Taking on a refrigerator-sized minicomputer is not for the faint-hearted, but [Usagi Electric] has done it with a DEC PDP-11/44. He’s not doing it in half measures either, for his machine is tricked out with an impressive array of upgrades. Among them however is no storage, and with two co-processors there’s a meager 3U of rack space left. The plan is to fit a period 8″ hard drive in the space alongside a TU50 tape dive, and it’s this final component that’s the subject of his latest video.

DEC never did anything by halves, and a DECTape II cartridge is more than a simple container for tape reels. Instead it has a capstan of its own that engages with one in the drive, and an internal drive belt that moves the reels. All the rubber parts in both tapes and drive are thoroughly perished, and it’s impressive that he manages to find inexpensive modern polymer alternatives. The original drive is probably intended for a VAX system, thus it has the interesting feature of a second drive mechanism out of sight to hold a tape containing microcode.

Having reconditioned the drive, it goes in behind a custom front panel, and though there’s no useful data to test it with on the tapes he has, it appears all working. You can see it all in the video below the break, and if you’re interested further we’ve covered this machine in the past.

youtube.com/embed/KmZ9xGP6O4s?…

hackaday.com/2025/10/08/a-mini…

Glasses are perhaps the most non-invasive method of vision correction, followed by contact lenses. Each have their drawbacks though, and some seek more permanent solutions in the form of laser eye surgeries like LASIK, aiming to reshape their corneas for better visual clarity. However, these methods often involve cutting into the eye itself, and it hardly gets any more invasive than that.

A new surgical method could have benefits in this regard, allowing correction in a single procedure that requires no lasers and no surgical cutting of the eye itself. The idea is to use electricity to help reshape the eye back towards greater optical performance.

The Eyes Have It

Thus far, the research has worked with individual eyeballs. Great amounts of work remain before this is a viable treatment for eyes in living subjects. Credit: research paper
Existing corrective eye surgeries most often aim to fix problems like long-sightedness, short-sightedness, and astigmatism. These issues are generally caused by the shape of the cornea, which works with the lens in the eye to focus light on to the light-sensitive cells in the retina. If the cornea is misshapen, it can be difficult for the eye to focus at close or long ranges, or it can cause visual artifacts in the field of view, depending on the precise nature of the geometry. Technologies like LASIK reshape the cornea for better performance using powerful lasers, but also involve cutting into the cornea. The procedure is thus highly invasive and has a certain recovery time, safety precautions that must be taken afterwards, and some potential side effects. A method for reshaping the eye without cutting into it would thus be ideal to avoid these problems.

Enter the technology of Electromechanical Reshaping (EMR). As per a new paper, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, came across the idea by accident, having been looking into the moldable nature of living tissues. As it turns out, collagen-based tissues like the cornea hold their structure thanks to the attractions between oppositely-charged subcomponents. These structures can be altered with the right techniques. For example, since these tissues are laden with water, applying electricity can change the pH through electrolyzation, altering the attraction between components of the tissue and making them pliable and reformable. Once the electric potential is taken away, the tissues can be restored to their original pH balance, and the structure will hold firm in its new form.
The untreated lens is visible in section A, and the new shape of the modified lens can be seen in section B. Graphs C and D show the change in radius and refractive power of the lens. Credit: research paper
Researchers first tested this technique out on other tissues before looking to the eye. The team were able to use EMR to reshape ears from rabbits, while also being able to make physical changes to scar tissue in pigs. These efforts proved the basic mechanism worked, and that it could have applicability to the cornea itself.

To actually effectively reshape the cornea using this technique, a sort of mold was required. To that end, researchers created a “contact lens” type device out of platinum, which was formed in the desired final shape of the cornea. A rabbit eyeball was used in testing, doused in a saline solution to mimic the eye’s natural environment. The platinum device was pushed on to the eye, and used as an electrode to apply a small electrical potential across the eyeball. This was controlled carefully to precisely change the pH to the region where the eye became remoldable. After a minute, the cornea of the rabbit eyeball had conformed to the shape of the platinum lens. With the electrical potential removed, the pH of the eyeball was returned to normal and the cornea retained the new shape. The technique was trialled on twelve eyeballs, with ten of those treated for a shortsightedness condition, also known as myopia. In the case of the myopic eyeballs, all ten were successfully corrected the cornea, creating improved focusing power that would correspond to better vision in a living patient’s eye.

While the technique is promising, great development will be required before this is a viable method for vision correction in human patients. Researchers will need to figure out how to properly apply the techniques to eyeballs that are still in living patients, with much work to be done with animal studies prior to any attempts to translate the technique to humans. However, it could be that a decade or two in the future, glasses and LASIK will be increasingly less popular compared to a quick zap from the electrochemical eye remoulder. Time will tell.

hackaday.com/2025/10/08/reshap…

L’americano Nick Ray, affetto da sclerosi laterale amiotrofica, ha raccontato di aver trascorso tre giorni a controllare il suo braccio robotico assistito (ARA) utilizzando l’interfaccia neurale Neuralink. L’ha descritta come una delle esperienze più incredibili della sua vita.

Ray ha osservato che, per la prima volta dopo molti anni, era in grado di indossare un cappello, riscaldare il cibo, mangiare, aprire il frigorifero e richiudere i coperchi dei barattoli.

Ha anche provato a guidare una sedia a rotelle e ha stabilito dei record personali: ha spostato 39 cilindri in cinque minuti ed eseguito cinque movimenti precisi in un test di destrezza. Ha promesso di pubblicare un video dei suoi successi .

Ha ringraziato il team di Neuralink e il Fondo Buoniconti per l’opportunità di partecipare al progetto e ha sottolineato che la tecnologia sta ripristinando le opportunità perdute. Ray sta anche lavorando al suo progetto crittografico, che, a suo dire, è diventato un modo per esplorare qualcosa di completamente nuovo e dimostra come le interfacce di comunicazione interconnesse (BCI) possano aiutare non solo con l’attività fisica, ma anche con quella digitale.

Neuralink descrive l’obiettivo dell’esperimento come il ripristino delle capacità motorie di base e dell’indipendenza nelle persone con gravi disturbi del movimento. L’azienda continua a testare l’interfaccia cervello-computer e pubblica i dettagli della sperimentazione sul suo sito web ufficiale.

In precedenza, nel settembre 2024, Neuralink aveva ricevuto l’approvazione della FDA per testare un impianto per il ripristino della vista. Nel novembre dello stesso anno, l’azienda aveva presentato una protesi controllata mentalmente , che consentiva ai pazienti di afferrare e muovere oggetti.

Nell’aprile 2025, Neuralink ha dimostrato come l’impianto potesse ripristinare la parola : il sistema riconosceva le intenzioni e sintetizzava le voci basandosi sui segnali neurali. Uno dei primi passi ha riguardato esperimenti con il controllo del cursore e giochi controllati dalla mente, in cui il paziente controllava un computer senza muoversi.

E nel settembre 2025, l’azienda ha svelato i piani per tradurre i pensieri in testo, consentendo alle persone di comunicare direttamente e controllare i dispositivi attraverso un’interfaccia neurale.

L'articolo Uomo con sclerosi laterale amiotrofica controlla braccio robotico con Neuralink proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Steve and James discuss The Black Response’s excellent Abolition and Alternatives Conference this weekend and Trump’s TikTok deal and what it could mean. We also discussed ICE and other TLAs attacking an apartment building in Chicago in the middle of the night where they seized and abused the people who lived in it. Finally, we followed up on HorizonMass/BINJ’s reporting on the Boston Police Department’s use of drones at two public events. youtube.com/embed/I-w5-TZR6v4?… Join us at the Boston Anarchist Bookfair Nov. 1-2. Sign up to our newsletter to get notified of new events or volunteer. Join us on:

• Mastodon;
• Facebook;
• Blue Sky;
• Twitter.

Check out:

• Our Administrative Coup Memory Bank;
• Our Things to Do when Fascists are Taking Over.

Some links we mentioned:

• The GOP’s Government Shutdown;
• Abolition and Alternatives Conference (AAC) Starts Today;
• TikTok’s algorithm will be overseen by Oracle in the US after the sale is completed;
• TikTok’s U.S. operations may be bought by Oracle, Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake and others;
• Trump Makes It Very Clear They’re Going To Turn TikTok Into A Right Wing Propaganda Machine;
• Why Do We Assume TrumpTok Will Succeed?
• Chicago And The End Of American Liberty;
• Boston Police Deployed 71 Drone Flights Over Caribbean Carnival;
• Did The BPD Fly A Surveillance Drone Over The Dominican Parade? They Won’t Tell Us.

Image Credit: Fair use of TikTok‘s logo for commentary on news about the company. We reserve no rights on the image we creat

uspirates.org/mass-pirate-news…

A partire dal 7 ottobre 2025, si è verificata un’intensificazione su larga scala di attacchi specifici contro i portali di accesso GlobalProtect di Palo Alto Networks, PAN-OS. Oltre 2.200 indirizzi IP unici sono stati coinvolti in attività di ricognizione.

Un notevole incremento è stato rilevato rispetto ai 1.300 indirizzi IP iniziali rilevati solo pochi giorni prima. Secondo il monitoraggio di GreyNoise Intelligence, questo rappresenta l’attività di scansione più intensa degli ultimi 90 giorni.

Il 3 ottobre 2025, un’impennata significativa dell’attività di scansione, pari al 500%, ha contrassegnato l’inizio della campagna di ricognizione. In quel giorno, sono stati rilevati circa 1.300 indirizzi IP unici che stavano esplorando i portali di accesso di Palo Alto. Rispetto ai tre mesi precedenti, questo picco iniziale di attività ha costituito il più alto livello di scansioni registrate.

Nei 90 giorni che hanno preceduto tale evento, i volumi giornalieri di scansioni non avevano quasi mai raggiunto la soglia dei 200 IP.

L’analisi condotta da GreyNoise ha messo in luce che una quota preponderante degli indirizzi IP nocivi, ben il 91%, risulta essere ubicata negli Stati Uniti. Si rilevano inoltre altri nuclei concentrati di tali indirizzi rispettivamente nel Regno Unito, nei Paesi Bassi, in Canada e nella Russia.

Un sostanziale investimento infrastrutturale per tale operazione è evidenziato dal fatto che gli specialisti della sicurezza hanno individuato intorno al 12% delle subnet ASN11878 complessivamente dedicate alla scansione dei gate di accesso Palo. E’ probabile che gli artefici della minaccia stiano esaminando in modo sistematico ampi database di credenziali, visti i pattern di autenticazione falliti che fanno supporre l’utilizzo di operazioni automatizzate brute-force nei confronti dei portali GlobalProtect SSL VPN.

GreyNoise ha reso pubblico un dataset esaustivo che include nomi utente e password univoci ricavati dai tentativi di login a Palo monitorati, in modo da permettere ai team per la sicurezza di stimare l’eventuale esposizione delle credenziali. Dall’analisi tecnica emerge che il 93% degli indirizzi IP coinvolti è stato etichettato come sospetto, mentre un 7% è stato giudicato dannoso.

L’esame delle attività di scansione rivela la presenza di diversi pattern di aggregazione a livello regionale contraddistinti da impronte TCP uniche, il che fa supporre l’esistenza di vari gruppi di minacce organizzate che agiscono in concomitanza. Gli studiosi nel campo della sicurezza hanno rilevato possibili legami tra la serie di scansioni registrata a Palo Alto e le operazioni di esplorazione condotte simultaneamente contro dispositivi Cisco ASA.

Entrambe le campagne di attacco condividono impronte TCP dominanti legate all’infrastruttura nei Paesi Bassi, insieme a comportamenti di clustering regionale e caratteristiche degli strumenti simili. L’attacco multitecnologico suggerisce una campagna di ricognizione più ampia contro le soluzioni di accesso remoto aziendale.

L'articolo Ondata di attacchi contro Palo Alto Networks: oltre 2.200 IP coinvolti nella nuova campagna proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

WELCOME BACK TO DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and I have many feelings about Sora, OpenAI's new AI-generated social media platform. Many of which are encapsulated by this video by Casey Neistat. #FreeTheSlop.

— The world's largest platforms have failed to respond to the highest level of global conflict since World War II.

— The semiconductor wars between China and the United States are creating a massive barrier between the world's two largest economies.

— China's DeepSeek performs significantly worse than its US counterparts on a series of benchmark tests.

Let's get started:

WHEN PLATFORM GOVERNANCE MEETS GLOBAL CONFLICT

OCT 7 MARKED THE 2-YEAR ANNIVERSARY of Hamas militants attacking Israel, killing roughly 1,200 citizens and engulfing the region in a seemingly endless conflict. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have died, many more have been displaced, and attacks (or the threat of attack) against both Israelis and Jews, worldwide, have skyrocketed.

I won't pretend to understand the complexities of the Israeli-Hamas war (more on that here, here and here). But the last two years have seen a slow degradation of the checks and safeguards that social media companies once had in place to protect users from war-related content, propaganda and illegal content now rife wherever you look online.

First, let's be clear. This isn't just an Israeli-Hamas issue. As we hurtle toward the end of 2025, there are currently almost 60 active state-based conflicts worldwide and global peace is at its lowest level in 80 years, according to statistics from the Institute for Economics and Peace.

That is not social media's fault. As much as it's easy to blame TikTok, YouTube and Instagram for the ills of the world, real-world violence is baked into generational conflicts, multitudes of overlapping socio-economic issues and other analogue touch-points that have nothing to do with people swiping on their phones.

But it's also true the recent spike in global conflicts has come at a time of collective retrenchment on trust and safety issues from social media giants that, at the bare minimum, have failed to stop some of the offline violence from spreading widely within online communities. Again, there's a causation versus correlation issue here that we must be careful with. But at a time of heightened polarization (and not just in the US and Europe), the capacity for tech platforms to be used to foment real-world instability and violence has never been higher.

Before I get irate complaints from those of you working within these companies, social media platforms have clear terms of service supposed to limit war-related content from spreading among users. You can review them here, here, here and here. But there's one thing to have clear-cut rules, and it's another to actively implement them.

Thanks for reading the free monthly version of Digital Politics. Paid subscribers receive at least one newsletter a week. If that sounds like your jam, please sign up here.

Here's what paid subscribers read in September:
— A series of legal challenges to online safety legislation challenge how these rules are implemented; The unintended consequences of failing to define "tech sovereignty;" Where the money really goes within the chip industry. More here.
— What most people don't understand about Brussels' strategy toward technology; Unpicking the dual antitrust decisions against Google from Brussels and Washington; AI chatbots still return too much false information. More here.
— The next transatlantic trade dispute will be about digital antitrust, not online safety; Washington's new foreign policy ambitions toward AI; The US' spending spree on data centers. More here.
— An inside look into the United Nations' takeover of AI governance; How the United Kingdom embraced the US "AI Stack;" People view the spread of false information as a higher threat than a faltering global economy. More here.
— Washington's proposed deal to untangle TikTok US from Bytedance is not what it first appears; How social media companies are speaking from both sides of their mouths on online safety; AI's expected boost to global trade. More here.

Social media companies' neglect related to conflicts outside the Western world has been a feature for years (more on that here.) Now, that same level of omission has seeped into conflicts, including those within the Middle East and Ukraine, that are closer to home for the Western public.

There are many reasons for this shift.

Companies like Alphabet and Meta have pared back their commitments to independent fact-checking which provided at least some pushback to government and non-state efforts to peddle falsehoods associated with these global conflicts. A shift to crowdsourced fact-checking — initially rolled out by X, and then followed by Meta — has yet to fill that void. That's mostly because companies have found it difficult to find consensus among their users about often divisive topics (including those related to warfare) which is required before these crowdsourced fact-checks are published.

Social media platforms have similarly spent the last three years gutting their existing trust and safety teams to the point where the industry is on life support. This was initially done for economic reasons. Faced with a struggling advertising sector in 2022, company executives sought cost savings, wherever they could, and internal trust and safety teams felt the brunt of those efforts. Fast forward to 2025, and there has been an ideological shift to "free speech" among many of these firms which makes any form of content moderation anathema to the current (US-focused) zeitgeist.

Third: politics. The current White House's aversion to online safety is well known. So too is the US Congress' accusations that other country's digital regulation unfairly infringes on American citizens' First Amendment rights. But from India to Slovakia, there are growing local efforts to quell platforms' content moderation programs — and the associated domestic legislation that has sprouted up from Brazil to the United Kingdom. In that geopolitical context, social media firms have instituted a "go slow" on many of their internal systems — even if (at least in countries with existing online safety regulation) they still comply with domestic rules.

Making things more difficult is the platforms' increasingly adversarial relationship with outsiders seeking to hold these firms to account for their stated trust and safety policies. (Disclaimer: My day job puts me in this category, though my interactions with the companies remain cordial.) Researchers have found it increasingly difficult to access publicly-available social media data. Others have faced legal challenges to analyses which cast social media giants in an unfavorable light. Industry-linked funding for such independent "red-teaming" of platform weaknesses has fallen off a cliff.

Taken together, these four points represent a fundamental change in what had been, until now, a progressive multi-stakeholder approach to ridding global social media platforms of illegal and gruesome content — and not just related to warfare.

Before, companies, policymakers and outside groups worked together (often with difficulty) to make these social media networks a safe space for people to express themselves in ways that represented free speech rights and safeguarded individuals from hate. That coalition has now disintegrated amid a combination of hard-nosed economics, shifting geopolitics and fundamental differences over what constitutes tech companies' trust and safety obligations.

Each of the above points occurred separately. No one set out thinking that cutting back on internal trust and safety teams; ending relations with fact-checkers; kow-towing to a shift in geopolitics; and reducing ties to outside researchers would make it easier for conflict-related content to spread easily among these social media networks.

And yet, that is what happened.

Go onto any social media platform, and within a few clicks (if you know what you're doing), you can come face-to-face with gruesome war-torn content — or, at least, purportedly material associated with one of the 59 state-based conflicts active worldwide. Even if you're not seeking out such material, the collective pullback on trust and safety has raised the possibility that you will stumble over such content in your daily doomscroll.

That is the paradox we find ourselves in at the end of 2025.

In many ways, social media has become even more ingrained in everything from politics to the latest meme craze (cue: the rise of OpenAI's Sora.) But these platforms are less secure and protected than they have ever been — at a time when the world is engulfed in the highest level of subnational, national and regional warfare in multiple generations.

Chart of the Week

THE US CENTER FOR AI STANDARDS AND INNOVATION ran a series of tests — across four well-known sectors associated with the performance of large language models — between services offered by OpenAI, Anthropic and Deepseek.

You have to take these results with a pinch of salt, as they come from a US federal agency. But across the board, China's LLM performed significantly worse than its US rivals.
Source: Center for AI Standards and innovation

THE AI WARS: SEMICONDUCTOR EDITION

COMMON WISDOM IS THAT YOU NEED three elements to compete in the global race around artificial intelligence. In your "AI Stack," you need world-leading microchips, you need cloud computing infrastructure that's cheap and almost universal, and you need applications like large language models that can sit on top and drive user engagement. On that first component — semiconductors — China and the US are increasingly going down different paths.

Looking back, it almost was inevitable. Washington has long safeguarded world-leading chips (from both American firms and those of its allies) from Beijing via export bans and other strong-arm tactics. The goal: to ensure China's AI Stack was always one step behind its US counterpart.

Yet that strategy is starting to backfire. Yes, Western AI chips are still better than their Chinese equivalents. But the lack of access to such semiconductors has forced the world's second largest economy to invest billions in domestic production in the hopes of eventually catching up — and surpassing — the likes of Nvidia or Taiwan's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

What has galvanized this Chinese resolve is the repeated efforts by both the Trump and Biden administrations to hobble Chinese firms' ability to access the latest semiconductors. In this never-ending 'will they, or won't they?' game of national security ping-pong, the Trump 2.0 administration agreed in August to allow Nvidia and AMD to sell pared-down versions of their latest chips to China — as long as they gave the US federal government a 15 percent slice of that export revenue. Principled diplomacy, it was not.

That plan appears to have backfired. Nvidia is now under an antitrust investigation from Chinese authorities for its takeover of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox in 2020. The Cyberspace Administration of China has also reportedly told the country's largest tech firms, including Alibaba, ByteDance and Baidu, to not buy Nvidia's semiconductor. Jensen Huang, chief executive of the US chip firm, said he was "disappointed" with that move (which has never been officially confirmed.)

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Nvidia has invested millions to design China-specific microchips that both meet the national security limitations demanded by Washington and can be sold directly into the Middle Kingdom in ways that placate Beijing. If Chinese officials close the door — and require local firms to use domestic alternatives, many of which are reportedly almost on par with their Western rivals — then it's another indicator the US and China are on diverging paths when it comes to technological development.

Again, a lot of this was foreseeable. Repeated White House administrations urged American and Western chip and equipment firms to steer clear of China. In response, Beijing invested billions into local semiconductor production, much of which has remained at the lower level of sophistication. But as in other tech-related industries, Chinese manufacturers have steadily risen through the stack to now offer world-beating hardware. It's not unusual for that, eventually, to be the case in semiconductors.

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What does this all mean for the politics of technology?

First, Western semiconductor firms offering pared-back versions of their latest chips to China may have the door shut on them. Beijing may need these manufacturers, in the short term. But don't expect that welcome to remain warm — especially as Western officials continue to rattle sabres.

Second, the need for Chinese firms to rely on (currently sub-par, but rapidly advancing) homegrown chips will lead to scrappy innovation once associated just with Silicon Valley. We can debate whether the meteoric rise of DeepSeek was truly as unique as first believed (based on the company's ties to the wider Chinese tech ecosystem.) But relying on second-tier semiconductors will force Chinese AI firms to be more nimble compared to their US counterparts with seemingly unlimited access to chips, compute power and data.

Third, the "splinternet" will come to hardware. I wrote this in 2017 to explain how the digital world was being balkanized into regional fiefdoms. The creation of rival semiconductor stacks — one led by the US, one led by China — will extend that division into the offline world. Companies will try to make the respective hardware interoperable. But it won't be in the interests of either party, as the separation expands between which semiconductors can work with other infrastructure worldwide, to maintain such networking capability.

In short, the global race between AI Stackshas entered a new era.

What I'm reading

— The Wikimedia Foundation published a human rights impact assessment on artificial intelligence and machine learning. More here.

— The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats assessed the current strengths and weaknesses in the transatlantic fight against state-backed disinformation. More here.

— The Canadian government launched an AI Strategy Task Force and outlined its agenda for public feedback on the emerging technology. More here.

— The Appeals Centre Europe, which allows citizens to seek redress from social media companies under the EU's Digital Services Act, published its first transparency report. More here.

— Researchers outlined the growing differences between how countries are approaching the oversight and governance of artificial intelligence for the University of Oxford. More here.

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