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Submission + - Computer Misuse Act of 1990 hamstrung cyber security

An anonymous reader writes: Computer Misuse Act of 1990 – which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security

“The long-awaited reform of Britain’s outdated Computer Misuse Act of 1990 – which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security professionals and researchers for years – is to be included in a new National Security Bill.”

“It comes partly in response to the 2024 Southport terror attack, and more recent incidents targeting Britain’s Jewish community, and will create offences around creating and disseminating harmful material online, and according to Westminster will close gaps within the nation’s state threats legislation and align it more closely with anti-terror laws.”

Submission + - CERN Open Sources Its KiCad Component Libraries

ewhac writes: CERN, a long-time Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad ("KEE-kad"), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It's gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics fabricators (rather than the traditional step of converting the layouts to Gerber files). Over the years, CERN have also developed their own symbol and footprint libraries to support their own internal electronic designs. Last week, CERN released those KiCad component libraries, containing over 17,000 symbols, under the CERN Open Hardware License (permissive version).

Submission + - Guy Built an Entire Wikipedia that's 100% AI Hallucinations (x.com) 2

schwit1 writes: It's called Halupedia

Nothing on the site existed before you clicked. Every article was generated the second you arrived.

The site has one rule: the universe only exists when you visit it.

It looks exactly like wikipedia, same fonts, same layout, same scholarly citations, same "stumble" button for random articles.

The only difference is none of it is real.

Here are some actual articles currently in the encyclopedia:

> the great pigeon census of 1887
> the ministry of slightly wrong maps
> Chaldic arithmetic — a branch of mathematics where subtraction is forbidden
> Armund the river mapper — a cartographer who mapped 14,000 leagues of river without leaving his chair
> The society for the prevention of unnecessary Tuesdays

Every article page also tells you how many people are reading it right now. it says: "you alone are consulting this folio at present."

The creator's own tagline for the site is the most unhinged sentence i've read this year:

"an encyclopedia of a universe that does not exist until you visit it"

The entire backend is a single open source repo called vibeserver. One guy. One description on github: "a little webserver making things up just in time."

Submission + - How I added an LLM-based grammar checking + TeX math import to LibreOffice

KeithCu writes: At Microsoft, I spent five years working on the text components RichEdit and Quill, and came to understand the “physics” of word processing: the file formats, data structures, and algorithms that provided fast access to text and properties, independent of the length of the file. When I decided to add an async AI grammar checker to my LibreOffice plugin WriterAgent, I knew what I was getting into, but I underestimated the trickery of LibreOffice’s UNO.

Submission + - Sysadmin Creates "ModuleJail" to Automatically Blacklist Unused Kernel Modules

internet-redstar writes: After the recent wave of Linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerabilities like “Copy Fail” and “Dirty Frag”, Belgian Linux sysadmin and Tesla Hacker "Jasper Nuyens" got tired of the idea of manually blacklisting dozens or even hundreds of obscure kernel modules across large fleets of Linux systems in the near future. So he wrote ModuleJail, a GPLv3 shell script that scans a running Linux system and automatically blacklists currently unused kernel modules, reducing kernel attack surface without requiring a reboot. The idea is simple: many modern Linux privilege escalation bugs target obscure or rarely used kernel functionality that is still enabled by default on servers that do not actually need it. ModuleJail works across major distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux and Arch Linux, generating 1 modprobe blacklist rules file while preserving commonly used modules. Nuyens argues that the increasing speed of AI-assisted vulnerability discovery will likely turn kernel hardening and attack surface reduction into a much bigger operational priority for sysadmins over the next few weeks and months.

Submission + - Russian Ship Carrying Nuclear Reactors Was Heading To North Korea When It Sank (artvoice.com)

schwit1 writes: A Russian cargo ship carrying what its own captain later admitted were components for two submarine nuclear reactors sank off the coast of Spain in December 2024, and a CNN investigation published Monday May 12, 2026 reveals the full picture of where those reactors were likely headed, what they were for and what may have caused the ship to go down.

The vessel, the Ursa Major, also known as Sparta 3, sank approximately 100 kilometers off the Spanish coast on December 23-24, 2024, after a series of explosions killed two crew members.

The Russian state-linked owner called it a terrorist attack. But a Spanish investigation obtained by CNN suggests the hull may have been pierced by a Barracuda supercavitating torpedo, a high-speed weapon possessed by only a handful of the world’s most elite militaries, including the United States.

The suspected destination was not Vladivostok, as the public shipping manifest claimed.

Russian captain Igor Anisimov, per sources familiar with the Spanish investigation, believed he was taking the reactors to the port of Rason in North Korea.

Comment Not every hobby should be a career (Score 1) 193

Arts and Humanities are fine....as pursuits of the leisure class who don't need to make living from them, or for people who work for a living to enjoy as hobbies.

Everyone is free to enjoy arts and humanities, but it's cruel to encourage expectations of gainful employment and silly to expect to
make a living from them. Confusing jobs and careers with hobbies can be financially deadly, so I didn't.

Careers fund hobbies so you can enjoy both. For example I can afford to collect and restore classic motorcycles because I did not try to make it a business. In consequence I easily afforded a well equipped personal workshop instead of starving for years to establish a financially vulnerable business. Fixing fighters paid much better.

Comment Trust is a vulnerability. (Score 2) 95

It's silly to trust other nations with one's data because the nation one made friendly arrangements with can replace the administration you trusted and purge its appointees.

Europe should not want any but FOSS because proprietary software only belongs to its creator. To use it is submission to its owners. The cost to European governments to code any software required is a trifle compared to relying on the kindness of their enemies.

No non-corrupt reasons exist to want the shackles of proprietary software. That's like wanting proprietary speech.

Comment Choose like the first time SSD were expensive (Score 1) 70

When prices change, evaluate priorities.

If a tool costs a thousand dollars but will generate sufficient profit or save time or add convenience to justify the expense, I'd buy the tool. A thousand bucks is quite affordable for many skilled trades machine budgets. Tradespeople are normal people too.

If a thousand bucks is not affordable, choose different parts accordingly, for example using multiple smaller and/or different storage drives.

If a toy costs a thousand dollars and that is too expensive, choose a different toy or save up for one you prefer. It's easy to not buy new hardware which doesn't make one money.

If buying the entire machine at once is unaffordable, buy parts gradually.
If a used machine solves one's problem for less money, buy proven used PCs.

Submission + - Chrome silent install of 4GB AI model without consent gets expensive. (thatprivacyguy.com)

couchslug writes: Widespread unasked for downloads devour bandwidth squandering energy:

From the parent article:

"Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed [1]. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched.

This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.

The legal analysis is the same one I gave for the Anthropic case. The environmental analysis is new. At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4 GB binary they did not request."

Submission + - Canvas hacked and down (bleepingcomputer.com)

tphb writes: In the middle of final's season, Instructure Canvas, the widely used learning management system for thousands of schools and universities such as Harvard, Colorado, and Georgia tech has been hacked and is currently down. Per a report from Bleeping Computer, the company reported a breach on May 1. Today, school landing pages were replaced by a message from the hacking consortium ShinyHunters claiming that they would release the data by May 12th unless a ransom is paid. Shortly thereafter all school landing sites went offline for "maintenance".

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