Comment offline data (Score 1) 38
"It appears that the agency has an offline copy of the wiped data"
Well, like, duh. Had they not, they should all be immediately fired. And never work in IT again.
Comment Re:Read my words: ai will ... (Score 1) 90
"if they can accuse important people without evidence and make them spend time and money"
So, for example, dredging up (in a suitable venue ofc) some ancient bimbo who diddled some rich guy in a dressing room (though she can't remember exactly when, or what she was wearing, and....well... She does admit to finding rape kinda sexy before she's dragged off the air), carefully not bringing the case to criminal court? Like that?
Comment a solution looking for a problem (Score 1) 41
I don't mean that in a demeaning way. Z80 assembly language was my first professional programming job and I spent some years being the department SME. I'm very interested in this, but I don't currently have a use case. In the present time, where we have 64 bit Raspberry Pis, I'm sad to say that I'm not sure there is one.
I'd love to be wrong about this.
Comment Re:You can't live below your means (Score 1) 81
"... the way that the Federal reserve deals with that is every few years they crank interest rates. "
What?
That's absolutely the opposite of the data.
The US has generally had - aside from ww1/WW2, and the explosive 1970s - an inflation rate of 3-3.5% since 1900.
The last 25 years have had extraordinarily LOW inflation until the literal shoveling of money toward the public during COVID. ($5t in "assistance" including $1.8t in DIRECT payments).
Couple that with an insistence on the radical increase in legal wage floors across the country - how would those policies (which, I recall, you militantly supported) NOT be inflationary?
It's hypocrisy to blame "the Federal Reserve" for the logical, predicted outcome of the policies you have rather militantly endorsed.
Comment Re:Shrug. My machine won't run 11. (Score 1) 98
Unfortunately, the software I need to be able to run makes heavy use of the GPU. I don't think Windows VMs have that level of compatibility yet.
I think the hot setup is to run it in an AWS instance. That way I could have access to the software from pretty much anywhere. But I don't expect that to work either.
Comment Re:Shrug. My machine won't run 11. (Score 1) 98
Yes, exactly.
Comment Shrug. My machine won't run 11. (Score 2) 98
Nor will my mom's machine, mother-in-law's machine, and wife's machine.
As I depend on a software suite that doesn't yet run on Linux, I'm kinda trapped. My machine is studly and in fine shape. I'm not going to replace it at this time.
So, Microsoft can continue clutching their pearls.
Or.... they could perhaps come out with a version of Windows that doesn't depend on TPM 2.
Or, I could bite the bullet and switch to Linux. I already have Mint running on a laptop, and it's pretty nifty.
Comment 60%? (Score 5, Funny) 236
"only 60% of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission (according to a survey from auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle)"
1) that seems like 60% of the readers of American Muscle
2) 'know how to' is covering a lot of ground here. "Knows how to start a stick, and how to probably get it moving from level ground with 25% of killing it" maybe. Can confidently and reliably drive with a stick, knowing basic techniques? 25% or less, certainly.
Having a stick shift is 100% the simplest security system you can have on a car in the US in 2026. Your car might still get broken into, but they'll abandon it quickly.
Comment unfortunately (Score 4, Insightful) 38
Unfortunately, afaik red dwarf stars are so cool that any planet in their liquid water zone are also almost certainly tidally locked.
Not saying that doesn't make it habitable (as ample science fiction authors have imagined alternatives) just that that might make the challenge harder.
Then again, life finds a way.
Comment is this new? (Score 1) 221
First, let's note the referenced article IS A SALES PITCH.
Second, electrical outages are a normal thing in a storm prone country. The "outages" aren't news, it's only meaningful if they're growing more frequent.
The article asks plaintively "is this the new normal" without ever establishing what the old normal was.
When taking into account the higher population and higher electrical demand per person, are large blackouts becoming more common in the US?
Per ai: no.
"The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) tracks Bulk Power System (BPS) performance annually in its State of Reliability (SOR) reports. Key takeaways from the 2025 SOR (covering 2024 data):
The BPS "remains highly reliable and resilient." Core metrics like frequency response, misoperations, and many transmission outage categories are stable or improving.
Severe weather (hurricanes, winter storms) caused the most impactful outages, as in prior years. In 2024, events like Hurricanes Helene and Milton led to millions of (mostly distribution-level) customer outages, but BES restoration was often faster than historical averages for similar storms due to hardening efforts. No major operator-initiated load shed during key winter events.
There were notable events, but the Severity Risk Index (SRI) and other indicators do not show a clear upward trend in frequency or severity of large-scale BPS disruptions when viewed over multiple years. Distribution outages (local, below 100 kV) are more visible to customers and can be widespread, but they are outside NERC's primary jurisdiction."
I fully agree our policies toward the increasingly critical electrical grid infrastructure are incoherent. That's said: quit buying into advertisers insisting the world is ending and here's some snake oil that will fix it.
Submission + - Physicists create first room-temperature quantum material (phys.org)
alternative_right writes: In a study published in Nature, LSU physicists have developed the first room-temperature quantum material capable of distinguishing and transporting different quantum states of light, overcoming one of the biggest challenges in quantum materials research. Led by Associate Professor of Physics Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza, the work establishes a general design principle for engineering an entirely new class of quantum materials, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, secure communications, sensing technologies and advanced energy systems.
Submission + - Records Are Made to Be Broken: Patch Tuesday Raises Triage Stakes (darkreading.com)
schwit1 writes: When Microsoft vice president of engineering Tom Gallagher warned in May that the company's monthly patch releases could soon grow larger because of AI-driven vulnerability discovery, few likely expected the numbers would surpass 600 just two months later.
But with fixes for 622 unique CVEs, Microsoft’s July 2026 Patch Tuesday update is the largest by far in the program's history and offers a preview of the growing prioritization challenges organizations face as AI dramatically increases the volume of flaws requiring attention.
July's update contains fixes for three zero-day vulnerabilities, two of which attackers are already exploiting and one that's publicly known but remains unexploited. The patch update also includes fixes for more than five dozen critical vulnerabilities, many of which Microsoft identified as flaws that attackers are more likely to exploit. The total includes 416 vulnerabilities in Windows, 82 each in Office and Office 2016, 46 in Edge, 27 in Microsoft Developer Tools, and 17 in SharePoint Server.
"If people want a severity hook, July has 26 vulnerabilities with a CVSS base score above 9.0, and 13 of those sit at 9.8," said Josh Taylor, lead cybersecurity analyst at Fortra, in an emailed comment. "That matters, but CVSS is still only one part of the risk story. The real triage problem this month is the mix of exploited issues, a publicly disclosed BitLocker flaw, and a massive concentration of vulnerabilities in Windows and Office," he said. And rather than focusing on volume, patching teams need to prioritize the exploited vulnerabilities and their exposed infrastructure first, Taylor added.
"Today, July 14, 2026, marks a pivotal moment in our industry," researchers from Nightwing said in a statement. "We are officially moving past the traditional 'Patch Tuesday' approach and entering an era of continuous, high-volume security updates" and continuous patching.
But with fixes for 622 unique CVEs, Microsoft’s July 2026 Patch Tuesday update is the largest by far in the program's history and offers a preview of the growing prioritization challenges organizations face as AI dramatically increases the volume of flaws requiring attention.
July's update contains fixes for three zero-day vulnerabilities, two of which attackers are already exploiting and one that's publicly known but remains unexploited. The patch update also includes fixes for more than five dozen critical vulnerabilities, many of which Microsoft identified as flaws that attackers are more likely to exploit. The total includes 416 vulnerabilities in Windows, 82 each in Office and Office 2016, 46 in Edge, 27 in Microsoft Developer Tools, and 17 in SharePoint Server.
"If people want a severity hook, July has 26 vulnerabilities with a CVSS base score above 9.0, and 13 of those sit at 9.8," said Josh Taylor, lead cybersecurity analyst at Fortra, in an emailed comment. "That matters, but CVSS is still only one part of the risk story. The real triage problem this month is the mix of exploited issues, a publicly disclosed BitLocker flaw, and a massive concentration of vulnerabilities in Windows and Office," he said. And rather than focusing on volume, patching teams need to prioritize the exploited vulnerabilities and their exposed infrastructure first, Taylor added.
"Today, July 14, 2026, marks a pivotal moment in our industry," researchers from Nightwing said in a statement. "We are officially moving past the traditional 'Patch Tuesday' approach and entering an era of continuous, high-volume security updates" and continuous patching.
Submission + - How Microsoft's "Little Workaround" Created a Major Pentagon Threat (propublica.org)
joshuark writes: ProPublica Reporter Renee Dudley heard Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary.
The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.
Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.
National security and cybersecurity experts in the Trump administration contacted by ProPublica were also surprised to learn that such an arrangement was in place, especially at a time when the U.S. intelligence community and leading members of Congress and the Trump administration view China’s digital prowess as a top threat to the country.
Microsoft uses the escort system to handle the government’s most sensitive information that falls below “classified.” According to the government, this “high impact level” category includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin.” The “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability” of this information “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets and individuals, the government has said. In the Defense Department, the data is categorized as “Impact Level” 4 and 5 and includes materials that directly support military operations.
“If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea,” a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system, told ProPublica in an email. That said, he maintained that the “scope of systems they could disrupt” is limited.
In an emailed statement, the Defense Information Systems Agency said that cloud service providers “are required to establish and maintain controls for vetting and using qualified specialists,” but the agency did not respond to ProPublica’s questions regarding the digital escorts’ qualifications.
It’s unclear whether other cloud providers to the federal government use digital escorts as part of their tech support. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud declined to comment on the record for this article. Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the inspector general — whose office is supposed to operate independently in order to investigate potential waste, fraud and abuse — told ProPublica they were not authorized to speak about the issue and directed questions to DISA public affairs.
The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.
Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.
National security and cybersecurity experts in the Trump administration contacted by ProPublica were also surprised to learn that such an arrangement was in place, especially at a time when the U.S. intelligence community and leading members of Congress and the Trump administration view China’s digital prowess as a top threat to the country.
Microsoft uses the escort system to handle the government’s most sensitive information that falls below “classified.” According to the government, this “high impact level” category includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin.” The “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability” of this information “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets and individuals, the government has said. In the Defense Department, the data is categorized as “Impact Level” 4 and 5 and includes materials that directly support military operations.
“If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea,” a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system, told ProPublica in an email. That said, he maintained that the “scope of systems they could disrupt” is limited.
In an emailed statement, the Defense Information Systems Agency said that cloud service providers “are required to establish and maintain controls for vetting and using qualified specialists,” but the agency did not respond to ProPublica’s questions regarding the digital escorts’ qualifications.
It’s unclear whether other cloud providers to the federal government use digital escorts as part of their tech support. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud declined to comment on the record for this article. Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the inspector general — whose office is supposed to operate independently in order to investigate potential waste, fraud and abuse — told ProPublica they were not authorized to speak about the issue and directed questions to DISA public affairs.
Comment Re:From the article it's just browser fingerprinti (Score 2) 87
I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.
If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.
Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.
Comment the juice isn't worth the squeeze (Score 1) 107
1) there's no feedback of any value, at least not worth the effort. Any post can be immediately swarmed by bots or by humans that are little more than such. It happens here; you might be posting about the functionality of light switches and you'll get 5 anon posts about being a MAGA cuck and how it's Trump's fault; likewise you might post asking legit questions about data centers and have 5 anon posts calling you a communist woke traitor. Why bother connecting your brain to social media if all you're getting back is digital feces?
2) I've just spent much less time online anyway; I've decided to practice what I preach and - unless I'm actually doing something like ordering food, etc - I simply put my phone away when there are other humans present that I might interact with. At all. On a tram, in a waiting room. I am ready to engage other people, and if they don't choose to I've welcomed being alone with my thoughts again instead of being constantly bemused by some bit of celebrity news I couldn't give a shite about.
