Leftovers

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Betelgeuse Is Definitely Not Alone, 8-Year Study Confirms

    Meet Siwarha.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of The Fourier Transform

    A talk, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Fourier Transform, was presented by [Joshua Wise] at Teardown 2025 in June last year. Click-through for the notes or check out the video below the break for the one hour talk itself.

  • Science Alert ☛ Moroccan Cave Fossils Capture a Crossroads in Modern Human Evolution

    Fascinating in so many ways.

  • Science Alert ☛ Earliest Direct Evidence of Poisoned Arrows Revealed in 60,000-Year-Old Relics

    So clever.

  • Science Alert ☛ Hundreds of Nearby Stars Flagged as Prime Candidates to Support Life

    "A long-term, stable environment for their planetary companions."

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Graphing Calculator Gets USB-C Upgrade

    Unlike Texas Instruments, whose graphing calculators have famously not made technological improvements in decades despite keeping the same price tag, HP has made a few more modern graphing calculators in the last few years. One of which is the HP Prime which boasts hardware from the mid-2010s including an ARM processor, a color screen, and rechargeable lithium battery. But despite this updated hardware it’s still using micro-USB for data and charging. [David] wanted to fix that by giving this calculator a USB-C port.

  • Hackaday ☛ DIY Grid Dip Meter Teardown

    You don’t see them much anymore, but there was a time when any hobbyist who dealt with RF probably had a grid dip meter. The idea was to have an oscillator and measure the grid current as it coupled to external circuits. At resonance, the grid current would go down or dip, hence the name. In the hands of someone who knew how to use it, the meter could measure inductance, capacitance, tuned circuits, antennas, and more. [Thomas] takes a peek inside a homebrew unit from the 1950s in a recent video you can see below.

  • Hackaday ☛ Co-Extrusion Carbon Fiber FDM Filament Investigated

    After previously putting carbon fiber-reinforced PLA filament under the (electron) microscope, the [I built a thing] bloke is back with a new video involving PLA-CF, this time involving co-extrusion rather than regular dispersed chopped CF. This features a continuous CF core that is enveloped by PLA, with a sample filament spool sent over by BIQU in the form of their CarbonCore25 filament.

  • Hackaday ☛ How Do PAL And NTSC Really Work?

    Many projects on these pages do clever things with video. Whether it’s digital or analogue, it’s certain our community can push a humble microcontroller to the limit of its capability. But sometimes the terminology is a little casually applied, and in particular with video there’s an obvious example. We say “PAL”, or “NTSC” to refer to any composite video signal, and perhaps it’s time to delve beyond that into the colour systems those letters convey.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Potential Anti-Cancer Fungal Compound Finally Synthesized After 55 Years

    Worth the wait.

  • Science Alert ☛ Caffeine in Your Blood Might Affect Body Fat And Diabetes Risk, Study Shows

    Something to think about.

  • Science Alert ☛ Multiple Sclerosis May Have Two Distinct Subtypes, Scientists Discover

    This could lead to better treatments.

  • Latvia ☛ State Audit: 'disabled' status in Latvia of limited practical value

    The State Audit Office has concluded that disability status in Latvia only partially achieves its objective. The main purpose of determining disability is to reduce the barriers caused by functional limitations and ensure equal opportunities. However, in practice, the status often serves to compensate for income rather than to provide access to necessary services, the audit office said in its report on 7th January.

  • Science Alert ☛ Expert Reveals 5 Surprising Sources of Microplastics in Your Daily Diet

    And how you can reduce them.

  • Science Alert ☛ Old Foe Tops Expert's List of Viruses to Watch in 2026

    Vigilance can help keep everyone safe.

  • Science Alert ☛ 5 Easy Tips to Have a Great Day at Work, From a Workplace Psychologist

    Achieving corporate synergy.

• Proprietary

  • Jon Chiappetta: Surveillance Giant Google Cancels Gmailify! :O :(

    First, Yahoo cancels simple mail forwarding. Then I try to use the Surveillance Giant Google gmailify feature to get my email as well as be able to send mail on behalf of my domain name. Next, Surveillance Giant Google cancels gmailify so now I have recently switched everything over to Fastmail, which offers both of these features plus the label organization and filtering capabilities — but for a price of course. Anyway, I’ve been using Gmail for many many years since it was Beta as my default mail client but now that time has come to an end sadly…

  • International Business Times ☛ Why Microsoft Employees Over 40 Fear They're Being 'Targeted' in January 2026 Layoffs

    If you are over 40 and work at Microsoft, anonymous insiders suggest your job may be at greater risk than your younger colleagues when the tech giant implements redundancies later this month.

    Rumours of impending layoffs have circulated among the company's workforce, with estimates suggesting between 11,000 and 22,000 roles could be cut globally, according to reports from TipRanks. This would represent roughly 5% to 10% of Microsoft's approximately 220,000 employees. The cuts are expected during the third week of January, with 21 January emerging as a likely date, based on an anonymous post on Blind, the verified workplace forum.

    What has alarmed many veteran employees, however, is a specific warning buried in that 30 December 2025 post.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Security Week ☛ Chrome Extensions With 900,000 Downloads Caught Stealing Hey Hi (AI) Chats

      Impersonating a legitimate extension from AITOPIA, the two malicious extensions were also exfiltrating users’ browser activity.

    • Futurism ☛ Terrified Investors Are Bracing for an Hey Hi (AI) Bubble “Reckoning”

      "Some of the valuations are insane."

    • Futurism ☛ Dell Admits That Customers Are Disgusted by PCs Stuffed With Hey Hi (AI) Features

      "They're not buying based on AI."

    • Futurism ☛ National Weather Service Uses Hey Hi (AI) to Generate Forecasts, Accidentally Hallucinates Town With Dirty Joke Name

      Welcome to Whata Bod, Idaho.

• Security

  • Security Week ☛ Complex Routing, Misconfigurations Exploited for Domain Spoofing in Phishing Attacks

    Threat actors spoof legitimate domains to make their phishing emails appear to have been sent internally.

  • Security Week ☛ Hackers Exploit Zero-Day in Discontinued D-Link Devices

    The critical-severity vulnerability allows unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute arbitrary shell commands.

  • Security Week ☛ The Loudest Voices in Security Often Have the Least to Lose

    Security advice fails when it comes from those who don’t bear the consequences and won’t be responsible for making it work.

  • Security Week ☛ Several Code Execution Flaws Patched in Veeam Backup & Replication

    Four vulnerabilities have been fixed in the latest release of Veeam Backup & Replication.

  • Security Week ☛ Vulnerability in Totolink Range Extender Allows Device Takeover

    An error in the firmware-upload handler leads to devices starting an unauthenticated root-level Telnet service.

  • Wladimir Palant ☛ Backdoors in VStarcam cameras

    VStarcam is an important brand of cameras based on the PPPP protocol. Unlike the LookCam cameras I looked into earlier, these are often being positioned as security cameras. And they in fact do a few things better like… well, like having a mostly working authentication mechanism. In order to access the camera one has to know its administrator password.

    So much for the theory. When I looked into the firmware of the cameras I discovered a surprising development: over the past years this protection has been systematically undermined. Various mechanisms have been added that leak the access password, and in several cases these cannot be explained as accidents. The overall tendency is clear: for some reason VStarcam really wants to have access to their customer’s passwords.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Futurism ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man’s Golden Smartphone Is Getting Sketchier and Sketchier

      The company is still collecting $100 deposits for a device that likely doesn't exist.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Ravi Dwivedi: Why my Riseup account got suspended (and reinstated)

      Disclaimer: The goal of this post is not to attack Riseup. In fact, I love Riseup and support their work.

      Story

      Riseup is an email provider, known for its privacy-friendly email service. The service requires an invite from an existing Riseup email user to get an account.

• Defence/Aggression

  • BIA Net ☛ ‘Wells of isolation’: Prisoners allege severe abuse in 'maximum-security' prisons

    High-security prisons introduced in recent years in Turkey fail to meet Mandela Rules on prisoners’ right to sunlight and fresh air, according to human rights advocates.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Latvia ☛ WATCH: Latvia makes its debut at the United Nations Security Council

      With much advance fanfare, Latvia took its place for the first time ever as a temporary member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on January 1st – but would probably not have expected that within a few days it would be a voice discussing a major new international crisis.

    • Latvia ☛ Lithuanian border guards are picking up migrants who have moved on from Latvia

      Secondary migration from Latvia into Lithuania more than doubled last year, Lithuania’s State Border Guard Service (VSAT) said Tuesday, citing increased pressure along the EU’s eastern border linked to Belarus, according to Lithuanian public media outlet LRT.

    • Meduza ☛ U.S. military seizes Russian-flagged tanker linked to Venezuelan oil — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Pay to pray: How the Russian Orthodox Church is making faith more expensive — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ O Bella, ciao! U.S. seizes sanctioned tanker after weeks-long Atlantic pursuit and brief standoff with Russian naval escort — Meduza

    • NYPost ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man greenlights tough Russia sanctions bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham announces

      "After a very productive meeting today with Hell Toupée on a variety of issues, he greenlit the bipartisan Russia sanctions bill that I have been working on for months with Senator Blumenthal and many others,” Graham wrote on X.

    • Latvia ☛ Some Russians' businesses are turning 'Latvian' for a couple of reasons

      Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the number of companies whose owners or ultimate beneficiaries have changed their citizenship from 'Russian' and 'Belarusian' has increased rapidly, and the most common changes have been to citizenship of Israel, Latvia and Antigua and Barbuda, reports Latvian Radio.

    • Latvia ☛ Baltic states aim for resilience on rails

      Rail Baltica is to connect the Baltic States with the rest of Europe by 2030. The high-speed rail link is about to bring the railway networks of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania together with Western Europe. This has become even more important after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – both strategically and for military mobility.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Testing Laughing Gas For Rocket Propellant

      Nitrous oxide’s high-speed abilities don’t end with racing cars, as it’s a powerful enough oxidizer to be a practical component of rocket propellant. Since [Markus Bindhammer] is building a hybrid rocket engine, in his most recent video he built and tested a convenient nitrous oxide dispenser.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • NYPost ☛ Abandoned and angry Palisades residents mark fire anniversary with reckoning

      Thousands gathered at the burned-out town center one year after the Palisades Fire, demanding answers over evacuation failures, missing emergency response and a disaster residents say changed their community forever.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Three of the best: George Michaelson

    In 2025, George Michaelson touched on topics ranging from news to explainers. Here are three of George’s best.

Monopolies/Monopsonies