The Xteink X4 is a tiny eink ereader which is pretty affordable, and definitely very pocketable. At around £44 from Aliexpress I took the plunge.
One big plus that I had read about was that there are actively developed open source firmwares available for this device, most notably Crosspoint Reader. The supplied firmwares are pretty naff and also mine and most of these come out of the box setup with Chinese localisation. So to be honest, beyond just booting the device to check it worked I immediately flashed Crosspoint reader onto it within seconds. Flashing Crosspoint Reader is incredibly simple as there is a web flashing tool. Simply USB your device to your computer, point a chrome based browser at this website and click flash! Simple.
Trump has already said the Navy will escort ships through Hormuz “if necessary.” If the same reflagging requirement applies, every European and Asian tanker that wants a U.S. escort would need to fly the American flag.
Think about what that means for the SHIPS Act, the Jones Act, the U.S. flag fleet, and CMA CGM’s unfulfilled promise to triple its U.S.-flag vessels, Greenland. Hormuz becomes the forcing function for everything Trump’s maritime agenda could not achieve through legislation or diplomacy.
Meanwhile, Iran is selectively letting ships through. Turkish, Indian, Chinese, and some Saudi tankers have been permitted to transit via Iranian territorial waters. About eighteen tankers, mostly Chinese, have done so according to Lloyd’s. Western-allied ships are blocked.
The “closure” is really a sorting mechanism. Iran decides who trades and who does not. Unless the U.S. Navy reopens it for everyone. On America’s terms.
That’s the decision the world has to make, let Iran pull up a tollbooth or stop blocking Trump’s maritime plans. //
While TV oil analysts focus on the global price of oil, the real experts in Houston are watching something different: the fracturing of the global energy market.
The real threat is not $200 oil. It’s a fracture of the system. It is cheap energy in export nations and ruinous energy costs in places far from reserves. It’s $2 oil in the Persain Gulf, $20 dollar oil in the Gulf of America and $2,000 oil in the UK. //
One global price only works if there is a surplus of tankers to arbitrage differentials. Before the Iran strikes, that surplus was razor-thin. Now, with supertankers stuck in the Gulf, it is gone. //
Meanwhile, California has been closing refineries and blocking pipelines, forcing gasoline imports from South Korea on ships with dayrates that are skyrocketing. Govenor Newsom, the leading canidate for President in 2028, is irrate. New England imports LNG and diesel by ship. If Hormuz stays closed, prices spike in those states. Deep blue states. Red state energy costs fall. Blue state costs rise. Europe capitulates on major policy disputes between now and the midterms. //
The strongest version of this thesis is not “Trump is playing 4D chess.” It is that the administration holds more options than anyone realizes, and the insurance mechanism, not the Navy, is the real lever of power.
One of my favorite Apollo astronauts is the late Jim Lovell. He flew in two missions yet never walked on the moon. His unflappable leadership during the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission helped make it what some called a “successful failure.”
Lovell also flew on Apollo 8, the mission that first flew around the moon. It was Christmas Eve 1968, and Lovell, William Anders, and Frank Borman delivered a Christmas message to the world from their orbit around the moon, which included a reading from Genesis 1: //
Lovell passed away at the age of 97 in August of last year, but a couple of months before he died, he recorded a message for Artemis II. NASA kept Lovell’s message a secret, but mission control played it to wake the crew up on Monday.
Hello Artemis II! This is Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Welcome to my old neighborhood. When Frank Borman and Bill Anders and I orbited the moon on Apollo 8, we got humanity's first up close look at the moon and got a view of the home planet that inspired and united people around the world. I'm proud to pass that torch on to you as you swing around the moon and lay the groundwork for missions to Mars, for the benefit of all. It's a historic day, and I know how busy you'll be, but don't forget to enjoy the view. So, Reid and Victor and Christina and Jeremy, and all the great teams supporting you, good luck and Godspeed from all of us here on the good earth.
An estimated 18,000 to 40,000 consumer routers, mostly those made by MikroTik and TP-Link, located in 120 countries, were wrangled into infrastructure belonging to APT28, an advanced threat group that’s part of Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU, researchers from Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said. //
The easiest way for people to know if their router has been compromised in the operation is to review the current DNS settings to see if they list unrecognized servers. Users should also check event logs for any unrecognized changes to DNS server settings. People should also strongly consider replacing end-of-life routers with ones that receive regular security updates. People should never click through browser alerts warning of untrusted TLS certificates.
“Affected devices include Kindle 1st and 2nd Generation, Kindle DX and DX Graphite, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, and Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation,” reads the message from the Kindle team. Older 2011 and 2012-era Kindle Fire tablets will also lose access to the Kindle Store.
Amazon’s Kindle generational branding is occasionally confusing—that “Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation” is also referred to as “Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation)” on Amazon’s support pages because it’s part of the fifth generation of Kindle releases overall. But if you check your Kindle’s software version and see anything older than 5.12.2.2, it means your Kindle is losing access to Amazon’s store and your e-book library.
It’s been a while since any of these devices received active software support from Amazon; only 2024-and-later devices have received the latest 5.19.3.0.1 software update, though 2021 and 2022’s Kindles have been updated as recently as February. Historically, though, Amazon has been willing to allow older, un-updated Kindles to continue to buy and download more books, even if they’re no longer benefitting from new features.
A situation like this is extremely rare, with 74 infants born on 73 commercial flights, of whom 71 survived delivery, between 1929 and 2018, according to a March 2020 study by the National Library of Medicine.
However, the birth brings up some legal questions regarding the baby’s citizenship status.
Most of the out-of-this-world photos being beamed home from Artemis II were taken with an old-model Nikon camera that can be bought for about $1,000.
NASA traded in the legendary Hasselblad model it used on Apollo missions years ago for the Nikon D5 DSLR — a classic digital single-lens-reflex camera first released in 2016.
The Nikon was carefully selected for its proven track record as a workhorse space camera, as well as its extraordinary ability to pick up detail even in extreme darkness, Nikon’s top NASA consultant told The Post on Tuesday.
He said the Nikon D5 has been used successfully in space since 2017 — and “is still producing amazing images for them.”
One of the camera’s top-selling points for Artemis II was its incredible low-light capabilities, Corrado said.
The camera is able to shoot at an ISO — or light-sensitivity rating — of up to 3.2 million. //
“After this mission, it should be Z9. They won’t go back to the D5 after this,” he said. “Once they fully test and continue to test, the Z9 will be the camera going to the moon.”
Artemis II brought a total 32 cameras onboard for their 10-day mission.
Fifteen were mounted on the spacecraft, and 17 were handheld cameras the crew operated while peering out the cabin windows during their historic flyby of the lunar far side.
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To get started and turn your phone into a server-compatible camera, you need it to actually broadcast a signal that your server can catch. There are a few different options when it comes to applications that will do this for you. These include IP Webcam and RTSP Camera Server Pro, and both are available on the Play Store. It's worth keeping in mind that these apps don't store video on the phone; they turn the phone into a network node.
We’ve been pretty excited about the announcement of Chrome OS Flex and what it could mean for scores of aging laptops – Windows and Mac OS included. Though we have a lot of content planned around this new OS from Google, we also realize that we’ve not put up a clear guide on how to actually get this up and running on your own device. With the USB method, you can test drive Chrome OS Flex without breaking anything on your computer and make the decision if it’s the right move for you or not. So why not give it a go?
As the Artemis II crew came close to passing behind the Moon and experiencing a planned loss of signal, they captured this image of a crescent Earth setting on the Moon’s limb.
“The five experiments all succeeded, but none of them revolutionized our understanding of the corona,” he says in a disarmingly honest way about the flight’s immediate impact. “They all played their role in the normal progression of scientific knowledge, but there were no extraordinary results, it has to be said.” //
Léna doubts their incredible flight will ever be repeated. Today, space-based satellites that can watch the sun 24/7 and create permanent artificial eclipses have revolutionized our understanding of the nearest star to Earth—although observing eclipses on Earth is still useful for astronomy. //
“At the time, our knowledge of the solar corona was very very limited,” explains Léna. “Today we have far less need for eclipse flights from a scientific point of view because we can put missions like SOHO in space, which is doing essentially what we were aboard Concorde. Our observation methods have changed a lot, so I doubt if today we’d redo a mission like that.”
It’s often said that scientific inquiry leads to innovation, but the Concorde experiment is a reminder that sometimes innovation offers wild, unexpected dividends to science. Today, the exact plane that chased the eclipse in 1973 sits as a permanent exhibit at Le Bourget Air and Space Museum, complete with the special roof portholes and the eclipse mission logo on its fuselage. Léna, John Beckman and other engineers and astronomers were present for the 2013 unveiling, along with the late pilot André Turcat
Jet Propulsion Laboratory and California Institute of Technology
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I have a friend who works in the security sector. He always plays Red Team - so let's call him Reddy. His job is to look at systems, understand them, and then dream up ways to exploit and compromise them.
I recently asked for his opinion on the SAVE Act. No surprise, like the overwhelming majority of Americans, he is all for it - but his reasoning was less about preventing individual illegal aliens from voting but about reversing a deliberate systemic compromise of election system integrity by Democrats over the last two decades.
Reddy thinks Blue State voting systems are deliberately designed to enable fraud on an industrial scale, and California's electoral system is the model at or near full maturity.
He contends (and I agree with his analysis) that Democrats in California and their allied NGOs have successfully built up a huge bank of false registrations and jiggered their ballot handling and counting rules so they can always "find" enough votes on election night, or even after, (when they know the margins) to make sure they never lose.
Someday there is going to be a movie made about this rescue mission in Iran.
But man, what a morale booster for our military to know that the Secretary of War and Commander-in-Chief will blow up $300 million worth of our own military aircraft to rescue one US soldier.
No man left behind!
God bless our troops!
Military personnel matter to President Trump. At $300 million a troop the 1.3 million people in uniform means they are worth 390 trillion dollars (a million times a million is a trillion).
To Joe Biden, they were worth nothing.
He left 13 behind to die in Afghanistan and he looked at his watch repeatedly when their bodies came home.
But for a moment, look at our military’s rescue through the eyes of the enemy.
Iran had two men downed inside Iran and somehow its military was unable to find them, while the military from a nation thousands of miles away rescued them. It was like a groundball going through a fielder’s legs and costing his team a World Series game.
The rescue feels like victory because it is.
"Now, these are not routine operations. They were high-risk, high-stakes missions conducted in the heart of enemy territory.
"This was not just barely into Iran. This was deep into Iran, involving coordinated strikes to suppress threats, deception tactics to protect our teams, and full synchronization across air, ground, and special operations.
"The Iranians are still asking themselves right now, how did the Americans do this?"
Of the first mission, Hegseth said:
"The first mission, the first of two, was an audacious daylight thunder run right up the middle.
"It was authorized in less than two hours from that pilot going down, when we knew where he was, and it was authorized in the middle of the night because anybody that’s worked for this man knows he’s up in the middle of the night." //
"I looked up at my screen when the final mission was complete inside our SCIF, our secure facility.
"And we have a running VTC, a running coordination cell, and the top of it read 45 hours and 56 minutes.
"For 45 hours and 56 minutes, we held that call open for coordination.
"From the moment our pilots went down, our mission was unblinking.
"The call never dropped.
"The meeting never stopped.
"The planning never ceased."
The Normandy Invasion consisted of 5,333 Allied ships and landing craft embarking nearly 175,000 men. The British and Canadians put 75,215 troops ashore, and the Americans 57,500, for a total of 132,715, of whom about 3,400 were killed or missing, in contrast to some estimates of ten thousand.
The foregoing figures exclude approximately 20,000 Allied airborne troopers. Extensive planning was required to move all these troops.
The U.S. VII Corps sustained 22,119 casualties from 6 June to 1 July, including 2,811 killed, 13,564 wounded, 5,665 missing, and seventy-nine captured.
American personnel in Britain included 1,931,885 land, 659,554 air, and 285,000 naval—a total of 2,876,439 officers and men. While in Britain they were housed in 1,108 bases and camps.
These are just individuals, they just use computers, and they just want to steal your data and make money. They're not mythical. They don't have superpowers. //
And thus, the Dark Web Roast was born. It's a regular blog complete with memes, mockery, and a Ricky Gervais' "they're just jokes" inspired disclaimer: "While these incidents are genuinely amusing, they represent real criminal activities causing significant harm. This content is for threat intelligence and educational purposes only."
The most recent edition features a ransomware gang that bulk-drafted and scheduled their extortion attempts like a content calendar: "Considering the sheer, numbing volume of their posts, it's a solid bet that their 'victims' are probably just fake sites they spun up themselves for content, because nothing screams legitimacy like inflating your stats with phantom compromises," the researchers wrote. //
But public mockery (as with LockBit), and infiltration like the FBI did with Hive's ransomware network, can fracture trust among cyberthieves. And this fragmentation can help defenders dismantle criminal operations and keep people and data safe. //
The video shows an administrator skimming the most valuable secrets and cryptocurrency keys for personal gain, while passing only less lucrative data to customers. Trellix learned about this incident during a briefing with Dutch police.
"They said to us, 'We found out that this admin is also stealing from his own customers,'" Fokker remembers. After the Europol press release came out, Trellix unleashed the snark in a Dark Web Roast.
"We basically said you're stupid if you work with him, because he's just getting rich, and we just make fun of him," Fokker said. "We don't know if the impact was measurable, but still, we had an opportunity to run with that story and make a complete fool out of this admin. So that's something." ®
The cost of high-performance GPUs, typically $8,000 or more, means they are frequently shared among dozens of users in cloud environments. Three new attacks demonstrate how a malicious user can gain full root control of a host machine by performing novel Rowhammer attacks on high-performance GPU cards made by Nvidia.
The attacks exploit memory hardware’s increasing susceptibility to bit flips, in which 0s stored in memory switch to 1s and vice versa. In 2014, researchers first demonstrated that repeated, rapid access—or “hammering”—of memory hardware known as DRAM creates electrical disturbances that flip bits. A year later, a different research team showed that by targeting specific DRAM rows storing sensitive data, an attacker could exploit the phenomenon to escalate an unprivileged user to root or evade security sandbox protections. Both attacks targeted DDR3 generations of DRAM. //
On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new—and potentially much more consequential—territory: GDDR bitflips that give adversaries full control of CPU memory, resulting in full system compromise of the host machine. For the attack to work, IOMMU memory management must be disabled, as is the default in BIOS settings. //
A separate mitigation is to enable Error Correcting Codes (ECC) on the GPU, something Nvidia allows to be done using a command line. //
Kevin G
Ars Scholae Palatinae
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The ECC functionality on nVidia cards can take a pretty big performance hit as they do not include extra DRAM for ECC. Thus on a 32 GB workstation GPU, the amount of usable memory is reduced down to a 28 GB. Thus if you were using that extra memory and flipped on ECC, performance tanks as the remaining 4 GB gets paged out to host CPU memory. Beyond that, the ECC algorithm itself as the where the parity data for ECC resides is some what configurable. If itis on the same memory controller (which generally means the same memory chip as often there is only one chip per memory channel), then the calculation is done inside the memory controller relatively quickly. This of course comes at the higher integrity risk of losing data if a memory chip fails but this does protect against random bit flips. The other ECC algorithm is more akin to software RAID5 which rotates where the parity data resides across the chip and across the various internal memory controllers. Thus to compute ECC, one memory controller has to wait for another control to read that information and pass it down which is big performance penalty.
What this article doesn't cover is HBM which can both have extra stacks of memory in a channel as well as extra bits of parity on each die in the stack. Most ECC leverage the extra memory on the die plus rotating where the parity data resides. The end result is effectively the same as having an extra DRAM chip on a DIMM. (For those who don't know, an 8 GB ECC DIMM will contain ten 1 GB memory chips but the extra 2 GB is used exclusively for ECC and does not alter the usable capacity.)
HBM controllers are rather complex and the reason why capacities like 141 GB exist is due to a single die failure in one of the many stacks. Instead of disabling a wholes stack and reducing the memory capacity down to 120 GB, only the explicitly broken die is disabled.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that “almost half of the US data centers planned for this year are expected to be delayed or canceled” because developers can’t import enough transformers, switchgear, and batteries to build out the power infrastructure that every data center needs.
These parts, which China has primarily manufactured for US manufacturers “for decades,” used to take between 24 and 30 months to get delivered prior to 2020. Now, they can require wait times up to five years, Bloomberg reported. That lag could matter, since China is reportedly about five years behind the US in the AI race.
Rather than rely on China, Trump would prefer that the US manufacture its own equipment. However, currently, “US manufacturing capacity for these devices cannot keep up with demand,” Bloomberg reported.