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Comment Re: Disclosure Timing Drama Part 2.0 (Score 1) 23

I suspect part of it is that the mitigation for DirtyFrag covers it, so everyone who blocked all the modules in question when that had only an incomplete patch probably hasn't unblocked them yet. I think this is the 4th patch for these modules, and only got a new name rather than just "there's still a way to get this code to do the wrong thing" because a different outside team found this one.

Comment Re: Embargo intrigue (Score 1) 44

Yeah, and the person who released the information first was operating in an "if I noticed this, doing only as much as I'm doing, surely attackers would also notice" mode. Possibly some patches these days are sufficiently obvious as to their correctness and also effect that they should first become public as a set of stable releases. This was a kind of special case, as CopyFail was the combination of some code doing something strange with one user not being prepared for it, and fixed the user. If there are other users that also aren't prepared, fixing them isn't going to be subtle.

Comment Re: Gun cam, in a maneuvering jet (Score 1) 83

How shadows and reflections move when you're 10 milies from a mostly flat surface a thousand miles across is legitimately hard to analyze for a visual system that evolved on the ground, especially if you throw in small periodic surface orientation variations. Given how complicated it is to explain rare rainbow-related phenomena like sun dogs, it would be surprising if we'd identified and explained everything that can appear when flying above the ocean.

Comment Re: Founder Guilty Of Negligence (Score 3, Informative) 110

According to the article, they (by way of their cloud provider) had DR backups, which they were able to get restored. But getting offline backups restored takes longer than the SLAs they give their customers and loses some data that hasn't been copied offline yet, which is why they also have backups that are complete and immediately available, using the API key that the attacker -- sorry, AI -- found in a file it wasn't supposed to have access to.

Submission + - COMMAND.COM is back!

kevin lyda writes: Microsoft's best try at an operating system, COMMAND.COM from MS-DOS 3.3, is now a native shell for Unix-like systems.

The project recreates the DOS command-line experience while running on a modern Unix environment. It supports a small, historically inspired command set, .BAT-style scripting, and even maps DOS concepts like drive letters onto the Unix filesystem. You can even experience the joy of editing a CONFIG.SYS file (this time as an INI style file).

Unlike a simple emulator, it’s designed to work as a real shell: it can be used as a login shell or as an interpreter for batch files (within reason, given the differences between DOS and Unix semantics). The result is an unusual hybrid of DOS-style command parsing layered on top of Unix processes.

It’s implemented in Go for maximum portability and aims to balance authenticity with just enough practicality to be usable.

Source and release on codeberg.

Comment Re: Is anyone already doing this? (Score 1) 64

That works at some intersections. At others, buildings and echoes make it pretty much impossible to tell if the siren you hear is an emergency vehicle about to cross the intersection in front of you where you have a green light, or there's some emergency somewhere else, which is often true. They could still go through red lights, but not at full speed. With the new system, they find that the light is green for them at every intersection, and they don't have to slow down.

Comment Re: That translates into job losses (Score 1) 48

I think what you think of as recipients resenting handouts is commonly misunderstood. People have a basic need to feel like they are doing something worthwhile, which is traditionally fulfilled by them having jobs that pay them an amount that indicates how much other people value the work. Telling people they need handouts, then, indicates that they aren't capable of doing meaningful work. On the other hand, if people see that their work is valuable to people who can't afford to pay them a living wage (for example, daycare providers for retail workers who are parents), they're much more willing for somebody else to provide the money. UBI also helps the perception, in that there's no implication that recipients aren't also capable of getting paid for their work, since it's universal, and that frees people to look for things to do that they personally value but may not have built-in funding.

Of course, none of this helps if no occupations people can do are worthwhile any more because AI just does it better. You still have to worry about a high rate of idleness, even if the people aren't broke, but that's a somewhat different problem.

Comment Re: More naunced (Score 2) 36

My favorite bug was when they started using message-signaled interrupts. When enabling MSI, they didn't disable the traditional IRQ, and my machine would keep delivering it. In particular, the network card would do something to toggle the IRQ line whenever a packet came in, but would leave the line triggered when idle. If this persisted for five minutes, the kernel would decide that line was stuck and mask it, but it was shared with my hard drive, whose driver would then never find out that operations had completed. Very odd to debug a computer that would fail if you left it alone too long, and nothing suggested that the network card was using that IRQ once it was configured to use MSI instead.

The fun part was that other people had machines where disabling the IRQ would also disable the MSI, so my fix broke other motherboards, and the PCI standard said something that could be interpreted as requiring either behavior. Fortunately, there was something you could check about the manufacturer to decide what to expect.

Comment Re: It's weird (Score 1) 118

Applications which required getting mRNA into particular cells had problems with delivery, unless those cells were in the liver where everything tends to end up eventually. But getting cells in muscles in one arm to present antigens of a respiratory disease turns out to be fine for producing an immune response to the disease when it shows up in the lungs, so delivery isn't an issue for vaccines. This was known at the time of the article, but all the diseases with known proteins that would make good antigens already had approved vaccines, and nobody really wanted to develop a flu vaccine technology that wasn't more effective and just didn't take all summer to grow after settling on a strain. Then COVID showed up, and the ability to produce a vaccine knowing just the antigen and do it fast was suddenly important.

For that matter, this year it would be useful to be able to change the flu vaccine between Thanksgiving and New Years, because they picked the wrong H3N2 in the spring, but we don't have a suitable regulatory framework for approving that change, even though it's easy to make with mRNA.

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