Although to many of us the progression from ‘standard definition’ TV and various levels of high-definition at 720p or better seemed to happen smoothly around the turn of the new century, there was a far messier technological battle that led up to this. One of these contenders was Enhanced Definition TV (EDTV), which was 480p in either 4:3 or 16:9, as a step up from Standard Definition TV (SDTV) traditional TV quality. The convoluted history of EDTV and the long transition to proper HDTV is the subject of a recent video by [VWestlife].

One reason why many people aren’t aware of EDTV is because of marketing. With HDTV being the hot new bullet point to slap on a product, a TV being widescreen was often enough to market an EDTV with 480p as ‘HD’, not to mention the ‘HD-compatible’ bullet point that you could see everywhere.

That said, the support for digital 480p and ‘simplified 1080i’ signals of EDTV makes these displays still quite usable today, more than SDTV CRTs and LCDs that are usually limited to analog signals-only at regular NTSC, PAL or SECAM. It may not be HD, but at least it’s enhanced.

youtube.com/embed/J0as4DiswGU?…

hackaday.com/2025/09/18/enhanc…

“Il bosco fiorito” – Psichedelia: orizzonti di cura
Venerdì 26 settembre 2025, ore 18:30 – Via Tommaseo 49, La Spezia

Venerdì 26 settembre, a La Spezia, si terrà la presentazione del libro “Il bosco fiorito – Psichedelia: orizzonti di cura”, edito da Animamundi Edizioni.

All’incontro interverranno Letizia Renzini, curatrice del volume e membro di MAPS Italia, Claudia Moretti e Marco Perduca, autori del libro.

L’evento è promosso dall’Associazione Luca Coscioni, MAPS Italia e Librerittutti, la partecipazione è libera e aperta a tutte e tutti, fino a esaurimento posti.

L'articolo A La Spezia la presentazione de “Il bosco fiorito” – Psichedelia: orizzonti di cura proviene da Associazione Luca Coscioni.

(articolo di Roberto Festa, Radio Popolare, 18 set. 2025
radiopopolare.it/kimmel-colber…)

“Sospensione” a tempo indeterminato per lo show di Jimmy Kimmel. Lo annuncia ABC, che di fatto “silura” uno dei suoi volti più popolari, star dell’intrattenimento della tarda serata TV. Kimmel, in trasmissione, aveva detto: “Abbiamo toccato nuovi minimi nel fine settimana, con la banda MAGA che cerca disperatamente di caratterizzare questo ragazzo che ha assassinato Charlie Kirk come qualcosa di diverso da uno di loro, e fa tutto il possibile per ottenerne vantaggi politici”. La sospensione dello show di Jimmy Kimmel è stata chiesta direttamente da Brendan Carr, avvocato, vicino a Donald Trump, chairman della Federal Communication Commission, l’agenzia responsabile di controlli e regolamentazioni del mondo dell’audiovisivo. Carr ha minacciato ABC – quindi la sua proprietà, Disney – di ritiro della licenza, nel caso non fossero stati presi provvedimenti contro Kimmel – che non è peraltro l’unica vittima della nuova, difficile fase nei rapporti tra media e governo americano. CBS ha chiuso il programma di Stephen Colbert, altro ospite della tarda serata americana, altro critico feroce di Trump. Il presidente ha appena chiesto al New York Times 15 miliardi di danni per averne messo in discussione la “reputazione personale e professionale”. Sempre ABC e CBS, nei mesi scorsi, si erano piegati a pagare 16 milioni di dollari al presidente in cause piuttosto pretestuose. L’omicidio di Charlie Kirk ha ulteriormente rafforzato la stretta repressiva. Il Washington Post ha licenziato una sua opinionista, Karen Attiah, che ha accusato la destra di “doppio standard razziale” nella morte di Kirk. MSNBC ha allontanato un suo analista, Matthew Dowd, che ha chiamato Kirk divisivo. Sono vicende che arrivano nel momento in cui le grandi corporation hanno bisogno del via libera dell’amministrazione per le loro strategie. Dalla fusione di Paramount Skydance e Warner Bros sta per nascere il più grande conglomerato americano della comunicazione – da CNN al cinema a MTV a TikTok – controllato da Larry Ellison, magnate e finanziatore della destra americana, intimo di Benjamin Netanyahu. Tra affari, cause, licenziamenti, la vittima è soprattutto una. La libertà di pensiero e parola negli Stati Uniti.

*
(cfr. anche radiopopolare.substack.com/)

Kimmel, Colbert e gli altri. L’attacco della destra di Trump alla libertà di parola negli Usa

“Sospensione” a tempo indeterminato per lo show di Jimmy Kimmel. Lo annuncia ABC, che di fatto “silura” uno dei suoi volti più popolari.

^{Roberto Festa (Radio Popolare)}

Magick Talk – La cultura psichedelica in Italia

Venerdì 19 settembre 2025 – ore 18:30
The Magick Bar, Lungotevere Guglielmo Oberdan, 2, 00195 Roma RM

Venerdì 19 settembre, alle ore 18:30, il Magick Bar di Roma ospita Magick Talk, un momento di confronto aperto e interdisciplinare tra studiosi, attivisti e ricercatori.

Intervengono:
Federico Di Vita
Sara Ballotti
Marco Perduca
Raffaello Caiano
Enrico Greco
Georgia Wilson Jones

L’evento è organizzato in collaborazione con The Magick Bar e Illuminismo Psichedelico, e intende contribuire al dibattito pubblico sull’uso consapevole delle sostanze psichedeliche, con particolare attenzione agli aspetti culturali, scientifici, terapeutici e politici.

Ingresso libero fino a esaurimento posti.
Per informazioni: Illuminismo Psichedelico – Instagram
The Magick Bar – Roma

L'articolo A Roma Magick Talk – La cultura psichedelica in Italia proviene da Associazione Luca Coscioni.

[WhiskeyTangoHotel] wrote in with his newest clock build — and he did warn us that it was minimalist and maybe less than useful. Indeed, it is nothing more than a super-cheap ESP32-C3 breakout board with an OLED screen and some code. Worse, you can’t even tell the time on it without pointing your cell phone at the QR code it generates. Plot twist: you skip the QR code and check the time on your phone.

But then we got to thinking, and there is actually a lot to learn from here on the software side. This thing pulls the time down from an NTP server, formats it into a nice human-readable string using strftime, throws that string into a QR code that’s generated on the fly, and then pushes the bits out to the screen. All in a handful of lines of code.

As always, the secret is in the libraries and how you use them, and we wanted to check out the QR code generator, but we couldn’t find an exact match for QRCodeGenerator.h. Probably the most popular library is the Arduino QRCode library by [ricmoo]. It’s bundled with Arduino, but labelled version 0.0.1, which we find a little bit modest given how widely it’s used. It also hasn’t been updated in eight years: proof that it just works?

That library drew from [nayuki]’s fantastically documented multi-language QR-Code-generator library, which should have you covered on any platform you can imagine, with additional third-party ports to languages you haven’t even heard of. That’s where we’d go for a non-Arduino project.

What library did [WTH] use? We hope to find out soon, but at least we found a couple good candidates, and it appears to be a version of one or the other.

We’ve seen a lot of projects where the hacker generates a QR code using some online tool, packs the bits into a C header array, and displays that. That’s fine when you only need a single static QR code, but absolutely limiting when you want to make something dynamic. You know, like an unreadable clock.

You will not be surprised to know that this isn’t the first unreadable QR-code clock we’ve featured here. But it’s definitely the smallest and most instructive.

youtube.com/embed/rA7HXQxqpPA?…

hackaday.com/2025/09/18/worst-…

Il 23 e 24 settembre dalle 12.00 alle 18.00 l'Unione dei Comitati contro l'inceneritore sarà in presidio a Piazza Capranica, alle spalle di Montecitorio, perché le 24 mila firme raccolte contro i poteri speciali di Gualtieri sono il nostro biglietto da visita per la due giorni di mobilitazioni a Roma.

Le 24 mila firme chiedono alle due Camere del Parlamento che Gualtieri, al pari di ogni cittadino della Repubblica, sia tenuto al rispetto delle leggi, nel suo caso di tutte quelle di settore. Prima di ogni altra normativa chiediamo che sia tenuto al rispetto del testo unico ambientale perché è inconcepibile che si possa fare un impianto di incenerimento che brucerà 600mila tonnellate per oltre 30 anni senza rispettare il codice dell'ambiente che disciplina, tra l'altro, l'intera materia dei rifiuti, impianti compresi.

Le migliaia di persone che hanno sottoscritto la petizione hanno riposto fiducia nell'istituzione parlamentare. La prossima settimana saremo quindi in presidio rivolgendoci alla Camera dei deputati, un'assemblea legislativa differente da quella che ha convertito il decreto legge n. 50/22. In più circostanze la famigerata norma attributiva dei poteri speciali, articolo 13, è stata oggetto di discussione e votazioni senza però portare mai a una modifica normativa. Ora che però il Giubileo sta per concludersi, motivo alla base dell'attribuzione dei poteri speciali è necessario mettere termine alla stagione di un Gualtieri posto, dalla legge stessa, al di sopra delle leggi. Come Unione dei Comitati abbiamo il dovere di far valere ognuna di quelle 24 mila firme.

Alle deputate e ai deputati, di maggioranza come di minoranza, chiediamo la modifica normativa per ripristinare il diritto che con l'articolo 13 del DL n.50/2022 è stato irrimediabilmente leso laddove conferisce al Sindaco di Roma potere assoluto.
Per le bambine e i bambini che hanno aperto i nostri due cortei estivi e per tutti noi che abbiamo il diritto di vivere liberi dai veleni di Roma, chiediamo che il Parlamento ripristini la giustizia modificando la norma affinché anche Gualtieri finalmente rispetti le leggi.

#Ambiente #StopInceneritore #NoInceneritore #NoInceneritori #ZeroWaste #Rifiuti #Riciclo #EconomiaCircolare #NoAlCarbone #EnergiaPulita

For the most part, the Radio Apocalypse series has focused on the radio systems developed during the early days of the atomic age to ensure that Armageddon would be as orderly an affair as possible. From systems that provided backup methods to ensure that launch orders would reach the bombers and missiles, to providing hardened communications systems to allow survivors to coordinate relief and start rebuilding civilization from the ashes, a lot of effort went into getting messages sent.

Strangely, though, the architects of the end of the world put just as much thought into making sure messages didn’t get sent. The electronic village of mid-century America was abuzz with signals, any of which could be abused by enemy forces. CONELRAD, which aimed to prevent enemy bombers from using civilian broadcast signals as navigation aids, is a perfect example of this. But the growth of civil aviation through the period presented a unique challenge, particularly with the radio navigation system built specifically to make air travel as safe and reliable as possible.

Balancing the needs of civil aviation against the possibility that the very infrastructure making it possible could be used as a weapon against the U.S. homeland is the purpose of a plan called Security Control of Air Traffic and Air Navigation Aids, or SCATANA. It’s a plan that cuts across jurisdictions, bringing military, aviation, and communications authorities into the loop for decisions regarding when and how to shut down the entire air traffic system, to sort friend from foe, to give the military room to work, and, perhaps most importantly, to keep enemy aircraft as blind as possible.

Highways in the Sky

As its name suggests, SCATANA has two primary objectives: to restrict the availability of radio navigation aids during emergencies and to clear the airspace over the United States of unauthorized traffic. For safety’s sake, the latter naturally follows the former. By the time the SCATANA rules were promulgated, commercial aviation had become almost entirely dependent on a complex array of beacons and other radio navigation aids. While shutting those aids down to deny their use to enemy bombers was obviously the priority, safety demanded that all the planes currently using those aids had to be grounded as quickly as possible.
The Rogue Valley VOR station in Table Rock, Oregon. According to the sectional charts, this is a VORTAC station. Source: ZabMilenko, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Understanding the logic behind SCATANA requires at least a basic insight into these radio navigation aids. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has jurisdiction over these aids, listing “VOR/DME, ILS, MLS, LF and HF non-directional beacons” as subject to shutdown in times of emergency. That’s quite a list, and while the technical details of the others are interesting, particularly the Adcock LF beacon system used by pilots to maneuver onto a course until alternating “A” and “N” Morse characters merged into a single tone, but for practical purposes, the one with the most impact on wartime security is the VOR system.

VOR, which stands for “VHF omnidirectional range,” is a global system of short-range beacons used by aircraft to determine their direction of travel. The system dates back to the late 1940s and was extensively built out during the post-war boom in commercial aviation. VOR stations define the “highways in the air” that criss-cross the country; if you’ve ever wondered why the contrails of jet airliners all follow similar paths and why the planes make turns at more or less the same seemingly random point in the sky, it’s because they’re using VOR beacons as waypoints.

In its simplest form, a VOR station consists of an omnidirectional antenna transmitting at an assigned frequency between 108 MHz and 117.95 MHz, hence the “VHF” designation. The frequency of each VOR station is noted on the sectional charts pilots use for navigation, along with the three-letter station identifier, which is transmitted by the station in Morse so pilots can verify which station their cockpit VOR equipment is tuned to.

Each VOR station encodes azimuth information by the phase difference between two synchronized 30 Hz signals modulated onto the carrier, a reference signal and a variable signal. In conventional VOR, the amplitude-modulated variable signal is generated by a rotating directional antenna transmitting a signal in-phase with the reference signal. By aligning the reference signal with magnetic north, the phase angle between the FM reference and AM variable signals corresponds to the compass angle of the aircraft relative to the VOR station.

youtube.com/embed/R0Vzaf14SKQ?…

More modern Doppler VORs, or DVORs, use a ring of antennas to electronically create the reference and variable signals, rather than mechanically rotating the antenna. VOR stations are often colocated with other radio navigation aids, such as distance measuring equipment (DME), which measures the propagation delay between the ground station and the aircraft to determine the distance between them, or TACAN, a tactical air navigation system first developed by the military to provide bearing and distance information. When a VOR and TACAN stations are colocated, the station is referred to as a VORTAC.

Shutting It All Down

At its peak, the VOR network around the United States numbered almost 1,000 stations. That number is on the decrease now, thanks to the FAA’s Minimum Operational Network plan, which seeks to retire all but 580 VOR stations in favor of cockpit GPS receivers. But any number of stations sweeping out fully analog, unencrypted signals on well-known frequencies would be a bonanza of navigational information to enemy airplanes, which is why the SCATANA plan provides specific procedures to be followed to shut the whole thing down.
Inside the FAA’s Washington DC ARTCC, which played a major role in implementing SCATANA on 9/11. Source: Federal Aviation Administration, public domain.
SCATANA is designed to address two types of emergencies. The first is a Defense Emergency, which is an outright attack on the United States homeland, overseas forces, or allied forces. The second is an Air Defense Emergency, which is an aircraft or missile attack on the continental U.S., Canada, Alaska, or U.S. military installations in Greenland — sorry, Hawaii. In either case, the attack can be in progress, imminent, or even just probable, as determined by high-ranking military commanders.

In both of those situations, military commanders will pass the SCATANA order to the FAA’s network of 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC), the facilities that handle traffic on the routes defined by VOR stations. The SCATANA order can apply to all of the ARTCCs or to just a subset, depending on the scale of the emergency. Each of the concerned centers will then initiate physical control of their airspace, ordering all aircraft to land at the nearest available appropriate airport. Simultaneously, if ordered by military authority, the navigational aids within each ARTCC’s region will be shut down. Sufficient time is obviously needed to get planes safely to the ground; SCATANA plans allow for this, of course, but the goal is to shut down navaids as quickly as possible, to deny enemy aircraft or missiles any benefit from them.

As for the specific instructions for shutting down navigational aids, the SCATANA plan is understandable mute on this subject. It would not be advisable to have such instructions readily available, but there are a few crumbs of information available in the form of manuals and publicly accessible documents. Like most pieces of critical infrastructure these days, navaid ground stations tend to be equipped with remote control and monitoring equipment. This allows maintenance technicians quick and easy access without the need to travel. Techs can perform simple tasks, such as switching over from a defective primary transmitter to a backup, to maintain continuity of service while arrangements are made for a site visit. Given these facts, along with the obvious time-critical nature of an enemy attack, SCATANA-madated navaid shutdowns are probably as simple as a tech logging into the ground station remotely and issuing a few console commands.

A Day to Remember

For as long as SCATANA has been in effect — the earliest reference I could find to the plan under that name dates to 1968, but the essential elements of the plan seem to date back at least another 20 years — it has only been used in anger once, and even then only partially. That was on that fateful Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when a perfect crystal-blue sky was transformed into a battlefield over America.

By 9:25 AM Eastern, the Twin Towers had both been attacked, American Airlines Flight 77 had already been hijacked and was on its way to the Pentagon, and the battle for United Flight 93 was unfolding above Ohio. Aware of the scope of the disaster, staff at the FAA command center in Herndon, Virginia, asked FAA headquarters if they wanted to issue a “nationwide ground stop” order. While FAA brass discussed the matter, Ben Sliney, who had just started his first day on the job as operations manager at the FAA command center, made the fateful decision to implement the ground stop part of the SCATANA plan, without ordering the shutdown of navaids.

The “ground stop” orders went out to the 22 ARTCCs, which began the process of getting about 4,200 in-flight aircraft onto the ground as quickly and safely as possible. The ground stop was achieved within about two hours without any further incidents. The skies above the country would remain empty of civilian planes for the next two days, creating an eerie silence that emphasized just how much aviation contributes to the background noise of modern life.

youtube.com/embed/bo1ZtpKqlYw?…

hackaday.com/2025/09/18/radio-…

La piattaforma di sviluppo collaborativo GitLab ha annunciato la correzione di una vulnerabilità critica, identificata come CVE-2025-6454. Il problema riguardava le installazioni server delle edizioni Community ed Enterprise e consentiva l’esecuzione di richieste a risorse interne tramite intestazioni webhook appositamente create.

L’attacco richiedeva un account con privilegi di sviluppatore minimi e non era necessario alcun intervento da parte di altri utenti.

Il bug ha ricevuto un punteggio CVSS elevato di 8,5 su 10. Ha interessato le versioni dalla 16.11 alla 18.1.6, dalla 18.2 alla 18.2.6 e dalla 18.3 alla 18.3.2. Le correzioni sono state incluse nella versione 18.3.2, pubblicata il 10 settembre. GitLab ha sottolineato che il problema è stato scoperto tramite un programma di bug hunting e che il rapporto è stato redatto da un ricercatore con lo pseudonimo “ppee ” .

La vulnerabilità era unica in quanto consentiva di aggirare le restrizioni di isolamento della rete. Le richieste potevano essere inviate a proxy interni, servizi di metadati o API locali. Questo era visibile nei registri eventi tramite intestazioni HTTP non standard e richieste a indirizzi atipici. Gli esperti avvertono che tali attacchi potrebbero portare alla fuga di dati riservati e alla compromissione dell’integrità dell’infrastruttura.

Al momento della pubblicazione, non esiste alcun exploit pubblicamente disponibile, né vi sono prove di un effettivo sfruttamento. Tuttavia, il potenziale pericolo è elevato: la descrizione afferma che la vulnerabilità ha un impatto sulla riservatezza, la disponibilità e l’integrità dei dati.

Si consiglia agli sviluppatori di aggiornare GitLab alle versioni 18.1.6, 18.2.6 o 18.3.2 o successive il prima possibile. Si consiglia inoltre di rivedere le impostazioni dei webhook e di disabilitare l’uso di intestazioni personalizzate, se impostabili dagli utenti.

Per le distribuzioni basate su proxy inversi, si consiglia di limitare l’accesso di GitLab alle risorse interne. Si consiglia inoltre di monitorare i log per individuare richieste sospette e di segmentare la rete per impedire accessi indesiderati.

L'articolo GitLab risolve vulnerabilità critica: pericolo per server Community ed Enterprise proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Fausto Amodei, l'autore, ci ha lasciato oggi.

youtube.com/watch?v=WmFYVEiXGy…

What has the EDRi network been up to over the summer? Find out the latest digital rights news in our bi-weekly newsletter. In this edition: age verification gains traction, EU’s deregulation spree risks entire digital rulebook, & more!

The post EDRi-gram, 17 September 2025 appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).