The email wasn't even too good to be true. The nasty phishing emails are the ones where the recipient is supposed to get a real email on the topic, but it's because of a publicly known event and outsiders could easily make up the content, so they just need to find a bunch of likely recipients.

I think the "you've been assigned the mandatory phishing training" emails should come from an external sender and contain a link to get into the extended training, and you should only get the short refresher by finding it through verified sources. Not only would this be a good placement test, it would test that official communications are actually hard to fake and possible to verify using the process in the training.

"In response to the embarrassing data breach that hit the news recently, we've assigned every employee at the company an online training session about phishing at this link. By sure to take it immediately, because it's a legal requirement for our settlement and delays could affect your employment." --Russian Hackers

Doing it in software means you can move CPUs from one machine to another based on the time of day. Your CI infrastructure can lose some resources from its UI at night and make another server for nightly builds when most of your users are away, without either having a VM layer in between or needing the builds to happen on a kernel configured with the features needed by the UI.

The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of the same thing for a large population. It's likely that the cost for each different sequence will come down if it's worth designing and building equipment that switches every dose, but there's an intermediate time between proving that the treatment is useful and being able to provide it in a cost-effective way.

It's clearly all the superfans who hear that there's a new album and immediately drive into their local record store. (Rather than doing the sensible, calm thing and entering the store on foot.)

With their COVID vaccine, the first time was the highest dose they knew would have only acceptable side effects, and they reduced it for the next iteration when they saw how effective it was. (If you remember the myocarditis rare side effect, that was only seen with the first version.) I would guess that the next step is backing off on the dosage to reduce the side effects now that they have results on effectiveness, which will also let them make a better case for younger people at less risk from the flu.

Some important background for this is that, around 1900, mathematics got formalized to the point that there is a standard for whether a proof is valid or not that doesn't depend on humans thinking about it, just doing a bit calculation following an algorithm. However, it is such a large calculation that nobody wrote complete formal proofs or verified all of the steps (since they'd be spending huge amounts of time on obvious parts, and not the novel aspects). Then, in the past 20 years, people have made computer systems that work on complete formal proofs while showing you the interesting parts, with the rest in macros, and check these proofs automatically. This means that finding proofs has the form of things like what AlphaZero is good at: something to check if moves are legal and a win condition. However, only a relatively small portion of mathematical research has been put into Lean so far, and that doesn't include the sorts of obscure results that often turn out to be useful in other problems. So the current wave is using LLMs to find results in the literature that might be relevant and producing formal versions of them, game AI to put them together, and deterministic validation to check each of these as it goes along and then people can see at the end that the calculation shows the proof is valid. The only part requiring mathematicians is checking that what the proof proves is what they understood the open question to be.

Eric S. Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which inspired Mozilla to make their browser open source. For some reason, this means they name their extended support releases after him.

Most US population centers are in places east of the point in their time zones where the sun is overhead (or due south) at noon, and being a bit west is better than being a bit (or very, for New England) east. This means that DST is mostly the right UTC offset for the wrong reason: Boston should be on Atlantic Standard Time year-round, but Eastern Daylight Time is a name for the same clock setting that is already used there sometimes, so that's easier to legislate. Of course, the people who live west of their true noon line don't think permanent DST would be good, but the fact that we should have no DST and a different map is too nuanced for the position that there's got to be a single simple answer as to how to fix everything, regardless of the situation.

I don't think this is trying to get back into the US market. OnePlus is banned because it's part of a Chinese corporation. OPPO is... that corporation. It's not going to confuse any regulator who found something to complain about with OnePlus. This is more likely a mundane tactic of being liked in Europe for phones and wanting to expand that reputation to the parts of the organization that sell other consumer electronics.

You use your coal to make steel, which needs the carbon from the coal for the alloy. Not all use of coal can be replaced by other electricity or heat production, even if getting blast furnace temperatures out of a nuclear reactor weren't considered bad.

It's worth noting that nuclear reactors don't really explode in the way people think of. What they can do is turn into radioactive lava, melt through the floor, and release the highly carcinogenic dust from their system into the environment. They're generally big water heaters without pressure release valves (because the water has the carcinogenic dust in it), so they can burst like any water heater, and they contain zirconium, which reacts with steam at high temperatures to release hydrogen gas, which can make fireballs, but the accident risk is much less about a shock wave destroying the site than airborne radioactive particles getting out. And, even if the reactor design is incapable of producing enough heat to damage itself without first shutting down, you still have to worry about whether the site is safe enough from external damage. The traditional thick concrete walls are as much about keeping runaway trucks out as keeping steam explosions in.

It sounds to me like the input to the algorithm is truly random, but not unbiased, and the algorithm perfectly unbiases output from the particular source they are using. The rest of the article goes into the type of flaw they're addressing, and talks about very slightly unfair dice, which you could correct, but you'd need to know exactly how unfair they are, and you're always going to be very slightly wrong and end up correcting not quite perfectly. The obvious quantum RNG is to generate polarized light and measure it perpendicular to the polarization, but you'd still need to get it perfectly perpendicular. It sounds like they've built something that doesn't rely on precise alignment to give a known distribution, which they can then use to unbias the output perfectly.

It's pretty close to being an MP3 marked as a BMP, actually. It's the result of taking a reversable transformation of the audio signal that separates out the different perceptible components and then discarding the ones that matter least, and keeping the important ones in a convenient form for accessing them. It's the first step you'd take if you wanted a computer to identify speakers or what they were saying. The only part that's image-related is making the diagram, but getting back to the data is just taking the pixel values.

I suspect that they started using spectrograms in reports at a time when getting back the data from the image would have lost too much quality to printing and scanning to hear anything as quiet as voices, but PDFs with lossless images retain all of that.

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.

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.