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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/4chan-may-be-dead-but-its-toxic-legacy-lives-on/

My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can has cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying "ORLY?" was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on.
[...]
It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the Internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online.
[...]
It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X to Facebook to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan.
[...]
"The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United States," the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED. "Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man."
[...]
4chan was more complicated than it looked from the outside. The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography. Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan's cooking board. (Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.)
[...]
Holderness calls 4chan the Internet's "Wild West" and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now.
[...]
"The snippets that we have of what 4chan was—it's all skewed," Holderness says. "There is no record. There's no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/19/us_crosswalk_button_hacking/

Some pranksters altered the voices on crosswalk buttons in some US cities. The hardware had a control app available on Google Play and Apple App Store along with a listed default PIN of 1234.

Video Crosswalk buttons in various US cities were hijacked over the past week or so to – rather than robotically tell people it's safe to walk or wait – instead emit the AI-spoofed voices of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg.

And it's likely all thanks to a freely available service app and poorly secured equipment.

In Seattle this week, some crosswalks started playing AI-generated messages spoofing tech tycoon Jeff Bezos. In one video clip, a synthetic Bezos voice can be heard introducing himself from the push-button box, and claiming the crossing is sponsored by Amazon Prime.

Then it veered into parody-turned-social commentary: "You know, please don't tax the rich, otherwise all the other billionaires will move to Florida too. Wouldn't it be terrible if all the rich people left Seattle or got Luigi-ed and then the normal people could afford to live here again?"

Original Submission

coolgopher writes:

http://www.quiss.org/signal_carnival/

At Revision 2025, we released "Signal Carnival" (csdb, YouTube). This demo asks you to switch the audio and video cable of your C64:

Image

Technically, "misplugging" those cables is not a completely new idea. In the 90s, it was a common thing to connect audio to both speaker and video, to get screen flickering timed with the music beats.

However, "Signal Carnival" is the first production to switch both these cables, while still being able to play meaningful audio and video.

How to drive audio using a video signal

The C64's VIC chip operates at a frequency of 7.9Mhz, and new values can be written to it by the 6502 at a rate of up to 246kHz. Since even high quality audio rarely exceeds 44kHz, this is easily a high enough frequency to generate music.

Inspired by the music routine from freespin, we combined two timers to get an interesting waveform, which is adjusted once per frame. This is the code that drives audio:

lda $dc06
ora $dd06
eor $02
sta $d020

Here, $dc06 and $dd06 are the lower bytes of the B timers of CIA #1 and #2, respectively. They're in turn increased every time their A timers overflow. And those are set to a new value for every new note.

Eor-ing with the value at zeropage $02 allows to slightly tweak the waveform (and volume!), and then the result is written to $d020, which is the screen color. Only the brightness of said color matters (chrominance is encoded at the PAL color carrier frequency, which is outside of the human hearing range). There's no obvious relationship between the brightness of the C64 color and its number, but that's fine - it actually makes the waveforms more interesting.

Of course, the above uses up all four timers the C64 CIAs have, which means there are no timers left for e.g. video stabilization, which is instead done through the lightpen circuitry. (Finally! A use case for $d013. :))

Music is just one voice, but the song switches between voices (and waveforms) often enough to sound mildly polyphonic.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

The Open Home Foundation fights for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And for every person who lives in one. It does this by supporting the development of open-source projects, and open connectivity and communication standards.

In the past year, Open Home has doubled its user base to 2 million households. Music Assistant has also made great strides recently. Music Assistant is a music library manager for your offline and online music sources which can easily stream your favourite music to a wide range of supported players and be combined with Home Assistant. They are also making great progress in voice controls which you can run 100% within your home, or via lighter weight devices and their cloud service.

For myself, I started constructing the tinfoil hat for my home (we already have a metal roof) about two weeks ago, replacing cloud controlled smart outlets with ZigBee devices controlled via Home Assistant. I'm getting close to putting ZigBee smart outlets in control of my Google Home speakers so I can just say "Hey Google, Wiretap off." and have them all powered down easily.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The scam exploited a Google Sites vulnerability, tricking users with convincing fake emails:

Google, a company that regularly collects and stores vast amounts of personal data, has failed to safeguard its own users from a sophisticated phishing attack. The scam, first exposed by Ethereum developer Nick Johnson, exploited vulnerabilities in Google's infrastructure, duping even tech-savvy individuals into handing over their credentials.

Despite Google's massive resources and dominance in the tech industry, its delayed response and initial reluctance to address the flaw underscore a troubling pattern: Silicon Valley giants prioritize innovation over security, leaving everyday Americans vulnerable to digital threats.

The attack, targeting Gmail's 1.8 billion users, highlights the dangers of centralized digital control. If a company like Google (which constantly urges users to trust its platforms) cannot protect its own systems, how can individuals be expected to rely on Big Tech for security? The incident also raises serious questions about whether these corporations deserve the unprecedented level of trust placed in them.

The phishing email, which appeared to come from the address "no-reply@accounts.google.com", claimed the recipient had been subpoenaed for their Google account data. It cleverly bypassed standard security checks, displaying no warnings in Gmail and even threading itself among legitimate security alerts.

[...] The irony is staggering. Google aggressively harvests user information (tracking searches, emails, and location data), yet struggles to defend that same data from hackers. If centralized tech giants can't secure their systems, perhaps it's time to reconsider the dangers of placing so much personal control in their hands.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) boasts that it has designed the world’s first lightning triggering and guidance system that leverages flying drones (via machine translation). After successful trials earlier this year it is hoped that networks of these drones can be installed in cities and key infrastructure as a preventative protection measure.

Lightning damage isn’t as rare as many an old adage might suggest, according to the stats shared by NTT. Its PR bulletin says that every year in Japan there is 100B to 200B Yen (up to $1.4B) worth of damage caused by lightning – and then there is the human cost to consider. Meanwhile, conventional lightning rods don’t provide as wide coverage as desirable, or might be tricky to install (e.g. wind turbines).

With the above in mind NTT set up an experiment to see if drones can be used to prevent lightning damage. The firm used ground monitoring equipment to judge the danger of lightning in an area. And basically, when thunderclouds approached and electric field fluctuations observed, a drone was sent up to intercept.

These are not kamikaze drones - they are equipped with a lightning-resistant cage. In a test flight on Dec 13, 2024, a drone attached to a ground wire was flown to 300m altitude to approach a suspected thundercloud. NTT says it then observed a massive electrical pulse and claims that it achieved “the world's first successful lightning induction using a drone.”

When the lightning struck the drone, it could continue to fly thanks to the cage protection (though it part melted). It is key that the drone could remain airborne after being zapped, says NTT and before this live trial it had successfully tested them at up to bursts of 150,000 Amps.

NTT intends to continue refining its lightning triggering and guidance drones. To augment the above study and trials it is looking at improving lightning location prediction accuracy. Moreover, there are plans to research and development into storing the lightning energy that is safely diverted.

Original Submission

turgid writes:

At phys.org there is an article about a lone black hole discovered by astronomers at the University of St Andrews.

Lone black holes are very rare, and the discovery was challenged, since lone neutron stars are far more common but subsequent observations confirm the lone black hole moving through the constellation Sagittarius.

The research team made their initial observations using data from Hubble over the years 2011 to 2017. This time around, they looked at data from Hubble for the years 2021 and 2022, as well as from the Gaia space probe. They found that the object under review was approximately seven times as massive as the sun, showing that it could not be a neutron star, leaving only a black hole as the sole option.

This is the first time the existence of a lone black hole has been confirmed. All of the others previously discovered have had a companion star, either another black hole, a neutron star or an ordinary star.

Journal Reference: Kailash C. Sahu et al, OGLE-2011-BLG-0462: An Isolated Stellar-mass Black Hole Confirmed Using New HST Astrometry and Updated Photometry, The Astrophysical Journal (2025). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/adbe6e

Original Submission

coolgopher writes:

https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2025-04-21-this-blog-is-hosted-on-a-nintendo-wii/

For a long time, I've enjoyed the idea of running general-purpose operating systems on decidedly not-general-purpose hardware.

There's been a few good examples of this over the years, including a few which were officially sanctioned by the OEM. Back in the day, my PS3 ran Yellow Dog Linux, and I've been searching for a (decently priced) copy of PS2 Linux for 10+ years at this point.

There are some other good unofficial examples, such as Dreamcast Linux, or PSPLinux.

But what a lot of these systems have in common is that they're now very outdated. Or they're hobbyist ports that someone got running once and where longer-term support never made it upstream. The PSP Linux kernel image was last built in 2008, and Dreamcast Linux is even more retro, using a 2.4.5 kernel built in 2001.

I haven't seen many of these projects where I'd be comfortable running one as part of an actual production workload. Until now.

While browsing the NetBSD website recently, I noticed the fact that there was a 'Wii' option listed right there on the front page in the 'Install Media' section, nestled right next to the other first-class targets like the Raspberry Pi, and generic x86 machines.

Unlike the other outdated and unmaintained examples above, clicking through to the NetBSD Wii port takes you to the latest stable NetBSD 10.1 release from Dec 2024. Even the daily HEAD builds are composed for the Wii.

As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it. That workload is the blog you're reading now.

Original Submission

Booga1 writes:

Researchers explored a new range of colors using a different kind of laser vision. Direct laser stimulation of individual photoreceptors:

These experiments confirmed that the prototype successfully displays a range of hues in Oz: e.g., from orange to yellow to green to blue-green with a 543-nm stimulating laser that ordinarily looks green. Further, color matching confirms that our attempt at stimulating only M cones displays a color that lies beyond the natural human gamut. We name this new color "olo," with the ideal version of olo defined as pure M activation. Subjects report that olo in our prototype system appears blue-green of unprecedented saturation, when viewed relative to a neutral gray background. Subjects find that they must desaturate olo by adding white light before they can achieve a color match with the closest monochromatic light, which lies on the boundary of the gamut, unequivocal proof that olo lies beyond the gamut.

Related WKRC interview article:

"We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented color signal but we didn't know what the brain would do with it," said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer that worked on the study. "It was jaw-dropping. It's incredibly saturated." Komo article: All five researchers who witnessed the new color, which they named "olo," described it as a blue-green, but said that words cannot do it justice. "There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor," said vision scientist Austin Roorda. "The whole point is that this is not the color we see, it's just not. The color we see is a version of it, but it absolutely pale by comparison with the experience of olo."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

With the release of its latest models earlier in the week, OpenAI seems to have inadvertently tuned ChatGPT to become a potent geo-guesser. The newly available o3 and o4-mini are so good at this ‘reverse location search’ task that showing off this newfound functionality has become a viral social media trend, notes TechCrunch. However, this apparent geographic needle-in-a-haystack hunting improvement raises privacy concerns. And pro geo-guessers on social media platforms might be a little worried too.

This newfound ability of ChatGPT is a great example of the strengthened visual reasoning being brought to the platform with model updates. It can now reason based on the content of uploaded images and perform some Photoshop-esque tasks like cropping, rotating, and zooming in.

As per the source report, there are plenty of examples of users of this famous AI chatbot now using it to drill down on the location of various images. A popular jape is to ask ChatGPT to imagine it is playing the online GeoGuessr game and provide the answer based on supplied imagery. [...]

As Jowett points out, the newly popular ChatGPT ‘reverse image search’ functionality has privacy implications, and raises particular concerns with regard to doxing. Doxing is publicly sharing someone’s private information, particularly location / residence, on the broad internet. People are commonly doxed with malicious intent, with the perpetrator hoping to direct loonies and cranks to visit upon the victim(s).

Interestingly, TechCrunch notes that ‘Geoguessr’ ability isn’t new for ChatGPT with the release of o3 and o4-mini. It is just the trend / awareness that has ballooned. It is said that o3 is particularly good at reverse location search, but GPT-4o, a model released without image-reasoning, can sometimes outpace o3, and deliver the same correct answer “more often than not,” says TechCrunch.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US tariff war with China, along with changes in duties, means that products from China will be more expensive. Unfortunately, it looks like a major gaming handheld company has decided to stop shipping devices to the US for now.

Anbernic announced on its website that it has suspended shipments to the US from China, citing the US tariff changes: 

We’re glad to see that customers can still buy products from the US warehouse, but this stockpile isn’t going to last forever. So if you’re in the market for an Anbernic gaming handheld, you should take up this option sooner rather than later.

The company also noted that it would publish a revised shipping policy as soon as it receives verified information regarding import duties. 

This news comes after the US escalated tariffs against China. However, it also follows an end to de minimis exceptions on products coming from China. The latter is effectively a death blow for cheap handhelds as they’ll be subjected to minimum duties of $75 from May, escalating to $150 in June. It’s worth noting that Anbernic has handhelds that ordinarily start from under $50.

Anbernic isn’t the only handheld company experiencing issues due to US tariffs and duties. Retroid recently announced that US customers buying the Teal, Kiwi, and Berry variants of the Retroid Pocket Classic handheld will face indefinite delays. The company urged these customers to contact customer support in order to switch to any other color of the handheld.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Throughout the Yangtze River Delta, a region in southern China famed for its widespread rice production, farmers grow belts of slender green stalks. Before they reach several feet tall and turn golden brown, the grassy plants soak in muddy, waterlogged fields for months. Along the rows of submerged plants, levees store and distribute a steady supply of water that farmers source from nearby canals.

This traditional practice of flooding paddies to raise the notoriously thirsty crop is almost as old as the ancient grain’s domestication. Thousands of years later, the agricultural method continues to predominate in rice cultivation practices from the low-lying fields of Arkansas to the sprawling terraces of Vietnam.

As the planet heats up, this popular process of growing rice is becoming increasingly more dangerous for the millions of people worldwide that eat the grain regularly, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Planetary Health. After drinking water, the researchers say, rice is the world’s second largest dietary source of inorganic arsenic, and climate change appears to be increasing the amount of the highly toxic chemical that is in it. If nothing is done to transform how most of the world’s rice is produced, regulate how much of it people consume, or mitigate warming, the authors conclude that communities with rice-heavy diets could begin confronting increased risks of cancer and disease as soon as 2050.

“Our results are very scary,” said Donming Wang, the ecological doctorate student at the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences who led the paper. “It’s a disaster … and a wake-up call.”

[...] After nearly a decade of observing and analyzing the growth of the plants, the researchers discovered that the combination of higher temperatures and CO2 encourages root growth, increasing the ability of rice plants to uptake arsenic from the soil. They believe this is because climate-related changes in soil chemistry that favor arsenic can be more easily absorbed into the grain. Carbon-dioxide enriched crops were found to capture more atmospheric carbon and pump some of that into the soil, stimulating microbes that are making arsenic.

The more root growth, the more carbon in the soil, which can be a source of food for soil bacteria that multiply under warming temperatures. When soil in a rice paddy is waterlogged, oxygen gets depleted, causing the soil bacteria to rely further on arsenic to generate energy. The end result is more arsenic building up in the rice paddy, and more roots to take it up to the developing grain.

aliks writes:

The stated aim is to promote better security by encouraging automation of certificate renewal, and this is the narrative promoted by vendors who will coincidentally benefit mightily from increased certificate and services sales.

The story was picked up by most of the usual tech channels such as Computerworld

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3960658/vendors-vote-to-radically-slash-website-certificate-duration.html

who have a decent summary of the likely consequences, but here is an exercept from the press release of one vendor: Sectigo

https://www.sectigo.com/resource-library/sectigo-cab-reduce-ssl-tls-certificates-lifespan-47-days

Scottsdale, AZ — April 14, 2025 — Sectigo, a global leader in digital certificates and automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), today announced that the CA/Browser (CA/B) Forum ballot it endorsed to reduce the maximum validity term of SSL/TLS certificates to 47 days by 2029 has passed. This groundbreaking move to shorten digital certificate lifespans seeks to enhance online security, drive automation in certificate management, and ready systems for quantum computing challenges by improving crypto agility.

The newly approved measure, initially proposed by Apple and endorsed by Sectigo in January 2025, will gradually reduce certificate lifespans from the current 398 days to 47 days through a phased approach:

        March 15, 2026: Maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 200 days. This accommodates a six-month renewal cadence. The Domain Control Validation (DCV) reuse period reduces to 200 days.
        March 15, 2027: Maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 100 days. This accommodates a three-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 100 days.
        March 15, 2029: Maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 47 days. This accommodates a one-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 10 days.

"At Sectigo we have long advocated for shorter certificate lifecycles as a crucial step in bolstering internet security, which is why we endorsed this ballot from its inception," said Kevin Weiss, chief executive officer at Sectigo. "This collaborative initiative passed by the CA/Browser Forum not only showcases the industry's unified commitment to enhance digital trust for all but also empowers customers to be at the leading edge of preparing for a quantum future."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla Accused Of Speeding Up Odometers So Their Warranties Expire Faster:

A Tesla owner in California is seeking a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all other Tesla owners in the state after he says the company has been systematically altering odometers so their warranties expire faster.

Lead plaintiff Nyree Hinton said he bought a used Model Y in December 2022 with 36,772 miles on it.

But after several visits to Tesla for repairs completed under warranty, he said, he began to notice odd quirks with the odometer, which regularly overestimated his mileage by at least 15% but sometimes as much as 117%.

From March 2023 to June 2023, for instance, Hinton said, his car logged 72.35 miles per day despite him having a consistent driving routine of just 20 miles per day.

After the vehicle's 50,000-mile basic warranty expired in July 2023, Hinton said, the odometer then began to underreport his daily usage. In April 2024, the lawsuit alleges, the Model Y reported around 50 average daily miles, despite Hinton driving a 100-mile commute two to three days a week.

The lawsuit points to similar tales shared by other Tesla owners online as the basis for class-action status.

According to the lawsuit, Tesla's odometer system isn't physically linked to the number of miles the vehicle has traveled, instead relying on data like energy consumption, driving behavior and predictive algorithms to estimate distance traveled.

"By tying warranty limits and lease mileage caps to inflated 'odometer' readings, Tesla increases repair revenue, reduces warranty obligations, and compels consumers to purchase extended warranties prematurely," the suit said.

Odometer fraud constitutes a federal crime, with cumulative penalties that can be applied for every instance of odometer tampering.

Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Oldest serving US astronaut returns to Earth on 70th birthday:

America's oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday.

The Soyuz MS-26 space capsule carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan's steppe at 06:20 local time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.

They spent 220 days on board the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, the US space agency Nasa said.

For Pettit - who has now spent a total of 590 days in space - it was his fourth mission.

Still, he is not the oldest person to fly in orbit - that record belongs to John Glenn, who aged 77 flew on a Nasa mission in 1998. He died in 2016.

Pettit and the two Russian cosmonauts will now spend some time readjusting to gravity.

After that, Pettit - who was born in Oregon on 20 April 1955 - will be flown to Houston in Texas, while Ovchinin and Vagner will go to Russia's main space training base in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Star City) near Moscow.

Before their departure from the ISS, the crew handed command of the spaceship to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi.

Last month, two Nasa astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, finally returned to Earth after spending more than nine months on board the ISS - instead of the initially planned just eight days.

They flew to the ISS in June 2024 - but technical issues with the spacecraft they used to get to the space station meant they were only able to return to Earth on 18 March this year.

Original Submission