Comment Rest in peace (Score 1) 49
Farewell, mon capitaine. See you out there.
Submission + - Well, shit.
Cpt_Kirks writes: Patrick Stewart dead at 86.
Comment Re:Blame the correct thing (Score 2) 161
Millions of users don't have proper connectivity, they are stuck behind CGNAT and cannot self host or p2p. They are dependent on those walled gardens hosted by someone else.
Comment Re:Blame the correct thing (Score 2) 161
The continued use of legacy IPv4 and slow rollout of IPv6 breaks that notion completely. Now you have a two tier system of users with full connectivity, and many millions of second tier users with partial connectivity stuck behind CGNAT.
These second tier users can't self host, can't p2p, and become dependent on additional third parties for things that first-tier users take for granted. Many of these third parties are abusive in various ways.
Back in the day you could host a low bandwidth chat server such as IRC, and high bandwidth activities like file sharing or video calls were direct p2p. Now many users cannot p2p so you need a high bandwidth and low latency server to relay all of that traffic. Only a few large players have the resources to do this.
Because there are so many second-tier users now this abusive system has become the norm, and many users aren't even aware of other options.
Submission + - Bank of America kindly asks that you don't share your password with your AI asst (techcrunch.com)
schwit1 writes: In an email blast to customers titled “Protecting your finances in the Al World,” Bank of America urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service, “including an Al-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf.”
You can practically sense the frustration in the person sending the email. Still, customers are increasingly handing over their log-ins as personal AI assistants grow more popular. Sharing your banking username and password with an AI assistant runs the risk that it could do something with your finances without your knowledge, or that your bank thinks someone’s raiding your account and locks you out of it. Worse, a security flaw in the AI assistant could result in it leaking your banking credentials elsewhere, giving financially motivated hackers a way into your bank account.
You can practically sense the frustration in the person sending the email. Still, customers are increasingly handing over their log-ins as personal AI assistants grow more popular. Sharing your banking username and password with an AI assistant runs the risk that it could do something with your finances without your knowledge, or that your bank thinks someone’s raiding your account and locks you out of it. Worse, a security flaw in the AI assistant could result in it leaking your banking credentials elsewhere, giving financially motivated hackers a way into your bank account.
Comment Re:Why would it be Linux based? (Score 1) 65
Sure there has been ARM64 windows for 5+ years, but it generally has poor reviews - compatibility issues (x64 emulation is only in userland so drivers won't work unless there's a native version), poor performance (mostly caused by emulation) etc.
Linux applications already natively support ARM64, and it runs the same kernel with the same drivers so most of these problems don't exist.
Apple are also in a much better place as they can mandate ARM64 as the only way forward. For Apple developers porting to ARM64 is a hard requirement unless you want to abandon your software, whereas for Windows developers porting to ARM64 is a cost with very little benefit. That's why virtually all mac software is now native ARM64, whereas for Windows it's a very small percentage.
Submission + - This frog bacterium wiped out cancer tumors in mice with a single dose (sciencedaily.com)
fahrbot-bot writes: Science Daily has reported that scientists at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) have identified a naturally occurring bacterium from the intestines of Japanese tree frogs (Dryophytes japonicus) that demonstrated remarkable anticancer activity in mice. The findings, published in Gut Microbes, introduce a new approach to cancer treatment that uses living bacteria to directly target tumors rather than simply altering the gut microbiome.
In a mouse model of colorectal cancer, a single intravenous dose of E. americana completely eliminated tumors, producing a 100% complete response (CR) rate. The researchers emphasize that these findings are limited to mice, but they believe the results provide an encouraging proof of concept for developing new bacterial cancer therapies.
First, E. americana directly attacks tumors. As a facultative anaerobic bacterium, it thrives in both oxygen rich and oxygen poor environments, allowing it to multiply inside the oxygen deprived regions commonly found within tumors. Once there, the bacterial population increased by roughly 3,000 fold within 24 hours after treatment, directly damaging cancer cells.
Second, the bacterium stimulates the immune system. Its presence attracted T cells, B cells, and neutrophils into tumors. These immune cells then released inflammatory signaling molecules, including TNF- and IFN-, which strengthened the immune response and promoted cancer cell death.
One of the most striking findings was that E. americana accumulated almost exclusively inside tumors and did not colonize healthy organs.
They found that the bacteria were rapidly cleared from the bloodstream, with a half life of approximately 1.2 hours, and became undetectable within 24 hours. No bacterial colonization was detected in healthy organs, including the liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys, or heart.
The treatment caused only mild, temporary inflammation that returned to normal within 72 hours. During a 60 day observation period, the researchers found no evidence of chronic toxicity.
In a mouse model of colorectal cancer, a single intravenous dose of E. americana completely eliminated tumors, producing a 100% complete response (CR) rate. The researchers emphasize that these findings are limited to mice, but they believe the results provide an encouraging proof of concept for developing new bacterial cancer therapies.
First, E. americana directly attacks tumors. As a facultative anaerobic bacterium, it thrives in both oxygen rich and oxygen poor environments, allowing it to multiply inside the oxygen deprived regions commonly found within tumors. Once there, the bacterial population increased by roughly 3,000 fold within 24 hours after treatment, directly damaging cancer cells.
Second, the bacterium stimulates the immune system. Its presence attracted T cells, B cells, and neutrophils into tumors. These immune cells then released inflammatory signaling molecules, including TNF- and IFN-, which strengthened the immune response and promoted cancer cell death.
One of the most striking findings was that E. americana accumulated almost exclusively inside tumors and did not colonize healthy organs.
They found that the bacteria were rapidly cleared from the bloodstream, with a half life of approximately 1.2 hours, and became undetectable within 24 hours. No bacterial colonization was detected in healthy organs, including the liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys, or heart.
The treatment caused only mild, temporary inflammation that returned to normal within 72 hours. During a 60 day observation period, the researchers found no evidence of chronic toxicity.
Submission + - Blue Chip - fully US supply chain laptop (anduril.com)
fadethepolice writes: Anduril, arguing that its manuftacuring capabilities are directly applicable to laptop manufacturing is starting a project for a fully 100 percent US sourced laptop. The computer will use a Qualcomm snapdragon SOC. I did not see any information for the OS, but I'm assuming with the type of processor this will be Linux based?
Comment Re:Big Laundry hated the Washing Machine (Score -1, Troll) 146
But it's the same with any new technology, the incumbents hate it and either ignore it and hope it goes away, or try to push back against it, stifling progress. Usually this is a kneejerk response from people who are afraid of change and don't even understand the new tech.
Sensible people evaluate the new technology properly and determine how to make the best use of it, while understanding what weaknesses it might have and when its use might not always be the best option.
Anyone who dismisses a new technology without having properly tested and understood it is not worth listening to.
Comment There is no good marker for the "age" of a cell. (Score 2) 22
There is no good marker for the "age" of a cell.
Google result:
Key Methods Used to Estimate Cellular and Biological Age
https://www.google.com/search?...
Google result:
Key Methods Used to Estimate Cellular and Biological Age
https://www.google.com/search?...
Submission + - Will AI expose the rickety infrastructure of the internet? (techcrunch.com)
sziring writes: A startling announcement went out earlier this week: Due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the open source programming language PHP, website owners had to immediately patch their sites â" or if they couldnâ(TM)t update right away, they should take the sites down to be safe.
On this weekâ(TM)s episode of TechCrunchâ(TM)s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean Oâ(TM)Kane, and I discussed the significance of the PHP-ocalypse and whether weâ(TM)ll see more incidents like this in the future.
Sean called this âoea real reckoning momentâ that highlights how âoewhen you get down to the bone level of the internet,â everything seems to be âoeheld together by glue and dreams.â And with widespread access to large language models and AI agents, itâ(TM)s only going to become easier to find these vulnerabilities. (That said, these specific vulnerabilities were found by human researchers, not AI models.)
Kirsten, meanwhile, wondered if weâ(TM)re about to see the âoenext level of prepper doom [â¦] because you could see how banks could get exploited, and [with] data and privacy concerns, it just feels a lot bigger than we can fix right now.â
Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Sean Oâ(TM)Kane: The internet is breaking in lots of ways this week, it seems.
I think the best way to think about this, if people are coming into this kind of cold: How many times over the last 10 years have we had these moments where something breaks or something nearly breaks, where one person maintaining one tiny repro repository as a hobby or whatever happens to catch that something nefarious is going on and and saves us from the infrastructure of the internet completely crumbling?
Now multiply that by a billion, when people have access to not only extremely advanced software in the form of these LLMs that everybody uses, but also the ability to task them to go out and do it themselves, with creating AI agents that are single-minded at accomplishing those things.
Weâ(TM)re seeing a balance of two things happening this week. One is a bunch of the labs and companies like Google and OpenAI actually had people go out and find a bunch of vulnerabilities, including the one with PHP. And then we also have a bunch of people seeming to rush to take advantage of those vulnerabilities to try and hack into websites. So we have governments taking down websites, we have really popular websites that are going down briefly to be able to fix this vulnerability.
This is a real reckoning moment, where weâ(TM)re going to find out the downside risk of building so much of the internet on open source technology like PHP. When you really get down to the bone level of the internet, it is held together with glue and dreams.
On this weekâ(TM)s episode of TechCrunchâ(TM)s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean Oâ(TM)Kane, and I discussed the significance of the PHP-ocalypse and whether weâ(TM)ll see more incidents like this in the future.
Sean called this âoea real reckoning momentâ that highlights how âoewhen you get down to the bone level of the internet,â everything seems to be âoeheld together by glue and dreams.â And with widespread access to large language models and AI agents, itâ(TM)s only going to become easier to find these vulnerabilities. (That said, these specific vulnerabilities were found by human researchers, not AI models.)
Kirsten, meanwhile, wondered if weâ(TM)re about to see the âoenext level of prepper doom [â¦] because you could see how banks could get exploited, and [with] data and privacy concerns, it just feels a lot bigger than we can fix right now.â
Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Sean Oâ(TM)Kane: The internet is breaking in lots of ways this week, it seems.
I think the best way to think about this, if people are coming into this kind of cold: How many times over the last 10 years have we had these moments where something breaks or something nearly breaks, where one person maintaining one tiny repro repository as a hobby or whatever happens to catch that something nefarious is going on and and saves us from the infrastructure of the internet completely crumbling?
Now multiply that by a billion, when people have access to not only extremely advanced software in the form of these LLMs that everybody uses, but also the ability to task them to go out and do it themselves, with creating AI agents that are single-minded at accomplishing those things.
Weâ(TM)re seeing a balance of two things happening this week. One is a bunch of the labs and companies like Google and OpenAI actually had people go out and find a bunch of vulnerabilities, including the one with PHP. And then we also have a bunch of people seeming to rush to take advantage of those vulnerabilities to try and hack into websites. So we have governments taking down websites, we have really popular websites that are going down briefly to be able to fix this vulnerability.
This is a real reckoning moment, where weâ(TM)re going to find out the downside risk of building so much of the internet on open source technology like PHP. When you really get down to the bone level of the internet, it is held together with glue and dreams.
Comment Re:Lazy owners. (Score 1) 132
It makes sense in some cases to have a cleaning fee at the end rather than building it in to the nightly cost.
A decent hotel will clean your room every day, an airbnb will not - they will just clean the place after you leave ready for the next guest. Thus the cleaning costs are the same wether you stay 1 night or 1 month.
If you're not getting daily cleanings it doesn't make sense to factor the cost into the nightly rate.
Submission + - The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency (yahoo.com) 1
schwit1 writes: The Pentagon has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority.
Neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor any other senior Pentagon official has publicly mentioned the agency since it was established this April — a conspicuous omission for a department that has reveled in announcing other major changes aimed at modernizing the military or adopting hard-nosed new policies against foreign adversaries.
Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda.
Special Operations Command and U.S. Cyber Command both objected to creating the new agency, fearing it would cut into their budgets, according to the two former intelligence officials and one former senior U.S. national security official.
But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations.
Many of the people who spoke argued that the aggressive new initiative is needed to help the Pentagon counter foreign adversaries they say are harnessing artificial intelligence and advanced commercial technologies, such as drones, in creative ways that could erode America's military advantage.
Neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor any other senior Pentagon official has publicly mentioned the agency since it was established this April — a conspicuous omission for a department that has reveled in announcing other major changes aimed at modernizing the military or adopting hard-nosed new policies against foreign adversaries.
Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda.
Special Operations Command and U.S. Cyber Command both objected to creating the new agency, fearing it would cut into their budgets, according to the two former intelligence officials and one former senior U.S. national security official.
But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations.
Many of the people who spoke argued that the aggressive new initiative is needed to help the Pentagon counter foreign adversaries they say are harnessing artificial intelligence and advanced commercial technologies, such as drones, in creative ways that could erode America's military advantage.
Submission + - Microsoft says October updates didn't actually fix VPN issues (bleepingcomputer.com)
joshuark writes: Microsoft says it mistakenly flagged a bug causing Always On VPN connection issues as fixed in the October 2026 Windows 11 cumulative updates.
Always On VPN replaced the legacy DirectAccess technology and supports domain-joined, non-domain-joined, and Microsoft Entra ID–joined devices running Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server.
It runs in the background and establishes secure tunnels back to the user's corporate network whenever their device connects to the internet.
Microsoft first acknowledged the issue in a service alert sent to IT administrators in late September, saying it was triggered on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and later after installing the September 2026 security updates when the initial Always On VPN connection failed (e.g., when using automatic protocol selection with IKEv2 and SSTP).
"When automatic protocol selection or protocol fallback was configured, affected VPN connections could remain stuck in a Connecting state or fail to connect after an initial connection attempt failed," it said. "In some cases, subsequent connection attempts could display the error, 'The specified port is already in use.'"
After releasing the October 2026 Patch Tuesday Windows 11 cumulative updates, Microsoft marked the bug as resolved, but in a Tuesday update it said the issues weren't actually addressed and that a fix would ship later.
"This disclosure was mistakenly updated to Resolved status on October 13, 2026. We have returned its status to Mitigated," it said in a service alert sent to IT admins. "A resolution for this issue is planned to be included in an update to be released in the coming weeks. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion."
While Microsoft continues working on a permanent solution, it shared a temporary fix that requires affected customers to choose one of two VPN tunneling protocols to work around the issue.
Always On VPN replaced the legacy DirectAccess technology and supports domain-joined, non-domain-joined, and Microsoft Entra ID–joined devices running Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server.
It runs in the background and establishes secure tunnels back to the user's corporate network whenever their device connects to the internet.
Microsoft first acknowledged the issue in a service alert sent to IT administrators in late September, saying it was triggered on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and later after installing the September 2026 security updates when the initial Always On VPN connection failed (e.g., when using automatic protocol selection with IKEv2 and SSTP).
"When automatic protocol selection or protocol fallback was configured, affected VPN connections could remain stuck in a Connecting state or fail to connect after an initial connection attempt failed," it said. "In some cases, subsequent connection attempts could display the error, 'The specified port is already in use.'"
After releasing the October 2026 Patch Tuesday Windows 11 cumulative updates, Microsoft marked the bug as resolved, but in a Tuesday update it said the issues weren't actually addressed and that a fix would ship later.
"This disclosure was mistakenly updated to Resolved status on October 13, 2026. We have returned its status to Mitigated," it said in a service alert sent to IT admins. "A resolution for this issue is planned to be included in an update to be released in the coming weeks. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion."
While Microsoft continues working on a permanent solution, it shared a temporary fix that requires affected customers to choose one of two VPN tunneling protocols to work around the issue.
Comment Re:Do people still remember "oxygen-free copper"? (Score 1) 63
Sent through a physical cable you either receive the original data or not.
Once you are receiving the original data - either through clean transmission, or because error correction has fixed any transmission errors, it doesn't get any better.
At the relatively low bandwidth needed for audio data, there are many protocols and physical carriers capable of transmitting the data and ensuring a perfect copy is received even over low quality cabling.
