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Slashdot (Last Update: 2026-11-12 11:00:00GMT)

Tim Peters, Python User #2 and Prolific Contributor, Dies At 74

Tim Peters, one of Python's earliest and most influential contributors, died on July 15 at age 74. Known as Python's second real user, Peters created the Zen of Python and Timsort sorting algorithm while contributing to numerous core components. He also served as a Python Software Foundation director from 2001 to 2014. Adafruit remembers Peters in a blog post: He's best known for the Zen of Python, PEP 20, still printed by typing import this. In 2002, he gave Python Timsort, the sorting algorithm he designed for lists, later adopted by Java and Android. He also polished the cyclic garbage collector and the pymalloc allocator, worked on the dict implementation, the float object, the math module and Karatsuba multiplication in longobject, and wrote the first version of doctest, plus difflib, pickletools and tabnanny. He was a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2001 to 2014. Before Python, he wrote compilers at Cray Research and speech-to-text software at Dragon Systems. The thread is full of recollections from core developers about his patient, detailed answers on the mailing lists, signed with his trademark . Python creator Guido van Rossum also paid tribute to Peters in a post on discuss.python.org, writing: "It's hard to overestimate Tim's influence on Python. He's probably best known for writing the Zen of Python (PEP 20), but to me he was a mentor and language co-designer long before that..." Further discussions can be found on Hacker News and Reddit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Power Grids On 5 Continents Pulse Every 60s. Scientists Think They Know Why

"ScienceAlert is reporting that researchers may have finally determined why, for many years, power grids around the world have been pulsing every 60 seconds," writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. The likely culprit? Uninterruptible power supplies running routine battery checks. From the report: Every minute, some uninterruptible power supplies perform routine battery checks, creating small but measurable surges in electricity demand. And it's like clockwork. "Even benign control routines can become systemically relevant when many devices act coherently," writes a team led by physicist Dirk Witthaut of the University of Cologne, Germany, in a paper published in Nature Energy. "Unintended synchronization can generate recurrent and potentially amplified oscillatory behavior in large-scale cyber-physical energy systems." To figure it out, Witthaut and his colleagues analyzed high-resolution electricity measurements from buildings at the Forschungszentrum Julich research campus in Germany. [... they found that] the 60-second pattern appeared in four buildings, all of which contained uninterruptible power supplies. None of the buildings they measured without these systems showed the same pattern. Following the electrical signals more closely, the researchers detected tiny bursts of current from the batteries at precisely one-minute intervals. They were able to trace the resulting fluctuations through one building's electrical system, all the way to the connection with the public high-voltage grid. The manufacturer subsequently confirmed the culprit's identity -- routine battery self-tests, conducted automatically by the systems' management software. But why would equipment in different buildings, let alone different countries, be doing this at the same time? The answer appears to lie in the clocks. Digital devices can synchronize their internal clocks using external time signals, meaning that independently operating systems can end up performing their scheduled tasks together. Individually, these small checks are insignificant. But when enough devices act in synchrony, their combined electricity demand can produce a measurable effect across an entire power grid.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sunken SS United States Set To Become World's Largest Artificial Reef

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: The historic ocean liner SS United States will be intentionally sunk Wednesday off the coast of the Florida panhandle. Live coverage of the sinking of the SS United States is expected to start at 1 p.m. EST, with the sinking expected at 2 p.m. EST. Watch live in the video player above. In its heyday, the SS United States crushed the trans-Atlantic speed record, which it still holds. The luxury ocean liner took only three days to cross from New York to Europe on its maiden voyage in 1952. Carrying presidents and Hollywood stars, the nearly 1,000-foot vessel was a technical marvel of its time. However, the rise of air travel and high operating costs sunk its economic viability, and the ship was pulled from service in 1969. The ocean liner sat at Philadelphia's Pier 82 for nearly 30 years. After a contentious back and forth with a pier landlord over rent and docking fees, Okaloosa County in Florida eventually stepped in to purchase the ship and bring it to the Gulf of Mexico to become the world's largest artificial reef. The multi-million dollar project is also aimed at creating an economic development opportunity as a major diving attraction. "It was our goal to make sure that she wasn't lost forever," said David Lawrence, a member of the board for the SS United States Conservancy, the group that sold the vessel to the Florida county. Like the ship's unconventional life, it will also have an unconventional sinking. Federal environmental and explosives rules prevent the county from using explosives. Instead, tanks inside the ship have been removed and large holes were cut into the decks. Once the valves are opened, water will flood the hull, sinking the ship. Resting at 180 feet below the surface of the water, the SS United States will join more than 500 artificial reefs in Okaloosa County, which the county relies on to support the underwater ecosystem.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United Airlines Bans AI Agents From Booking Flights On Behalf of Travelers

United Airlines is banning unauthorized third-party AI agents from booking flights, checking in passengers or making account changes on travelers' behalf. CBS News reports: To make an airline booking, an AI agent requires access to a customer's personal information, including credentials like payment information. United has a problem with that, saying that "sharing account credentials with personal, third-party, AI assistants can expose sensitive information, and actions taken by these tools may result in unintended purchases, account changes, or use of MileagePlus miles." The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances. "As a result, United is taking steps to restrict access -- directly within our digital platforms and indirectly via travel agencies and aggregators -- to prohibit use by unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents or assistants," said the airline, which is updating its booking and ticketing policies to reflect the new rule. "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," said Henry Harteveldt, an aviation analyst at Atmosphere Research Group. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jensen Huang Said to Have Had Relationship With Nvidia Executive Who Reports to Him

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is facing scrutiny over an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Now, The New York Times reports that Mr. Huang also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president of health care and a direct report, raising questions about conflicts of interest and compliance with the company's policies governing personal relationships. From the report: The relationship, which has not been previously reported, was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, said the people, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information. Under Nvidia's code of conduct, employees are told to "avoid situations where our actions create conflict" including "personal relationships," and the company states that it "promptly investigates reports of misconduct." Many corporations have policies against managers having relationships with subordinates. Mr. Huang, 63, and Ms. Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March, according to two of the people who worked at the company. The New York Times has not seen the video. Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people. [...] One bystander captured the interaction on their phone, three people briefed on the incident said. Mr. Huang's security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Further reading: Nvidia and Jensen Huang Face Shareholder Lawsuit Alleging Investors Were Misled About Spy Affair

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia and Jensen Huang Face Shareholder Lawsuit Alleging Investors Were Misled About Spy Affair

Charlotte Web shares a report from the Associated Press: A shareholder has sued Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, accusing them of deceiving investors in their responses to media reports about Huang's affair with a purported Chinese spy that threatens national security. [...] The news reports said that the Commerce Department was investigating Alice Huang's company, Singapore-based Megaspeed, on suspicions that it was helping to sidestep U.S. export restrictions blocking Nvidia chips from being sold to China. But Nvidia said then that its compliance team checked and determined that Megaspeed wasn't doing anything illegal. But, according to the complaint, the statements were misleading because they were made when Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang, who is "suspected of seeking to help smuggle Nvidia products into China." It accuses Nvidia and Huang of failing to disclose the affair and issuing false statements about Nvidia's relationship with Megaspeed, which posed a "material risk" to Nvidia's reputation and business prospects. [...] "As a result of Defendants' wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company's securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages," the complaint said. Had investors known the truth, they wouldn't have purchased Nvidia's shares "at the artificially inflated prices that they did, or at all," the complaint said. "Fun fact: Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump's White House ballroom fund," notes Slashdot reader Charlotte Web.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York Forces T-Mobile to End Data Caps On Low-Income Plans

New York has forced T-Mobile to remove a 50GB monthly data cap from its $15 low-income broadband plan after regulators found customers who exceeded the limit had their speeds cut by more than 97%, to just 650 Kbps. "Additionally, the [Office of the Attorney General (OAG)] found T-Mobile restricted [New York's Affordable Broadband Act (ABA)] plans to areas with 5G coverage, despite offering standard-rate 25 Mbps plans in 4G areas, and intentionally coded its website to hide affordable plans from search engines," reports RochestFirst. From the report: Under the terms of the settlement, T-Mobile must: - Eliminate data caps on its ABA plans and deliver guaranteed 25 Mbps download speeds. - Expand ABA plan availability to all geographic areas where it offers fixed-wireless home internet service. - Make its ABA webpage indexed and easily discoverable via standard web searches.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukraine Strikes Cause Permanent Data Loss at Russia's Yandex Cloud

Russia's Yandex says 2.84% of customer data has been permanently lost following Ukrainian strikes on data centers in the country. "According to the company, recovery is impossible because of critical damage to equipment and the lack of backup copies on the platform," reports UNITED24 Media. From the report: Yandex clarified that customers who had previously enabled the platform's backup tools did not experience any data loss, as their information remained fully preserved. The incident has prompted the company to revise its approach to data protection and disaster recovery, particularly the default settings for cloud infrastructure. Under the updated policy, automatic backups will be enabled by default whenever customers create new virtual machines on Yandex Cloud. Users will retain the option to disable the feature manually through the management console. In addition to changing its backup policy, Yandex Cloud announced the launch of a new availability zone, designated ru-central1-f. The new availability zone operates from a separate location, improving the resilience and reliability of the services. The report says Ukrainian drones targeted three Yandex data centers in Russia over four days, beginning October 8 with a strike on a facility in the Ryazan region that houses two of the company's three supercomputers. A second attack hit Yandex's largest data center in the Kaluga region on October 9, followed by a third strike on October 11 targeting a facility in the Vladimir region that houses the company's remaining supercomputer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix (Last Update: 2026-11-12 11:26:17GMT)

AMD EPYC 9006 Venice vs. NVIDIA Vera Benchmarks For HPC Performance

Yesterday in the AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" SP7 launch testing were reviews of the AMD EPYC 9996 256-core processor as well as the EPYC 9686F 96-core high frequency part. There were hundreds of benchmarks looking at the gen-on-gen performance from EPYC Turin to EPYC Venice as well as against the Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids competition. For those wondering about how AMD EPYC Venice is competing with NVIDIA's Vera CPU, this article provides a look at those results for a range of HPC workloads.

Undeadly.org (Last Update: 2026-11-11 18:58:28GMT)

LibreSSL 4.3.5 and 4.4.1 released

The world moves on, and with it comes bugfixes and new releases. The LibresSSL project has announced the release of versions 4.3.5 and 4.4.1, in an announcement that reads,

List:       openbsd-announce
Subject:    LibreSSL 4.3.5 and 4.4.1 released
From:       Brent Cook <busterb () gmail ! com>
Date:       2026-11-11 13:37:27
Message-ID: avRvlxkd6oW6QuJ2 () bobcat ! local

We have released LibreSSL 4.3.5 and 4.4.1, which will be arriving in the
LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon.

Read more…

OpenBSD top(1) adds flag to show chroot, pledge and unveil status

With one recent commit, the top(1) command on OpenBSD became quite a bit more useful. The commit adds a new -Q flag to show each process' use of the chroot(2), pledge(2) and unveil(2) facilities.

The commit message reads,

List:       openbsd-cvs
Subject:    CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src
From:       Klemens Nanni <kn () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date:       2026-11-05 17:54:16

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	kn@cvs.openbsd.org	2026/11/05 11:54:16

Modified files:
	usr.bin/top    : display.c machine.c machine.h top.1 top.c 

Log message:
add Q flag/key to show pledge/chroot/unveil usage

Read more…

OpenSSH 10.6p2 released

In an announcement posted on social media, Damien Miller (djm@) writes,
OpenSSH 10.6p2 has been released with a workaround for a critical vulnerability.

If you operate a Linux system that uses musl libc without PAM (Alpine Linux is one example) then stop reading and set PasswordAuthentication=no or disable SSH for these systems IMMEDIATELY.

This vulnerability does not exist on non-Linux systems, Linux/glibc systems and Linux systems that use PAM for password authentication.

We consider the root cause of this bug to be outside OpenSSH itself, but we're in a good position to deliver a mitigation quickly.

Read more…

Work on GEFS (the Good Enough File System) for OpenBSD progresses

As previously reported, Ori Bernstein is working on GEFS, the "Good Enough File System" imported to OpenBSD, and his EuroBSDCon 2026 presentation was very well received. In fact, the video is among the most frequently played from the conference.

Now Ori has followed up with more evolved code that includes several important steps towards makin the new file system fit for general use. In a message to tech@, Ori writes:

List:       openbsd-tech
Subject:    Re: GEFS on OpenBSD: A very early preview
From:       ori () eigenstate ! org
Date:       2026-10-31 17:08:42

So, it's probably time for a few updates. First
off, thanks to Martijn, and everyone else who
tried it out and sent patches.

Everything is updated and rebased, and the diff
has been regenerated with all of the lastest.

Read more…

emulators/wine (re)entering OpenBSD ports

In his message to the ports@ mailing list, Thomas Frohwein (thfr@) leads in,
In what might the most surprising port proposal of the year, I'm proud
to present a new port for wine.

talking not about the beverage, but the Windows Emulator that enables running binaries for that operating system on other systems.

Among the editors there is no one with enough recent Windows exposure to comment seriously on this, but we do vaguely remember that a port of this software existed back in the day.

So if this falls within the things you are interested in or actually need, we would encourage you to read the entire emulators/wine thread and the later supplement on new port: emulators/wine-extras: scripts for winetricks and wine-steam to keep up to date on developments.

Then, if you are able, please help the effort by testing the ports and reporting back.

dbupdate(8) added to -current

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has committed to -current a (WIP) new utility for updating system databases:

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org	2026/10/20 19:08:58

Added files:
	usr.sbin/dbupdate: Makefile dbupdate.8 dbupdate.sh 

Log message:
initial draft of dbupdate(8) for updating (signed) zoneinfo and cert.pem
from a new cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/dbupdates/ directory.  We can't
do this nicely with syspatch(8) because it requires patches in sequence
so a new tool had to be written.  It is intentionally kept very simple
so that it can be studied because we intend to run this in root cron,
(the non-simple parts figure out quickly when not to update).
looked at by sthen beck lucas dgl

Read more…

OpenBSD 8.0 Released

The OpenBSD project has announced OpenBSD 8.0, its 61st release.

The new release contains a number of significant improvements, including but certainly not limited to:

  • OpenBSD/amd64 kernel virtual address space is now 512GB [See earlier report]
  • Mitigation for AMD Zen-2 operation cache corruption added [See commit]
  • OpenBSD now uses AES instructions (on amd64 and arm64 when available) to increase speed of swap encryption/decryption [See commit]
  • The OpenBSD/loongson hardware platform has been retired [See earlier report]
  • getexecpath(3) added [See commit]
  • drm(4) has been updated to Linux 6.18.53
  • vmm(4)/vmd(8) improvements:
    • files are now used to manage VM ownership [See earlier report]
    • multi-processor VMs are now supported [See earlier report]
  • WPA3 support introduced [See earlier report]
  • syslogd(8) privileged and non-privileged parts now separate binaries [See earlier report]
  • qwz(4) driver for Qualcomm Technologies WCN7850 wireless network devices added [See commit]
  • PF queues break the 4 Gbps barrier [See earlier report]
  • httpd(8) and smtpd(8) are now randomly relinked at boot [See earlier report]
  • httpd(8) has seen many improvements:
    • support for custom HTTP headers [See earlier reports]
    • header block/drop rules for request filtering [See earlier report]
    • improved default crypto methods for HTTPS [See earlier report]
    • cache control for static files [See commit]
  • relayd(8) has received several improvements:
    • improved default crypto methods for HTTPS [See earlier report]
    • support for ECDSA keys and certificates was added [See earlier report]
    • filter rules gained support for Lua patterns(7) [See earlier report]
    • support for multiple resolvable addresses [See commit]
  • rtrd(8), a RTR-To-Router protocol daemon, and its control program, rtrctl(8), were imported [See earlier report]
  • acme-client(1) gained support for external account binding [See commit]
  • Several improvements in OpenBGPD [See earlier reports]
  • A number of incremental improvements in rpki-client(8) [See earlier reports]
  • tmux(1) gained support for floating panes [See commit]
  • LibreSSL 4.4.0 [See earlier reports]
  • OpenSSH 10.6 [See earlier reports]
  • llvm/clang(1)/lld(1) updated to version 22.1.6 [See earlier report]
  • LLVM toolchain added to OpenBSD/sparc64 [See earlier report]
  • compiler-rt, libunwind, libcxxabi, libcxx updated to version 22.1.8

In addition, this release offers a number of bug fixes and as well as numerous improvements in hardware support.

See the full changelog for more details of the changes made over this latest six month development cycle.

The Installation Guide details how to get the system up and running with a fresh install, while those who already run earlier releases should follow the Upgrade Guide, in most cases using sysupgrade(8).

Readers are encouraged to celebrate the new release by donating to the project to support further development of our favourite OS!

Schneier (Last Update: 2026-11-12 12:02:58GMT)

Another Way Police Are Locating People from Their Smartphones

Penlink’s Webloc is an application that locates people using information from the weather, gaming, email, and religious apps on their phone. It’s sold to the police.

The tool collects vast quantities of location data from smartphones via commonly used weather, gaming, email and religious apps. It can build a detailed picture of where a smartphone has been over the past 12 months, and update the data hourly, showing the movements of people on a near real-time basis. Law enforcement officers can use Webloc to zero in on a map and look at all phones that were present at a specific place and time, analyzing “billions of location data points,” according to company documents reviewed by Bloomberg.

There’s a nice infographic that explains how the system works at the link.

Three People Arrested for AI-Enhanced Impersonation Fraud

It’s hard to believe how lucrative this crime can be:

According to a press release from the United States attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, three men ­ Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan, and Guy Sheetrit ­ were arrested for using AI to alter and impersonate the voices and images of executives and attorneys at various companies in order to convince employees to send over large payments. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain over the summer, while Sheetrit was arrested in the United Kingdom in September. The alleged fraud took place between 2024 and 2026.

With the help of AI, the men allegedly acted as a corporate executive, targeting employees of various companies and telling them they needed their help with sensitive financial transactions. They would then instruct the employees to get in touch with lawyers at a large international law firm. The men would then impersonate a lawyer at these firms and have the employees wire a large amount of money.

The men ultimately stole more than $129m from companies all over the world including in the US, according to the DoJ.

Always remember that there are three parts of AI security: security of AI, security with AI, and security from AI. This is the third.

New OpenSSH Vulnerability

It’s a bad one, and it’s been in the code for a decade:

A newly disclosed flaw involving OpenSSH and musl, dubbed “*sshole,” allows attackers to log in to certain Alpine Linux and other musl-based Linux accounts configured to block password authentication simply by entering an oversized password.

“Oversized” means longer than 256 bytes. Details.

Slashdot thread. And another news article.

AI Security

Two weeks ago, I attended the [un]prompted AI security conference in San Francisco. It was an excellent event: three days of very dense talks about all aspects of AI security. (My talk was about integrous AI, and I will post it when it is online.)

AI security can be divided into three broad topics. It’s important for researchers to understand which one they are working on. And it’s important for us as a community to work on them all. They are: security of AI, security with AI, and security from AI. [un]prompted had good talks about all three.

Friday Squid Blogging: New Jurassic Squid Predecessors

News story: “Scientists discover a bizarre Jurassic ‘squid’ unlike anything ever seen.”

Scientists have identified the “fattest” belemnite ever discovered, a bizarre, barrel-shaped squid relative that lived in Wyoming’s ancient seas 160 million years ago. The exceptionally rare fossils reveal a creature unlike anything previously known, potentially a predator of smaller squid-like animals and a surprising survivor of a supposedly vanished family.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Pinpointing Location of Videos from Background Airplane Sounds

This is fascinating:

The video describes a technique that can reveal where an otherwise unidentifiable recording was made by analyzing its audio for the faint sounds of passing aircraft. The technique is both fascinating and frightening.

It works by looking at Doppler curves, which plot the way a plane’s sound changes as it passes overhead because of the Doppler effect. This is the same familiar Doppler effect that causes the frequency of a siren to rise as it approaches and then fall as it passes by and moves away. More generally, it’s the phenomenon whereby the frequency of a wave perceived by an observer changes when the observer and the source of the wave are moving in relation to one another.

[…]

It’s sound that’s relevant here, though, and specifically the sound of aeroplanes. Early in his video, Colsto brings up a map of the flights that were in the air at the time the video he’s tracing was recorded. Much of this information is publicly available. Aircraft equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) transmit data about their position, velocity, and altitude, which flight-tracking services collect and make available to the public. While not every plane is tracked, the system provides an enormous amount of information about aircraft movements.

AIs Hacking the Law

In both a 2021 essay and my 2022 book, A Hacker’s Mind, I talk about AIs finding vulnerabilities and exploits—hacking—the legal system.

Here’s some demonstrations of this from Germany:

Legal systems encode the foundations of social order in natural language. Similar to computer systems, the written law can contain vulnerabilities that invite exploitation.1 Courts absorb most exploits through interpretation, and such vulnerabilities rarely surface in the first place. With highly capable AI systems enabling the discovery of vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, we believe the latter could change.

In testing this hypothesis, we have identified a substantial number of vulnerabilities in the German legal system using LLMs. To our knowledge, none of these have been previously recorded. We share a selection of vulnerabilities below, and present potential exploits for each. We share only those vulnerabilities whose exploitation we believe would not cause serious harm.

We believe that with cheap legal reasoning proliferating, AI systems could jeopardize the functioning of today’s legal systems. In such a world, lawmakers would need to significantly harden the process of legislation, for example by leveraging advanced AI themselves.

Still in its early stages, but definitely something that’s coming.

AI Vulnerability Finding

A comment:

3% of ‘critical’ software security bugs, in all of recorded history, have been found in the last month. This is on pace to find another ~100,000 bugs this year alone, adding ~26% more vulnerabilities to the all time total Do you realize how fucking insane that is?

Yes. It is a new world out there.

LXer (Last Update: 2026-11-12 12:54:29GMT)

Sprout upgrades your old iPod using Raspberry Pi & Linux

A new hardware project is using open-source hardware and software to breathe new life – and modern capabilities – into decades old iPods. Sprout, by London-based FOSS folk Certain Things, is a “modern motherboard for old iPods” that requires no soldering. It re-uses all of the iPod’s original parts, including the screen, click wheel, case, etc. The idea is you split open your old device, remove…