Non c'è mai stata una reale cessione di sovranità all'UE da parte degli stati membri in materia di politica estera o di politica economica. In questo caso particolare, inoltre, l'unica cosa su cui gli stati membri erano d'accordo era ridurre i dazi del 30% minacciati da Trump.

Trovo abbastanza ridicolo che i governi che non hanno mai voluto un'Europa forte e che hanno dato un mandato così minimalista a Von Der Layen adesso l'accusino di essersi genuflessa a Trump.

[Stoppi] always has interesting blog posts and videos, even when we don’t understand all the German in them. The latest? Computer simulation of wave propagation (Google Translate link), which, if nothing else, makes pretty pictures that work in any language. Check out the video below.

Luckily, most browsers will translate for you these days, or you can use a website. We’ve seen waves modeled with springs before, but between the explanations and the accompanying Turbo Pascal source code, this is worth checking out.

We can’t explain it better than [Stoppi] who writes:

The model consists of individual atoms with the mass m, which are connected to each other by springs with the spring constant k. To start, I deflect the first atom sinusoidally. According to this, the individual atoms obey Newton’s equation of motion F = m·a, whereby Hook’s spring law F = k·Δl is used for the force F. I solved these differential equations iteratively using the Euler method. The movement of the atoms is restricted in the y-direction. At the beginning, the number of atoms, their mass m and the spring constant k must be entered. In addition, you can choose between transverse or longitudinal deflection and whether you want the reflection at the free or fixed end.

Can you get better simulations? Of course. But will this help you develop more intuitive understanding? Maybe. If you are interested in simulating the physical world, don’t forget TinkerCad has added that capability.

youtube.com/embed/eAZvdjsBR8c?…

hackaday.com/2025/07/28/models…

Although firmly entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist now, the skateboard wasn’t always a staple of popular culture. It had a pretty rocky start as surfers jankily attached roller skating hardware to wooden planks searching for wave-riding experiences on land. From those rough beginnings it still took decades of innovation until Rodney Mullen adapted the ollie for flatground skating before the sport really took off. Skateboard hardware is quite elegant now too; the way leaning turns the board due to the shape of the trucks is immediately intuitive for even the most beginner riders, and bearing technology is so high-quality and inexpensive now that skateboard hardware is a go-to parts bin grab for plenty of other projects like this plasma cutter modification.

[The Fabrication Series]’s plasma cutter is mounted to a CNC machine, allowing for many complex cuts in much less time than it would take to do by hand. But cutting tubes is a more complicated endeavor for a machine like this. This is where the skateboard hardware comes in: by fabricating two custom pivoting arms each with two skateboard wheels that push down on a tube to hold it in place, the CNC machine can roll the tube along the table in a precise way as the plasma cutter works through it.

Of course, cutting a moving part is a little more complicated for the CNC machine than cutting a fixed piece of sheet metal, so [The Fabrication Series] walks us through a few ways of cutting pipe for various purposes, including miters and notches. The first step is to build a model of the pipes, in this case using Onshape, and then converting the 3D model of the pipes into a sheet metal model that the CNC machine can use. It does take a few cuts on the machine to fine-tune the cuts, but in no time the machine is effortlessly cutting complex shapes into the pipe. Don’t have a plasma cutter at all? You can always build your own from scratch.

Thanks to [JohnU] and [paulvdh] for the tip!

youtube.com/embed/F9LiEK-DjPk?…

hackaday.com/2025/07/28/skateb…

PAHT-CF part printed at 45 degrees, with reinforcing bolt, post-failure. (Credit: Functional Print Friday, YouTube)
The good part about FDM 3D printing is that there are so many different filament types and parameters to choose from. This is also the bad part, as it can often be hard to tell what impact a change has. Fortunately we got destructive testing to provide us with some information here. Case in point [Functional Print Friday] on YouTube recently testing out a few iterations of a replacement part for a car.

The original part was in ABS, printed horizontally in a Bambu Lab FDM printer, which had a protruding element snapped off while in use. In addition to printing a replacement in carbon fiber-reinforced nylon (PAHT-CF, i.e. PA12 instead of the typical PA6), the part was now also printed at a 45° angle. To compare it with the original ABS filament in a more favorable way, the same part was reprinted at the same angle in ABS.

Another change was to add a machine screw to the stop element of the part, which turned out to make a massive difference. Whereas the original horizontal ABS print failed early and cleanly on layer lines, the angled versions put up much more of a fight, with the machine screw-reinforced stop combined with the PA12 CF filament maxing out the first meter.

The take-away here appears to be that not only angles are good, but that adding a few strategic metal screws can do wonders, even if you’re not using a more exotic filament type.

youtube.com/embed/5k6YLlyV9ds?…

hackaday.com/2025/07/28/destru…

Wall clocks! Are they very accurate? Well, sometimes they are, and sometimes they lose minutes a day. If you’ve got one that needs calibrating, you might like this device from [Lauri Pirttiaho].

Most cheap wall clocks use very similar mechanisms based around the Lavet-type stepper motor. These are usually driven by a chip-on-board oscillator that may or may not be particularly accurate.

[Lauri] desired a way to tune up these cheap clocks by using GPS-level timing accuracy. Thus began a project based around a CY8KIT evaluation board from Cypress. The microcontroller is paired with a small character LCD as a user interface, and hooked up to a cheap GPS module with an accurate 1-pulse-per-second (1PPS) timing output. The concept is simple enough. Clock drift is measured by using counters in the microcontroller to compare the timing of the GPS 1PPS output and the pulses driving the Lavet-type stepper motor. The difference between the two can be read off the device, and used to determine if the wall clock is fast or slow. Then one need only use a trimmer capacitor to tweak the wall clock’s pulse rate in order to make it more accurate.

Few of us spend much time calibrating low-cost wall clocks to high levels of accuracy. If that sounds like a fun hobby to you, or your name is Garrus, you would probably find [Lauri]’s device remarkably useful. Believe it or not, this isn’t the first clock calibrator we’ve seen, either. Meanwhile, if you’ve brewed up your own high-accuracy timing hardware, feel free to let us know on the tipsline.

hackaday.com/2025/07/28/2025-o…

La 55enne, completamente paralizzata a causa della sclerosi multipla aggiunge: “Ogni giorno per me è una tortura”

Filomena Gallo commenta: “ll tempo non è una semplice variabile: diventa parte integrante del diritto stesso”

A seguito della recente sentenza della Corte costituzionale 132/2025, “Libera”, 55enne toscana completamente paralizzata a causa della sclerosi multipla, non potrà, per ora, essere aiutata da un medico nella somministrazione del farmaco letale, come aveva chiesto. Il giudice dovrà, infatti, verificare a livello nazionale l’esistenza di strumentazioni per l’autosomministrazione. Nel frattempo le condizioni di “Libera” sono peggiorate, non riesce quasi più a parlare.

Assistita dal collegio legale coordinato dall’avvocata Filomena Gallo, Segretaria nazionale dell’Associazione Luca Coscioni, la donna al momento non può procedere autonomamente con l’assunzione del farmaco per il fine vita: non può autosomministrarsi il farmaco letale a causa delle sue condizioni fisiche ma neanche ottenere la somministrazione del farmaco letale da parte del medico.

Queste le parole di “Libera”, affidate all’Associazione Luca Coscioni, a seguito della sentenza:

Capisco che sia difficile comprendere davvero cosa significhi per me continuare ad aspettare. Ma è proprio questo il punto: i miei tempi non sono quelli della politica. I parlamentari hanno rinviato la discussione sul fine vita a settembre, come se la mia malattia potesse prendersi una pausa estiva.

I miei tempi non sono neanche quelli della giustizia. I giudici chiedono altra documentazione, altri approfondimenti. Ma ogni giorno in più, per me, è sofferenza. Ogni giorno in più è tortura, è umiliazione. Vi chiedo una sola cosa: fate presto.

“La Corte costituzionale non entra nel merito della questione di legittimità costituzionale esaminando l’articolo 579 codice penale, non chiude la porta, anzi ribadisce e rilancia alcuni principi fondamentali del diritto costituzionale: il diritto all’autodeterminazione e il ruolo attivo del Servizio sanitario nazionale nel fine vita.

Ora il procedimento su ‘Libera’ torna al tribunale di Firenze, che dovrà effettuare delle verifiche su scala nazionale, coinvolgendo anche il Ministero della Salute e l’Istituto Superiore di Sanità.

La Corte non elude il nucleo del problema: chiarisce che, una volta verificate tutte le condizioni stabilite dalla sentenza n. 242/2019 (caso Cappato/Dj Fabo) e ribadite nelle n. 135/2024 e 66/2025 — ovvero patologia irreversibile, sofferenze intollerabili, capacità di autodeterminazione e decisione libera e consapevole — la persona interessata si trova in una situazione soggettiva tutelata costituzionalmente.

L’urgenza è evidente: le condizioni cliniche di ‘Libera’ stanno peggiorando e ogni ulteriore rinvio rischia di trasformarsi in una concreta negazione del diritto che le è stato già riconosciuto. In questi casi, il tempo non è una semplice variabile: diventa parte integrante del diritto stesso”, ha dichiarato l’avvocata Filomena Gallo, Segretaria nazionale dell’Associazione Luca Coscioni e legale di “Libera” di cui coordina anche il collegio di studio e difesa.

L'articolo Dopo la sentenza della Consulta parla “Libera”: “I miei tempi non sono quelli della politica e della giustizia” proviene da Associazione Luca Coscioni.

Forse sarebbe il caso di arricchire la Netiquette, in modo da estendere la sua ala protettrice anche sopra il Fediverso.

Serve, secondo me, un capitolo "Fediquette".

Per cominciare aggiungerei alla Fediquette questa regola:

- non si possono pubblicare link ad articoli, post o contenuti che per essere fruiti richiedono il pagamento di un abbonamento o l'obbligo ad accettare cookies che non siano tecnicamente necessari al funzionamento del sito.

Although often glossed over, the human liver is a pretty amazing organ. Not just because it’s pretty much the sole thing that prevents our food from killing us, but also because it’s the only organ in our body that is capable of significant regeneration. This is a major boon in medicine, as you can remove most of a person’s liver and it’ll happily regrow back to its original volume. Obviously this is very convenient in the case of disease or when performing a liver transplant.

Despite tissue regeneration being very common among animals, most mammalian species have only limited regenerative ability. This means that while some species can easily regrow entire limbs and organs including eyes as well as parts of their brain, us humans and our primate cousins are lucky if we can even count on our liver to do that thing, while limbs and eyes are lost forever.

This raises many questions, including whether the deactivation of regenerative capabilities is just an evolutionary glitch, and how easily we might be able to turn it back on.

Regenerating Vs Repair

Even in the absence of a regenerative ability, animals can heal injuries, which generally means the growth of fibrous tissue called scar tissue. This can be observed very clearly on our skin, where certain old injuries tend to remain clearly visible as the scar tissue replaces skin tissue. While made of the same collagen protein as skin tissue, the fiber organization is different and serves no real purpose beyond sealing up a lesion. Scar tissue can form elsewhere in the body too, where it can impede function, as in the heart and lungs.

Both regeneration and repair are a form of healing in an organism, but only the former restores the original functionality, whereas the latter is the biological equivalent of slapping on a duct tape patch and calling it good. This ‘repair’ outcome is effectively an incomplete regeneration process, where instead of the affected site creating the conditions for normal growth – leading to a good-as-new result – you only get the basic scaffolding while certain biochemical pathways are never or insufficiently activated.
Phases of wound healing. (Credit: Mikael Häggström, Wikimedia)
Although it’s often said that the human liver is the sole organ capable of regeneration in our species, it could be argued that our blood vessels are a much better example of regeneration. Within minutes after receiving a cut or bad scrape, any damaged blood vessels are plugged and macrophages along with other specialized cells begin to move into the area as the inflammatory phase begins.

At the end of this phase, angiogenesis commences, which involves existing blood vessels growing new blood vessels into the affected area. In a developing embryo, this is the stage that follows the earliest development of the initial blood vessels through vasculogenesis. In this regard, blood vessels can be said to regenerate themselves in the case of injury. They can also expand into tissues where e.g. hypoxia conditions are present, which triggers the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) signaling path.

In the case of wound healing this signal path is stimulated due to the hypoxia condition that exists at the injury site. Although the HIF-related HIF-1α subunit is constantly expressed, oxygen-dependent prolyl hydroxylases (PHDs) normally degrade it and thus downregulating the further responses down this chain.

Another aspect here is the re-epithelization, whereby surrounding skin cells move towards the wound, multiplying until the signals that induce this growth are downregulated below a critical threshold. Based on research the same HIF pathway is implicated here. For example, in a 2015 study in Science Translational Medicine Yong Zhang et al. reported that forced upregulation of HIF-1α was able to induce full regeneration of a hole punched in the ears of mice who normally just show scarring.

This indicates that boosting the HIF signaling pathway might be a viable way to prevent scarring and induce full regeneration of certain types of wounds to the skin.

Blastema Limbo

Two Ambystoma mexicanum axolotl at the Vancouver Aquarium. (Credit: ZeWrestler, Wikimedia)
The HIF signaling pathway is an example of a basic regeneration pathway involving a single organ (i.e. the skin). Things get more complicated when there’s the removal of something to the extent of a limb. Among mammals regenerating ability is limited, with some species like rabbits still possessing the ability to regenerate holes in their ears while other species, including humans, are not creating the requisite blastema of undifferentiated cells after an amputation.

The axolotl is one of the most studied species when it comes to tissue regeneration. Similar to other salamanders they possess a remarkable ability to regenerate many parts of their body, with the axolotl capable of regenerating their limbs, gills, eyes and parts of their brain. Although annelids (segmented worms) and echinoderms like starfish are capable of even more extreme forms of regeneration, axolotls are significantly more akin to us mammals than either of those.

Incidentally, similar research in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) has led us to the highly conserved Hippo signaling pathway. This particular signaling path is essential in determining how big an organ is supposed to be, such as when a human liver is chopped up in vivo and has to regrow back to its original size.

New Limb Cap

When an axolotl suffers severe injury like the loss of a limb or a gill, the surface where the amputation occurred gets covered up by epidermal cells, forming the wound epithelium (WE). This is the point where for human and other mammals the process pretty much ends with a stump covered up by skin. In the case of the axolotl, however, this WE keeps gathering epidermal cells, forming the apical epithelial cap (AEC).

Inside this AEC the tissues then undergo dedifferentiation into a blastema – led by signals from macrophages – effectively resetting the tissues here to a much earlier, embryonic state of development. Under the influence of Hox genes which regulate the body’s layout, the AEC subsequently grows as it would have done previously with the very young axolotl until the entire limb, gill, eye, etc. has been regrown.
Hox protein classification across model organisms by CLANS analysis, (Credit: Hueber et al., 2010)
The trick is thus to take these identified signaling pathways, establish in how far they have been preserved in other animals – like us primates – and whether we can easily re-enable them in some way, whether permanently or temporarily. After all, it worked once when we were still embryos, ergo by resetting the cellular clock on part of our bodies it would simply run through the same biochemical steps again.

Still A Lumpy Road Ahead

Of course, this involves developmental biology, biochemistry and genetic research, meaning that clear answers are rarely found and require immense amounts of research and study to unravel how all of these signaling pathways work, while maybe finding a few more ones along the way. The upshot of course is that the field of regenerative medicine can have massive implications for human health, ranging from the ability to treat many (genetic) disorders related to faulty signaling pathways to the ability regrow limbs, eyes and more.

It’s likely that regenerating skin and directly related tissues in human patients will be one of the first widescale applications of these findings, with recently Weifeng Lin et al. publishing a study in Science involving regrowing a damaged outer ear (pinna) of mice and rats through the addition of retinoic acid (RA), a key element in embryonic development. Specifically they identified that in non-regenerative species of rats and mice the Aldh1a2 gene was not expressed as much as it was in species who do regenerate, which reduces the amount of available RA from the retinaldehyde precursor.

Although there’s a lot that can be said about the pros and cons of turning back on genes that haven’t been active since we were either an embryo or a still-growing-child, understanding these biochemical pathways offers us the prospect of bypassing them in order to restore that which once was thought to be lost forever. Even if we won’t be regrowing limbs yet next year, we might be giving people back their pinna, digits, faces and erase old scars before we know it.

“Closeup of Axolotl in Hand” by [Yaiol AI]

“Purple Tropical Axolotl” by[ Raphael Brasileiro]

hackaday.com/2025/07/28/be-mor…

Sygnia segnala che il vettore di attacco iniziale di Fire Ant CVE-2023-34048, sfrutta la vulnerabilità di scrittura fuori dai limiti nell’implementazione del protocollo DCERPC di vCenter Server che consente l’esecuzione di codice remoto non autenticato. I ricercatori di sicurezza hanno identificato arresti anomali sospetti del processo ‘vmdird‘ sui server vCenter, indicando lo sfruttamento di questa vulnerabilità critica.

Dopo aver ottenuto la compromissione, gli autori della minaccia implementano strumenti sofisticati, tra cui lo script open source vCenter_GenerateLoginCookie.py, per falsificare i cookie di autenticazione e aggirare i meccanismi di accesso. Gli aggressori raccolgono sistematicamente le credenziali vpxuser, ovvero account di sistema creati automaticamente da vCenter con privilegi amministrativi completi sugli host ESXi.

Questo furto di credenziali consente lo spostamento laterale nell’intera infrastruttura di virtualizzazione, poiché gli account vpxuser restano esenti dalle restrizioni della modalità di blocco. Gli autori della minaccia sfruttano anche il CVE-2023-20867, una vulnerabilità di VMware Tools che consente l’esecuzione di comandi host-to-guest non autenticati tramite il cmdlet Invoke-VMScript di PowerCLI.

Capacità di persistenza e metodi di evasione

Fire Ant dimostra notevoli capacità di persistenza attraverso molteplici tecniche di distribuzione di backdoor. Il gruppo installa vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) dannosi con livelli di accettazione impostati su “partner” e distribuiti utilizzando il flag -force per ignorare la convalida della firma. Questi VIB non autorizzati contengono file di configurazione che fanno riferimento a file binari nella cartella ‘/bin‘ e script personalizzati incorporati in ‘/etc/rc.local.d/’ per l’esecuzione all’avvio.

Inoltre, gli aggressori implementano una backdoor HTTP basata su Python denominata autobackup.bin che si collega alla porta 8888 e fornisce funzionalità di esecuzione di comandi remoti. Questo malware modifica ‘/etc/rc.local.d/local.sh’ sugli host ESXi per un’esecuzione persistente. Per eludere ulteriormente il rilevamento, Fire Ant termina il processo vmsyslogd, il demone syslog nativo di VMware, disabilitando di fatto sia la scrittura dei log locali che l’inoltro dei log remoti.

Gli autori della minaccia dimostrano sofisticate capacità di manipolazione della rete compromettendo i bilanciatori di carico F5 tramite lo sfruttamento CVE-2022-1388 e distribuendo webshell su ‘ /usr/local/www/xui/common/css/css.php ‘ per il bridging di rete. Utilizzano webshell di tunneling Neo-reGeorg su server web interni basati su Java e distribuiscono il rootkit Medusa su punti pivot Linux per la raccolta delle credenziali e l’accesso persistente.

Fire Ant utilizza i comandi netsh portproxy per l’inoltro delle porte attraverso endpoint attendibili, aggirando di fatto gli elenchi di controllo degli accessi e le restrizioni del firewall. Il gruppo sfrutta inoltre il traffico IPv6 per aggirare le regole di filtraggio incentrate su IPv4, dimostrando una conoscenza approfondita degli ambienti di rete dual-stack e delle comuni lacune di sicurezza nelle infrastrutture organizzative.

Le organizzazioni devono dare urgentemente priorità alla protezione dei propri ambienti VMware tramite l’applicazione completa di patch, un monitoraggio avanzato delle attività dell’hypervisor e l’implementazione di funzionalità di rilevamento avanzate che vadano oltre le tradizionali soluzioni di sicurezza degli endpoint.

L'articolo Fire Ant all’attacco: come un bug in vCenter apre le porte all’inferno IT proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), represented by nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight, filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for failing to release a legal memorandum that reportedly justified the Trump administration’s acceptance of a $400 million jet gifted by the Qatari government in May.

The luxury aircraft — set to be retrofitted for use as Air Force One to the tune of hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars and later transferred to President Donald Trump’s private foundation — has raised serious legal and ethical concerns. Multiple experts and lawmakers from both parties have raised questions about whether accepting such a gift from a foreign government violates the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause and federal ethics rules. Additionally, while Trump claims Qatar reached out and offered the jet as a “gift” to him, media reports the opposite is true — his administration approached Qatar.

“It shouldn’t take 620 days to release a single, time-sensitive document,” said Lauren Harper, Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy. “How many flights could Trump have taken on his new plane in the same amount of time it would have taken the DOJ to release this one document? The government’s inability to administer FOIA makes it too easy for agencies to keep secrets, and nonexistent disclosure rules around donations to presidential libraries provide easy cover for bad actors and potential corruption.”

“President Trump’s deal to take a $400 million luxury jet from a foreign government deserves full public scrutiny — not a stiff-arm from the Department of Justice,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, which is representing FPF in its litigation. “This is precisely the kind of corrupt arrangement that public records laws are designed to expose. The DOJ cannot sit on its hands and expect the American people to wait years for the truth while serious questions about corruption, self-dealing, and foreign influence go unanswered.”

The May 2025 memorandum, reportedly signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously lobbied on behalf of the Qatari government, purportedly concluded that the Trump administration’s acceptance of the jet was legally permissible. The administration accepted the jet just days later. The circumstances surrounding the jet deal, including reports that the transaction may have been initiated by the Trump administration and that it followed a lucrative Trump private business arrangement in Qatar, have only heightened calls for transparency.

News that the luxury jet will be donated to Trump’s private presidential library foundation after he is no longer in office follows reports that ABC News and Paramount, which was seeking government approval for a merger with Skydance, resolved litigation with President Trump by agreeing to multimillion-dollar payouts to the foundation.

FPF submitted its FOIA request for the Bondi memo on May 15. Although the DOJ granted expedited processing, the department informed FPF that the estimated time for fulfilling the request was more than 600 days. As of today, the DOJ has failed to release any responsive records or provide a further timeline for production.

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

freedom.press/issues/fpf-sues-…

We’ve often thought that it must be harder than ever to learn about computers. Every year, there’s more to learn, so instead of making the gentle slope from college mainframe, to Commodore 64, to IBM PC, to NVidia supercomputer, you have to start at the end. But, really, you don’t. You can always emulate computers from simpler times, and even if you don’t need to, it can be a lot of fun.

That’s the idea behind the MonTana mini-computer. It combines “…ideas from the PDP-11, MIPS, Scott CPU, Game Boy, and JVM to make a relatively simple 16-bit computer…”

The computer runs on Java, so you can try it nearly anywhere. The console is accessed through a web browser and displays views of memory, registers, and even something that resembles a Game Boy screen. You’ll need to use assembly language until you write your own high-level language (we’d suggest Forth). There is, however, a simple operating system, MTOS.

This is clearly made for use in a classroom, and we’d love to teach a class around a computer like this. The whole thing reminds us of a 16-bit computer like the PDP-11 where everything is a two-byte word. There are only 4K bytes of memory (so 2K words). However, you can accomplish a great deal in that limited space. Thanks to the MTOS API, you don’t have to worry about writing text to the screen and other trivia.

It looks like fun. Let us know what you’ll use it for. If you want to go down a level, try CARDIAC. Or skip ahead a little, and teach kids QBasic.

hackaday.com/2025/07/28/learn-…

Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as the first one we’d heard of: Pong.

The truth is, Pong wasn’t the first video game. We suspect that many people might have had the idea, but Ralph Baer is most associated with inventing a practical video game. As a young engineer in 1951, he tried to convince his company to invest in games that you could play games on your TV set. They didn’t like the idea, but Ralph would remember the concept and act on it over a decade later.

But was it really the first time anyone had thought of it? Perhaps not. Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent in 1947 for a game that simulated launching missiles at targets with an oscilloscope display. The box took eight tubes and, being an oscilloscope, was a vector graphic device. The targets were physical dots on a screen overlay. These “amusement devices” were very expensive, and they only produced handmade prototypes.

Between 1952 and 1961, computers were coming into their own. In the UK, a man named Douglas used the CRT display of EDSAC to play naughts and crosses — also known as tic-tac-toe to Americans. Interestingly, the display was sort of “bit mapped” as it showed the bits in one of the machine’s mercury delay lines. The program featured an algorithm-driven computer player that was capable of beating humans.

Meanwhile, in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Willy Higginbotham used an analog computer and an oscilloscope to allow two people to play “tennis” against each other. There was no computer player, but still. You can see a video below. The machine didn’t survive, but the Lab built a replica in 1997.

youtube.com/embed/6PG2mdU_i8k?…

By 1961, MIT had Spacewar running on a DEC PDP-1, which became fairly famous. However, it would take Ralph Baer — remember him? — to bring the game into your home.

In 1966, he revisited his old idea and had built seven prototype games by 1968, aided by $2,500 from his employer and a couple of engineers. The resulting “brown box” game (so called because the final prototype had a simulated wood case created using brown tape) was shopped around until Magnavox decided to produce it. By the way, Baer would go on to also invent Simon and a few other games, but that’s another story.

1972: A Game Odyssey

Magnavox liked the brown box and signed a deal to produce a game based on it. In May 1972, Odyssey hit store shelves. By today’s standards, it wasn’t much. Just one or two paddles and a moving dot. Graphics and color were plastic overlays on your screen. Check out those controllers in the promotional video below.

youtube.com/embed/jLGBtkKPj2U?…
The Odyssey looked good, but its controller design was unusual. (Public Domain)
In a year, the box sold 69,000 units. By 1975, there were 350,000 out in the world. The $99.95 price was high for those days. They did some test marketing with the system, then called Skill-O-Vision, and decided to add some generic board games that seemed pretty pointless. If you wanted the shooting game that was part of the prototypes, that was extra.

It is hard to remember how unusual the idea of hooking something up to your TV was in the early 1970s. If you read the announcement in the February 1973 issue of Popular Electronics, you’ll see they explain about the antenna-game switch and note that it is “safe for youngsters.”

Oh, and if you are under a certain age, you might have to stretch your imagination of what an 18-inch TV looks like. It was a different world and arcades in those days had electromechanical devices like pinball machines, bowling machines, and very rare games that had real electronics in them.

Pong?

You might notice that the video doesn’t mention Pong. The reason? While what we call Pong was one of the 12 games on the Odyssey, it wasn’t called that. That name was from Atari and Nolan Bushnell (who later started Chuck E. Cheese).

Bushnell wanted to create electronic games after working while in college for an amusement park where he’d seen electromechanical arcade games. He set out with a partner, Ted Dabney, to form a company to create a game similar to Spacewar. Called Computer Space, it arrived in amusement parks and similar venues in 1970 with the help of partner company Nutting Associates.

youtube.com/embed/o019DYaSxUQ?…

The game was a commercial flop. However, Bushnell wanted to try again. He hired Allan Alcorn. Here’s where the story gets strange.

The goal was to build a driving game for Bally, but Alcorn had no experience with games. Bushnell claims that he had played tennis on a PDP-1 in college and decided to get Alcorn to create a tennis game as a warm-up project. However, there is considerable evidence that Bushnell had, in fact, seen the Magnavox Odyssey and was looking to copy it.

Whatever the truth is, a prototype Pong game wound up in a local bar late in 1972, about three months after the Odyssey was on store shelves. It was such a hit that the coin acceptor filled up in only a few days.

Bushnell originally shopped the game to Bally, where he wanted to use it to fulfill his existing contract, and to Midway. However, once he realized it was a hit, he decided Atari should produce it themselves. He told Bally that Midway didn’t want it. Then he told Midway that Bally didn’t want it. As a result, both declined to buy the machine. A few months later, Atari started producing Pong arcade games for sale.

Back Home

The Tele-Games was Atari’s 1975 home version of Pong. CC-BY-SA 3.0 by [Evan Amos]Atari realized they could tap into the same market as the Odyssey and set out to build a home system using a custom LSI chip, which — in those days — cost quite a bit to produce (about $50,000 then; $388,000 today). Code named Darlene, the device was ready by late 1974. Sears ordered 150,000 rebranded as “Sears’ Tele-Games” and sold them for $98.95. You’d have to drop an extra eight bucks for the AC power adapter.

This led to Magnavox suing Atari. Atari capitulated and struck a deal to be considered a licensee for $1.5 million and other concessions.

During the same time, Magnavox was also feeling the pinch of production costs. The box, which had cost $37 to produce, was up to $47, and there was no appetite for raising the $100 price tag. To make it more affordable, they also turned to integrated circuits (the original was full of discrete devices and was entirely analog).

Chips for the Win

Magnavox used Texas Instruments to develop a chip set for its new 1975 games. TI developed more advanced chips, and by combining chips, you could make new kinds of games. By 1976, TI began selling these parts to the general public. However, they would ultimately not succeed because another company had arguably done a better job: General Instruments.
It was very easy to build a video game with the General Instruments chip.
General Instruments created the single-chip Pong game. The AY-3-8500 was nearly everything you needed to create a Pong game. In fact, it could also play soccer, squash (one or two players), and two rifle games, with the right equipment. You could add a few components to get color and a few more to get four players instead of two.

These chips were cheap and made it extremely simple to create a workable video game. If you had a way to sell them, this was the answer. Coleco was the first, but not the last, to be a customer. We’ve heard there were over 200 products from the era that utilized the IC, including the Odyssey 2000 and 3000, Radio Shack’s TV Scoreboard, and Sears’ Hockey Pong. The chips were also popular among hobby builders. Prior to that, it was a big project to make even a simple game (like the one on page 61 of the November 1972 Popular Electronics magazine).

The AY-3-8500 wasn’t, however, the only game in town — no pun intended. National Semiconductor had its own entry into the market. MOSTek was another entrant. They all played the same basic games with a bouncing ball and some controllers. None of these could stand against General Instruments’ momentum. We saw one of these recently in one of the many little-known attempts to cash in on the video game craze.

A company called Universal Research produced the F4301 in 1976. It featured two tennis-like games, as well as two unique car racing games. This helped it a bit, but it was still no match for the simple designs possible with the General Instruments devices. Even TI finally threw in the towel and produced a clone of the General Instrument chip.

There were so many of these made that they are still easy to find and use. Even on a breadboard. Can’t imagine how you’d do this without a chip? Simulate it.

The Future

Who could have imagined where games on video screens would go? In 1978, Space Invaders hit the arcade scene. But that’s an entirely different subject.

hackaday.com/2025/07/28/a-hist…

Il sogno di tutti è avere un assistente in casa che faccia lavori fisici come il celebre film “io e Caterina” non è vero? Sappiate che non ci siamo molto lontani.

27 luglio 2025 – Il futuro delle faccende domestiche avrà sicuramente un volto – anzi, un corpo – umanoide, ma per ora serve ancora un operatore umano dietro le quinte. È quanto emerge dalla presentazione ufficiale di HIVA Haiwa, il nuovo prototipo di robot sviluppato da Haier Group, gigante cinese noto per i suoi elettrodomestici smart.

Come riportato dal portale IT Home, HIVA Haiwa è progettato per svolgere attività domestiche come lavare i pavimenti, avviare la lavatrice, stirare e piegare i vestiti. Tuttavia, c’è un dettaglio importante: il robot non esegue queste operazioni in completa autonomia, ma è controllato a distanza da specialisti di Haier. Questa scelta rientra nella fase di apprendimento del robot, che attraverso l’esperienza operativa accumula dati per migliorare le proprie capacità e, in futuro, diventare (si spera) più indipendente.

Un robot umanoide “domestico”, ma con limiti

HIVA Haiwa misura 165 cm di altezza e pesa circa 70 kg. È dotato di due braccia meccaniche e si sposta grazie a una piattaforma mobile a ruote. Grazie ai suoi 44 gradi di libertà, può afferrare e maneggiare oggetti posizionati fino a 2 metri dal pavimento, rendendolo potenzialmente molto versatile in un ambiente domestico.

Il design del robot ricorda un altro prototipo sviluppato da Haier Brothers Robotics Technology, una sussidiaria del gruppo Haier Smart Home, in collaborazione con Beijing Xingdong Jiyuan Technology. Le due aziende hanno stretto un accordo di cooperazione nel marzo 2025 con l’obiettivo di creare robot specializzati per scenari smart home.

Verso una casa sempre più intelligente

Secondo quanto dichiarato da Haier, l’intento finale non è solo avere un robot che pulisce, ma integrare HIVA Haiwa nell’ecosistema della smart home, dove potrà coordinarsi con altri dispositivi intelligenti: elettrodomestici, sensori, impianti domotici e sistemi di monitoraggio. L’idea è che, grazie all’intelligenza artificiale e all’interconnessione, questi robot possano diventare veri assistenti domestici, capaci di gestire in autonomia gran parte delle incombenze quotidiane.

Per il momento, però, HIVA Haiwa resta un progetto sperimentale, ancora lontano da un utilizzo commerciale diffuso. Nonostante ciò, la strada tracciata da Haier e dai suoi partner mostra chiaramente come i robot potrebbero trasformare il concetto stesso di “casa intelligente” nei prossimi anni.

L'articolo Caterina sta arrivando? Lava, stira e piega e comunica con gli altri elettrodomestici in casa proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Oltre 200.000 siti WordPress sono vulnerabili a causa di un errore critico nel popolare plugin Post SMTP , che consente agli aggressori di ottenere il pieno controllo dell’account amministratore. Alla vulnerabilità è stato assegnato l’identificatore CVE-2025-24000 e interessa tutte le versioni del plugin fino alla 3.2.0 inclusa. Al momento della pubblicazione, la correzione è stata installata su meno della metà dei sistemi che utilizzano questo componente.

Post SMTP è uno strumento per l’invio sicuro di email da siti WordPress, che sostituisce la funzione integrata wp_mail(). Oltre 400.000 installazioni lo rendono una delle soluzioni più popolari nella sua categoria. Tuttavia, a maggio 2025, gli specialisti di PatchStack hanno ricevuto una segnalazione secondo cui la REST API del plugin presentava una logica di controllo degli accessi errata. Invece di verificare i diritti degli utenti, il sistema si limitava al solo controllo dell’autorizzazione, consentendo anche ai visitatori con privilegi bassi, come gli abbonati, di accedere ai dati protetti.

In particolare, un abbonato poteva avviare la reimpostazione della password di amministratore e intercettare l’email corrispondente tramite i log delle email, il cui accesso non era limitato. Ciò creava una scappatoia per assumere il controllo dell’intero pannello amministrativo del sito senza la necessità di sfruttare vulnerabilità di terze parti o di accedere fisicamente al server.

Il problema è stato segnalato allo sviluppatore Saad Iqbal il 23 maggio. Tre giorni dopo, ha fornito un’implementazione aggiornata della funzione get_logs_permission, che implementava un controllo completo dei diritti utente prima di accedere all’API. La versione con la correzione, la 3.3.0, è stata pubblicata l’11 giugno.

Nonostante l’aggiornamento, le statistiche di WordPress.org mostrano una situazione allarmante: oltre il 51% dei siti utilizza ancora versioni vulnerabili. La situazione è particolarmente pericolosa per gli utenti della versione 2.x: secondo una stima, circa 96.800 siti continuano a utilizzare queste versioni, che contengono non solo la vulnerabilità CVE-2025-24000, ma anche altre falle di sicurezza note.

Il problema evidenzia la vulnerabilità sistemica dell’ecosistema WordPress, dove anche gli aggiornamenti di sicurezza più importanti non vengono installati immediatamente. Data la facilità di sfruttamento e l’uso diffuso del plugin, è prevedibile che gli attacchi a risorse non protette continueranno e diventeranno più diffusi. L’eliminazione della minaccia richiede un aggiornamento immediato alla versione 3.3.0 o superiore.

L'articolo Vulnerabilità critica nel plugin Post SMTP di WordPress: oltre 200.000 siti a rischio proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.