Science and Technology (old posts, page 185)
AI Overviews hallucinates that Airbus, not Boeing, involved in fatal Air India crash
CISA loses another senior exec - and the budget cuts haven't even started yet
Another one bites the dust at America's top cybersecurity agency
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has lost another senior leader: executive director Bridget Bean departed on Wednesday.…
Crafty curlews: birds eavesdrop on prairie dog calls to evade predators
Vulnerable grassland birds listen in to the social rodents warning of the many threats both species face
Prairie dogs bark to alert each other to the presence of predators, with different cries depending on whether the threat is airborne or approaching by land.
But their warnings also seem to help a vulnerable grassland bird.
Continue reading...[$] FAIR package management for WordPress
The last year has been a rocky one for the WordPress community. Matt
Mullenweg—WordPress co-founder and
CEO of WordPress hosting company Automattic—started a messy public spat with
WP Engine in September and
has proceeded to use his control of the project's WordPress.org
infrastructure as weapons against the company, with the community
caught in the crossfire. It is not surprising, then, that on
June 6 a group of WordPress community participants announced the
Federated
and Independent Repositories Package Manager (FAIR.pm) project. It
is designed to be a decentralized alternative to WordPress.org with a
goal of building "public digital infrastructure that is both
resilient and fair
".
Summaries from the 2025 Python Language Summit
The Python Language Summit 2025 occurred on May 14th in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Core developers and special guests from around the world gathered in one room for an entire day of presentations and discussions about the future of the Python programming language.
Topics covered include making breaking changes less painful, free-threaded Python, interaction with Rust, and challenges faced by the Steering Council.
Rocky Linux 10.0 released
Version 10.0 of the Rocky Linux distribution has been released. As with the AlmaLinux 10.0 release, Rocky Linux 10.0 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10. See the release notes for details.
[$] Parallelizing filesystem writeback
Security updates for Thursday
European journalists targeted with Paragon Solutions spyware, say researchers
Citizen Lab says it found ‘digital fingerprints’ of military-grade spyware that Italy has admitted using against activists
The hacking mystery roiling the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government is deepening after researchers said they had found new evidence that two more journalists were targeted using the same military-grade spyware that Italy has admitted to using against activists.
A parliamentary committee overseeing intelligence confirmed earlier this month that Italy had used mercenary spyware made by Israel-based Paragon Solutions against two Italian activists.
Continue reading...