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Submission + - China Testing Domestic Advanced Chipmaking Tool, Plan for AI Clusters (ft.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: The Financial Times reported that China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) is testing a deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machine made by Yuliangsheng, a Shanghai-based start-up, said two people with knowledge of the development. The ability to produce advanced DUV machines would represent a big victory in China’s ability to overcome US controls on chip exports, reduce reliance on western technology and increase the production capacity of advanced AI processors. China’s DUV effort has challenges to overcome. While the majority of its components in Yuliangsheng’s machine are made domestically, some parts are sourced from abroad, said those with knowledge of the effort. But they added the company was making efforts to make all parts in the country soon.

In a related development, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei announced Thursday new computing systems for powering artificial intelligence with its in-house Ascend chips despite heavy American sanctions against the company. Huawei announced it would roll out three new versions of its Ascend chips through the end of 2028, with the aim to “double compute” capabilities with each year’s release, and build AI superpods and superclusters from the new chips. According to Huawei, the 950PR, to be released early 2026, will feature 128GB of its in-house HBM delivering up to 1.6 TB/s of bandwidth, while the 950DT increases those figures to 144GB and 4 TB/s, but Huawei hasn’t disclosed how its in-house HBM is manufactured, what packaging is used, or which foundry is producing the chip itself. That is followed by Ascend 960 and 970, to be released in 2027 and 2028 respectively. Its new Atlas 950 supernode would support 8,192 Ascend 950 chips, and that the Atlas 950 SuperCluster would use more than 500,000 chips. A more advanced Atlas 960 version, slated for launch in 2027, would support 15,488 Ascend 960 chips per node. The full supercluster would have more than 1 million Ascend chips, according to Huawei. In a speech Thursday, Eric Xu, rotating chairman of Huawei, claimed that its forthcoming Atlas 950 supernode would deliver 6.7 times more computing power than Nvidia’s NVL144 system, also planned for launch next year, and the Atlas 950 supercluster would have 1.3 times the computing power of Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus supercomputer. China on Monday announced it was extending a probe into Nvidia over alleged monopolistic practices and ordered local tech giants to stop tests and orders of the Nvidia ("castrated by the US government") H20 and RTX Pro 6000D chips.

Submission + - Zuckerberg Humiliated on Stage After AI-Powered Smart Glasses Keep Glitching (dnyuz.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg was humiliated onstage not once, but twice, as his attempts to showcase the brilliance of Meta’s new AI-powered glasses were met with dismal failure.

Speaking at the company’s annual Meta Connect conference, Zuckerberg introduced the company’s second-generation smart Ray-Bans and a new neural wristband, as part of his vision for an AI that serves people in real-time.

Business Insider reported the vision unraveled when the AI glitched moments after the request, ignoring basic instructions and insisting that the employee had “already combined these ingredients.”

Submission + - C++ Commitee Prefers Bjarne Profiles Over Baxter Rustification

Submitted by robinsrowe
robinsrowe writes: No surprise, the C++ Committee is still trending toward C++ Profiles. It would have been a huge change had the Committee embraced Baxter's Rustification memory safety proposal. Would mean banning pointers. Making the C++ language much like Rust would deeply break every C++ program in the world. Article at TheRegister: “Rust-style safety model for C++ 'rejected' as profiles take priority” https://www.theregister.com/20...

The C++ standards committee abandoned a detailed proposal to create a rigorously safe subset of the language, according to the proposal's co-author, despite continuing anxiety about memory safety.

Article at Le Monde (in French): “The C++ standards committee rejected a proposal to create a secure subset of the language. Members prefer to focus on the Profiles framework pushed by C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup.” https://www.lemondeinformatiqu...

"If you mark your code to apply a Profile, some features of the C/C++ language will stop working," he says. There is also a small problem, these guidelines were not integrated into version 26 of C++, but simply into a white paper. The controversy surrounding the security of C++ opens the door to another solution with the use of another language. The first advocated by several American authorities is Rust, but there is also Google's experimental Carbon project. Unveiled in 2022, it also aims to modernize C++.

If Profiles are eventually adopted, it may Balkanize C++ by dividing C++ into safe and unsafe subsets. C++ Profiles won't fix the issue of making C pointers memory safe. A proposal to implement pointer memory safety is TrapC, but for the C language, not C++. Some say make the switch to Rust, but that doesn't solve the safety problems lurking in billions of lines of existing C/C++ code.

Submission + - Shai-Hulud: The novel self-replicating worm infecting hundreds of NPM packages (sysdig.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: On September 15, 2025, an engineer discovered a supply chain attack against the NPM repository. Unlike previous NPM attacks, this campaign used novel, self-propagating malware (also known as a worm) to continue spreading itself. At the time of this writing, approximately 200 infected packages have been identified, including several repositories such as the popular @ctrl/tinycolor and multiple owned by CrowdStrike.

Once executed, this novel worm — dubbed Shai-Hulud — steals credentials, exfiltrates them, and attempts to find additional NPM packages in which to copy itself. The malicious code also attempts to leak data on GitHub by making private repositories public.

Submission + - There isn't an AI bubble—there are three (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: AI is experiencing not just one, but three bubbles—speculative, infrastructure, and hype. How businesses respond to these bubbles will dictate their fate, and determine whether they will be able to survive when the bubbles burst.

Submission + - Doomed 'cannibal' star could soon explode in a supernova visible during day (space.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Astronomers have discovered the secret of a strange star system that has baffled them for years, finding it contains a dead star about to erupt after overfeeding on a stellar companion. The supernova explosion of this cosmic cannibal could be as bright as the moon, making it visible with the naked eye over Earth even in broad daylight.

The system in question is the double star V Sagittae located around 10,000 light-years from Earth, containing a white dwarf stellar remnant and its victim companion star, which orbit each other roughly twice every Earth day.

Submission + - Beer drinkers are mosquito magnets, according to a festival study (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Researchers set up a pop-up lab in connected shipping containers in 2023, and around 500 volunteers took part. First, they filled out a questionnaire about their hygiene, diet and behavior at the festival. Then, to see how attractive they are to mosquitoes, they placed their arm into a custom-designed cage filled with the pesky insects.

The cage had tiny holes so the mosquitoes could smell the person's arm but couldn't bite them. A video camera recorded how many insects landed on a volunteer's arm compared to a sugar feeder on the other side of the cage. By comparing the video footage and questionnaire answers, researchers saw some clear results emerge.

Participants who drank beer were 1.35 times more attractive to mosquitoes than those who didn't. The tiny vampires were also more likely to target people who had slept with someone the previous night. The study also revealed that recent showering and sunscreen make people less attractive to the buzzing menace.

Submission + - Burger King Uses Copyright Law to Nix Security Research (bankinfosecurity.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Self-described ethical hacker "BobDaHacker" posted Saturday a blog post disclosing authentication bypass and other vulnerabilities in the "Assistant" system used by Toronto-based Restaurant Brands International, parent company to the hamburger chain as well as Tim Hortons, Popeyes and Firehouse Subs.

The "Assistant" system is deployed across RBI brands, BobDaHacker said in the now-deleted report, which remains archived online.

The blog post, titled "We Hacked Burger King," was up for less than 48 hours, until the researcher said they received a copyright infringement notice transmitted by threat intel firm Cyble. "Their complaint specifically states that our use of the 'Burger King' trademark was unauthorized and creates 'a high degree of confusion among the public that the website is in some way endorsed by/or linked with our client,'" BobDaHacker said in a statement posted to the URL where their research previously was live.

Here it is on the wayback machine

Submission + - William Shatner Hasn't Earned Any Money From Star Trek Reruns (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: William Shatner hasn't earned "a penny" from reruns of the original Star Trek.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Shatner stated "the concept of syndication only came in after 'Star Trek' was canceled when someone from the unions said: 'Wait a minute, you're replaying all those films, those shows".

There was a strike, and ultimately the unions secured residual fees after 'Star Trek' ended and Shatner didn't receive any benefit. Shatner has been outspoken about the issue and stated "Anything before 1973 (that includes Star Trek Original Series) doesn’t pay a cent in Royalties".

Submission + - Ultra-wideband radio observations unravel polarization mystery of millisecond pu (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Within our Milky Way galaxy, in the direction of the constellation Vulpecula, a cosmic "lighthouse" named PSR B1937+21 spins at an astonishing rate of 642 revolutions per second. It emits electromagnetic pulses that rival the precision of atomic clocks.

The researchers unveiled the radiation secrets of PSR B1937+21: the linear polarization degree of the main pulse decreases as frequency increases, while the interpulse shows the opposite trend; the circular polarization degree of both emission regions strengthens with rising frequency; and the main-to-interpulse intensity ratio follows a power-law spectrum with an index of 0.52±0.02.

The results confirmed that emission height decreases as frequency increases, which manifests as a narrowing pulse width. The results also suggest that the main pulse and interpulse likely originate from different regions within the magnetosphere. These findings provide observational support for the "relativistic beaming model."

Submission + - Couples Are More Likely to Share Psychiatric Disorders, But Why? (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: For those partnered up in a long-term relationship, studies have shown that different health characteristics can sometimes be shared across the couple – and that extends to psychiatric disorders, according to new research.

Based on an analysis of more than 6 million couples across Taiwan, Denmark, and Sweden, an international team of researchers found that people were significantly more likely to have the same psychiatric conditions as their partners than would be expected by chance.

Those conditions included schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, autism, anxiety, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), substance abuse, and anorexia nervosa.

Submission + - Heart attacks may actually be infectious (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Scientists from Finland and the UK have uncovered groundbreaking evidence that heart attacks may be triggered by infectious processes rather than just cholesterol and lifestyle factors. Hidden bacterial biofilms inside arterial plaques can remain dormant for decades, shielded from the immune system, until activated by a viral infection or another external trigger. Once awakened, the bacteria spark inflammation, rupture arterial plaques, and cause blockages that lead to heart attacks.

Submission + - Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 traffick (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run complex online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits.
Instead he was trafficked across the border and his passport was taken away. Each day he was required to message hundreds of older American men on social media sites, building their trust until they shared their WhatsApp number. The contact would then be passed on to another scamming team.

If he failed to meet targets he would be punished with a stun gun or with gruelling physical penalties in the searing heat outside. Leaving the compound was not an option. “There are many armed guards,” he says.
To me, that’s such ignorance, in not understanding the scale of this and where it will grow to,” she says, adding that there are already signs of similar schemes emerging in countries such as Sri Lanka and Nigeria.

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