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"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/12/ukrainian-drone-strikes-on-yandex-datacenters-knock-cloud-and-payments-offline/5302577

Yandex engineers are working to restore services after Ukraine launched drone strikes on three of its five Russian datacenters.

The strikes began overnight on October 7-8, "seriously damaging" Yandex's Sasovo datacenter and leading to a total shutdown. Ukrainian drones struck again on the morning of October 9, targeting the company's Kaluga datacenter, resulting in part of its infrastructure being taken offline.

Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech division, confirmed via Telegram on Sunday morning that a third strike targeted the company's Vladimir site, which supports Yandex Pay. A day later, services remain offline, although Pirogov said users' money is safe.

"I'm very sorry I can't tell you yet that everything is working again," the exec wrote. "The team continues to restore services and is checking every step. When it comes to your money, it's important to us not just to restore Yandex Pay as quickly as possible, but also to ensure that everything is working reliably.

"I understand that you're not waiting for words, but for access to your money. And I understand how hard it is to wait when you can't use it. We can't give you a precise timeline for the restoration yet, but we promise: we won't stop until the service is back online."

Yandex Pay is the company's digital payments service. Users can make online and in-store purchases, pay in installments, and split bills with friends and family.

It's also integrated into online shopping experiences. It is comparable to Apple Pay or Google Pay, while Yandex more broadly offers services similar to Google's.

Yandex said engineers are prioritizing the most-used services, and reported that access to the Alice AI assistant, Mail, Maps, Search, and Taxi is being restored, but other features remain offline.

The company's status page lists widespread outages across Yandex Cloud, its public cloud platform, following the attacks.

Updates from the maintenance team describe partial availability despite the outage indicators. They suggest that some customers may be able to access certain features, such as Yandex Cloud Console and API, but availability remains inconsistent across the platform.

In its most recent update, the company said: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode. Our specialists continue restoration work around the clock. The technical support team receives an increased number of requests, so the response time can be increased.

"Our recommendations continue to be relevant. We recommend using alternative sites for hosting and reserving resources."

hubie writes:

If you're 18, getting a bit more sleep could matter more than you think:

"Go to bed!" — it's a phrase most teenagers have heard countless times. For many young people, bedtime is easily pushed aside in favour of Netflix, gaming or just another scroll on their phone. Most already know that sleep is important for concentration, mood and learning. Now, there's new evidence that it matters for metabolic health too.

A new study from the University of Copenhagen and the COPSAC research unit at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital shows that longer sleep is associated with fewer fluctuations in blood sugar – even among healthy 18-year-olds.

Large swings in blood sugar can increase inflammation and place strain on the metabolism, potentially contributing over time to conditions such as obesity and diabetes.

The link between sleep and metabolic diseases is not new. However, most previous studies have focused on middle-aged adults or individuals at increased risk of diabetes.

"For most 18-year-olds, diabetes feels like something far off in the future. We've known very little about what blood sugar variability means for this age group," says senior author Professor Morten Arendt Rasmussen of the Department of Food Science at the University of Copenhagen and COPSAC. "But here we're seeing similar patterns even in completely healthy young adults."

[...] The results were clear: on days following longer sleep, participants had more stable blood sugar and fewer extreme spikes.

While the researchers had expected to find this link, they were surprised to discover that the relationship also worked in the opposite direction:

"The more stable participants' blood sugar was during the day, the longer they slept the following night," says first author and postdoctoral researcher David Horner from COPSAC at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital and the University of Copenhagen. "So this appears to be a two-way relationship — and that's new."

The study also found that more sleep was linked to slightly higher blood sugar levels during the morning and early part of the day — the opposite of what researchers had anticipated.

"However, that may actually be beneficial. Slightly higher blood sugar early in the day may help curb sugar cravings and thereby contribute to more stable blood sugar overall," says Morten Arendt Rasmussen.

One possible explanation lies in how the body prepares to wake up. The researchers observed that blood sugar levels typically rose in the hours before waking — with a steeper increase after longer sleep.

"This may reflect the body getting ready for the day," says Horner. "For example, the natural morning rise in the stress hormone cortisol can affect blood sugar around waking. Our findings suggest that the transition from sleep to wakefulness may be an important window for metabolism."

[...] "If future studies confirm our findings, sleep could become an even more important factor in preventing disease and promoting health among young people. And taking action doesn't require a new diet or an expensive gym membership – it really just comes down to going to bed," says Morten Arendt Rasmussen.

Journal Reference: David Horner, Kristin Evensen, Zhi Ye, et al., Night-to-night sleep duration and wake-anchored glycemia: associations with continuous glucose monitoring in free-living adolescents, Sleep, 2026;, zsag158, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsag158

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/10/13/intel-optimizes-ipv6-networking-into-nothingness-say-users/5302622

If you're encountering some odd IPv6 networking issues, the culprit might be the Intel Connectivity Performance Suite (ICPS), although the chipmaker has kept quiet about the problem.

A Samsung Galaxy Book owner contacted The Register about some decidedly odd networking behavior that they eventually traced to unwanted ICPS optimizations. And by "optimization", we mean "borked networking."

For our reader, the problem showed up in OneDrive and OneNote. Notebooks were showing as empty, even though they were reported as "Up to date" according to the software. Microsoft couldn't get to the bottom of it.

A bit of sleuthing by our reader revealed that something was borking the IPv6 packet. Removing Samsung's ICPS build (40.25.926.0) and installing the generic release (50.26.623.243) fixed the problem.

Our reader told us, "From the user's side it looks like random 'connection reset' errors on all kinds of sites, plus OneNote saying 'We can't get to your notebooks right now.'

"IPv4 is unaffected, which is why the web version and my phone kept working and nobody could figure out what was going on."

It isn't only Samsung and our reader affected. Intel's own Community forums shows other users encountering the same glitch. An ASUS user put together an exhaustive report on the issue (IPv6 connection woes while IPv4 worked well). In this instance, ICPS version 40.25.725.165 was in use, and the problem went away following uninstallation. The user asked whether there was an official way to opt out of ICPS permanently, and the Intel Customer Support Technician responded:

"Good news!... We can confirm that the Wireless driver and ICPS are available as separate standalone driver packages."

So in that particular instance, ditching ICPS would make no difference. Which, of course, raises another question – in this example (where the Intel BE201 Wi-Fi adaptor is present), why is it even there?

The answer: "It is often bundled with OEM systems as an added value software to enhance the overall wireless experience."

You might see "enhance," but for users affected by IPv6 problems, it's more like "break."

The issue is insidious, and broken ICPS builds are still floating around, ready to catch users off guard. According to our reader, Microsoft's own Update Catalog will hand out the broken drivers, which effectively break Microsoft 365 services on certain hardware.

For the ASUS user, the issue affected Chrome, Edge, and Windows curl.exe. "Approximately 40–60 percent of IPv6 HTTPS connections to an AWS CloudFront distribution were reset. IPv4 was completely stable."

According to our reader, "Intel created the bug, then fixed it quietly." Updating to the later, generic version appears to fix things. However, according to the Intel technician, as of the July post, "we do not have a confirmed public advisory for this specific behavior."

We asked Intel and Microsoft for comment, but neither responded. However, judging by forum comments, the issue has caught out plenty of users.

As such, if you find yourself with some weird networking issues with IPv6 and are using ICPS (as many will be), it might be worthwhile checking out the generic rather than OEM version of the software or removing it altogether to see if the problem goes away.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New Bayesian model can combine conflicting rankings, measure uncertainty and reveal what drives them:

Who, really, is the best player in baseball?

Ask five sports media outlets and you may get five different answers. Rankings can vary dramatically from one source to another, change from year to year and leave out different players altogether, making it difficult to determine where there is genuine consensus and where opinions diverge.

Now, Rice University statisticians, in collaboration with Cornell University, have developed a new method designed to find clearer answers in messy rankings data. The research was recently published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports.

The approach, called Bayesian Multivariate Rank Regression, or BMRR, combines rankings from multiple sources and across multiple time points while accounting for disagreements among the rankers, incomplete lists and factors that might influence the rankings. And just as importantly, the method measures just how certain or uncertain the resulting consensus is.

"Rankings look simple on the surface, but statistically they're actually very complicated," said Rose Graves, a doctoral student studying statistics at Rice and the study's corresponding author. "Two experts may rank different numbers of items, disagree about the order or even change their opinions over time. We wanted to create a way to bring all of that information together while accounting for uncertainty."

For their real-world test case, the researchers turned to one of the most closely scrutinized ranking systems in sports: annual lists of Major League Baseball's best players. They analyzed preseason rankings published by ESPN, CBS, Bleacher Report, Yahoo Sports and MLB from 2021 through 2024. Each outlet ranked its top 100 players, but the lists varied in both who was included and where players were ranked. To create a consistent pool for comparison, the researchers focused on 55 players who appeared in at least one outlet's rankings in each of the four years.

Those differences illustrate exactly what makes ranking data difficult to analyze. Simply averaging a player's position across several lists can mask meaningful information, especially when a player is omitted from one list altogether or when assessments shift substantially from year to year.

BMRR instead treats the rankings as evidence about an underlying value and uses a hierarchical Bayesian framework to combine that evidence. The model can incorporate incomplete rankings and ties, borrow information across years and estimate how closely each source aligns with the overall consensus. Unlike a single definitive list, the result also includes a measure of uncertainty, showing when the data strongly favor one player and when two players are effectively too close to separate.

[...] "Rather than asking only who ranks first, this framework lets us ask how confident we are in that conclusion, why someone may be ranked highly and how much agreement actually exists among the people doing the ranking," said Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice and one of the authors of the paper. "That kind of uncertainty quantification can be extremely important when rankings are being used to inform decisions."

[...] While MLB provided a compelling proving ground, the researchers designed BMRR for a much broader problem.

Rankings appear almost everywhere: Search engines order websites, voters rank candidates, experts prioritize intelligence information and clinicians may rank treatment preferences. Existing statistical approaches often struggle when different raters evaluate different items, when rankings are repeated across multiple criteria or points in time or when analysts want to incorporate additional information about what is being ranked.

"The biggest challenges when working with ranking data are remarkably similar across different fields and industries," said Dan Kowal, a previous Rice statistics faculty member now at Cornell University and second author on the paper. "We believe that BMRR can be impactful in many of these areas beyond Major League Baseball."

The authors encourage broader application of their method and have made the code for BMRR available on GitHub, so other statisticians can apply this method to their own data.

"Wherever multiple sources disagree about what belongs at the top, our framework offers a way to identify a consensus while measuring how confident that consensus should be," Graves added.

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1515/jqas-2026-0012

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/japan-cybersecurity-cybersecurity-ai-millions-emergency

Government sites across Europe have also been affected in attempted data breaches in recent months.

Japan’s financial regulator has asked banks to protect themselves against fraud after a series of cyberattacks rattled the country in recent years.

In a press conference last Friday (9 October), the country’s Ministry for Finance said that banks should implement appropriate verification mechanisms when new bank accounts are opened, including by mandating ID cards with chips.

“In recent years, there have been a series of unauthorised access incidents in various industries, resulting in numerous cyber incidents in which customer information, including images of identity verification documents, has been leaked,” the country’s finance minister Satsuki Katayama said in the press conference. The financial services agency said it would issue a warning to banks.

Cyberattacks have affected a range of public and private institutions in the country, including from rail operators, car manufacturers, karaoke chains and even the police.

Late last month, Times Car Rental, a popular Japanese car-sharing service announced that a data breach affected some 6.6m accounts. Lawson, a convenience store chain, reported last week that 2.15m customer records were illegally accessed in the hack, with names, emails and credit card details potential leaked in the incident.

Between January and June this year, Japan saw a total of 123 recorded cases of ransomware attacks.

Other official bodies, including the National Cyber ​​Security Office has also issued a warning to businesses asking them to promptly consider further security measures, including those of their contractors, to quickly address vulnerabilities and strengthen authentication functions. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications also issued a similar warning to businesses and other organisations under its jurisdiction.

In an emergency meeting convened last Friday, the head of the National Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters and former Digital Minister Masaaki Taira called the situation a “state of emergency in [the] cyberspace”.

Japan isn’t alone in facing a barrage of cyberattacks in recent years. Across Europe, a number of Government websites have been targeted in attacks, including Spain, Norway, Germany and the European Commission.

Last week, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it bad been the target of a recent cyberattack, while Danish authorities alerted the public to an “extremely serious” cyber incident after hackers secured access to the personal information of around 8.8m people.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/10/07/argonne-scientists-create-chatty-x-ray-microscope-that-zooms-in-where-you-tell-it-to/5301737

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have plugged an agentic AI platform into an X-ray nanoprobe beamline, creating a system that can get a closer look at areas researchers ask it to focus on.

Argonne reported the success of an experimental run of the agentic microscope this week, with the device initially tested on its ability to locate the interface between two regions on an integrated circuit device, and all by just telling the microscope what they wanted it to determine using natural language. 

"Microelectronics was simply the example used to showcase the technology," Argonne computational scientist Mathew Cherukara said of the project. "The real achievement is developing a next‑generation, AI‑enhanced microscope that can benefit many scientific fields."

The microscope itself is part of Argonne's 26-ID hard X-ray nanoprobe beamline, which uses a tightly focused X-ray beam to perform nanoscale imaging and measurements of target samples.

Such devices are considered a prime use case for scientific applications of AI because they produce a massive amount of data that can take human researchers considerable time to comb through thanks to their use of a technique known as ptychography. The method collects multiple diffraction patterns as X-rays interact with a sample, with modern X-ray experiments capable of generating millions of images in just a few hours of beam time. Conventional ptychographic reconstruction and analysis can take hours or days, whereas Argonne says its AI system can reconstruct images in real time as the data arrives. 

Argonne's X-ray nanoprobe beamline is the sort of scientific facility the Trump administration is looking to boost with AI through its Genesis Mission. Launched by President Trump in November 2025 and led by the Department of Energy, Genesis aims to find ways to use AI in scientific research, including the Synergistic Neutron and Photon Science - Intelligence (SYNAPS-I) project that Argonne is undertaking in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is leading the effort. Brookhaven National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are also participating in the project.

The inclusion of agentic AI in the Argonne X-ray microscope is actually the second phase of the project; the first was simply to see if, as mentioned above, AI could be used to reduce ptychographic image processing time. That was a success, as the lab reported in April, and phase two's addition of natural language agentic AI appears to have been a win as well.

"Combined, these SYNAPS-I advances lay the groundwork for self-driving microscopes, closed-loop experimentation and automated defect-detection tools that promise to accelerate discovery across fields ranging from semiconductor manufacturing to advanced materials and national user facilities," Cherukara said of the project's work thus far. 

In addition to the speed at which the new machine can process data, the conversational AI added in phase two gives researchers the ability to just ask the microscope to examine an area of interest rather than having to figure out how to aim the beam themselves. The AI can not only handle data collection and processing, but also analyze the results itself and flag additional areas of interest, which it can then further investigate on its own. 

Tao Zhou, a scientist at Argonne, said in a video from the lab that the new, chattier version of the microscope could open up advanced scientific research to researchers who could benefit from X-ray nanoprobe beamline science but don't know how to operate a complicated instrument like the one at his lab.

"This can be a game changer for a lot of users," Zhou said. "This kind of interactive chat interface allows them to do their scientific research, get excellent data, without having to spend too much time to learn about the beamline components." 

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Historical accounts of the eruption nearly 2,000 years ago provide a precise timeline that allowed recalibration of one of the most versatile dating methods:

When Pliny the Younger recorded his first-hand experience of the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius 2,000 years ago — a cataclysm that buried Pompeii and killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder — he provided enough detail about the precise date to allow scientists to benchmark methods for dating volcanic eruptions.

In a study published today (Sept. 25) in the journal Science Advances, scientists from the Berkeley Geochronology Center, UC Berkeley and the University of Padua in Italy report that argon-argon dating calibrated with the inferred date of the eruption — Aug. 24, 79 C.E. — is now significantly more precise, making it one of the most versatile dating methods available.

The improvement will allow geologists, paleontologists and archaeologists to attach more accurate dates to geologic events of the past, including past eruptions of volcanoes that still threaten dense urban areas like Mexico City, Naples and Yogyakarta in Indonesia. It will also help ground-truth other dating methods, such as carbon-14 dating of organic material and uranium-lead dating of billion-year-old rocks from the early days of planet Earth.

"If you want to put together the eruptive history of a volcano in relatively recent time, precision and accuracy really count," said study leader Paul Renne, a Berkeley professor in residence of earth and planetary science and director of the independent Berkeley Geochronology Center. "The study shows that you can achieve that kind of highly useful precision and accuracy into the historical realm."

Accuracy refers to whether a result is correct, whereas precision is a measure of how reproducible the result is. The recalibrated argon-argon dating method, used on eight samples of a potassium-containing volcanic mineral from Vesuvius called sanidine, pegged the eruption at 1,938 ±13 years prior to when the minerals were analyzed in 2025. The actual age of the volcanic minerals was 1,946 years, according to analysis of Pliny the Younger's writings. The estimate is equivalent to a precision of 0.7% and an accuracy of 0.4%.

"This lets us more precisely infer causality between events in the geologic record, for example a meteor impact structure and a mass extinction," Renne said. A decade ago, Renne used argon-argon dating to provide precise dates for a meteor impact, volcanic eruptions in India and the dinosaur extinction — all of which took place within a few tens of thousands of years 66 million years ago. These precise dates bolstered the idea that the impact triggered intensified volcanism, providing a one-two punch that led to the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs.

Thanks to a deep dive into the recorded history of Vesuvius' eruption by graduate student Caroline Hasler, the team was also able to validate the eruption date attributed to Pliny the Younger — August 24 — to within two months. This enabled the team to more precisely measure the half-life of the decay of potassium-40 to argon-40 that provides the basis for argon-argon dating. That half-life is now 12.044 billion years, give or take 0.088 billion — twice as precise as the previous value determined from nuclear physics.

AnonTechie writes:

Norwegian military personnel discovered that rented Chinese-made cars automatically recorded and stored video footage during military exercises. The Norwegian newspaper DN reported the incident. The cars continued to be used throughout the exercises because few alternative vehicles were available. Norwegian outlet Nettavisen drew attention to the supplier's links to China's Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. The Norwegian Armed Forces use rental vehicles from First Rent A Car Norway AS, which operates under the Hertz brand, for daily activities, military exercises, and operational tasks.

[...] The military's use of modern civilian vehicles also raises separate security concerns. In its Risiko 2025 assessment, Norway's National Security Authority warned that a modern car can contain more than 200 electronic sensors. If external actors gain access to such data, they could use it for surveillance, tracking movements, or intelligence-gathering. In its National Threat Assessment 2026, Norway's counterintelligence service, the Police Security Service, stated that Chinese intelligence and security agencies had expanded their capacity to conduct operations in Norway, including in cyberspace and through human intelligence sources.

[Source]: NGO "MILITARNYI"

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

As someone who spent 3-4 years writing 8086 assembly code I'm getting a kick out of this.

Regardless of whether you're on Intel or AMD, the first instruction your CPU executes runs in a mode designed for the 16-bit Intel 8086, released in June 1978. This is called "real mode," and despite everything that has changed about processors since then, this part of the startup process has remained remarkably similar.

  Real mode, or real-address mode as Intel calls it, is the execution environment of the original 8086. Intel says that "To an 8086 program, a processor operating in real-address mode behaves like a high-speed 8086 processor." In this mode, registers are 16 bits wide, there's no memory protection and no paging, and memory is addressed by taking a 16-bit segment value, shifting it left by four bits, and adding a 16-bit offset to it. That gives you a 20-bit address and a nominal 1MB address space, which was plenty in 1978 and is tiny by any modern standard.

When an x86 processor powers up, or when its reset pin is asserted, its registers are set to a known state and the CPU goes into real mode. The reset table for Intel's current processors have the control register CR0 at 60000010h, meaning that protection is off and paging is off, and it's the same value used by AMD for its own chips as well. No matter how powerful your 64-bit CPU is, it's basically just a chip from 1978 at boot until it's told to switch out of it.

Original Submission

Major French Supermarket Chains Hit by Cyber

"Ingar" writes:

Major French Supermarket Chains Hit by Cyber:

Several chains of supermarkets in France have reportedly been hit by a cyber-attack targeting the refrigeration facilities of several stores across the country.

One of the affected companies is Coopérative U, a retail cooperative encompassing supermarkets branded as Hyper U, Super U, U Express and Utile.

In a post on X published on October 12, Dominique Schelcher, CEO of Cooperative U, confirmed the cyber-attack affected several stores in the network from October 11.

"Our teams are fully mobilized, in coordination with refrigeration specialists, to restore the situation as quickly as possible. An investigation will be needed to shed full light on this attack," he said.

He also highlighted that refrigeration systems are "essential to preserving fresh products and supplying food to the French public" and said this attack is "of utmost gravity, unprecedented [and] unacceptable."

French news channel BFMTV reported that the compromised systems are administered by Danish refrigeration systems provider Danfoss.

The media outlet reported the attackers targeted outdated versions of the manufacturer's refrigeration control software.

"Hackers reportedly managed to remotely trigger forced defrost cycles in refrigeration systems at numerous supermarkets, with temperatures programmed to reach as high as 50 °C (122°F)," BFTV reported .

BFTV reported that two supermarkets alone, an Intermarché and Super U, already recorded losses of €270,000 ($302,000) worth of merchandise in Haguenau, in the Alsace region, as a result of the incident.

The media outlet assessed that 150 of Intermarché stores, part of Groupe Mousquetaire, are affected.

Other reportedly affected supermarket networks include some of the major retail chains in the country, such as E. Leclerc, Carrefour and Monoprix, Jonathan Le Borgne, author of the specialized retail news website Je bosse en grande distribution, has reported .

Danfoss products have been found to contain critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the past, such as CVE-2023-25915, CVE-2025-41450, CVE-2025-41451 and CVE-2025-41452, some of which could allow attackers to gain privileged access to refrigeration control systems and manipulate physical equipment.

Additionally, research presented by Claroty's Team82 at DEF CON 34 in August 2026 demonstrated how a compromised AK-SM 800A controller could disable cooling while falsifying temperature readings, potentially concealing failures in the cold chain. These findings highlight the real-world risks of exposing industrial refrigeration systems to the public internet without adequate security controls, authentication, and firmware updates.

On October 13, the Danish company will be at Chillventa in Nuremberg, a three-day trade fair for refrigeration technology, where it is planning to showcase the new iC7-HVACR drive featuring "integrated cybersecurity features."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/10/12/celebrating-the-brilliant-pragmatism-of-tcp/ip-the-wiring-of-the-world/5302202

It's 1988. Windows 2.0 is a DOS shell that runs on a dual-floppy 8086 PC. VGA is the aspirational video standard. A three-man startup in East London has decided to create low-cost LANs. There's not much of that and not much by way of standards, which is why a young programmer is rather excited by an emerging contender called TCP/IP.

He's particularly keen because he's just finished implementing IBM's PC networking API, NetBIOS, which hurt almost as much as integrating any sort of networking with DOS. Research means library books, magazine articles, and asking questions on Usenet over kilobit dial-up. Getting the wrong idea is easy. Trying to build the TCP/IP stack on the ISO/OSI seven-layer model produces more pain, but sanity prevails, and after a bit, there's a working network.

Nearly 40 years later, the once-young programmer is now a curmudgeonly Reg columnist. Floppies have become terabyte thumb drives. Kilobit modems are gigabit fiber and Wi-Fi. Graphics have come on a bit too. And he hasn't touched Windows or an Intel CPU in years. It is a transformed world. Except for one thing – everything talks to everything over TCP/IP. It's time to celebrate the digital oxygen of the global data ecosystem. 

TCP/IP is still newsworthy. Any apparent attempt to replace part of it is worth reporting, in this case a congestion-easing protocol called Homa superseding TCP. Only it's not a replacement, just an alternative designed to run alongside. That this is possible is due to one of the genius decisions made as TCP/IP evolved – splitting what was one protocol into two: TCP and IP.

IP, the Internet Protocol, just sends packets between two addresses, best effort, no guarantees when, in what order, or even if they'll get through. The Transmission Control Protocol uses IP but delivers a reliable, ordered stream of bytes, arranging retransmission of missing data. Thus, if you don't like how TCP does things, you can add your own IP-speaking protocol to run alongside. 

hubie writes:

https://btiscience.org/wild-tomatoes-still-hold-the-flavor-we-bred-away-new-map-shows-breeders-where-to-look/

Modern tomatoes are a breeding success story. Generations of selection have made them bigger, firmer, more productive, and easier to ship. But that progress came at a cost. Domestication and breeding reduced much of the crop's genetic diversity, and flavor has proven stubbornly hard to breed back in.

Tomato's wild relatives still carry much of what was lost. Some pack their fruit with high levels of the red pigment lycopene, and some store sugar differently. Others, like Solanum pennellii and Solanum neorickii, never turn red at all. Breeders have long wanted to know which genetic controls produce these traits, and which ones are worth bringing back.

A new study by researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) offers a detailed map of those controls. The team compared how genes behave in cultivated tomato and three wild relatives, across different fruit tissues and stages of development and ripening. That let them pinpoint the genetic "dimmer switches" behind color, sweetness, bitterness, and aroma, giving breeders a list of targets for developing tastier, more nutritious tomatoes.

[...] "Wild tomatoes are an enormous reservoir of diversity for flavor, nutrition, and resilience, but bringing those traits into modern varieties can come at the expense of other traits that breeders have spent decades improving, like yield, fruit size, or shelf life. This can be countered with precise information on how the genes responsible for such traits are controlled," said Catala.

Think of each gene as a lamp. Some shine brightly, some glow faintly, and how bright they are shapes how a fruit grows, ripens, and tastes. Something can change a lamp's brightness in two ways.

One is through a dimmer built into the lamp itself. Scientists call this a cis effect: a change in the section of DNA sitting right next to the gene, which controls how strongly that one gene turns on. The other is through the building's wiring. That's a trans effect: a change somewhere else in the genome that alters the power supply, often affecting many genes at once.

quietus writes:

I am a US Citizen and a first generation college student. I have worked since I was 16 years old. I had 2 jobs when I was a sophomore through senior in high school and I worked my way through college as well. I struggled for decades to make a living and pay my federal student loans back. I have learned that schools not only give foreign students lot of scholarships, but actively recruit them to come here and attend. Then I complete against them for jobs and they are hired over me because they can fluently speak a second language.

Thus opens a comment by one Ecstacy Smith on a new regulation proposal by the Trump administration. Under the proposal, Optional Practical Training Fees, US Universities need to pay up to $100,000 for each international student who, after graduation, works a science job in the country.

Currently, under a program called Optional Practical Training (OPT), foreign students (F-1 or M-1 visa) are eligible to work for 3 years after graduating a US university, on condition that employment must be directly related to the student's major area of study. In 2024, there were 1.58 million foreign graduates in the United States. Twenty-six percent (418,781) of those were authorized to work via OPT.

According to a source quoted by Nature, OPT is especially important for international PhD graduates in STEM fields. The DHS/ICE claims the scheme has seen widespread fraudulent abuse:

Most recently, DHS announced an investigation that identified more than 10,000 F-1 nonimmigrant students who were engaged in OPT and were working for highly suspect employers.

The current administration has good form in combating fraud and abuse this way: in 2025 Trump imposed a $100,000 levy on a visa reserved for researchers and other high-skilled workers. As a result, new applications for those visas plummeted by 90%, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Jon Henshaw has summarized a report about Internet infrastructure. Of about two dozen critically essential infrastructure components, about half have only one or two developers and little to no public funding.

A new analysis from sheets.works, The people holding up the [I]nternet, reveals that in 2026, key pieces of software the internet depends on are still underfunded or don't receive any public funding at all. Many of those critical components are kept alive and updated by individual contributors, and it's often just one or two people.

The analysis looked at the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers, and servers rely on. It counted everyone who made ten or more changes between October 2025 and October 2026. Of those 23 projects, 11 had only one or two people doing the regular work.

Even some of the larger projects go mostly underfunded or even unfunded. For example, if OpenBSD received even a penny for each commercially deployed instance of either the OpenSSH client or server, their budget worries would be finished.

Previously:
(2025) Curl Project Founder Snaps over Deluge of Time-Sucking AI Slop Bug Reports
(2022) SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
(2022) The New Yorker on NTP Software Maintenance
(2016) Dutch Government Says "No" to Backdoors after Giving €500,000 Grant to OpenSSL

Original Submission

McGruber writes:

I learned of Robert X. Cringely's passing from Avram Miller, who wrote:
My friend Mark Stephens died last Saturday. Most of the world knew him as Robert X. Cringely. I knew him as the neighbor who stood with me on garage roofs in Sonoma County, pointing dish antennas at distant ridge tops in 2020, because it was not possible to get a broadband internet connection at my location. That is how we became friends, more than 25 years ago. We managed to use directional wifi and created a link to someone that had broadband several miles from my home.

Mark was creative, technically competent and a dreamer. He was a gifted writer and storyteller. One of the few historians of his time to track the development of the computer industry. Sometimes we would dream together. He and his family lived close to our home in Sonoma for many years. He had an amazing family including a wonderful wife, MaryAlyce. Eventually they moved back to South Carolina where is wife had family. With all his moving and all my moving, we did not communicate often but we meant a lot to each other.

ARTICLE: https://twothirdsdone.com/2026/10/11/goodby-mark-stephens-aka-bob-cringely/

Mark Stephen's obituary: https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49806651

Robert X. Cringely's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

Original Submission