Are you passionate about European policy and security? Don’t miss the chance to participate in the Pirate Academy, running from September to November 2025. Thirty selected candidates will take part in online sessions focused on key challenges and problem areas, where they will gain a deeper understanding of how European institutions function. Ten of them will have the unique opportunity to experience the process firsthand in Brussels in winter 2025, alongside MEP Markéta Gregorová. The entire course is hosted by MEP Gregorová and her political group, the Greens/EFA.

Curious about how complex problems are negotiated in the European Parliament? Then keep reading. The workings of the European institutions are intricate, designed to ensure democratic processes and representation for all member states. The issues they tackle often have global implications. Even Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) sometimes struggle to stay on top of all the legislation and world developments — that’s why they rely on policy advisors. Through the Pirate Academy, you’ll have the chance to step into this role and experience it for yourself.

To negotiate European legislation effectively, it’s essential to understand how the European Commission and the European Parliament function — including who holds which responsibilities and powers. This is one of the core topics covered in detail during the Online Pirate Academy. Want to get a behind-the-scenes look at how legislation is negotiated? Wondering if you need any special superpowers to do it? If so, you’re in the right place — don’t miss this opportunity. Apply for the Online Pirate Academy here.

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It’s an inconvenient fact that most of Earth’s largesse of useful minerals is locked up in, under, and around a lot of rock. Our little world condensed out of the remnants of stars whose death throes cooked up almost every element in the periodic table, and in the intervening billions of years, those elements have sorted themselves out into deposits that range from the easily accessed, lying-about-on-the-ground types to those buried deep in the crust, or worse yet, those that are distributed so sparsely within a mineral matrix that it takes harvesting megatonnes of material to find just a few kilos of the stuff.

Whatever the substance of our desires, and no matter how it is associated with the rocks and minerals below our feet, almost every mining and refining effort starts with wresting vast quantities of rock from the Earth’s crust. And the easiest, cheapest, and fastest way to do that most often involves blasting. In a very real way, explosives make the world work, for without them, the minerals we need to do almost anything would be prohibitively expensive to produce, if it were possible at all. And understanding the chemistry, physics, and engineering behind blasting operations is key to understanding almost everything about Mining and Refining.

First, We Drill

For almost all of the time that we’ve been mining minerals, making big rocks into smaller rocks has been the work of strong backs and arms supplemented by the mechanical advantage of tools like picks, pry bars, and shovels. The historical record shows that early miners tried to reduce this effort with clever applications of low-energy physics, such as jamming wooden plugs into holes in the rocks and soaking them with liquid to swell the wood and exert enough force to fracture the rock, or by heating the rock with bonfires and then flooding with cold water to create thermal stress fractures. These methods, while effective, only traded effort for time, and only worked for certain types of rock.

Mining productivity got a much-needed boost in 1627 with the first recorded use of gunpowder for blasting at a gold mine in what is now Slovakia. Boreholes were stuffed with powder that was ignited by a fuse made from a powder-filled reed. The result was a pile of rubble that would have taken weeks to produce by hand, and while the speed with which the explosion achieved that result was probably much welcomed by the miners, in reality, it only shifted their efforts to drilling the boreholes, which generally took a five-man crew using sledgehammers and striker bars to pound deep holes into the rock. Replacing that manual effort with mechanical drilling was the next big advance, but it would have to wait until the Industrial Revolution harnessed the power of steam to run drills capable of boring deep holes in rock quickly and with much smaller crews.

The basic principles of rock drilling developed in the 19th century, such as rapidly spinning a hardened steel bit while exerting tremendous down-pressure and high-impulse percussion, remain applicable today, although with advancements like synthetic diamond tooling and better methods of power transmission. Modern drills for open-cast mining fall into two broad categories: overburden drills, which typically drill straight down or at a slight angle to vertical and can drill large-diameter holes over 100 meters deep, and quarry drills, which are smaller and more maneuverable rigs that can drill at any angle, even horizontally. Most drill rigs are track-driven for greater mobility over rubble-strewn surfaces, and are equipped with soundproofed, air-conditioned cabs with safety cages to protect the operator. Automation is a big part of modern rigs, with automatic leveling systems, tool changers that can select the proper bit for the rock type, and fully automated drill chain handling, including addition of drill rod to push the bit deeper into the rock. Many drill rigs even have semi-autonomous operation, where a single operator can control a fleet of rigs from a single remote control console.

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Proper Prior Planning

While the use of explosives seems brutally chaotic and indiscriminate, it’s really the exact opposite. Each of the so-called “shots” in a blasting operation is a carefully controlled, highly engineered event designed to move material in a specific direction with the desired degree of fracturing, all while ensuring the safety of the miners and the facility.

To accomplish this, a blasting plan is put together by a mining engineer. The blasting plan takes into account the mechanical characteristics of the rock, the location and direction of any pre-existing fractures or faults, and proximity to any structures or hazards. Engineers also need to account for the equipment used for mucking, which is the process of removing blasted material for further processing. For instance, a wheeled loader operating on the same level, or bench, that the blasting took place on needs a different size and shape of rubble pile than an excavator or dragline operating from the bench above. The capabilities of the rock crushing machinery that’s going to be used to process the rubble also have to be accounted for in the blasting plan.

Most blasting plans define a matrix of drill holes with very specific spacing, generally with long rows and short columns. The drill plan specifies the diameter of each hole along with its depth, which usually goes a little beyond the distance to the next bench down. The mining engineer also specifies a stem height for the hole, which leaves room on top of the explosives to backfill the hole with drill tailings or gravel.

Prills and Oil

Once the drill holes are complete and inspected, charging the holes with explosives can begin. The type of blasting agents to be used is determined by the blasting plan, but in most cases, the agent of choice is ANFO, or ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. The ammonium nitrate, which contains 60% oxygen by weight, serves as an oxidizer for the combustion of the long-chain alkanes in the fuel oil. The ideal mix is 94% ammonium nitrate to 6% fuel oil.
Filling holes with ammonium nitrate at a blasting site. Hopper trucks like this are often used to carry prilled ammonium nitrate. Some trucks also have a tank for the fuel oil that’s added to the ammonium nitrate to make ANFO. Credit: Old Bear Photo, via Adobe Stock.
How the ANFO is added to the hole depends on conditions. For holes where groundwater is not a problem, ammonium nitrate in the form of small porous beads or prills, is poured down the hole and lightly tamped to remove any voids or air spaces before the correct amount of fuel oil is added. For wet conditions, an ammonium nitrate emulsion will be used instead. This is just a solution of ammonium nitrate in water with emulsifiers added to allow the fuel oil to mix with the oxidizer.

ANFO is classified as a tertiary explosive, meaning it is insensitive to shock and requires a booster to detonate. The booster charge is generally a secondary explosive such as PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a powerful explosive that’s chemically similar to nitroglycerine but is much more stable. PETN comes in a number of forms, with cardboard cylinders like oversized fireworks or a PETN-laced gel stuffed into a plastic tube that looks like a sausage being the most common.
Electrically operated blasting caps marked with their built-in 425 ms delay. These will easily blow your hand clean off. Source: Timo Halén, CC BY-SA 2.5.
Being a secondary explosive, the booster charge needs a fairly strong shock to detonate. This shock is provided by a blasting cap or detonator, which is a small, multi-stage pyrotechnic device. These are generally in the form of a small brass or copper tube filled with a layer of primary explosive such as lead azide or fulminate of mercury, along with a small amount of secondary explosive such as PETN. The primary charge is in physical contact with an initiator of some sort, either a bridge wire in the case of electrically initiated detonators, or more commonly, a shock tube. Shock tubes are thin-walled plastic tubing with a layer of reactive explosive powder on the inner wall. The explosive powder is engineered to detonate down the tube at around 2,000 m/s, carrying a shock wave into the detonator at a known rate, which makes propagation delays easy to calculate.

Timing is critical to the blasting plan. If the explosives in each hole were to all detonate at the same time, there wouldn’t be anywhere for the displaced material to go. To prevent that, mining engineers build delays into the blasting plan so that some charges, typically the ones closest to the free face of the bench, go off a fraction of a second before the charges behind them, freeing up space for the displaced material to move into. Delays are either built into the initiator as a layer of pyrotechnic material that burns at a known rate between the initiator and the primary charge, or by using surface delays, which are devices with fixed delays that connect the initiator down the hole to the rest of the charges that will make up the shot. Lately, electronic detonators have been introduced, which have microcontrollers built in. These detonators are addressable and can have a specific delay programmed in the field, making it easier to program the delays needed for the entire shot. Electronic detonators also require a specific code to be transmitted to detonate, which reduces the chance of injury or misuse that lost or stolen electrical blasting caps present. This was enough of a problem that a series of public service films on the dangers of playing with blasting caps appeared regularly from the 1950s through the 1970s.

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“Fire in the Hole!”

When all the holes are charged and properly stemmed, the blasting crew makes the final connections on the surface. Connections can be made with wires for electrical and electronic detonators, or with shock tubes for non-electric detonators. Sometimes, detonating cord is used to make the surface connections between holes. Det cord is similar to shock tube but generally looks like woven nylon cord. It also detonates at a much faster rate (6,500 m/s) than shock tube thanks to being filled with PETN or a similar high-velocity explosive.

Once the final connections to the blasting controller are made and tested, the area is secured with all personnel and equipment removed. A series of increasingly urgent warnings are sounded on sirens or horns as the blast approaches, to alert personnel to the danger. The blaster initiates the shot at the controller, which sends the signal down trunklines and into any surface delays before being transmitted to the detonators via their downlines. The relatively weak shock wave from the detonator propagates into the booster charge, which imparts enough energy into the ANFO to start detonation of the main charge.

The ANFO rapidly decomposes into a mixture of hot gases, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. The shock wave pulverizes the rock surrounding the borehole and rapidly propagates into the surrounding rock, exerting tremendous compressive force. The shock wave continues to propagate until it meets a natural crack or the interface between rock and air at the free face of the shot. These impedance discontinuities reflect the compressive wave and turn it into a tensile wave, and since rock is generally much weaker in tension than compression, this is where the real destruction begins.

The reflected tensile forces break the rock along natural or newly formed cracks, creating voids that are filled with the rapidly expanding gases from the burning ANFO. The gases force these cracks apart, providing the heave needed to move rock fragments into the voids created by the initial shock wave. The shot progresses at the set delay intervals between holes, with the initial shock from new explosions creating more fractures deeper into the rock face and more expanding gas to move the fragments into the space created by earlier explosions. Depending on how many holes are in the shot and how long the delays are, the entire thing can be over in just a few seconds, or it could go on for quite some time, as it does in this world-record blast at a coal mine in Queensland in 2019, which used 3,899 boreholes packed with 2,194 tonnes of ANFO to move 4.7 million cubic meters of material in just 16 seconds.

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There’s still much for the blasting crew to do once the shot is done. As the dust settles, safety crews use monitoring equipment to ensure any hazardous blasting gases have dispersed before sending in crews to look for any misfires. Misfires can result in a reshoot, where crews hook up a fresh initiator and try to detonate the booster charge again. If the charge won’t fire, it can be carefully extracted from the rubble pile with non-sparking tools and soaked in water to inactivate it.

hackaday.com/2025/06/24/mining…

Secondo un rapporto di Cato Networks, i criminali informatici continuano a utilizzare attivamente i modelli LLM nei loro attacchi. In particolare, stiamo parlando di versioni dei modelli Grok e Mixtral deliberatamente modificate per aggirare le restrizioni integrate e generare contenuti dannosi.

A quanto pare, una di queste versioni modificate di Grok è apparsa sul popolare forum BreachForums a febbraio 2025. È stata pubblicata da un utente con lo pseudonimo di Keanu. Lo strumento è un wrapper per il modello Grok originale ed è controllato tramite un prompt di sistema appositamente scritto. È in questo modo che gli autori garantiscono che il modello ignori i meccanismi di protezione e generi email di phishing, codice dannoso e istruzioni di hacking.

Un secondo modello modificato, basato su Mixtral, un prodotto dell’azienda francese Mistral AI, è stato trovato anch’esso su BreachForums. È stato pubblicato da un altro utente del forum con il nickname xzin0vich a ottobre. Entrambi i modelli sono disponibili per l’acquisto da chiunque sul dark web.

Vale la pena notare che né xAI né Mistral AI hanno rilasciato dichiarazioni ufficiali su come i loro sviluppi siano finiti nelle mani dei criminali informatici.

Secondo Cato Networks, tali modifiche non rappresentano una vulnerabilità dei modelli Grok o Mixtral in sé. Rappresentano piuttosto un abuso del principio del prompt di sistema che determina il comportamento della rete neurale. Quando un aggressore invia una richiesta, questa diventa parte del dialogo generale con il modello, incluso il prompt stesso che imposta le istruzioni per aggirare le restrizioni.

Gli esperti hanno sottolineato che queste versioni “sbloccate” stanno diventando sempre più comuni. Attorno a esse si stanno gradualmente formando interi ecosistemi ombra, basati principalmente su LLM aperti. Con il loro aiuto, i criminali informatici ottengono accesso a potenti strumenti che semplificano notevolmente la creazione di phishing, malware e altri scenari di attacco.

Ciò che rende questa tendenza particolarmente difficile da contrastare è il fatto che Mixtral è distribuito come un modello completamente aperto, consentendo agli aggressori di eseguirlo sui propri server e di aprirne l’accesso tramite API ad altri partecipanti al darknet. I prodotti basati su Grok sono teoricamente controllati da xAI stessa, ma anche in questo caso, tracciare e bloccare gli abusi è un gioco del gatto e del topo.

La situazione è complicata dal fatto che tali strumenti sono andati ben oltre le build locali. Le prime versioni di tali prodotti, note come WormGPT, sono apparse sul darknet nel giugno 2023. All’epoca, l’IA generativa, basata su un modello aperto di EleutherAI, divenne rapidamente nota dopo un’inchiesta del giornalista Brian Krebs. Sebbene la versione originale fosse stata presto bloccata, i suoi analoghi con nomi come FraudGPT ed EvilGPT iniziarono a diffondersi in massa sui forum underground.

I prezzi per questi strumenti variano dai 60 ai 100 euro al mese, mentre per build private e configurazioni individuali si parla di circa 5.000 euro. Secondo Cato Networks, i criminali informatici stanno assumendo sempre più specialisti di intelligenza artificiale per creare le proprie versioni di tali modelli. Allo stesso tempo, come ha dimostrato lo studio, spesso non si tratta di uno sviluppo autonomo da zero, ma di modificare reti neurali esistenti.

Gli esperti del settore sottolineano che il mercato degli LLM “sbloccati” è enorme. Centinaia di questi modelli sono già disponibili nelle darknet, compresi quelli basati su DeepSeek . La tecnica principale utilizzata dagli aggressori è la manipolazione immediata. Riferimenti storici, abili parafrasi o costrutti nascosti contribuiscono a ingannare l’IA e a indurla a generare contenuti dannosi. La minaccia principale non risiede tanto nelle vulnerabilità tecniche, quanto nella rapidità con cui i criminali imparano a utilizzare l’IA per migliorare l’efficacia degli attacchi, accelerandone la preparazione e la precisione.

Secondo gli esperti, le attuali misure di protezione sono chiaramente insufficienti. Inoltre, sui forum underground si sta già assistendo all’emergere di un mercato di “jailbreak as a service”, dove è possibile ottenere reti neurali hackerate già pronte all’uso senza doverne comprendere i dettagli tecnici.

L'articolo Arriva il “jailbreak as a service”. 60 euro al mese per l’acquisto di sistemi AI pronti per il cybercrime proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Dopo il caso dei 568 endpoint di un’azienda italiana del settore macchinari industriali, un altro accesso compromesso relativo a una società italiana di ingegneria del software è finito in vendita su un forum underground frequentato da Initial Access Broker e attori ransomware.

L’inserzione, pubblicata dall’utente spartanking, offre accesso completo a un server con privilegi di amministratore locale e controllo remoto tramite AnyDesk.

L’inserzione riporta chiaramente che il sistema compromesso è collegato a un dominio Active Directory. Secondo quanto dichiarato nel post:

• Sono presenti 11 host attivi
• L’accesso è di tipo “local admin / AnyDesk”
• Il venditore accetta solo pagamenti tramite escrow del forum (Guarantor), a tutela delle parti coinvolte
• Il prezzo richiesto è di 200 dollari

L’accesso consentirebbe quindi privilegi elevati su almeno un server. In uno screenshot, si nota che il sistema compromesso è un Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard installato su un HP ProLiant ML350p Gen8, con 16 GB di RAM e 465 GB di spazio disco.

Le immagini a corredo dell’annuncio forniscono numerosi indizi:

• Accesso al desktop remoto completo del sistema, con icone visibili per applicazioni business come Nextcloud, Oracle VirtualBox, IBM Access per Windows, HW Serial Port e software da laboratorio.
• Presenza di tool di scansione di rete (Advanced IP Scanner), che mostrano una topologia di rete con 11 dispositivi attivi, tra cui switch Cisco, router MikroTik e diversi endpoint HP.
• Indicazione di un dominio Active Directory denominato “CEP”.

Sebbene l’accesso sia messo in vendita a un prezzo relativamente basso (200$), ciò non ne riduce l’impatto potenziale. Gli accessi low cost sono spesso acquistati da:

• Attori meno sofisticati ma motivati (script kiddie, gruppi ransomware minori)
• Gruppi interessati a movimenti laterali verso altri target
• Operatori specializzati in esfiltrazione dati o cryptojacking

La continua pubblicazione di accessi aziendali italiani dimostra che il nostro Paese non è affatto immune alle pratiche degli Initial Access Broker. Le PMI tecnologiche, spesso convinte di essere “troppo piccole per essere un target”, risultano invece vulnerabili e appetibili.

Il caso spartanking, con i suoi 7 escrow all’attivo, conferma inoltre che questi venditori stanno costruendo una reputazione duratura e profittevole, segno che il mercato di accessi italiani nel dark web è tutt’altro che marginale.

Ma la morale in tutto questo?

Che comprendere prima che un Initial Access Broker stia osservando o analizzando una rete aziendale è oggi una delle informazioni più preziose per la difesa preventiva. Questi attori vendono porte d’accesso già aperte, e sapere in anticipo se si è finiti nel loro radar consente di rafforzare i punti deboli, segmentare la rete, aggiornare le policy di accesso e attuare contromisure tempestive. Aspettare che l’accesso venga venduto – e poi magari usato da un gruppo ransomware – significa intervenire quando il danno è già in atto.

Qui entra in gioco la Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), che non si limita a osservare il passato, ma analizza pattern, comportamenti, reputazione e movimenti degli attori nelle zone grigie del web. L’intelligence delle minacce consente alle aziende di monitorare marketplace, forum underground, canali Telegram e dark web per rilevare vendite sospette, fughe di dati o credenziali compromesse. In un’epoca in cui le PMI vengono bersagliate con la stessa frequenza delle grandi aziende, la CTI non è un lusso per pochi, ma una necessità per tutti.

L'articolo 200 dollari per l’Accesso ad una Azienda italiana! Mentre il Dark Web fa affari, tu sei pronto a difenderti? proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Multimaterial printing was not invented by BambuLabs, but love them or hate them the AMS has become the gold standard for a modern multi-material unit. [Daniel]’s latest Mod Bot video on the Box Turtle MMU (embedded below) highlights an open source project that aims to bring the power and ease of AMS to Voron printers, and everyone else using Klipper willing to put in the work.
This isn’t a torture test, but it’s very clean and very cute.
The system itself is a mostly 3D printed unit that sits atop [Daniel]’s Voron printer looking just like an AMS atop a BambuLab. It has space for four spools, with motorized rollers and feeders in the front that have handy-dandy indicator LEDs to tell you which filament is loaded or printing. Each spool gets its own extruder, whose tension can be adjusted manually via thumbscrew. A buffer unit sits between the spool box and your toolhead.

Aside from the box, you need to spec a toolhead that meets requirements. It needs a PTFE connector with a (reverse) boden tube to guide the filament, and it also needs to have a toolhead filament runout sensor. The sensor is to provide feedback to Klipper that the filament is loaded or unloaded. Finally you will probably want to add a filament cutter, because that happens at the toolhead with this unit. Sure, you could try the whole tip-forming thing, but anyone who had a Prusa MMU back in the day can tell you that is easier said than done. The cutter apparently makes this system much more reliable.

In operation, it looks just like a BambuLabs printer with an AMS installed. The big difference, again, is that this project by [Armored Turtle] is fully open source, with everything on GitHub under a GPL-3.0 license. Several vendors are already producing kits; [Daniel] is using the LDO version in his video.

It looks like the project is well documented–and [Mod Bot] agrees, and he reports that the build process is not terribly difficult (well, if you’re the kind of person who builds a Voron, anyway), and adding the AFC Klipper Addon (also by [Armored Turtle]) was easy as pie. After that, well. It needs calibration. Calibration and lots of tuning, which is an ongoing process for [Daniel]. If you want to see that, watch the video below, but we’ll spoil it for you and let you know it really pays off. (Except for lane 4, where he probably needs to clean up the print.)We’ve featured open-source MMUs before, like the Enraged Rabbit Carrot Feeder, but it’s great to see more in this scene, especially something that looks like it can take on the AMS. It’s not the only way to get multimaterial– there’s always tool-changers, or you could just put in a second motion system and gantry.

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hackaday.com/2025/06/24/is-box…