Permanent Daylight Savings Time was tried and reversed in 1974, because people hated it ...

Source: NY Times and Washingtonian

In Canada, the three Western provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan) moved to permanent daylight savings today.

The team of doctors in Canada analyzed available research on what permanent daylight savings would do to human health, and recommended that permanent standard time be used instead.

Last August, NASA's contracted a company to boost the Swift space telescope.

But the rescue mission had control and positioning problems, and the whole thing was called off.

I hope that another mission succeeds for Hubble (and perhaps Swift?)

Last December, a client of 8 years informed me that they no longer have the traffic that generates revenue to justify spending money on my services.

The web site is a reference to some well known software, and documents all the intricacies of how to use it. They relied on ads because they had a lot of traffic when someone searches for the name of the software and a feature of it.

That traffic plummeted because "AI is killing content web sites" (their words).

So I totally believe Reddit on this, and many other sites will follow in the next year or two.

(Disclaimer: Written with an AI collaborator, because human editors were apparently too busy copy-pasting to proofread.)

Speaking of slop, notice how the summary ends by repeating the exact same sentence twice:

"It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator."
"Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quips that maybe 'It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator...'"

When humans publish duplicate-riddled writeups without reading them, it really raises the question of whether "human slop" is even setting a higher bar than "AI slop."

I was going to complain about the exact same repetition that they did in the summary.

A couple of weeks ago, I submitted an article about Canadian researchers recommended that if/when daylight savings time is abolished, we should go back on standard time, and not permanent summer time. That is because politicians almost everywhere are hell bent on switching to year round summer time.

The editors massacred my submission, removing the information above.

And the ensuing discussion was totally derailed, missing the main point.

I mean I'm pretty sure they got a lot of the money and spectrum to do this by claiming they would do it with satellites, not just the same terrestrial cell towers (not even new ones).

Actually, the .12 had fixes for other PHP CVEs.
But it was a .13 that did fix the CVEs in question (which are remote code executions).

The repositories were being hammered and the fix was delayed for most people.

Excerpt:

Changes for php8.3 (php8.3-zip php8.3-xml php8.3-readline php8.3-opcache php8.3-cli php8.3-phpdbg php8.3-mysql php8.3-mbstring php8.3-gd php8.3-fpm php8.3-dev php8.3-curl php8.3-cgi php8.3-bcmath php8.3-common) ---
php8.3 (8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.13) noble-security; urgency=medium

    * SECURITY UPDATE: Remote RCE via state corruption issue
        - debian/patches/CVE-2026-109618_109619.patch: Avoid state corruption via
            bailout in Zend/tests/bug40770.phpt, Zend/tests/bug54268.phpt, ...
        - CVE-2026-109618
        - CVE-2026-109619

  -- Marc Deslauriers Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:16:58 -0400

Although it says Monday 19 Oct, it was not available in the repositories (embargoed) until 10 am Eastern Wednesday 20th of Oct.

But the repository being under load delayed that for most people.

If you are using a distro with long term support (LTS), like I am, they backport the patch to the version that they have.

I am on Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS, and the change was from

8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11
To
8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12

So, .11 to .12.

This should have been posted before 10 am EDT.

Ubuntu LTS (26.04, 24,04, and 22.04) got the fix yesterday, as patches to the existing PHP version.

This is from 24.04:

Upgraded:
        php8.3-bcmath:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-cgi:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-cli:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-common:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-curl:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-dev:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-fpm:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-gd:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-mbstring:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-mysql:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-opcache:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-phpdbg:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-readline:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-xml:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12
        php8.3-zip:amd64 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.11 => 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.12

There is now a PHP2Shell.

... an attacker without a login can run code on Magento 2.4.9, WordPress 7.1.2, Drupal 11.4.3, Joomla 6.1.4, MediaWiki 1.46.2, Roundcube 1.7.4, phpMyAdmin 5.2.3, Nextcloud 35.0.1, Laravel 13.11, Symfony 8.1 and WHMCS. The exploit tool PHP2Shell, credited to Calif, combines both bugs into one attack that needs no login.

There will be lots of hacked sites in the coming days and weeks.

How about this for punditry?

Cringley thinks Apple and Intel are merging.

Also, there has been a recurring comment here on Slashdot about Robert X Cringley, with all sorts of claims allegedly made by him. However, it is posted anonymously, and does not provide sources..

The "working at Apple as employee #12" part appears on a speaker biography.

The same bio also says he taught for several years at Stanford.

This Reddit comment says that he claimed he has a PhD from Stanford when he worked at Infoworld.

This page has more of his claims (invented the trash can icon, ...), and details his foray into Kickstarter and Minecraft.

So, lots of questions about him, to say the least ...

- It's impossible to prove anything. Somalia was in the midst of a civil war, there are no records.

The civil war is not even the case.
I have a Somali friend who was born perhaps two decades before the civil war started in 1990.

He told me that he does not know when he was born, simply because there are no birth records in Somalia. He needed this info to apply for something in a Western country.

He said the only way to know for sure is to go to the village elders who will remember when he was born based on a certain event (natural disaster, war, or other notable event).

With people displaced and such in the civil war, it could only be worse ...

which could make running out of gas mid-journey a doubly-frightening thing.

From @sif@cathode.church (fediverse):
7" Apple Watch just dropped.

Polar circle?
Oh you mean the Arctic Circle.
Hardly ...

I live at latitude 43.44 N.

That is south of Florence Italy, and Nice and Cannes, France.
Also south of Madison, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis Minnesota.

And the most populous places in Canada are nearby.

But yeah, to Americans, we are "up north", so we have to be in the Arctic Circle.

Finally!

Someone who gets it ...

The editors massacred the submission, making the actual point obscure ...

The point they make is: "It is highly likely that the twice annual clock change will be abolished by legislators. When that happens we should go to standard time and NOT summer time".

But, if you read the vast majority of comments, they totally miss the points the researchers made. Some of them are highly upmodded even ...

The following was in my submission on the firehose, but the editors opted to remove it ...

Some of the key points, from the published article's summary:

1. Permanent DST preserves later evening light that may facilitate commuting, recreation, social participation, and some economic activity, but it also prolongs darkness on winter mornings, with potential adverse effects on circadian alignment, sleep, mood, education, and productivity.
2. Permanent ST is more closely aligned with circadian biology, although earlier dusk may limit some evening activities.
3. Choosing Permanent ST is supported by accumulated evidence related to health and the recommendations of major sleep and chronobiology societies; if Canadian jurisdictions choose to adopt Permanent DST, implementation should include anticipatory mitigation, protection for disproportionately affected groups, and transparent surveillance of population health impacts.

Unfortunately, it seems that politicians and a good chunk of the public prefer Permanent DST.