Could High-Speed Trains Shorten US Travel Times While Reducing Emissions?
With some animated graphics, CNN “reimagined” what three of America’s busiest air and road travel routes would look like with high-speed trains, for “a glimpse into a faster, more connected future.”
The journey from New York City to Chicago could take just over six hours by high-speed train at an average speed of 160 mph, cutting … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de pinging @zvava@twtxt.net, on your behalf. And @falsifian@www.falsifian.org.
Microsoft and GitHub Preview New Tool That Identifies, Prioritizes, and Fixes Vulnerabilities With AI
“Security, development, and AI now move as one,” says Microsoft’s director of cloud/AI security
product marketing.
Microsoft and GitHub “have launched a native integration between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security that aims to address what one e … ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA Preps 1.6Tb/s Networking For Linux 6.19
NVIDIA has a number of Linux kernel patches on the way to the Linux 6.19 kernel in preparing for 1.6 Tb/s networking on NVIDIA-Mellanox hardware… ⌘ Read more
Engineers are Building the Hottest Geothermal Power Plant on Earth - Next to a US Volcano
“On the slopes of an Oregon volcano, engineers are building the hottest geothermal power plant on Earth,” reports the Washington Post:
The plant will tap into the infernal energy of Newberry Volcano, “one of the largest and most hazardous active volcanoes in the United States,” according to t … ⌘ Read more
How the Internet Rewired Work - and What That Tells Us About AI’s Likely Impact
“The internet did transform work — but not the way 1998 thought…” argues the Wall Street Journal. “The internet slipped inside almost every job and rewired how work got done.”
So while the number of single-task jobs like travel agent dropped, most jobs “are bundles of judgment, coordination and hands-on work,” and in … ⌘ Read more
Which actively maintained Yarn/twtxt clients are there at the moment? Client authors raise your hands! 🙋
Linux Patches Improve Intel Nested VM Memory Performance Up To ~2353x In Synthetic Test
AWS engineers have been working on Linux kernel improvements to KVM’s VMX code for enhancing the unamanged guest memory when dealing with nested virtual machines. The improved code addresses some correctness issues as well as delivering wild performance improvements within a synthetic benchmark… ⌘ Read more
Glibc Math Code Sees 4x Improvement On AMD Zen By Changing FMA Implementation
Merged this week to the GNU C Library “glibc” code is dropping the ldbl-96 FMA implementation from this library as in doing so they found a 4x improvement to throughput and latency on AMD Zen 3 hardware… ⌘ Read more
Google Looks To Bring JPEG-XL Support Back To Chrome / Chromium
Back in 2022 was the surprising decision by Google that they were going to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in Chrome. By the end of 2022 they went ahead and removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium to the frustration of many web developers and end-users interested in this image format. Now though as we get ready to roll into 2026, Google engineers are looking at bringing back JPEG-XL support to the Chrome web browser… ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Warns Its Windows AI Feature Brings Data Theft and Malware Risks, and ‘Occasionally May Hallucinate’
“Copilot Actions on Windows 11” is currently available in Insider builds (version 26220.7262) as part of Copilot Labs, according to a recent report, “and is off by default, requiring admin access to set it up.”
But maybe it’s off for a good reason…besides t … ⌘ Read more
twtxt.net) was being hammered by something at a request rate of 30 req/s (there are global rate limits in place, but still...). The culprit? Turned out to be a particular IP 43.134.51.191 and after looking into who own s that IP I discovered it was yet-another-bad-customer-or-whatever from Tencent, so that entire network (ASN) is now blocked from my Edge:
This is what this looked like visually 😳 
twtxt.net) was being hammered by something at a request rate of 30 req/s (there are global rate limits in place, but still...). The culprit? Turned out to be a particular IP 43.134.51.191 and after looking into who own s that IP I discovered it was yet-another-bad-customer-or-whatever from Tencent, so that entire network (ASN) is now blocked from my Edge:
@prologic@twtxt.net Time to make a new internet. Maybe one that intentionally doesn’t “scale” and remains slow (on both ends) so it’s harder to overload in this manner, harder to abuse for tracking your every move, … Got any of those 56k modems left?
(I’m half-joking. “Make The Internet Expensive Again” like it was in the 1990ies and some of these problems might go away. Disclaimer: I didn’t have my coffee yet. 😅)
Amazon’s AI-Powered IDE Kiro Helps Vibe Coders with ‘Spec Mode’
A promotional video for Amazon’s Kiro software development system took a unique approach, writes GeekWire. “Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle’s Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence…”
“Can the software development hero conquer the ‘AI Slop Monster’ to u … ⌘ Read more
twtxt.net) was being hammered by something at a request rate of 30 req/s (there are global rate limits in place, but still...). The culprit? Turned out to be a particular IP 43.134.51.191 and after looking into who own s that IP I discovered it was yet-another-bad-customer-or-whatever from Tencent, so that entire network (ASN) is now blocked from my Edge:
At this point I’m considering starting a class action lawsuit for all the self-hostess and little-web folks that want to host a small thing or two and sue these fucking inconsiderate fucking corporate giants, hopefully win, and make them respect others on the web.
Fark me 🤦♂️ I woke up quite late today (after a long night helping/assisting with a Mainframe migration last night fork work) to abusive traffic and my alerts going off. The impact? My pod (twtxt.net) was being hammered by something at a request rate of 30 req/s (there are global rate limits in place, but still…). The culprit? Turned out to be a particular IP 43.134.51.191 and after looking into who own s that IP I discovered it was yet-another-bad-customer-or-whatever from Tencent, so that entire network (ASN) is now blocked from my Edge:
+# Who: Tentcent
+# Why: Bad Bots
+132203
Total damage?
$ caddy-log-formatter twtxt.net.log | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1 | head -n 5
61371 43.134.51.191
402 159.196.9.199
121 45.77.238.240
8 106.200.1.116
6 104.250.53.138
61k reqs over an hour or so (before I noticed), bunch of CPU time burned, and useless waste of my fucking time.
Did Bitcoin Play a Role in Thursday’s Stock Sell-Off?
A week ago Bitcoin was at $93,714. Saturday it dropped to $85,300.
Late Thursday, market researcher Ed Yardeni blamed some of Thursday’s stock market sell-off on “the ongoing plunge in bitcoin’s price,” reports Fortune:
“There has been a strong correlation between it and the price of TQQQ, an ETF that seeks to achieve daily investment results that correspond to three … ⌘ Read more
GCC Steering Committee Allows New Language Front-End To Land For GCC 16
Joining Ada, C/C++, COBOL, D, Fortran, Go, Modula-2, Objective-C/Objective-C++ and Rust is now another programming language expected to be added for the GCC 16 compiler release due out in the new year… ⌘ Read more
PHP 8.5 Brings Long-Awaited Pipe Operator, Adds New URI Tools
“PHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser,” reports the Register, “marking one of the scripting language’s more substantial updates… “
The pipe operator allows function calls to be chained together, which avoids the
extraneous variables and nested statements that might otherwise be
inv … ⌘ Read more
‘The Strange and Totally Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun and Reverse Global Warming’
In a 2023 pitch to investors, a “well-financed, highly credentialed” startup named Stardust aimed for a “gradual temperature reduction demonstration” in 2027, according to a massive new 9,600-word article from Politico. (“Annually dispersing ~1 million tons of sun-reflecting particles,” says one slide. “Equivalen … ⌘ Read more
Meta Plans New AI-Powered ‘Morning Brief’ Drawn From Facebook and ‘External Sources’
Meta “is testing a new product that would give Facebook users a personalized daily briefing powered by the company’s generative AI technology” reports the Washington Post. They cite records they’ve reviwed showing that Meta “would analyze Facebook content and external sources to push custom updates to its users. … ⌘ Read more
RISC-V Testing Lapse Resulted In Wrong MIPS RISC-V Vendor ID Landing In Linux 6.18
An interesting anecdote from this week’s batch of RISC-V fixes for the Linux 6.18 kernel exposed that the MIPS RISC-V/JEDEC vendor ID was wrong for code merged at the start of the kernel cycle. The testing hadn’t caught it either as the QEMU emulation also ended up inadvertently using the wrong vendor ID too… ⌘ Read more
Are Astronomers Wrong About Dark Energy?
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:
The universe’s expansion might not be accelerating but slowing down, a new study suggests. If confirmed, the finding would upend decades of established astronomical assumptions and rewrite our understanding of dark energy, the elusive force that counters the inward pull of gravity in our universe…
Last year, a consortium of hundreds of res … ⌘ Read more
Britain Sets New Record, Generating Enough Wind Power for 22 Million Homes
An anonymous reader shared this report from Sky News:
A new wind record has been set for Britain, with enough electricity generated from turbines to power 22 million homes, the system operator has said.
The mark of 22,711 megawatts (MW) was set at 7.30pm on 11 November… enough to keep around three-quarters of British homes … ⌘ Read more
Analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT Conversations Shows Echo Chambers, Sensitive Data - and Unpredictable Medical Advice
For nearly three years OpenAI has touted ChatGPT as a “revolutionary” (and work-transforming) productivity tool, reports the Washington Post.
But after analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations, the Post found that users “are overwhelmingly turning to the chatbot for … ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD 15.0-RC3 Ships Latest OpenZFS, KDE Dropped From DVD ISO Due To Size Constraints
FreeBSD 15.0 is working toward its stable release in early December. As part of reaching that major release, FreeBSD 15.0-RC3 released today as what may be the final release candidate before FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE… ⌘ Read more
780,000 Windows Users Downloaded Linux Distro Zorin OS in the Last 5 Weeks
In October Zorin OS claimed it had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days in the days following Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 10.
And one month later, Zorin OS developers now claim that 780,000 people downloaded it from a Windows computer in the space of a month, according to the tech news site XDA Developers.
… ⌘ Read more
Physicists Reveal a New Quantum State Where Electrons Run Wild
ScienceDaily reports:
Electrons can freeze into strange geometric crystals and then melt back into liquid-like motion under the right quantum conditions. Researchers identified how to tune these transitions and even discovered a bizarre “pinball” state where some electrons stay locked in place while others dart around freely. Their simulations hel … ⌘ Read more
Tiny ‘Micro-Robots’ in your Bloodstream Could Deliver Drugs with Greater Precision
The Washington Post reports:
Scientists in Switzerland have created a robot the size of a grain of sand that is controlled by magnets and can deliver drugs to a precise location in the human body, a breakthrough aimed at reducing the severe side effects that stop many medicines from advancing in clinical tria … ⌘ Read more
Linux Device Trees For Cancelled Products? Don’t “Waste Time”
Yesterday TUXEDO Computers cancelled their Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop plans. In their announcement discontinuing work on this X1E Linux laptop, they said they would still upstream the Device Tree support to the mainline Linux kernel. Indeed they posted a new revision of their DT patches on Friday for the Linux kernel, but there is diminishing outlook that they will be accepted upstream for this cancelled product… ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s what tests are for. To fix them. :-D
Court Ends Dragnet Electricity Surveillance Program in Sacramento
A California judge has shut down a decade-long surveillance program in which Sacramento’s utility provider shared granular smart-meter data on 650,000 residents with police to hunt for cannabis grows. The EFF reports: The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) … ⌘ Read more
hash[12:] instead of hash[:12].
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oops. 😅 But yay, it’s working. 🥳
KDE Plasma 6.6 Will Provide A Much Better Experience For High Refresh Rate Displays
More features continue piling on for the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop, including an important performance fix this week for those running displays with a higher than 60Hz refresh rate… ⌘ Read more
Algol 68 GCC Compiler Patches Updated With Modules System Added
Since the start of the new year, there have been patches being posted for proposing a new GCC compiler front-end for the half-century old Algol 68 programming language. Oracle engineer Jose Marchesi has been leading the Algol 68 effort for GCC and this weekend posted a new revision of the patches, which now includes a working modules system implementation… ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.18 To Enable Both Touchscreens On The AYANEO Flip DS Dual-Screen Handheld
Sent out today were a set of input subsystem fixes for the near-final Linux 6.18 kernel. A bit of a notable addition via this “fixes” pull is getting both touchscreens working on the AYANEO Flip DS, a dual-screen gaming handheld device that can be loaded up with Linux… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.6 Will Provide A Much Better Experience For High Refresh Rate Displays
More features continue piling on for the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop, including an important performance fix this week for those running displays with a higher than 60Hz refresh rate… ⌘ Read more
All my newly added test cases failed, that movq thankfully provided in https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28#issuecomment-20801 for the draft of the twt hash v2 extension. The first error was easy to see in the diff. The hashes were way too long. You’ve already guessed it, I had cut the hash from the twelfth character towards the end instead of taking the first twelve characters: hash[12:] instead of hash[:12].
After fixing this rookie mistake, the tests still all failed. Hmmm. Did I still cut the wrong twelve characters? :-? I even checked the Go reference implementation in the document itself. But it read basically the same as mine. Strange, what the heck is going on here?
Turns out that my vim replacements to transform the Python code into Go code butchered all the URLs. ;-) The order of operations matters. I first replaced the equals with colons for the subtest struct fields and then wanted to transform the RFC 3339 timestamp strings to time.Date(…) calls. So, I replaced the colons in the time with commas and spaces. Hence, my URLs then also all read https, //example.com/twtxt.txt.
But that was it. All test green. \o/
Ukraine Is Jamming Russia’s ‘Superweapon’ With a Song
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from 404 Media: The Ukrainian Army is knocking a once-hyped Russian superweapon out of the sky by jamming it with a song and tricking it into thinking it’s in Lima, Peru. The Kremlin once called its Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles “invincible.” Joe Biden said the missile was “almost impossible to stop.” Now Ukrainian … ⌘ Read more
Magician Forgets Password To His Own Hand After RFID Chip Implant
A magician who implanted an RFID chip in his hand lost access to it after forgetting the password, leaving him effectively locked out of the tech embedded in his own body. The Register reports: “It turns out,” said [said magician Zi Teng Wang], “that pressing someone else’s phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone’s … ⌘ Read more
And regarding those broken URLs: I once speculated that these bots operate on an old dataset, because I thought that my redirect rules actually were broken once and produced loops. But a) I cannot reproduce this today, and b) I cannot find anything related to that in my Git history, either. But it’s hard to tell, because I switched operating systems and webservers since then …
But the thing is that I’m seeing new URLs constructed in this pattern. So this can’t just be an old crawling dataset.
I am now wondering if those broken URLs are bot bugs as well.
They look like this (zalgo is a new project):
https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/
When you request that URL, you get redirected to /git/:
$ curl -sI https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:13:51 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 510
Location: /git/
And on /git/, there are links to my repos. So if a broken client requests https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/, then sees a bunch of links and simply appends them, you’ll end up with an infinite loop.
Is that what’s going on here or are my redirects actually still broken … ?
I just noticed this pattern:
uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
Let me add some spaces to make it more clear:
uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
Some IP (from Brazil) requests some (non-existing, completely broken) URL from my webserver. But they use the hostname uninformativ.de, so they get redirected to www.uninformativ.de.
In the next step, just a second later, some other IP (from Nepal) issues an HTTP proxy request for the same URL.
Clearly, someone has no idea how HTTP redirects work. And clearly, they’re running their broken code on some kind of botnet all over the world.
My webserver is getting millions of hits per month at the moment.
All bots.
Iran’s Capital Is Moving. The Reason Is an Ecological Catastrophe
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Amid a deepening ecological crisis and acute water shortage, Tehran can no longer remain the capital of Iran, the country’s president has said. The situation in Tehran is the result of “a perfect storm of climate change and corruption,” says Michael Rubin, a political analyst at the Am … ⌘ Read more
Cryptographers Cancel Election Results After Losing Decryption Key
The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) was forced to cancel its leadership election after a trustee lost their portion of the Helios voting system’s decryption key, making it impossible to reveal or verify the final results. Ars Technica reports: The IACR said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, … ⌘ Read more
Nautilus File Manager In GNOME 50 Will Load Thumbnails Much Faster
Just last week GNOME’s Nautilus file manager “GNOME Files” made headlines for finally supporting Ctrl+INsert and Shift+Insert while this week there is more activity worth pointing out. Nautilus in GNOME 50 will be loading thumbnail images much faster than in prior versions… ⌘ Read more
Google Starts Testing Ads In AI Mode
Google has begun testing sponsored ads inside its Gemini-powered AI Mode, placing labeled “sponsored” links at the bottom of AI-generated responses. Engadget reports: [A] Google spokesperson says the result shown is akin to similar tests it’s been running this year. “People seeing ads in AI Mode in the wild is simply part of Google’s ongoing tests, which we’ve been running for several months,” the … ⌘ Read more
SEC Dismisses Case Against SolarWinds, Top Security Officer
The SEC has officially dismissed its high-profile case against SolarWinds and its CISO that was tied to a Russia-linked cyberattack involving the software company. Reuters reports: The landmark case, which SEC brought in late 2023, rattled the cybersecurity community and later faced scrutiny from a judge who dismissed many of the charges. The SEC had said So … ⌘ Read more
Malaysia’s Palm Oil Estates Are Turning Into Data Centers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Malaysia’s palm oil giants, long-blamed for razing rainforests, fueling toxic haze and driving orangutans to the brink of extinction, are recasting themselves as unlikely champions in a different, potentially greener race: the quest to lure the world’s AI data centers to the Southeast Asian country (source paywalle … ⌘ Read more
Firefox 147 Will Support The XDG Base Directory Specification
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel reports: A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users’ home directory.
The XDG Base Directory specification lays out where applic … ⌘ Read more