Wall warts. Plug mounted power supplies that turn mains voltage into low voltage DC on a barrel jack to power a piece of equipment. We’ve all got a load of them for our various devices, most of us to the extent that it becomes annoying. [Mikeselectricstuff] has the solution, in the shape of a USB-C PD power supply designed to replace a barrel jack socket on a PCB.

The video below provides a comprehensive introduction to the topic before diving into the design. The chip in question is the CH224K, and he goes into detail on ordering the boards for yourself. As the design files are freely available, we wouldn’t be surprised if they start turning up from the usual suppliers before too long.

We like this project and we can see that it would be useful, after all it’s easy to end up in wall wart hell. We’ve remarked before that USB-C PD is a new technology done right, and this is the perfect demonstration of its potential.

youtube.com/embed/BElU9LPbaA8?…

hackaday.com/2025/07/22/usb-c-…

It hasn’t been that long since humans figured out how to create power grids that integrated multiple generators and consumers. Ever since AC won the battle of the currents, grid operators have had to deal with the issues that come with using AC instead of the far less complex DC. Instead of simply targeting a constant voltage, generators have to synchronize with the frequency of the alternating current as it cycles between positive and negative current many times per second.

Complicating matters further, the transmission lines between generators and consumers, along with any kind of transmission equipment on the lines, add their own inductive, capacitive, and resistive properties to the system before the effects of consumers are even tallied up. The result of this are phase shifts between voltage and current that have to be managed by controlling the reactive power, lest frequency oscillations and voltage swings result in a complete grid blackout.

Flowing Backwards

We tend to think of the power in our homes as something that comes out of the outlet before going into the device that’s being powered. While for DC applications this is essentially true – aside from fights over which way DC current flows – for AC applications the answer is pretty much a “It’s complicated”. After all, the primary reason why we use AC transmission is because transformers make transforming between AC voltages easy, not because an AC grid is easier to manage.
Image showing the instantaneous electric power in AC systems and its decomposition into active and reactive power; when the current lags the voltage 50 degrees. (Credit: Jon Peli Oleaga)
What exactly happens between an AC generator and an AC load depends on the characteristics of the load. A major part of these characteristics is covered by its power factor (PF), which describes the effect of the load on the AC phase. If the PF is 1, the load is purely resistive with no phase shift. If the PF is 0, it’s a purely reactive load and no net current flows. Most AC-powered devices have a power factor that’s somewhere between 0.5 to 0.99, meaning that they appear to be a mixed reactive and resistive load.
The power triangle, showing the relationship between real, apparent and reactive power. (Source: Wikimedia)
PF can be understood in terms of the two components that define AC power, being:

• Apparent Power (S, in volt-amperes or VA) and
• Real Power (P, in watts).

The PF is defined as the ratio of P to S (i.e. `PF = P / S). Reactive Power (Q, in var) is easily visualized as the angle theta (Θ) between P and S if we put them as respectively the leg and hypotenuse of a right triangle. Here Θ is the phase shift by which the current waveform lags the voltage. We can observe that as the phase shift increases, the apparent power increases along with reactive power. Rather than being consumed by the load, reactive power flows back to the generator, which hints at why it’s such a problematic phenomenon for grid-management.

From the above we can deduce that the PF is 1.0 if S and P are the same magnitude. Although P = I × V gets us the real power in watts, it is the apparent power that is being supplied by the generators on the grid, meaning that reactive power is effectively ‘wasted’ power. How concerning this is to you as a consumer mostly depends on whether you are being billed for watts or VAs consumed, but from a grid perspective this is the motivation behind power factor correction (PFC).

This is where capacitors are useful, as they can correct the low PF on inductive loads like electric motors, and vice versa with inductance on capacitive loads. As a rule of thumb, capacitors create reactive power, while inductors consume reactive power, meaning that for PFC the right capacitance or inductance has to be added to get the PF as close to 1.0 as possible. Since an inductor absorbs the excess (reactive) power and a capacitor supplies reactive power, if both are balanced 1:1, the PF would be 1.0.

In the case of modern switching-mode power supplies, automatic power factor correction (APFC) is applied, which switch in capacitance as needed by the current load. This is, in miniature, pretty much what the full-scale grid does throughout the network.

Traditional Grids

Magnetically controlled shunt reactor (MCSR). (Credit: Tayosun, Wikimedia)
Based on this essential knowledge, local electrical networks were expanded from a few streets to entire cities. From there it was only a matter of time before transmission lines turned many into few, with soon transmission networks spanning entire continents. Even so, the basic principles remain the same, and thus the methods available to manage a power grid.

Spinning generators provide the AC power, along with either the creation or absorption of reactive power on account of being inductors with their large wound coils, depending on their excitation level. Since transformers are passive devices, they will always absorb reactive power, while both overhead and underground transmission lines start off providing reactive power, overhead lines start absorbing reactive power if overloaded.

In order to keep reactive power in the grid to a healthy minimum, capacitive and inductive loads are switched in or out at locations like transmission lines and switchyards. The inductive loads often taken the form of shunt reactors – basically single winding transformers – and shunt capacitors, along with active devices like synchronous condensers that are effectively simplified synchronous generators. In locations like substations the use of tap changers enables fine-grained voltage control to ease the load on nearby transmission lines. Meanwhile the synchronous generators at thermal plants can be kept idle and online to provide significant reactive power absorption capacity when not used to actively generate power.

Regardless of the exact technologies employed, these traditional grids are characterized by significant amounts of reactive power creation and absorption capacity. As loads join or leave the grid every time that consumer devices are turned off and on, the grid manager (transmission system operator, or TSO) adjusts the state of these control methods. This keeps the grid frequency and voltage within their respective narrowly defined windows.

Variable Generators

Over the past few years, most newly added generating capacity has come in the form of weather-dependent variable generators that use grid-following converters. These devices take the DC power from generally PV solar and wind turbine farms and convert them into AC. They use a phase-locked loop (PLL) to synchronize with the grid frequency, to match this AC frequency and the current voltage.

Unfortunately, these devices do not have the ability to absorb or generate reactive power, and instead blindly follow the current grid frequency and voltage, even if said grid was going through reactive power-induced oscillations. Thus instead of damping these oscillations and any voltage swings, these converters serve to amplify these issues. During the 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout, this was identified as one of the primary causes by the Spanish TSO.

Ultimately AC power grids depend on solid reactive power management, which is why the European group of TSOs (ENTSO-E) already recommended in 2020 that grid-following converters should get replaced with grid-forming converters. These feature the ability absorb and generate reactive power through the addition of features like energy storage and are overall significantly more useful and robust when it comes to AC grid management.

Although AC doesn’t rule the roost any more in transmission networks, with high-voltage DC now the more economical option for long distances, the overwhelming part of today’s power grids still use AC. This means that reactive power management will remain one of the most essential parts of keeping power grids stable and people happy, until the day comes when we will all be switching back to DC grids, year after the switch to AC was finally completed back in 2007.

hackaday.com/2025/07/22/power-…

La nuova famiglia di malware LameHug utilizza il Large Language Model (LLM) per generare comandi che vengono eseguiti sui sistemi Windows compromessi. Come riportato da Bleeping Computer, LameHug è scritto in Python e utilizza l’API Hugging Face per interagire con il Qwen 2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct LLM, che può generare comandi in base ai prompt forniti. Si noti che l’utilizzo dell’infrastruttura Hugging Face può contribuire a garantire la segretezza delle comunicazioni e che l’attacco rimarrà inosservato per un periodo di tempo più lungo.

Questo modello, creato da Alibaba Cloud, èopen source e progettato specificamente per la generazione di codice, il ragionamento e l’esecuzione di istruzioni di programmazione. Può convertire descrizioni in linguaggio naturale in codice eseguibile (in più linguaggi) o comandi shell. LameHug è stato scoperto il 10 luglio di quest’anno, quando dipendenti delle autorità esecutive ucraine hanno ricevuto email dannose inviate da account hackerati.

Le email contenevano un archivio ZIP con il loader di LameHug, camuffato dai file Attachment.pif, AI_generator_uncensored_Canvas_PRO_v0.9.exe e image.py. Nei sistemi infetti, LameHug aveva il compito di eseguire comandi per effettuare ricognizioni e rubare dati generati dinamicamente tramite richieste a LLM.
Prompt per la generazione di comandi
Le informazioni di sistema raccolte venivano salvate in un file di testo (info.txt) e il malware cercava ricorsivamente documenti in cartelle come Documenti, Desktop, Download, per poi trasmettere i dati raccolti ai suoi operatori tramite richieste SFTP o HTTP POST. La pubblicazione sottolinea che LameHug è il primo malware documentato che utilizza LLM per eseguire attività dannose.

Sempre più spesso vediamo una preoccupante integrazione tra malware e intelligenza artificiale, che rende le minacce informatiche più sofisticate, flessibili e difficili da individuare. L’uso dei Large Language Model come “motori” per generare in tempo reale comandi dannosi permette agli attaccanti di adattarsi rapidamente, di diversificare le tecniche di attacco e di ridurre la rilevabilità da parte dei sistemi di difesa tradizionali.

LameHug rappresenta un chiaro esempio di questa nuova generazione di minacce: malware che non solo automatizzano le attività dannose, ma sono anche in grado di “ragionare” e rispondere dinamicamente agli input, sfruttando la potenza degli LLM. Un fenomeno che segna l’inizio di una nuova fase nelle minacce informatiche, in cui l’AI non è solo uno strumento difensivo, ma diventa parte integrante e attiva dell’arsenale offensivo dei cyber criminali.

L'articolo Arriva LameHug: il malware che utilizza l’AI per rubare i dati sui sistemi Windows proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Secondo quanto riportato guancha.cn e da altri media, Louis Vuitton ha recentemente inviato una comunicazione ai propri clienti per informarli di una fuga di dati che ha interessato circa 420.000 clienti a Hong Kong. I dati trapelati comprendono nomi, numeri di passaporto, date di nascita, indirizzi, indirizzi email, numeri di telefono, registri degli acquisti e preferenze sui prodotti. Louis Vuitton Hong Kong (LVHK) ha specificato che non sono stati coinvolti dati relativi ai pagamenti e ha dichiarato di aver notificato tempestivamente l’accaduto sia alle autorità competenti sia ai clienti interessati.

A seguito dell’incidente, l’Ufficio del Commissario per la privacy dei dati personali di Hong Kong ha comunicato di aver avviato un’indagine per accertare i fatti e verificare, tra le altre cose, se vi sia stata una notifica tardiva da parte dell’azienda. Va inoltre sottolineato che dall’inizio dell’anno Louis Vuitton ha già subito diversi gravi incidenti legati alla sicurezza dei dati.

Secondo Lin Yue, consulente capo di Lingyan Management Consulting e analista del settore dei beni di consumo, le cause principali di questi incidenti ricorrenti sarebbero da ricercare nell’abitudine, da parte dei marchi del lusso, di raccogliere quantità eccessive di dati non sempre necessari, come numeri di passaporto, e in misure di protezione e tecnologie di sicurezza non all’altezza della sensibilità dei dati gestiti.

Chen Jingjing, fondatrice di Jingjie Interactive, ha aggiunto che questa vulnerabilità riflette uno squilibrio tra la rapida digitalizzazione del settore del lusso e gli investimenti ancora insufficienti in sicurezza informatica: i marchi sono bravi a comunicare esclusività e artigianalità, ma spesso trascurano le fondamenta tecnologiche per proteggere i dati dei clienti.

Lin Yue ha inoltre sottolineato come la fuga di dati possa causare gravi danni sia per i consumatori, esposti a frodi e molestie, sia per i marchi stessi, che rischiano un crollo della fiducia, procedimenti legali e danni reputazionali. Chen Jingjing ha osservato che per i brand di lusso, la sicurezza dei dati dovrebbe diventare parte integrante dell’esperienza premium offerta ai clienti, e andrebbe inserita come priorità nelle strategie aziendali a lungo termine.

Infine, come misure di tutela, Lin Yue ha consigliato ai consumatori di limitare la quantità di dati personali condivisi con i brand e di cambiare regolarmente le proprie password. Per le aziende, invece, ha suggerito di trattare i dati come asset intangibili fondamentali, adottare tecnologie di protezione più avanzate – come password dinamiche per i sistemi CRM e limitazioni dell’accesso fuori orario – per consolidare davvero la fiducia dei propri clienti.

L'articolo Fuga di dati Louis Vuitton: 420.000 clienti coinvolti a Hong Kong proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

“Il tetto di sei mesi per i licenziamenti è incostituzionale”. La Consulta dá ragione alla Cgil. Per la Corte “il criterio fisso non garantisce adeguatezza e congruità del risarcimento”. La sua cancellazione faceva parte dei quesiti al referendum

Nonostante il menefreghismo dei lavoratori Italiani il sindacato è riuscito lo stesso a far sparire una norma ingiusta.

Peccato che ne beneficieranno anche quelli a cui non importa nulla dei loro diritti. Gente che magari si convincerà anche che in fondo hanno fatto bene a starsene a casa tanto poi il risultato lo raggiunge qualcuno altro per loro.

cgiltoscana.it/2025/07/21/il-t…