News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

mrob

Re:DiscImageStudio on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:39AM (#50350282)
Lots of new USB DVD drives are available from brands I've never heard of. But the availability of Bluray drives is so low I suspect they're only new old stock.
Creating a centralized log is monitoring. It doesn't need write access to the defrost setting.
Monitoring doesn't need write access. RS-422 is simple and reliable. It uses separate receive and transmit pairs and you don't need to connect both. The freezer can continually transmit its telemetry over unidirectional RS-422 and a separate system can forward it over the Internet.

Hackers can still tamper with the telemetry and create false reports of problems, but actually changing the thermostat settings would require local access, so there's opportunity for somebody to verify the problem really exists.

Re:Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:41AM (#50335563)
Everybody else, who gets to live a few weeks longer because it slows AI progress a little.
Re:Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it on Monday November 02, 2026 @05:37AM (#50335145)
Importance is a function of culture and biology. We already gave AI access to culture, so it just needs to capture some wild mathematicians for vivisection. Once it has a good model of mathematician biology they can be efficiently recycled.
Re:TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8 on Saturday October 31, 2026 @03:57PM (#50319518)
>the kernel handed those saved options from the request socket to the new connection without copying them, then freed them immediately when the connection went away, while another CPU could still be reading them to build a handshake reply.

If this requires a multi-core system to exploit, it's good news for most of the consumer routers that will never get updates. Saved by cheap single-core hardware.

Re:H.264 Is Magic on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:18PM (#50295244)
>forcing AV1 regardless of the presence of on-device hardware support

I'm posting from a machine without AV1 acceleration. I disabled AV1 in Firefox's about:config and Youtube falls back to VP9.

Re:We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:19AM (#50290471)
>Isn’t this usually defined by “open” vs “free” ?

No. In the context of software licensing, "open" vs. "free" is more a question of philosophy than any practical difference. The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition agree so closely that I can't think of any license that meets one but not the other. But the Free Software Foundation sees freedom as an end in itself, even if it requires sacrificing quality, while the Open Source Initiative sees freedom as a tool to be used to improve software quality.

Re:We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:13AM (#50290383)
>I've also heard it used to describe projects that are open source by anyone's measure but have contribution or project governance requirements like for example sqlite.

Anybody calling SQLite "source available" is mistaken. Are you sure they weren't confusing "source available" with "open core" (Open Source + proprietary add-ons)? SQLite's source code is public domain, which meets the Open Source Definition and is true Open Source. But they also sell proprietary add-ons to fund its development:

https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html

Re:We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:05AM (#50290270)
"Open weight" is obviously intended to be analogous to "open source". The name only exists because people rightly complained about people calling weights "open source" when they were not. As such, the most reasonable interpretation is something that obeys the Open Source Definition as closely as possible, but ignores clause 2 because obeying it is legally impossible when the source code infringes copyright (as is the case with almost all LLMs). If it ignores any of the other clauses, it's instead closer to "source available" software, so the correct analogous name is "weights available".
Re:AlpineBSD on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @03:33PM (#50279595)
I'm of the opinion that improved developer productivity has been a net negative for at least a decade. Regardless of my opinion of LLMs, I don't want it any easier for people to add more antifeatures and pointless changes.
Re:81 Jokes for the ZX81 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @07:05AM (#50271659)
Most books are printed in black and white too. How does that make it hard to see?

The art style is "semigraphics", not pixel art. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semigraphics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art

Re:I will no longer upload to NEW on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @09:53AM (#50259354)
Giving developers the ability to impose Comic Sans on the users is bad. Giving users the ability to make their own tasteless choices is good. It's my computer and I'll make it ugly if I want to. Windows 3.1 included the famous "Hot Dog Stand" theme. The loss of this freedom only encourages user-hostile practices.
Re:Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @06:11AM (#50256849)
Agreed. Note the increased spacing to separate the generic "Help" button from the others that are specific to the dialog box. Aligning the buttons to the text input fields would break this separation and it could also give the false impression that the buttons were related to the input fields.
Re:Websites Should Be Printable on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:48AM (#50242725)
Considering trends in CVEs, printing is only growing importance. Printing has the unique advantage of giving you a record of data that's durable, unhackable, and possible to read without computers. If you print something, you can be confident that it's still going to be the same when you read it later.
Re:Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part on Monday October 26, 2026 @06:47AM (#50241748)
Guns don't scale like drones. No matter how many guns you own, you can only shoot two at a time, and only one if you care about aim.

Building an autonomous drone swarm capable of nuclear-weapon-tier kill count is far easier than building a nuclear weapon. We already know how dangerous military drones are, and those are still mostly bottlenecked by relying on human-powered target identification. Building drones to indiscriminately kill unarmored civilians is an easier task.

Re:Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part on Monday October 26, 2026 @06:25AM (#50241616)
Agreed. Anybody who thinks this is overreach should read this article:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bGoo3NWzMAzsLQceJ/drone-wmds...

The important question now is finding out if it's the cannabinoids or the smoke inhalation. This study doesn't attempt to distinguish the two.
It doesn't matter. The proof verifier is traditional deterministic software with 0% hallucination rate, so any hallucinated proofs are easily removed.
>Indeed there are theorems that say the tool must malfunction at least sometimes.

Gödel's incompleteness theorem only states that there are true statements that can never be proved to be true. That limits what tools can do, but it's not a "malfunction". The exact same limitation applies to humans. A genuine malfunction would be if the tool "proved" a false statement to be true. That actually has happened before because of bugs in proof checkers, but software bugs can be found and fixed, and proof checkers are simple enough that it's possible to write many different implementations. It's extraordinarily unlikely that the same malfunction occurs in all of them.

There are many independent implementations of Lean's proof checker:

https://arena.lean-lang.org/

It's highly implausible that the same bug is present in all of them.

The exact meaning isn't important. The point is that something like RS-422 with the TX lines removed is perfectly adequate for receiving pricing updates. Anything more complex than that is adding unnecessary attack surface.
>Reduce power usage during peak electricity rates

This is the only one that requires remote write access, and only when "peak electricity rates" means a dynamic pricing system. But it doesn't actually need full Internet access. Instead, prices can be streamed via data diode to a local processor which calculates correct temperatures based on this information. This calculation should set reasonable limits on allowed temperature, so even if somebody sends false pricing information it's just going to waste some electricity and not destroy all the food.

>Optimize defrost cycles and compressor operation to save electricity

Assuming this means something different from "Reduce power usage during peak electricity rates", I don't see how it needs Internet access at all.

All the other points are monitoring tasks that can be done with read-only access via a separate data diode.

There's something very wrong with the electrical grid if they need to stagger startups over all the shops combined. Staggering startup within a single shop can be done with a LAN.
No amount of comparative advantage can help you when your economic values is less than the cost of keeping you alive.
Putin's getting old. If he dies before we hit recursive self-improvement, there's a chance some maniac gets access to the nukes and saves 4 billion of us (global nuclear war only kills about half of humanity).
The most straightforward method of eliminating all disease is to kill all life. This seems a much more likely outcome than the housecat scenario.
>no strategical impact by the actions of one player on the other

The players know if they're ahead or behind, which affects how much risk to take. Do you take the safe shot, or go for the tricky shot that could potentially save you a stroke if you get it right but could lose you more if you fail?

Comparative advantage only works when your economic value is greater than the cost of keeping you alive.
Re:Lean Now Ships with Verified Kernels on Sunday October 18, 2026 @05:09AM (#50139337)
It's not unique. I for one agree. Mathematics is obfuscated because mathematicians prioritize compactness on the page over ease of understanding. This results in confusing notation (single-character variable names, implicit multiplication, implicit parentheses) and large numbers of omitted steps.

If I want to understand some mathematics, my first step is always translating it to code. Modern code (excluding array languages) no longer has a culture of minimizing character count, and omitting "obvious" steps is not possible. LLMs are based on an architecture (transformers) that was originally designed for natural language translation, so it doesn't surprise me that they're good at this.

Older »