Deciphering the third transport protocol's four RFCs is a task to rival the proverbial blind man trying to understand an elephant. //

Streams are the primary mechanism making QUIC a better fit for request/response operations. When HTTP runs over TCP, the only way to allow one request to proceed independently of another is to open multiple parallel TCP connections.

With each connection running its own congestion control loop, the experience of congestion on one connection is not apparent to the other connections; each connection tries to figure out the appropriate amount of bandwidth to consume on its own, while competing with the others. And if HTTP runs over a single TCP connection, a single dropped packet blocks the entire progress of any requests in flight until that lost packet is retransmitted.

So QUIC allows for many streams within a single connection, and each stream can make progress independently from the others. A single packet loss only impacts the stream (or streams) whose data was in that packet. At the same time, QUIC can use that one packet loss to respond appropriately to congestion. //

Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie are the authors behind Computer Networks: A Systems Approach and the related Systems Approach series of books. All their content is open source and available for free on GitHub. https://github.com/SystemsApproach

US Mobile offers service through those two networks as well as Verizon’s, rebranding the options as Dark Star (AT&T), Light Speed (T-Mobile), and Warp (Verizon). //

A 2026 survey of Consumer Reports members placed US Mobile at the top of the publication’s customer-satisfaction ratings for phone carriers for the second year in a row. US Mobile received top marks for value, customer support, and overall quality of data service.

the passenger version of the Boeing 747-8, also known as the 747-8I for 'Intercontinental,' has a fuel capacity of 63,034 gallons (238,610 liters). According to Boeing, these aircraft have a range (based on a load of 410 passengers) of 8,900 miles (14,320 km). Dividing the latter by the former, we get a figure of just 0.142 miles per gallon.

The figure for the Boeing Business Jets (BBJ) version of the 747-8 is slightly more favorable. Indeed, based on an assumed capacity of just 100 VIP passengers, this private jet has a range of 10,213 miles (16,437 km), resulting in a figure of 0.162 miles per gallon. As for the 747-8F, which carries cargo, its range of 4,908 miles (7,899 km) and fuel capacity of 59,734 gallons (226,095 liters) give it a figure of 0.082 miles per gallon. But are these low figures as bad as they seem at face value? //

the 747-100, Boeing's data shows that this version of the iconic quadjet could typically fly for up to 5,320 miles (8,560 km). When this range is offset against the 747-100's maximum fuel capacity of 48,445 gallons (183,380 liters), we get a figure of 0.11 miles per gallon. As such, the 747-8's score on this front has improved by more than 29% from the oldest to the newest model. //

when we multiply the 747-8's figure of 0.142 miles per gallon by its capacity, for this purpose, of 410 guests, we get a much healthier figure of 58.22 passenger miles per gallon. Of course, a full five-seater car would only need to achieve around 11.65 miles per gallon to get a higher passenger miles per gallon figure, but, in reality, cars often only transport their driver. As such, in this regard, a fully loaded 747 can be more efficient than certain cars in the event of solo occupancy. //

Boeing 747 Production

Sub-Family

Number Produced

747-100

205

747SP

45

747-200

393

747-300

81

747-400

694

747-8

155

Turning a Kindle into a portable monitor isn't something you can do with the standard firmware. Amazon locks its software down so you can't just throw some code onto your Kindle and get it to display whatever you want.

The good news is that plenty of people far smarter than I am have figured out how to jailbreak many Kindle devices. I'd already done this to my Kindle and installed the KUAL app launcher that lets me install and run custom apps such as KOReader. Using the USBNetwork software, I was able to connect my Kindle to my computer over USB and SSH into it as if it were a network device.

https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-jailbreak-a-kindle-ereader/

With my Kindle jailbroken, I was able to set up a method of getting the Kindle to display a mirror of my Mac desktop. This works by running a shell script on my Mac that takes a screenshot of my desktop every half a second. This is passed through ImageMagick, an open-source image processing tool that converts the image to grayscale and resizes it to the correct resolution for the Kindle's screen.

This image is then made available as a JPEG over my home network using Python's lightweight web server. Another shell script running on the Kindle fetches the JPEG over Wi-Fi using Wget, a common tool for downloading files. The JPEG is then displayed on the Kindle screen, and the process repeats, producing a near-live mirror of my Mac desktop running at around one frame per second.

The result was better than I was expecting.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of Americans on Sunday converged on the National Mall to mark the country’s 250th birthday with a prayer festival featuring religious music and speeches by leaders from across faiths.

In February, President Trump declared May 17 a national day of prayer and a time “to rededicate America as one nation under God” in a move that energized evangelicals.

“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “Fox News Sunday” about Sunday’s massive religious gathering in DC. //

The May 17 date for the national prayer days traces its origins to America’s early days.

Shortly before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the colonial Congress declared May 17, 1776, a national day of fasting and prayer

The automaker marked its first annual loss in more than 70 years.

After US government policies wrecked the country’s electric vehicle market, automakers have been scrambling to adapt. The loss of federal clean vehicle tax incentives and funding for charging infrastructure, combined with capricious tariffs, has resulted in a 28 percent drop in EV sales for the first three months of the year.

That’s a far cry from just a few years ago, when optimism abounded and a strong commitment to an EV-heavy portfolio translated into a higher share price. As those commitments are abandoned, there’s a financial price to pay, including more than $9 billion of write-downs for Honda, which made its first operating loss in the company’s history.

Vaccines may be training a part of our immune system long thought to be untrainable.

May 15 marks one year since Governor Kathy Hochul enacted a “bell-to-bell” ban on personal phones in public schools, impacting almost a million children in K-12 public and charter schools across the state.

Teachers who spoke to The Post all say the ban has had an overwhelmingly postive impact on their schools.

“I think that the cell phone ban has been remarkable,” Dr. Jessica Chock-Goldman, director of clinical services at Bard High School Early College of Manhattan on the Lower East Side, told The Post. “I’ve been astounded by how much of a shift it has been.” //

But it’s not just in the classroom. When he walks by the cafeteria during lunch, it’s now full of energy.

“They’re talking with each other instead of just looking down at their phones,” he marveled. “Now they have to communicate, they have to socialize. They have to talk, find out how their day is going, what’s going on, what class do you have next, did you do last night’s homework?”

In a recent paper in Nature, a team of scientists led by Kimihiko Nakajima, an astronomer at the Kanazawa University, Japan, used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe an ultra-faint galaxy called LAP1-B as it existed roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang. It’s the most chemically primitive galaxy we’ve ever seen.

The magnifying glass
The LAP1-B is 13 billion light-years away from Earth. To observe an object that faint and distant, even the huge, gold-coated beryllium mirrors of JWST were not enough on their own. We spotted it due to a massive cluster of galaxies called the MACS J046, which warps the spacetime between us and the LAP1-B.

“The galaxy was strongly magnified through the gravitational lensing effect,” Nakajima said. Specifically, the spacetime warped by the MACS J046 clusters magnifies light traveling from LAP1-B toward Earth by roughly 100-fold. //

This analysis revealed a profound shortage of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The gas-phase oxygen-to-hydrogen ratio stood at just 0.4 percent of what we find in our Sun.

Another detail in the spectrum indicated the type of radiation that made the gas glow. The team detected emission lines from triply ionized carbon—a state where a carbon atom has lost half of its six electrons. Stripping multiple electrons away from carbon atoms requires extreme-ultraviolet photons, with energies exceeding 47.9 electronvolts. Standard stars, even the massive ones we see in our galactic vicinity, are not hot enough to produce radiation this intense.

The stars that could get this hot, Nakajima’s team suggests, were the very first that ignited in the Universe. These were made exclusively of hydrogen and helium forged in the Big Bang and lacked heavy elements to help them cool as they formed. “Such stars should be formed from primordial gas,” Nakajima said. //

The stars we see today, including our Sun, are Population I stars. The older generation, found in the halo of our galaxy, are Population II stars, which have far lower levels of elements heavier than helium. Population III stars were the first to appear in the cosmos, and they’re theorized to be violent monsters with masses hundreds of times higher than the Sun squeezed into surprisingly small volumes. They burned extremely hot and died young in supernova explosions. Nakajima’s team has likely found traces of these explosions in LAP1-B.

Cable firm Cox’s Supreme Court win may help all tech providers, not just ISPs.

Second, Jackson’s relationship with children too often ventured into the inappropriate and indefensible, but at the same time, the overwhelming evidence is that he was not guilty of sexually abusing children and was in fact the victim of multiple extortion schemes.

But even today, when the world has rendered its own judgement, that Michael Jackson remains beloved, the media cannot bring themselves to talk about him without suggesting he was likely a pedophile. They refuse to do it. They refuse to tell the truth and they refuse to acknowledge that their preferred version of his story has been rejected by the public. //

I could understand some of the obsession if there were any proof that Jackson did something criminal. He’s been accused and after the one and only time it went to trial, he was acquitted because the jury was introduced to the alleged victim’s wretch of a mother who had a proven history of theft and fraud— schemes that she used her kids to execute.

There was the 2019 Leaving Neverland documentary in which another two accusers, now grown men, laid out graphic details of their own alleged abuse. Both of them are demonstrable liars in ways both big and small, and both made their charges only after Jackson was dead and in pursuit of money (they’re both actively suing his estate).

The details of all of these cases are genuinely riveting, just not in the way the media would prefer.

Instead, their fitness seems to stem from their father’s exercise habits before they were even conceived. It’s a finding suggesting that running might benefit not just the exerciser, but also his unborn children.

“I was very surprised when I first saw the data,” says Yin, a biochemist at Nanjing University.

Yin’s team analyzed the molecules inside the exercising rodents’ sperm and found tiny bits of RNA—dubbed microRNAs—that were present in higher amounts than in the sperm of their idle littermates. When the scientists injected those molecules into unrelated embryos, they got animals just as fit as those that were born to exercising fathers.

That 2025 study adds to mounting evidence that sperm are more than wriggling vessels carrying DNA to an egg. Over the past two decades, studies in mice have detected microRNAs and other types of RNA fragments that surge and wane inside sperm cells in response to not just exercise or sloth but also fatty or sugary diets, daily stress, childhood trauma, heavy drinking and exposure to pesticides and other hazards. In step with these changes, researchers have documented developmental and metabolic changes and differing rates of depression in the males’ offspring.

And while it’s difficult to study the effect in people, researchers also have documented fluctuations in RNA fragments in the sperm of men who do or don’t exercise, smoke or eat excess sugar, as well as men with obesity or traumatic childhoods. Studies also report that children of parents who are overweight or who dealt with mental health stress are more likely to have those conditions, too. //

But though puzzles remain, recent studies show that not only are paternal RNA fragments transferred to a fertilized egg, but also that they are capable of inducing changes in the offspring at the doses found in sperm. //

Today, those studying the phenomenon are sure the effects exist but aren’t certain how they are transmitted. The end result, they believe, is adjustments to the activity of genes—a phenomenon known as epigenetics.

Such adjustments occur during normal development as tissues and organs adopt their different identities, which require certain genes to be active or to be turned off. //

Today, the idea that small RNAs carry environmental signals has the most direct evidence behind it. Although small RNAs are short-lived, they aren’t actively removed like other epigenetic marks. Somehow, the tiny bits of nucleic acid fluctuate in response to the environment, then find their way into sperm cells.b//

Whatever the mechanism, there’s enough evidence to rebalance parental responsibility, Teperino says. “Now it’s almost all on women,” he says. “When a couple is planning a family, the doctor gives the woman a list of rules to follow. This is not valid anymore—we need to at least give recommendations to both.”

First impressions disproportionately shape how passengers rate an entire flight. With self-service kiosks, online check-in, and biometric boarding gates reducing human touchpoints, the gate agent and the flight attendant at the door are now among the very few staff members a customer interacts with directly.

Net Promoter Score, a metric that airlines track closely, is heavily influenced by these early micro interactions. A warm welcome at the door costs the airline nothing yet sets a positive tone for the entire journey. A cold or absent greeting does the opposite and primes the passenger to view every subsequent service touchpoint negatively.

The hospitality industry follows the same principle. Most hotel guests form a subconscious judgement about their stay within five minutes of arrival, based largely on how the front desk staff receives them. Aviation operates under identical psychological dynamics. //

A greeting at the door is not a complicated training problem. It is the clearest available signal of whether an airline’s service culture is functioning, and right now at American, that signal is flashing red.

The Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance developed passkeys several years ago, and the technology offers numerous benefits. For example, passkeys cannot be guessed or shared. Also, passkeys resist some phishing attempts because they're unique to the sites they're created for, so they won't work on fraudulent lookalikes. Most importantly, in the age of near-constant data breaches, your passkeys cannot be stolen by hacking into a company's server or database, making the stolen data far less valuable to criminals. //

Apps or websites store your unique public key. A private key is stored on your device, in your password manager, or, if you're an Apple user, in your iCloud keychain. After your device (or iCloud) authenticates your identity, the two keys combine to grant you access to your account. //

To learn how to set up passkeys for your online accounts, check out our guide to setting up and using passkeys.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/no-more-passwords-how-to-set-up-apples-passkeys-for-easy-sign-ins

You know the data privacy pop-up screens? Don't immediately tap "Accept." Instead, navigate to the "Cookies" or "User Data" sections and choose the shortest available session duration. That way, your cookies will expire automatically or whenever you close your browser window. //

Because the technologies became popular around the same time, many people seem to believe that 2FA options like biometric authentication, authenticator apps, and hardware security keys are the same as passkeys.

The difference? Passkeys perform multi-factor authentication. You will log into a website using only the passkey; there is no need to enter a password and username. Depending on your privacy and security settings, the iCloud account, device, or password manager where you've stored a passkey may require you to unlock it by using your face, fingerprint, or passcode.

Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space from your computer for its local large language model unless you opted out.

It's called weights.bin and it's stored in a folder called OptGuideOnDeviceModel. What's more, if you track down the file and delete it, Chrome will download a fresh copy and reinstate it. //

If you didn't opt out, Google has some info on how to disable it. In brief: in Chrome's address box, enter the special URL chrome://flags. In the resulting page, look for an entry named optimization-guide-on-device-model and set it to Disabled, then restart Chrome. The browser should then delete the weights.bin file. //

The late great Grace Hopper used to hand out 30 cm (roughly 1 foot) lengths of wire as physical examples of a nanosecond: that's how far light can travel in one billionth of a second. If Google considers a 4 GB model to be "nano" sized, then it puts Hanff's hyperbolic comment about the climate footprint into real perspective. It gives a hint of the size of the real gigantic models in the datacenters metastasizing across the world.

A recent study led by Grace Liu at Carnegie-Mellon found that regular AI use caused measurable cognitive impairment. It's worth thinking carefully about what we trade away when we outsource our thinking and, separately, what the planet pays to power the systems we're outsourcing it to.

This vulture suggests you turn it off now, everywhere you can. ®

A celebration of the tweaks and customizations that make life easier at the CLI.

For hantaviruses, human infections are accidental and almost always dead ends. Transmission to people generally happens when virus-laden rodent excreta gets stirred up in dust and inhaled—for example, a person sweeping out a shed or garage with a rodent infestation without a mask.

Such a scenario made headlines in the US last year when pianist Betsy Arakawa, who was married to actor Gene Hackman, was revealed to have died of hantavirus. A subsequent investigation found an extensive rodent infestation at the couple’s residence.

The one exception to this transmission route is from the Andes virus; ANDV is the only hantavirus that has been documented in rare instances to spread from person to person.

Based on that documented incidence, it is clear that person-to-person transmission requires close, prolonged contact. To date, though, it remains unclear whether breathing significant amounts of aerosolized virus from an infected person or exposure to an infected person’s respiratory droplets is behind the rare transmission. //

Whether from rodent exposure or the ultra-rare person-to-person transmission, the incubation period for hantaviruses—the amount of time between exposure and when symptoms develop—ranges from about 7 to 42 days.

The currently recommended quarantine and/or active monitoring period for potentially exposed cases is 42 days.

Microsoft continues to make some of the earliest chapters of its operating system history open-source and freely available. Earlier this week, it announced that Tim Paterson's DOS listings, containing source code of the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, various PC-DOS 1.00 pre-release kernels and utilities, and the Microsoft BASIC-86 Compiler runtime library, were available on GitHub. Microsoft VP Scott Hanselman tied the release to 86-DOS 1.00’s 45th anniversary. The exec confirmed that the code, transcribed from reams of old dot matrix printouts found in a garage, was perfect, "and recompiles byte for byte to the original binaries.”

View and download this historic assembly code for your own space program //

The historic computer software code that took Apollo 11 to the moon has been open-sourced and is available for anyone to read, download, and tinker with. NASA’s Chris Garry made the code available on GitHub as public domain. The published resource is basically in two large codebases, one set of code for the Command Module (Comanche055) and another for the Lunar Module (Luminary099). These modules both had their own Apollo 11 guidance computers (AGC) upon which to run the code, and were instrumental to the success of the remarkable mission – the first human Moon landing in history. //

It is fascinating to see this Apollo 11 code from nearly 60 years ago shared in the context of the ongoing Artemis II lunar mission. Today, we aren’t marveling at the lean and mean machine code that NASA is using to get humans to and from the Moon. Rather, Microsoft Outlook email bugs and a malfunctioning toilet on the Orion spacecraft may have taken the shine off the momentous achievement this latest mission represents.

Microsoft CTO confesses that 30-year-old code from the mid-90s still forms the bedrock of Windows 11 — ancient Win32 API still the backbone, but CTO says it's 'more relevant than ever in 2026' //

As Russinovich eloquently puts it, those of us invested in the computer scene in the 90s “were thinking flying cars and moon stations by the year 2026, not Win32.” The admission that such old software tech is still the "bedrock" of Windows today may be the CTO strategically sharing a cold, hard truth, providing a 'let's be real' moment as part of Microsoft’s latest charm offensive. //

Russinovich highlights that Win32 was also the bedrock for tools like Sysmon and ZoomIt, which he actually wrote back in 1996. These tools are now “more relevant than ever in 2026,” as parts of Windows 11 and PowerToys, respectively, reckons the CTO.