Windows 11 Notepad Flaw Let Files Execute Silently via Markdown Links
Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11’s Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday upda … ⌘ Read more

Have We Been Thinking About Exercise Wrong for Half a Century?
“After a half-century asking us to exercise more, doctors and physiologists say we have been thinking about it wrong,” writes Washington Post columnist Michael J. Coren.

“U.S. and World Health Organization guidelines no longer specify a minimum duration of moderate or vigorous aerobic activity.”

Movement-tracking studies show even tiny, regular b … ⌘ Read more

Memory Prices Have Nearly Doubled Since Last Quarter
Memory prices across DRAM, NAND and HBM have surged 80 to 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, according to Counterpoint Research’s latest Memory Price Tracker. The price of a 64GB RDIMM has jumped from a Q4 2025 contract price of $450 to over $900, and Counterpoint expects it to cross $1,000 in Q2.

NAND, relatively stable last quarter, is tracking a parallel increase. De … ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Sacks Workers For Creating Tool To Track Layoffs
Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. BBC: The company recently announced job cuts, with chief executive Bill Ready stating in an email he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach,” according to an employee who posted some of the memo on LinkedIn.

Pinterest told investors the move would imp … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta 2 Released For Testing
Following the KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta from two weeks ago, a second beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop is now available for testing. KDE Plasma 6.6 stable remains on-track for a mid-February release… ⌘ Read more

Apple Launches AirTag 2 With Improved Range, Louder Speaker
Apple has launched a new AirTag 2 that features improved range, a speaker that’s 50% louder, and expanded Apple Watch-based tracking. Pricing stays the same at $29 (or $99 for four). 9to5Mac reports: The new AirTag comes with an upgraded second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for improved range, including when using Precision Finding. From Apple Newsroom: “ … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc7 Released With Kernel Continuity Plan, A Few Important Fixes
The Linux 6.19 kernel remains on track for its official release two weeks from today, with the extra RC being baked in due to the end of year holidays. Out today is Linux 6.19-rc7 with a few changes worth highlighting for the week… ⌘ Read more

Study Shows How Earthquake Monitors Can Track Space Junk Through Sonic Booms
A new study shows that earthquake monitoring networks can track falling space debris by detecting the sonic booms produced during atmospheric reentry, sometimes more accurately than radar. The Associated Press reports: Scientists reported Thursday that seismic readings from sonic booms that were generated when a discarde … ⌘ Read more

Ozempic is Reshaping the Fast Food Industry
New research from Cornell University has tracked how households change their spending after someone starts taking GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, and the numbers are material enough to explain why food industry earnings calls keep blaming everything except the obvious culprit.

The study analyzed transaction data from 150,000 households linked to survey responses on medicati … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025
According to CFO Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s annualized revenue surpassed $20 billion in 2025, up from $6 billion a year earlier with growth closely tracking an expansion in computing capacity. Reuters reports: OpenAI’s computing capacity rose to 1.9 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 from 0.6 GW in 2024, Friar said in the blog, adding that Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s … ⌘ Read more

Revocable Resource Management Appears On Track For Linux 7.0
A new feature that appears ready for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle is revocable resource management… ⌘ Read more

EHT Astronomers Will Film Swirling of a Supermassive Black Hole for the First Time
“Astronomers are preparing to capture a movie of a supermassive black hole in action for the first time,” reports the Guardian:

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will track the colossal black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy throughout March and April with the aim of capturing footage of the swirli … ⌘ Read more

Study Finds Weak Evidence Linking Social Media Use to Teen Mental Health Problems
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study. […] Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their s … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net I’m already using it for tracktivity (meant for tracking activities and events, like weather, food consumption, stuff like that), which is basically a somewhat-fancy CSV editor:

I have a couple of other projects where I could use it, because they are plain curses at the moment. Like, one of them has an “edit box”, but you can’t enter Unicode, because it was too complicated. That would benefit from the framework.

Either way, it’s the most satisfying project in a long time and I’m learning a ton of stuff.

#musiquinta: hoje o tema é “Toda semana”, com as músicas que vocês ouvem com regularidade semanal, sempre tão na ponta da língua e nos charts de mais tocados da semana.

Ora, não sei se é todas as semanas que ouço isto, mas é sem dúvida das músicas que mais vezes ouvi desde que a escrevi…

#kokori - The Sky Is Concrete, The Stars Are Bullet Holes

https://anti-demos-cracia.bandcamp.com/track/kokori-the-sky-is-concrete-the-stars-are-bullet-holes

Anthropic’s Index Shows Job Evolution Over Replacement
Anthropic’s fourth installment of its Economic Index, drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company’s consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI co … ⌘ Read more

How Many Years Left Until the Hubble Space Telescope Reenters Earth’s Atmosphere?
“The clock is ticking” on the Hubble Space Telescope,
writes the space news site Daily Galaxy, citing estimates from the unofficial “Hubble Reentry Tracker” site (which uses orbital data from the site space-track.org, created by tech integrator SAIC):

While Hubble was initially launched into low Earth orbit at … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Windows Media Player Stops Serving Up CD Album Info
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service. Readers of a certain vintage will remember inserting a CD into their PC and watching Windows Media Player populate with track listings and album artwork. No more … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s New Manager Dashboard Flags ‘Low-Time Badgers’ and ‘Zero Badgers’
Amazon has begun equipping managers with a dashboard that tracks not just whether corporate employees show up to the office but how long they stay once they’re there, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. The system, which started rolling out in December, flags “Low-Time Badgers” who average less than four hour … ⌘ Read more

Iran in ‘Digital Blackout’ as Tehran Throttles Mobile Internet Access
An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Inte … ⌘ Read more

#MusiQuinta com a pauta “músicas que viraram tatuagens de vocês, mas também valem músicas sobre tatuagem, que vocês planejem fazer tatuagem sobre, que conheçam alguém que tatuou a letra, que acha bonito ou que acha tatuável”:

Marilyn Manson - Tatooed in Reverse

I’m un-stabled, I’m not a show horse
I can’t be bridled, of course
I’m un-scabbed and un-regretted
I got tattooed in reverse
Woah, in reverse

https://marilynmanson.bandcamp.com/track/tattooed-in-reverse

Stack Overflow Went From 200,000 Monthly Questions To Nearly Zero
Stack Overflow’s monthly question volume has collapsed about 300 – levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform’s activity over its sixteen-year history.

Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that acceler … ⌘ Read more

Linux’s Hung Task Detector Will Be Able To Be Reset For Easing System Administration
Worked on back in 2024 for the Linux kernel was a built-in counter to keep track of the number of hung tasks since boot. That feature for keeping track of the number of hung tasks since boot was merged in Linux 6.13 and exposed via /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_detect_count. For helping ease use around it, new code working its way to the kernel will allow resetting that “hung_task_detect_count” counter… ⌘ Read more

With RAM crazy prices being what they are, I guess my PC is gonna be stuck on 16GB RAM for some time. I originally bought the DDR4 16GB kit for like $49 AUD, and I thought I’d just buy another 16GB or more later down the track (this was like a year and a half ago), thinking it would be similarly priced or even cheaper…

Boy was that a mistake in hindsight LOL. The same kit is like $229 AUD now….

At around 19 seconds in the video, you can see some minor graphical glitches.

Text mode applications in Unix terminals are such a mess. It’s a miracle that this works at all.

In the old DOS days, you could get text (and colors) on the screen just by writing to memory, because the VGA memory was mapped to a fixed address. We don’t have that model anymore. To write a character to a certain position, you have to send an escape sequence to move the cursor to that position, then more escape sequences to set the color/attributes, then more escape sequences to get the cursor to where you actually want it. And then of course UTF-8 on top, i.e. you have no idea what the terminal will actually do when you send it a “🙂”.

Mouse events work by the terminal sending escape sequences to you (https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking).

ncurses does an amazing job here. It’s fast (by having off-screen buffers and tracking changes, so it rarely has to actually send full screen updates to the terminal) and reliable and works across terminals. Without the terminfo database that keeps track of which terminal supports/requires which escape sequences, we’d be lost.

But gosh, what a mess this is under the hood … Makes you really miss memory mapped VGA and mouse drivers.

The only good thing about this absolute craziness is that I can restock my rocket sticks. I picked up twelve along the way. Unfortunately, it looks like 99.999% of ammunition is bombs instead of rockets. Some sections of my street look exactly like an arbitrary Pakistanian town that I’ve seen online.

There was surprisingly much snow in the woods. Also, all ponds have frozen over. I didn’t expect that. Not at all. There were even illegal ice skating tracks in the natural reserve. We came across a large puddle and it was at least 10cm solid ice to the ground. Crazy!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-01/

#musiquinta - conheci em 2025

Não quero mentir e não tenho a certeza absoluta, mas acho que só em 2025 conheci os La Tène. Seja como for, foi em 2025 que luz um álbum deles na minha wishlist…

https://lateneband.bandcamp.com/track/les-d-clives

Poor Sleep Quality Accelerates Brain Aging
A large-scale study tracking more than 27,500 middle-aged and elderly people over roughly nine years has found that poor sleep quality is associated with accelerated brain aging, and chronic inflammation appears to be one of the key mechanisms driving this effect.

Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute assessed participants’ sleep across five dimensions – chronotype, duration, i … ⌘ Read more

Despite a Record Year, Airlines Are Grappling With Big Challenges
The global airline industry is on track to post an all-time profit high of nearly $40 billion in 2025, according to trade group IATA, surpassing the pre-pandemic 2019 figure of $26 billion, but carriers are still managing a net margin of just 4% – roughly $7.90 per passenger. Economist adds: Not everything has been in the ascent. European and N … ⌘ Read more

I can track users’ feeds now

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d happily write API documentation for go.yarn.social/client

Researchers Make ‘Neuromorphic’ Artificial Skin For Robots
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming … ⌘ Read more

Texas Father Rescues Kidnapped 15-Year-Old Daughter After Tracking Her Phone’s Location
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Guardian:

A Texas father used the parental controls on his teenage daughter’s cell phone to find and help rescue her after she was kidnapped at knifepoint while walking her dog on Christmas, authorities allege… Her father subsequently located her phon … ⌘ Read more

Samsung’s 2026 Gaming Monitors Promise 6K, 3D, and Up To 1,040Hz
An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung is breaking new ground with its 2026 lineup of gaming monitors, with the Odyssey 3D G90XH becoming the first to feature a 6K display with “glasses-free 3D.” The new monitor comes with a 32-inch IPS panel, offering real-time eye-tracking that “adjusts depth and perspective” based on your position, … ⌘ Read more

Australia Poised for Desalination Boom as Water Shortages Loom
Australia is on track for a significant expansion of desalination capacity – converting seawater to freshwater – to meet the needs of a swelling population at a time of declining average rainfall. From a report: The world’s driest inhabited continent is projected to build or expand 11 desalination plants worth more than A$23 billion ($15 billion) over t … ⌘ Read more

Uber, Lyft Set To Trial Robotaxis In the UK In Partnership With China’s Baidu
Uber and Lyft plan to trial robotaxis in London starting in 2026 using autonomous vehicles from Baidu, as the UK fast-tracks approvals for self-driving cars on public roads. CNBC reports: Lyft’s testing of Baidu’s initial fleet of dozens of vehicles will begin in 2026, pending regulatory approval, “with plans to scale to h … ⌘ Read more

Garmin Emergency Autoland Has First Save
“Garmin’s Collier Trophy award-winning Autonomi emergency Autoland, a system designed to safely land an aircraft in the event of pilot incapacitation, made its first real-world use and save on Saturday,” writes Slashdot reader slipped_bit. AvBrief.com reports: Social media posts from flight tracking hobbyists reported a King Air 200 squawked 7700 about 2 p.m. local time today. The Autoland sy … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve been awake at that time, didn’t notice anything. 🤔 Where was that BGP analyzer again … 😅 There’s a tool that keeps track of these things, right? I forgot what it was.

Spotify Says ‘Anti-Copyright Extremists’ Scraped Its Library
A group of activists has scraped Spotify’s entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna’s Archive, a search engine for “shadow libraries” that previously focused on books.

Spotify described the activists as “anti-copyright extremists … ⌘ Read more

Strava Puts Popular ‘Year In Sport’ Recap Behind an $80 Paywall
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, released its annual “Year in Sport” wrap-up – a cutesy, animated series of graphics summarizing each user’s athletic achievements. But this year, for the first time, Strava made this feature available only to users with subscriptions ( … ⌘ Read more

Video Game Hardware Sales Had a Historically Bad November In the US
U.S. video game hardware spending fell 27% year over year in November to $695 million, according to market analyst company Circana. “This is the lowest video game hardware spending total for a November month since the $455 million reached during the November 2005 tracking period,” Circana says. Furthermore, only 1.6 million units of hardwa … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I shrank Day 9 Part 2 from “cover the whole map” to “only track the interesting lines.” By compressing coordinates to just the unique x/y breakpoints, the grid got tiny. I still flood-fill and do the corner-pair checks, but now on that compact grid with weighted prefix sums for instant rectangle checks. Result: far less RAM, way less CPU, same correct answer.

Chinese Whistleblower Living In US Is Being Hunted By Beijing With US Tech
A former Chinese official who fled to the U.S. says Beijing has used advanced surveillance technology from U.S. companies to track, intimidate, and punish him and his family across borders. ABC News reports: Retired Chinese official Li Chuanliang was recuperating from cancer on a Korean resort island when he got an urgent call: … ⌘ Read more

Ukrainians Sue US Chip Firms For Powering Russian Drones, Missiles
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dozens of Ukrainian civilians filed a series of lawsuits in Texas this week, accusing some of the biggest US chip firms of negligently failing to track chips that evaded export curbs. Those chips were ultimately used to power Russian and Iranian weapon systems, causing wrongful deaths last … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Builds Location Verification Tech That Could Track Where Its AI Chips End Up
Nvidia has developed location verification technology that could determine which country its AI chips are operating in, Reuters reports, citing a source, a capability that may help address ongoing concerns about the smuggling of advanced semiconductors to restricted markets like China. The feature, which Nvid … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft To Invest $17.5 Billion in India
Microsoft announced on Tuesday its largest-ever investment in Asia – $17.5 billion over four years starting in 2026 – to expand cloud and AI infrastructure across India, fund skilling programs, and support ongoing operations in the country. The commitment adds to a $3 billion investment the company announced in January 2025 that is on track to be spent by the end of 2026. A new hyperscale cloud … ⌘ Read more

Sydney greyhound track to be bulldozed to make way for parkland
After more than 90 years, greyhound racing will end at Wentworth Park in Glebe, with the public land to be be transferred to the City of Sydney. ⌘ Read more

All of Russia’s Porsches Were Bricked By a Mysterious Satellite Outage
An anonymous reader shared this report from Autoblog:

Imagine walking out to your car, pressing the start button, and getting absolutely nothing. No crank, no lights on the dash, nothing. That’s exactly what happened to hundreds of Porsche owners in Russia last week. The issue is with the Vehicle Tracking System, a satellite-based sec … ⌘ Read more

My current PC is from 2013, so I never even bothered to check, but as it turns out: My motherboard still has a serial port. 🤯 I thought these had long died out by then. To be honest, I didn’t have the need for one, either, not until recently … So I completely lost track if PCs have these things or not.

All I needed was one of those slot-cable-thingies. (And if the order of pins is correct, then it actually works. 🤦)

Cool! One less USB device. 😃

Train derailment closes Townsville-Mount Isa rail line
A train locomotive is on its side and two others are off the track after a derailment on the Townsville to Mount Isa rail line. ⌘ Read more

India Reviews Telecom Industry Proposal For Always-On Satellite Location Tracking
India is weighing a proposal to mandate always-on satellite tracking in smartphones for precise government surveillance – an idea strongly opposed by Apple, Google, Samsung, and industry groups. Reuters reports: For years, the [Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s] administration has been concerned its agencies do no … ⌘ Read more