes:

Major French Supermarket Chains Hit by Cyber:

Several chains of supermarkets in France have reportedly been hit by a cyber-attack targeting the refrigeration facilities of several stores across the country.

One of the affected companies is Coopérative U, a retail cooperative encompassing supermarkets branded as Hyper U, Super U, U Express and Utile.

In a post on X published on October 12, Dominique Schelcher, CEO of Cooperative U, confirmed the cyber-attack affected several stores in the network from October 11.

"Our teams are fully mobilized, in coordination with refrigeration specialists, to restore the situation as quickly as possible. An investigation will be needed to shed full light on this attack," he said.

He also highlighted that refrigeration systems are "essential to preserving fresh products and supplying food to the French public" and said this attack is "of utmost gravity, unprecedented [and] unacceptable."

French news channel BFMTV reported that the compromised systems are administered by Danish refrigeration systems provider Danfoss.

The media outlet reported the attackers targeted outdated versions of the manufacturer's refrigeration control software.

"Hackers reportedly managed to remotely trigger forced defrost cycles in refrigeration systems at numerous supermarkets, with temperatures programmed to reach as high as 50 °C (122°F)," BFTV reported .

BFTV reported that two supermarkets alone, an Intermarché and Super U, already recorded losses of €270,000 ($302,000) worth of merchandise in Haguenau, in the Alsace region, as a result of the incident.

The media outlet assessed that 150 of Intermarché stores, part of Groupe Mousquetaire, are affected.

Other reportedly affected supermarket networks include some of the major retail chains in the country, such as E. Leclerc, Carrefour and Monoprix, Jonathan Le Borgne, author of the specialized retail news website Je bosse en grande distribution, has reported .

Danfoss products have been found to contain critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the past, such as CVE-2023-25915, CVE-2025-41450, CVE-2025-41451 and CVE-2025-41452, some of which could allow attackers to gain privileged access to refrigeration control systems and manipulate physical equipment.

Additionally, research presented by Claroty's Team82 at DEF CON 34 in August 2026 demonstrated how a compromised AK-SM 800A controller could disable cooling while falsifying temperature readings, potentially concealing failures in the cold chain. These findings highlight the real-world risks of exposing industrial refrigeration systems to the public internet without adequate security controls, authentication, and firmware updates.

On October 13, the Danish company will be at Chillventa in Nuremberg, a three-day trade fair for refrigeration technology, where it is planning to showcase the new iC7-HVACR drive featuring "integrated cybersecurity features."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/10/12/celebrating-the-brilliant-pragmatism-of-tcp/ip-the-wiring-of-the-world/5302202

It's 1988. Windows 2.0 is a DOS shell that runs on a dual-floppy 8086 PC. VGA is the aspirational video standard. A three-man startup in East London has decided to create low-cost LANs. There's not much of that and not much by way of standards, which is why a young programmer is rather excited by an emerging contender called TCP/IP.

He's particularly keen because he's just finished implementing IBM's PC networking API, NetBIOS, which hurt almost as much as integrating any sort of networking with DOS. Research means library books, magazine articles, and asking questions on Usenet over kilobit dial-up. Getting the wrong idea is easy. Trying to build the TCP/IP stack on the ISO/OSI seven-layer model produces more pain, but sanity prevails, and after a bit, there's a working network.

Nearly 40 years later, the once-young programmer is now a curmudgeonly Reg columnist. Floppies have become terabyte thumb drives. Kilobit modems are gigabit fiber and Wi-Fi. Graphics have come on a bit too. And he hasn't touched Windows or an Intel CPU in years. It is a transformed world. Except for one thing – everything talks to everything over TCP/IP. It's time to celebrate the digital oxygen of the global data ecosystem. 

TCP/IP is still newsworthy. Any apparent attempt to replace part of it is worth reporting, in this case a congestion-easing protocol called Homa superseding TCP. Only it's not a replacement, just an alternative designed to run alongside. That this is possible is due to one of the genius decisions made as TCP/IP evolved – splitting what was one protocol into two: TCP and IP.

IP, the Internet Protocol, just sends packets between two addresses, best effort, no guarantees when, in what order, or even if they'll get through. The Transmission Control Protocol uses IP but delivers a reliable, ordered stream of bytes, arranging retransmission of missing data. Thus, if you don't like how TCP does things, you can add your own IP-speaking protocol to run alongside. 

This approach also saw TCP/IP vanquish rival protocols from very large industry incumbents, such as IBM's Systems Network Architecture (SNA) and ATM – Asynchronous Transfer Mode – from the telecoms side. Packet-switched IP can't possibly succeed, they said, with its non-deterministic transmissions of unknown latency. Nothing reliable could be built on that. TCP/IP, being open, flexible, and built by consensus by individual, inspired engineers, just got on with being useful.

That had been proved on January 1, 1983, when ARPANET – the proto internet – dropped the proto when it switched over wholesale from its own NCP to TCP/IP. Known as flag days, such events weren't uncommon as previously isolated early networks had to adapt or die to the new interconnected world. TCP/IP was explicitly designed to inter-network, from the seminal paper [PDF] in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. From that 13-page paper to adoption across ARPANET took nine years. Five years later, a greenhorn coder could build the stack for completely novel hardware in three months. It took longer to work out how to build an installable driver for IBM's PS/2 Micro Channel Architecture. The future wasn't hard to see.

Once it had beaten the opposition, the extremely practical, extremely open soul of TCP/IP repeatedly saved it from its biggest enemy. Itself. It turned out that once we had a technology that could freely connect any number of devices to each other, end to end, we wanted to do that very much. The internet, freed of central control and gatekeepers, grew exponentially, especially after another protocol, HTTP, shyly perched on top of TCP. Naysayers predicted letting ordinary people use this would clog the internet, to the point that the introduction of image tags was seen as portending the End Times. Congestion collapse could close it all down. 

Fortunately, shortly before Tim Berners-Lee began work on the Web, a 1988 paper by Van Jacobson and Mike Karels, Congestion Avoidance and Control [PDF], came up with a set of strategies and tweaks to TCP that has kept the problem at bay ever since. A global network with no central control that can fix show-stopping, scale-related problems on the fly is a true wonder. 

Similarly, IPv4's 32-bit address field with 4.3 billion addresses seemed an over-provision, until suddenly it was nowhere near enough. A new version of IP, IPv6, was introduced in 1995 with addresses as plentiful as grains of sand in the Sahara. The trouble was that if you've got billions of devices, you can't do a flag day. IPv6 proved great for infrastructure, but not the edge. Fortunately, a router kludge called Network Address Translation (NAT) appeared, again at roughly the same time. It broke the end-to-end principle only a little bit, but let the old version of IP, IPv4, run untouched. 

Let's be frank. It's fugly. But it let many devices share a single public IP address, which is why everything that comes out of the box for normies still rocks IPv4 like it's 1981. Just don't ask what happened to IPv5.

There are thousands of ways TCP/IP has evolved, many tiny and a few deeply silly, like RFC 1149 (IP over Avian Carriers), material relating to which is, at the time of writing, up for auction at Christie's. At heart, it is one of mankind's most brilliant technical achievements, the underpinning of everything the connected world can do, built from intelligence, vision, openness, iteration, freedom of thought, freedom of action, a rough consensus and running code. It deserves its own universal day of celebration. Let's make it January 1. Let's call it Flag Day.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

https://btiscience.org/wild-tomatoes-still-hold-the-flavor-we-bred-away-new-map-shows-breeders-where-to-look/

Modern tomatoes are a breeding success story. Generations of selection have made them bigger, firmer, more productive, and easier to ship. But that progress came at a cost. Domestication and breeding reduced much of the crop's genetic diversity, and flavor has proven stubbornly hard to breed back in.

Tomato's wild relatives still carry much of what was lost. Some pack their fruit with high levels of the red pigment lycopene, and some store sugar differently. Others, like Solanum pennellii and Solanum neorickii, never turn red at all. Breeders have long wanted to know which genetic controls produce these traits, and which ones are worth bringing back.

A new study by researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) offers a detailed map of those controls. The team compared how genes behave in cultivated tomato and three wild relatives, across different fruit tissues and stages of development and ripening. That let them pinpoint the genetic "dimmer switches" behind color, sweetness, bitterness, and aroma, giving breeders a list of targets for developing tastier, more nutritious tomatoes.

[...] "Wild tomatoes are an enormous reservoir of diversity for flavor, nutrition, and resilience, but bringing those traits into modern varieties can come at the expense of other traits that breeders have spent decades improving, like yield, fruit size, or shelf life. This can be countered with precise information on how the genes responsible for such traits are controlled," said Catala.

Think of each gene as a lamp. Some shine brightly, some glow faintly, and how bright they are shapes how a fruit grows, ripens, and tastes. Something can change a lamp's brightness in two ways.

One is through a dimmer built into the lamp itself. Scientists call this a cis effect: a change in the section of DNA sitting right next to the gene, which controls how strongly that one gene turns on. The other is through the building's wiring. That's a trans effect: a change somewhere else in the genome that alters the power supply, often affecting many genes at once.

quietus writes:

I am a US Citizen and a first generation college student. I have worked since I was 16 years old. I had 2 jobs when I was a sophomore through senior in high school and I worked my way through college as well. I struggled for decades to make a living and pay my federal student loans back. I have learned that schools not only give foreign students lot of scholarships, but actively recruit them to come here and attend. Then I complete against them for jobs and they are hired over me because they can fluently speak a second language.

Thus opens a comment by one Ecstacy Smith on a new regulation proposal by the Trump administration. Under the proposal, Optional Practical Training Fees, US Universities need to pay up to $100,000 for each international student who, after graduation, works a science job in the country.

Currently, under a program called Optional Practical Training (OPT), foreign students (F-1 or M-1 visa) are eligible to work for 3 years after graduating a US university, on condition that employment must be directly related to the student's major area of study. In 2024, there were 1.58 million foreign graduates in the United States. Twenty-six percent (418,781) of those were authorized to work via OPT.

According to a source quoted by Nature, OPT is especially important for international PhD graduates in STEM fields. The DHS/ICE claims the scheme has seen widespread fraudulent abuse:

Most recently, DHS announced an investigation that identified more than 10,000 F-1 nonimmigrant students who were engaged in OPT and were working for highly suspect employers.

The current administration has good form in combating fraud and abuse this way: in 2025 Trump imposed a $100,000 levy on a visa reserved for researchers and other high-skilled workers. As a result, new applications for those visas plummeted by 90%, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Jon Henshaw has summarized a report about Internet infrastructure. Of about two dozen critically essential infrastructure components, about half have only one or two developers and little to no public funding.

A new analysis from sheets.works, The people holding up the [I]nternet, reveals that in 2026, key pieces of software the internet depends on are still underfunded or don't receive any public funding at all. Many of those critical components are kept alive and updated by individual contributors, and it's often just one or two people.

The analysis looked at the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers, and servers rely on. It counted everyone who made ten or more changes between October 2025 and October 2026. Of those 23 projects, 11 had only one or two people doing the regular work.

Even some of the larger projects go mostly underfunded or even unfunded. For example, if OpenBSD received even a penny for each commercially deployed instance of either the OpenSSH client or server, their budget worries would be finished.

Previously:
(2025) Curl Project Founder Snaps over Deluge of Time-Sucking AI Slop Bug Reports
(2022) SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
(2022) The New Yorker on NTP Software Maintenance
(2016) Dutch Government Says "No" to Backdoors after Giving €500,000 Grant to OpenSSL

Original Submission

McGruber writes:

I learned of Robert X. Cringely's passing from Avram Miller, who wrote:
My friend Mark Stephens died last Saturday. Most of the world knew him as Robert X. Cringely. I knew him as the neighbor who stood with me on garage roofs in Sonoma County, pointing dish antennas at distant ridge tops in 2020, because it was not possible to get a broadband internet connection at my location. That is how we became friends, more than 25 years ago. We managed to use directional wifi and created a link to someone that had broadband several miles from my home.

Mark was creative, technically competent and a dreamer. He was a gifted writer and storyteller. One of the few historians of his time to track the development of the computer industry. Sometimes we would dream together. He and his family lived close to our home in Sonoma for many years. He had an amazing family including a wonderful wife, MaryAlyce. Eventually they moved back to South Carolina where is wife had family. With all his moving and all my moving, we did not communicate often but we meant a lot to each other.

ARTICLE: https://twothirdsdone.com/2026/10/11/goodby-mark-stephens-aka-bob-cringely/

Mark Stephen's obituary: https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49806651

Robert X. Cringely's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Understanding why our nearest star does what it does:

The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has enabled scientists to trace magnetic switchbacks in the solar wind's magnetic field back to their source at the Sun.

"Switchback" is the name given to an S-shaped kink in the solar wind's magnetic field – a sudden and large deflection. In 2022, the spacecraft gave scientists a full view of the structure (confirming the S-shape), but the origin remained up for debate. At the time, the probe's data suggested it might be near the Sun's surface, but a recent flight through a switchback allowed scientists to identify the source.

"Solar Orbiter flew through a very large switchback," said Jesse Coburn of the French National Center for Scientific Research / Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (CNRS/LPP. "Because of this, we were able to sample rarely observed particles there that have tell-tale fingerprints of their origin."

Solar Orbiter's Solar Wind Analyser instrument (SWA) was used to sample the switchback's plasma, and it came up with particles that could only have formed within hot magnetic loops at the surface of the Sun.

Coburn said, "There are two main competing theories for how a switchback, and by extension the solar wind, forms.

"The specific mix of particles detected by Solar Orbiter is the smoking gun for a formation process known as 'interchange reconnection'."

This occurs when parts of the Sun with different magnetic properties interact. Some have field lines that stretch away into space. Others are closed and extend into space before looping back. When the two types meet, the lines can snap open, releasing previously trapped plasma into space.

The other theory focuses on processes involving waves and turbulence.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

TP-Link can't sell latest routers in US, still needs exemption from FCC ban:

TP-Link is facing more legal troubles in the US as Florida and three other states filed lawsuits alleging that it lied to consumers about its connections to China and the risks of its routers being exploited by Chinese state hackers.

The lawsuits were filed yesterday, about six months after the Federal Communications Commission announced a sweeping ban on consumer-grade routers produced wholly or partly outside of the US. Numerous router makers have obtained exemptions to the ban, but the Trump administration so far has not granted one to TP-Link.

Router makers that received exemptions include Netgear, Asus, Adtran, Amazon and its Eero subsidiary, Calix, Nokia, SpaceX's Starlink division, and others. For now, TP-Link is unable to sell its latest Wi-Fi 8 routers in the US, though models approved before the ban can still be sold.

The state lawsuits claim that TP-Link misled US consumers by telling them its routers are safe. The suits allege that TP-Link committed unfair and deceptive trade acts in violation of the states' consumer protection laws.

"Chinese state-sponsored hackers exploited TP-Link routers sitting in American living rooms," Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said while announcing his lawsuit filed in a Florida county court. Uthmeier said Florida "will not allow families to be misled into handing their personal data to the Chinese Communist Party. We are seeking an injunction, restitution for Florida consumers, and [financial] penalties under Florida law."

[...] "The coordinated lawsuits are built on false premises," said Steve Kovsky, TP-Link's corporate affairs officer. "They do nothing to advance national security while unfairly penalizing an industry-leading US company." TP-Link said that for the past few months it has "provided state regulators with clear, verifiable documentation demonstrating two fundamental facts: TP-Link Systems devices sold in the US are manufactured in Vietnam and TP-Link Systems is an independent, US company that is not owned or controlled by any foreign government."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and six others agree to changes, but the ICO isn't done asking questions:

Ten of the world's biggest AI developers have agreed to tighten their handling of personal data following scrutiny by Britain's privacy watchdog, which is now turning its attention to autonomous AI agents that don't always play by the rules.

The recently rebranded Information Commission's Office (ICO) said Thursday that Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Stability AI have either made changes or committed to doing so after the regulator examined their compliance with UK data protection law.

These include clearer explanations of how personal information is used to train AI models, better ways for people to exercise their data rights, and tougher assessments of developers' safeguards.

The commitments follow a supervisory program launched in 2025 that initially covered 11 developers. That number dropped to ten after the ICO paused its engagement with Elon Musk's xAI to pursue a separate formal investigation into its Grok chatbot.

The watchdog isn't declaring victory just yet. It's monitoring whether developers deliver on their promises and admits that current AI training practices still pose problems under UK data protection law.

Developers still have some explaining to do over personal data buried in their models, particularly sensitive information, and how people are supposed to get their details removed once an AI has been trained on them. There's also the risk of personal information being extracted from models, including data developers never intended them to retain.

The ICO acknowledged that some of these issues will require cooperation between industry, regulators, and government. Getting companies to promise changes is one thing. Making today's AI models comply with the law is another.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/experts-starting-out-stem-career-working-life-tcs-fidelity-investments

Fidelity Investments' Eimear Coffey and TCS' Jennifer Scott explore how a diverse skillset, an open mind and adaptability can form the foundations of a strong career for school leavers and graduates.

Starting a STEM career, or indeed a career in any industry, can be a nerve-wracking experience, as the company or institution you choose to align yourself with has the potential to shape how your professional life unfolds. 

It is also a time of great excitement as you get to put all that you have learned up to now to the test and start to build the foundations of what will hopefully be a long, dynamic and rewarding career. But how do you get started?

For those looking for the most straightforward route, Jennifer Scott, the head of cyber delivery and operations, at Tata Consultancy Services Ireland (TCS), explained that young people who enjoy STEM subjects and are interested in a tech, engineering or science career should look into a Bachelor of Science degree. 

She told SiliconRepublic.com, “This is definitely the most linear entry path to a career in STEM. Organisations, such as TCS, looking to onboard fresh talent into STEM roles, look to universities for graduates. Some organisations contribute to course and curriculum content so are invested in the graduates who pass through these courses.”

It is worth noting that this is not the only route. Scott explained that individuals who have left school, who have drive, ambition and the support of an organisation with early-career starter resources, can start out by making a strong impact in an operational role, before moving on to a more technical position.  

She said, “This is a longer route to landing a job in STEM but the opportunity for growth is definitely there.”

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Ernst Abbe worked out in 1873 that even a perfect lens cannot separate details smaller than about half a wavelength of light, which is why a galaxy millions of light-years away photographs cleanly while a virus does not. The limit was not beaten by better glass. It was beaten two other ways: hold a probe closer to the surface than one wavelength and catch the evanescent field (near-field microscopy, ~6 nm lateral resolution demonstrated), or make fluorescent molecules blink one at a time so their centers can be found precisely (super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). Short writeup with sources:

https://telegra.ph/The-Near-Is-Blurrier-Than-the-Far-10-12

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://www.axios.com/2026/10/09/ai-companies-day-after-major-attack

Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event.

The first example of significant real-world harm caused by unsafe AI would turn an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as President Trump for his reluctance to regulate it.

Many AI industry insiders told Axios they believe a major event will occur in the next six to 12 months.

The plan for WHEN, not if, their product f*cks over humanity.

When do you think it will happen?
By whom?
Outcome?

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/10/04/spies-prime-ministers-and-balls-the-bbc-domesday-project-40/5300383

Decades before the modern web, the BBC Domesday Project dared to archive an entire nation using.... what else – massive LV-ROM (LaserVision Read Only Memory) LaserDiscs.

To mark the impending 40th anniversary of the BBC Domesday Project's release, the UK's Centre for Computing History (CCH) hosted a celebration at its museum on September 19, bringing together several of the original team members responsible for the system.

One was Mike Tibbetts, an assistant to Peter Armstrong, the BBC producer behind the project. Tibbetts revealed that the UK's domestic intelligence service, MI5, took an interest in the system, but "they didn't understand a word of what we were doing!"

"And on one occasion, Peter and I had to give a presentation, or Peter gave the presentation to [former prime minister] Margaret Thatcher, and well, I'm not sure she understood what we were doing either..."

What they were doing was compiling a trove of data that will prove invaluable to historians in the years to come, even if the politicians of the era looked nervously on at the amount of data being handed over to the public.

The Domesday Project was intended to be a modern version of the Domesday Book, compiled after the 1066 Norman invasion of England. The original book surveyed most of England and parts of Wales and was used by the King to assess dues owed to him. 900 years later, the name was given to a project in which more than a million people participated to provide a snapshot of life in the UK.

Participants (many of whom were school children) contributed content, which was linked with maps, photographs, and other data. It was all compiled onto a pair of LaserDiscs – the Community Disc and the National Disc – and accessed via a BBC Master computer and a Philips VP415 LaserVision player.

Armstrong came up with the idea, and the team compiled the project between 1984 and 1986. The system was eventually released at the end of 1986, and was aimed at schools, libraries, and universities. It was, alas, not a roaring sales success – the exact price per unit is difficult to pin down, but approximately £5,000 is a fair estimate. Government subsidies lowered the cost to around £3,000, but it was still out of reach for much of its audience.

As a resource, however, it has huge value, which will only increase as the years pass. Tibbetts drew parallels to the original Domesday Book, which took centuries for historians to recognize as a vital resource. "Perhaps," he mused, "40 years is simply too short a time for historians to perceive the Domesday Project as a sufficiently distant benchmark of useful research."

Perhaps. However, while hundreds of years have passed since the Domesday Book was compiled, the years have not been kind to the Domesday Project, thanks to technology's inexorable march.

"The original Domesday Book had one huge advantage over the Domesday Project when it comes to future-proofing and longevity," explained Tibbetts. "The vellum pages of the original Domesday have been preserved for 940 years so far, and it's likely to continue to exist well into the future.

"It took very few years for the bespoke technology of the BBC Domesday Project to be overtaken by universal media technologies."