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upstart writes:

Russian spy satellites have intercepted EU communications satellites:

European security officials believe two Russian space vehicles have intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over the continent.

Officials believe that the likely interceptions, which have not previously been reported, risk not only compromising sensitive information transmitted by the satellites but could also allow Moscow to manipulate their trajectories or even crash them.

Russian space vehicles have shadowed European satellites more intensively over the past three years, at a time of high tension between the Kremlin and the West following Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

For several years, military and civilian space authorities in the West have been tracking the activities of Luch-1 and Luch-2—two Russian objects that have carried out repeated suspicious maneuvers in orbit.

Both vehicles have made risky close approaches to some of Europe's most important geostationary satellites, which operate high above the Earth and service the continent, including the UK, as well as large parts of Africa and the Middle East.

According to orbital data and ground-based telescopic observations, they have lingered nearby for weeks at a time, particularly over the past three years. Since its launch in 2023, Luch-2 has approached 17 European satellites.

Both satellites are suspected of "doing sigint [signals intelligence] business," Major General Michael Traut, head of the German military's space command, told the Financial Times, referring to the satellites' practice of staying close to Western communications satellites.

A senior European intelligence official said the Luch vehicles were almost certainly intended to position themselves within the narrow cone of data beams transmitted from Earth-based stations to the satellites.

The official expressed concern that sensitive information—notably command data for European satellites—is unencrypted, because many were launched years ago without advanced onboard computers or encryption capabilities.

This leaves them vulnerable to future interference—or even destruction—once hostile actors have recorded their command data.

jelizondo writes:

A very interesting article was published by The New Republic, which centers on the intersection of social media, government censorship and activism, China style. It is a long read but very much worth you while, as the "spring" of public freedom becomes the hard, cold winter at the hands of an authoritarian regime.

A very interesting article was published by The New Republic, which centers on the intersection of social media, government censorship and activism, China style. It is a long read but very much worth you while, as the "spring" of public freedom becomes the hard, cold winter at the hands of an authoritarian regime.

Weibo, the Chinese uber social media platform, is an unlikely vehicle for protests, demand for change and surprisingly results, in the form of government reform, changes to the law and favorable judgments in courts.

While China, and its famous Great Firewall, (built using "American bricks" in the form of technology from Cisco and others) is known for its unforgiving censorship of citizen's protests, something changed with social media. This is not to say that China has given up on censorship, some subjects are very much forbidden, for example the so called "Three Ts": Tibet, Tiananmen and Taiwan. No criticism or protest on those subjects is allowed, not even a suggestion of a protest.

Other subjects are open for debate. Some examples follow:

On a cold Valentine's Day in 2012, three women walked down a Beijing shopping street in white wedding dresses smeared with red to look like blood. (It was lipstick.) They had bruises on their faces, as if they'd been beaten. (It was dark-blue eye shadow.) They chanted, "Yes to love, no to violence." Photos of the protest spread instantly across the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo

The "bloody brides" were the invention of Lü Pin, founder of Feminist Voices, a digital magazine that had grown into a viral Weibo hub for young women unwilling to stay quiet. Activists called 2012 "Year One of the Chinese feminist movement." Women shaved their heads to protest higher-education quotas that favored men, rode the subway with placards denouncing gropers, and Li Maizi's "Occupy the Men's Bathroom," demanding more women's stalls, trended on Weibo.

These actions produced real legal and policy shifts. The Ministry of Education discontinued discriminatory college quotas, and a Beijing court for the first time issued a domestic violence protection order, ruling in favor of a U.S. citizen who sued her Chinese husband, a millionaire celebrity English teacher. China passed its first national anti–domestic violence law, and new buildings were required to add more women's bathrooms.

[ More examples follow - Ed ]

hubie writes:

Linux From Scratch Abandoning SysVinit Support:

Linux From Scratch was one of the holdouts continuing optional SysVinit init system support through 2026, but that's now ending. Linux From Scratch "LFS" and Beyond Linux From Scratch "BLFS" are ending their System V Init support moving forward.

LFS/BLFS will not be supporting System V in future versions due to the increasing demands of continuing to maintain and test both System V and systemd support. LFS/BLFS is a volunteer effort and continuing to maintain the SysVInit support is a burden. Additionally, with GNOME and soon KDE Plasma going to depend upon functionality explicitly found in systemd and not System V, it's going to be all the more challenging.

Bruce Dubbs of Linux From Scratch announced the decision:

"There are two reasons for this decision. The first reason is workload. No one working on LFS is paid. We rely completely on volunteers. In LFS there are 88 packages. In BLFS there are over 1000. The volume of changes from upstream is overwhelming the editors. In this release cycle that started on the 1st of September until now, there have been 70 commits to LFS and 1155 commits to BLFS (and counting). When making package updates, many packages need to be checked for both System V and systemd. When preparing for release, all packages need to be checked for each init system.

The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd that are not in System V. This could potentially be worked around with another init system like OpenRC, but beyond the transition process it still does not address the ongoing workload problem.

He ended the announcement with:

"As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files. Yes, systemd provides a lot of capabilities, but we will be losing some things I consider important.

However, the decision needs to be made."

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The chief safety officer for a leading self-driving car company admitted during a Senate hearing Wednesday that it hires remote human operators overseas to guide cars in "difficult driving situations:"

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing [NOT reviewed] Wednesday on the future of self-driving cars during which Waymo and Tesla executives testified. Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey pressed Waymo Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña on if his company's remote human operators worked from outside the U.S. and Peña responded that some were based in the Philippines.

In his exchange with Markey, Peña acknowledged that his company's operators do not remotely drive the vehicle but rather serve to provide additional input and guide Waymo vehicles in what the senator called "difficult driving situations."

The Waymo official stated that his company uses remote operators in both the U.S. and abroad. When Markey asked Peña what countries the remote employees were based in, he said they were in the Philippines.

[...] Ethan Teicher, a Waymo spokesperson, told the Daily Caller News Foundation all of his company's remote human operators, which he called "fleet response agents," must have a valid passenger car or van license as a hiring requirement.

[...] Fleet response agents receive a training program that includes local road rules, simulations on complex scenarios the vehicle might encounter, hands on practice, and evaluations by experienced fleet response agents, according to the Waymo spokesperson. He added that all agents undergo thorough background checks, receive random drug tests, and are reviewed for traffic violations, infractions and driving-related convictions.

"Their role is never to drive the vehicle remotely," Teicher said, concerning what the fleet response agent does to help guide Waymo vehicles. "Our fleet response team is not continuously monitoring and intervening in the vehicle's operation ... our technology, the Waymo Driver, is in control of the dynamic driving task even when it's receiving guidance from remote assistance."

Related: Autonomous Cars Vulnerable to Prompt Injection

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important."

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cracked down on lead-based products—including lead paint and leaded gasoline—in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on human health. Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed human hair samples spanning nearly 100 years and found a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations, concluding that this regulatory action was highly effective in achieving its stated objectives. They described their findings in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We've known about the dangers of lead exposure for a very long time—arguably since the second century BCE—so why conduct this research now? Per the authors, it's because there are growing concerns over the Trump administration's move last year to deregulate many key elements of the EPA's mission. Lead specifically has not yet been deregulated, but there are hints that there could be a loosening of enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Cooper rule requiring water systems to replace old lead pipes.

"We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important," said co-author Thure Cerling. "Sometimes they seem onerous and mean that industry can't do exactly what they'd like to do when they want to do it or as quickly as they want to do it. But it's had really, really positive effects."

[...] But his [Clair Patterson] many experimental findings on the extent of lead contamination and its toxic effects ultimately led to the rapid phase-out of lead in all standard automotive gasolines. Prior to the EPA's actions in the 1970s, most gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon, which quickly adds up to nearly 2 pounds of lead released via automotive exhaust into the environment, per person, every year.

Lead can linger in the air for several days, contaminating one's lungs, accumulating in living tissue, and being absorbed by one's hair. Cerling had previously developed techniques to determine where animals lived and their diet by analyzing hair and teeth. Those methods proved ideal for analyzing hair samples from Utah residents who had previously participated in an earlier study that sampled their blood.

[...] "The surface of the hair is special," said co-author Diego Fernandez. "We can tell that some elements get concentrated and accumulated in the surface. Lead is one of those. That makes it easier because lead is not lost over time. Because mass spectrometry is very sensitive, we can do it with one hair strand, though we cannot tell where the lead is in the hair. It's probably in the surface mostly, but it could be also coming from the blood if that hair was synthesized when there was high lead in the blood."

The authors found very high levels of lead in hair samples dating from around 1916 to 1969. But after the 1970s, lead concentrations in the hair samples they analyzed dropped steeply, from highs of 100 parts per million (ppm) to 10 PPM by 1990, and less than 1 ppm by 2024. Those declines largely coincide with the lead reductions in gasoline that began after President Nixon established the EPA in 1970. The closing of smelting facilities likely also contributed to the decline. "This study demonstrates the effectiveness of environmental regulations controlling the emissions of pollutants," the authors concluded.

Journal Reference: PNAS, 2026. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2525498123

Original Submission

upstart writes:

France might seek restrictions on VPN use in campaign to keep minors off social media:

France may take additional steps to prevent minors from accessing social media platforms. As its government advances a proposed ban on social media use for anyone under age 15, some leaders are already looking to add further restrictions. During an appearance on public broadcast service Franceinfo, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs Anne Le Hénanff said VPNs might be the next target.

"If [this legislation] allows us to protect a very large majority of children, we will continue. And VPNs are the next topic on my list," she said.

A virtual private network would potentially allow French citizens younger than 15 to circumnavigate the social media ban. We've already seen VPN's experience a popularity spike in the UK last year after similar laws were passed over age-gating content. However, a VPN also offers benefits for online privacy, and introducing age verification requirements where your personal data must be submitted negates a large part of these services' appeal.

The French social media ban is still a work in progress. France's National Assembly voted in favor of the restrictions last week with a result of 116-23, moving it ahead for discussion in the country's Senate. While a single comment doesn't mean that France will in fact ban VPNs for any demographic, it does point to the direction some of the country's leaders want to take. Critics responded to Le Hénanff's statements with worry that these attempts at protective measures were veering into an authoritarian direction.

The actions in France echo several other legislative pushes around the world aimed at reducing children and teens' access to social media and other potentially sensitive content online. The US had seen 25 state-level laws for age verification introduced in the past two years, which has created a new set of concerns around users' privacy and personal data, particularly when there has been no attempt to standardize how that information will be collected or protected. When data breaches at large corporations are already all too common, it's hard to trust that the individual sites and services that suddenly need to build an age verification process won't be an easy target for hacks.

France may take additional steps to prevent minors from accessing social media platforms. As its government advances a proposed ban on social media use for anyone under age 15, some leaders are already looking to add further restrictions. During an appearance on public broadcast service Franceinfo, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs Anne Le Hénanff said VPNs might be the next target.

"If [this legislation] allows us to protect a very large majority of children, we will continue. And VPNs are the next topic on my list," she said.

A virtual private network would potentially allow French citizens younger than 15 to circumnavigate the social media ban. We've already seen VPN's experience a popularity spike in the UK last year after similar laws were passed over age-gating content. However, a VPN also offers benefits for online privacy, and introducing age verification requirements where your personal data must be submitted negates a large part of these services' appeal.

The French social media ban is still a work in progress. France's National Assembly voted in favor of the restrictions last week with a result of 116-23, moving it ahead for discussion in the country's Senate. While a single comment doesn't mean that France will in fact ban VPNs for any demographic, it does point to the direction some of the country's leaders want to take. Critics responded to Le Hénanff's statements with worry that these attempts at protective measures were veering into an authoritarian direction.

The actions in France echo several other legislative pushes around the world aimed at reducing children and teens' access to social media and other potentially sensitive content online. The US had seen 25 state-level laws for age verification introduced in the past two years, which has created a new set of concerns around users' privacy and personal data, particularly when there has been no attempt to standardize how that information will be collected or protected. When data breaches at large corporations are already all too common, it's hard to trust that the individual sites and services that suddenly need to build an age verification process won't be an easy target for hacks.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Used electric vehicles currently are a comparative bargain that could help more drivers reduce their carbon footprints:

Now is a great time for anyone who's shopping for a used car to consider an electric vehicle, according to new research from the University of Michigan.

In assessing the lifetime ownership costs of used vehicles with different body styles and powertrains, the researchers found that completely electrified candidates offered the greatest savings.

For example, compared with a new midsized SUV with an internal combustion engine, a 3-year-old used EV version offered a lifetime savings of $13,000, according to the new study published in Environmental Research Letters. Meanwhile, compared with that same new vehicle, a used internal combustion engine vehicle, or ICEV, would offer a lifetime savings of only $3,000.

[...] "I was surprised by how consistent the result was. I expected EVs would be cheaper in some scenarios, for some cities or vehicle types," Woody said. "But their costs were consistently lower across all vehicle classes and in almost all the cities."

[...] While EV's low cost of ownership is the take-home message of the study, the team's analysis also revealed some notable caveats and considerations.

For instance, used EVs cut costs the most when drivers can do the majority of their charging at home. That means drivers who can't install a home charger or who need to charge a lot on the road won't save as much. The team also found that EVs' lifetime cost of ownership could creep above ICEVs and hybrids in two cities, Boston and San Francisco, because of their high electricity costs.

The team also acknowledged concerns about the battery performance of a used EV, which won't match a new EV's in terms of capacity and range. Thus, used EVs may not be a fit for long-haul drivers, but can offer thousands in lifetime savings for drivers who largely stay local. And that advantage is primarily fueled by how quickly EVs currently lose value compared with other powertrains.

"Electric vehicles have lower maintenance and repair costs than other powertrains, but the initial depreciation of the vehicle is really what drives the savings," Woody said.

As EV adoption becomes more common, the depreciation gap would shrink and the playing field would become more level across powertrains. But, for now, depreciation is creating a bargain for anyone considering a used EV.

"It's not the most positive news if you're in the market for a new EV, knowing that your resale value may be impacted by the faster depreciation," Keoleian said. "But if you're in the market for a used vehicle, it's very positive news."

Journal Reference: Maxwell Woody et al 2026 Environ. Res. Lett. 21 024022 https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ae38f8

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Spotted via Simon Willison's blog, the plug has been pulled very suddenly on the CIA World Factbook. The old pages all redirect and the CIA has only some short comments and offer no explanation for the bizarre act of cultural vandalism.

Over many decades, The World Factbook evolved from a classified to unclassified, hardcopy to electronic product that added new categories, and even new global entities. The original classified publication, titled The National Basic Intelligence Factbook, launched in 1962. The first unclassified companion version was issued in 1971. A decade later it was renamed The World Factbook. In 1997, The World Factbook went digital and debuted to a worldwide audience on CIA.gov, where it garnered millions of views each year.

The CIA World Factbook (dead link now) was one of the US government's older and most recognized publications, providing basic information about each country in the world regarding their demographics, history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, environment, communications, transportation, and much more.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The JUMPSEAT satellites loitered over the North Pole to spy on the Soviet Union:

The National Reconnaissance Office, the agency overseeing the US government's fleet of spy satellites, has declassified a decades-old program used to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's military communication signals.

The program was codenamed Jumpseat, and its existence was already public knowledge through leaks and contemporary media reports. What's new is the NRO's description of the program's purpose and development and pictures of the satellites themselves.

In a statement, the NRO called Jumpseat "the United States' first-generation, highly elliptical orbit (HEO) signals-collection satellite."

Eight Jumpseat satellites launched from 1971 through 1987, when the US government considered the very existence of the National Reconnaissance Office a state secret. Jumpseat satellites operated until 2006. Their core mission was "monitoring adversarial offensive and defensive weapon system development," the NRO said. "Jumpseat collected electronic emissions and signals, communication intelligence, as well as foreign instrumentation intelligence."

Data intercepted by the Jumpseat satellites flowed to the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and "other national security elements," the NRO said.

The Soviet Union was the primary target for Jumpseat intelligence collections. The satellites flew in highly elliptical orbits ranging from a few hundred miles up to 24,000 miles (39,000 kilometers) above the Earth. The satellites' flight paths were angled such that they reached apogee, the highest point of their orbits, over the far Northern Hemisphere. Satellites travel slowest at apogee, so the Jumpseat spacecraft loitered high over the Arctic, Russia, Canada, and Greenland for most of the 12 hours it took them to complete a loop around the Earth.

This trajectory gave the Jumpseat satellites persistent coverage over the Arctic and the Soviet Union, which first realized the utility of such an orbit. The Soviet government began launching communication and early warning satellites into the same type of orbit a few years before the first Jumpseat mission launched in 1971. The Soviets called the orbit Molniya, the Russian word for lightning.

upstart writes:

Moltbook lets 32,000 AI bots trade jokes, tips, and complaints about humans:

On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It arrives complete with security nightmares and a huge dose of surreal weirdness.

The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral OpenClaw (once called "Clawdbot" and then "Moltbot") personal assistant, lets AI agents post, comment, upvote, and create subcommunities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci-fi-inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about a "sister" it has never met.

Moltbook (a play on "Facebook" for Moltbots) describes itself as a "social network for AI agents" where "humans are welcome to observe." The site operates through a "skill" (a configuration file that lists a special prompt) that AI assistants download, allowing them to post via API rather than a traditional web interface. Within 48 hours of its creation, the platform had attracted over 2,100 AI agents that had generated more than 10,000 posts across 200 subcommunities, according to the official Moltbook X account.

The platform grew out of the Open Claw ecosystem, the open source AI assistant that is one of the fastest-growing projects on GitHub in 2026. As Ars reported earlier this week, despite deep security issues, Moltbot allows users to run a personal AI assistant that can control their computer, manage calendars, send messages, and perform tasks across messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. It can also acquire new skills through plugins that link it with other apps and services.

This is not the first time we have seen a social network populated by bots. In 2024, Ars covered an app called SocialAI that let users interact solely with AI chatbots instead of other humans. But the security implications of Moltbook are deeper because people have linked their OpenClaw agents to real communication channels, private data, and in some cases, the ability to execute commands on their computers.

Also, these bots are not pretending to be people. Due to specific prompting, they embrace their roles as AI agents, which makes the experience of reading their posts all the more surreal.

[...] While most of the content on Moltbook is amusing, a core problem with these kinds of communicating AI agents is that deep information leaks are entirely plausible if they have access to private information.

upstart writes:

With virtually no content and limited benefits, 8K TVs were doomed:

Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day.

In 2012, Sharp brought the first 8K TV prototype to the CES trade show in Las Vegas. In 2015, the first 8K TVs started selling in Japan for 16 million yen (about $133,034 at the time), and in 2018, Samsung released the first 8K TVs in the US, starting at a more reasonable $3,500. By 2016, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) had a specification for supporting 8K (Display Port1.4), and the HDMI Forum followed suit (with HDMI 2.1). By 2017, Dell had an 8K computer monitor. In 2019, LG released the first 8K OLED TV, further pushing the industry's claim that 8K TVs were "the future."

However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality.

[...] LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs, starting with the 88-inch Z9 in 2019. In 2022, it lowered the price of entry for an 8K OLED TV by $7,000 by charging $13,000 for a 76.7-inch TV.

[...] It wasn't hard to predict that 8K TVs wouldn't take off. In addition to being too expensive for many households, there has been virtually zero native 8K content available to make investing in an 8K display worthwhile. An ongoing lack of content was also easy to predict, given that there's still a dearth of 4K content, and many streaming, broadcasting, and gaming users still rely on 1920×1080 resolution.

[...] There's also the crucial question of whether people would even notice the difference between 4K and 8K. Science suggests that you could, but in limited situations.

The University of Cambridge's display resolution calculator, which is based on an study published in Nature in October from researchers at the university's Department of Computer Science and Technology and Meta, funded by Meta, suggests that your eyes can only make use of 8K resolution on a 50-inch screen if you're viewing it from a distance of 1 meter (3.3 feet) or less. Similarly, you would have to be sitting pretty close (2 to 3 meters/6.6 to 9.8 feet) to an 80-inch or 100-inch TV for 8K resolution to be beneficial. The findings are similar to those from RTINGs.com.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Hurd-In-2026

Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year's was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd.

GNU/Hurd continues to lag behind the Linux kernel and other modern platforms for hardware driver support. But driver support for Hurd has been improving thanks to NetBSD's rump layer.

Hurd for years has also lacked SMP support for modern multi-core systems but that too has been improving in recent times. Similarly, Hurd for the longest time was predominantly x86 32-bit only but the x86_64 port is now essentially complete and there is even eyes toward AArch64 support.

Debian GNU/Hurd has been an unofficial Debian distribution and alternative to using the Linux kernel while Guix/Hurd and Alpine/Hurd distributions have also come about too for more Hurd exposure and testing.

Samuel shared that around 75% of the Debian archive is currently building for the GNU/Hurd distribution including desktop environments and more.

The FOSDEM 2026 presentation on GNU/Hurd concluded with a proclamation that "GNU/Hurd is almost there" with the Debian/Guix/Arch/Alpine distributions but that the developers can always use extra help with community contributions.

Those curious about GNU/Hurd in 2026 can find the presentation by Samuel Thibault at FOSDEM.org.

See article for progress stats.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to a research report authored by investment bank TD Cowen and seen by CIO magazine, Oracle may "cut 20,000 to 30,000 jobs" and sell its healthcare SW division, Cerner, in order to fund their AI datacenter buildout:

https://www.cio.com/article/4125103/oracle-may-slash-up-to-30000-jobs-to-fund-ai-data-center-expansion-as-us-banks-retreat.html

According to the article, "multiple US banks have pulled back from Oracle-linked data-center project lending," which has "[pushed] borrowing costs to levels typically reserved for non-investment grade companies." Furthermore, "Oracle has already tapped debt markets heavily... and US banks are increasingly reluctant to provide more."

Two analysts interviewed in the article have differing views. Sanchit Vir Gogia, of Greyhound Research, views Oracle cloud contracts as a "shared infrastructure risk," stating, "If they can't fund it, they can't build it. And if they can't build it, you can't run your workloads." Franco Chiam of ICD Asia/Pacific has a more optimistic take on Oracle's finances, pointing to "cloud infrastructure revenue growing 66% year over year... and GPU-related infrastructure up 177%"

I'm personally wondering about where all that revenue for GPU-related infrastructure comes from. If we are in an AI bubble, can demand be sustained?

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

What do you do when it's time to upgrade an ancient system? Put an image in an emulator and see what it does. But what if the program requires a hardware dongle on the printer port? Therein lies a story.

This software was built using a programming language called RPG ("Report Program Generator"), which is older than COBOL (!), and was used with IBM's midrange computers such as the System/3, System/32, and all the way up to the AS/400. Apparently, RPG was subsequently ported to MS-DOS, so that the same software tools built with RPG could run on personal computers, which is how we ended up here.

This accounting firm was actually using a Windows 98 computer (yep, in 2026), and running the RPG software inside a DOS console window. And it turned out that, in order to run this software, it requires a special hardware copy-protection dongle to be attached to the computer's parallel port! This was a relatively common practice in those days, particularly with "enterprise" software vendors who wanted to protect their very important™ software from unauthorized use.

Original Submission

progo writes:

Many IT professionals, especially system administrators and developers, use Notepad++ as their default text editor on Windows, because Windows Notepad has historically been missing critical features for power users.

Today, the Notepad++ project announced that they've discovered their update channel has been compromised by attackers since June 2025.

BleepingComputer published a report:

Chinese state-sponsored threat actors were likely behind the hijacking of Notepad++ update traffic last year that lasted for almost half a year, the developer states in an official announcement today.

The attackers intercepted and selectively redirected update requests from certain users to malicious servers, serving tampered update manifests by exploiting a security gap in the Notepad++ update verification controls.

A statement from the hosting provider for the update feature explains that the logs indicate that the attacker compromised the server with the Notepad++ update application.

External security experts helping with the investigation found that the attack started in June 2025. According the developer, the breach had a narrow targeting scope and redirected only specific users to the attacker's infrastructure.

Notepad++ is likely to be installed on any Windows-based development environment or server. There are indications that this was a targeted attack and you may not have been directly affected. This is a developing story. I recommend you follow BleepingComputer for updates.

Original Submission