When you think of a tape recorder, you might think of a cassette tape. However, [Michael Simpson] has an old Star-Lite small reel-to-reel tape machine. It isn’t a repair so much as a rework to make it work better. These cheap machines were never the best, although a $19 tape player back then was a luxury.

Part of the problem is that the design of the tape player wasn’t all that good to begin with. The motor runs off two C cells in parallel. When these were new in the 1960s, that would have meant conventional carbon-zinc batteries, so the voltage would have varied wildly. Didn’t matter, though, because the drive was directly to the tape reel, so the speed also varied based on how much tape was left on the reel.

The amplifier has four transistors. [Michael] decided to replace the capacitors on the unit. He noticed, too, that the volume control is in line with the microphone when recording, so even though the recording was supposedly in need of repair, it turned out to be simply a case of the volume control being turned down. Pretty impressive for a six-decade-old piece of consumer electronics.

The capacitor change-out was simple enough. Some cleaning and lubing was also in order. Did it help? You’ll have to listen and decide for yourself.

So, no real repair was in the works, but it is an interesting look back at an iconic piece of consumer tech. Tape recorders like this were an early form of social media. No kidding. If you’d rather not buy a tape recorder, you could roll your own.

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The switch from analog telephone exchanges to a purely digital network meant a revolution in just about any way imaginable. Gone were the bulky physical switches and associated system limitations. In the UK this change happened in the early 1980s, with what the Post Office Telecommunications (later British Telecom) and associated companies called System X. Along with the system’s rollout, promotional videos like this 1983 one were meant to educate the public and likely any investors on what a smashing idea the whole system was.

Although for the average person in the UK the introduction of the new digital telephone network probably didn’t mean a major change beyond a few new features like group calls, the same wasn’t true for the network operator whose exchanges and networks got much smaller and more efficient, as explained in the video. To this day System X remains the backbone of the telephone network in the UK.

To get an idea of the immense scale of the old analog system, this 1982 video (also embedded below) shows the system as it existed before System X began to replace it. The latter part of the video provides significant detail of System X and its implementation at the time, although when this video was produced much of the system was still being developed.

Thanks to [James Bowman] for the tip.

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Remember the 80286? It was the sequel to the 8086, the chip that started it all, and it powered a great number of machines in the early years of the personal computing revolution. It might not be as relevant today, but regardless, [Daniel Balsom] has now released a comprehensive test suite for the ancient chip. (via The Register)

The complete battery of tests are available on Github, and were produced using a Harris N80C286-12 from 1986. “The real mode test suite contains 326 instruction forms, containing nearly 1.5 million instruction executions with over 32 million cycle states captured,” Daniel explains. “This is fewer tests than the previous 8088 test suite, but test coverage is better overall due to improved instruction generation methods.” For now, the tests focus on the 286 running in real mode. There are no “unreal” or protected mode tests, but [Daniel] aims to deliver the in the future.

[Daniel] uses the tests with the ArduinoX86, a platform that uses the microcontroller to control and test old-school CPUs. The tests aid with development of emulators like [Daniel’s] own MartyPC, by verifying the CPU’s behavior in a cycle-accurate way.

We’ve explored some secrets of the 286 before, too. If you’ve been doing your own digging into Intel’s old processors, or anyone else’s for that matter, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

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L’azienda di sicurezza cloud Wiz ha identificato una vulnerabilità critica in NVIDIA Container Toolkit, identificata come CVE-2025-23266 e con un punteggio CVSS di 9.0. La vulnerabilità, denominata NVIDIAScape, potrebbe rappresentare una seria minaccia per i servizi cloud che utilizzano l’intelligenza artificiale e la containerizzazione basata su GPU.

Il bug riguarda tutte le versioni di NVIDIA Container Toolkit fino alla 1.17.7 inclusa, nonché NVIDIA GPU Operator fino alla versione 25.3.0. La vulnerabilità è già stata risolta rispettivamente nelle nuove versioni 1.17.8 e 25.3.1.

Il problema è legato all’utilizzo dei cosiddetti hook OCI, progettati per inizializzare i container. Uno di questi hook, “createContainer“, viene utilizzato con una configurazione errata, che consente a un aggressore di caricare una libreria dannosa all’avvio del container.

Il problema è che gli hook vengono eseguiti con privilegi elevati e nel contesto del file system del contenitore, consentendo all’attaccante di iniettare codice con il minimo sforzo. I ricercatori di Wiz hanno sottolineato che l’attacco può essere eseguito con sole tre righe nel Dockerfile, che impostano la variabile LD_PRELOAD e caricano la libreria dannosa. Di conseguenza, l’attaccante può non solo uscire dal contenitore, ma anche prendere il controllo del sistema host.

Ciò che è particolarmente allarmante è che la vulnerabilità interessa circa il 37% degli ambienti cloud che utilizzano l’intelligenza artificiale. Ciò significa che un singolo contenitore compromesso può essere utilizzato per accedere a dati e modelli di altri client ospitati sugli stessi server fisici. L’attacco potrebbe quindi portare a furti di proprietà intellettuale, interruzioni del flusso di lavoro e diniego di servizio.

Wiz aveva già segnalato due problemi simili nel toolkit di NVIDIA, CVE-2024-0132 e CVE-2025-23359 , entrambi con possibilità di acquisizione completa del sistema. La nuova vulnerabilità ha dimostrato ancora una volta quanto sia debole il meccanismo di isolamento nei container. Secondo il team, l’utilizzo esclusivo dei container come misura di sicurezza è inaccettabile: sono necessarie barriere aggiuntive come la virtualizzazione, soprattutto nelle infrastrutture multi-tenant.

La situazione di NVIDIAScape solleva interrogativi urgenti sulla resilienza delle infrastrutture moderne agli attacchi, dove vettori di hacking noti e legacy potrebbero essere più efficaci di ipotetiche minacce basate sull’intelligenza artificiale. Le problematiche a livello di componenti di base, come i container hook, dimostrano che l’attenzione ai dettagli e gli aggiornamenti regolari rimangono elementi chiave della difesa.

L'articolo L’isolamento dei container è a rischio. Solo 3 righe di codice per violare gli ambienti AI di NVIDIA proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Most research on electroplating tries to find ways to make it plate parts more uniformly. [Ajc150] took the opposite direction, though, with his selective electroplating project, which uses an electrode mounted on a CNC motion system to electrochemically print images onto a metal sheet (GitHub repository).

Normally, selective electroplating would use a mask, but masks don’t allow gradients to be deposited. However, electroplating tends to occur most heavily at the point closest to the anode, and the effect gets stronger the closer the anode is. To take advantage of this effect, [ajc150] replaced the router of an inexpensive 3018 CNC machine with a nickel anode, mounted an electrolyte bath in the workspace, and laid a flat steel cathode in it. When the anode moves close to a certain point on the steel cathode, most of the plating takes place there.

To actually print an image with this setup, [ajc150] wrote a Python program to convert an image into set of G-code instructions for the CNC. The darker a pixel of the image was, the longer the electrode would spend over the corresponding part of the metal sheet. Since darkness wasn’t linearly proportional to plating time, the program used a gamma correction function to adjust times, though this did require [ajc150] to recalibrate the setup after each change. The system works well enough to print recognizable images, but still has room for improvement. In particular, [ajc150] would like to extend this to a faster multi-nozzle system, and have the algorithm take into account spillover between the pixel being plated and its neighbors.

This general technique is reminiscent of a metal 3D printing method we’ve seen before. We more frequently see this process run in reverse to cut metal.

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😍😍😍

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#marvel #Fantastic4

Neha Madhira grew up in North Texas with the TV constantly buzzing with world news. Madhira, now 24, recognized that journalism was key to keeping her family informed on the happenings back home in India. But with state-sanctioned violence limiting journalists on the ground from reporting, and few legacy media outlets with reporters that looked like her left to report on it, Madhira also knew there were gaps to be filled.

Nearly a decade later, Madhira is bridging the gaps in Western media’s health and education coverage of the Middle East-North Africa region, South Asia, and their diasporas. The contacts she’s built have allowed her to expand her reporting focus — she recently collaborated with Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) on an article for The Intercept featuring testimonials from journalists targeted by the Israeli military.

“In a time where press freedom is definitely in question in the U.S. right now, and censorship on social media and in newsroom settings is even becoming more and more common, it’s really important for me that I stay true to my values of why I started reporting,” Madhira said. “I use freelancing to try my best to cover that gap in reporting when it comes to Western media, and try to cover the communities that I know deserve a platform.”

Madhira first spent years covering breaking news, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the social movements of 2020 for local newsrooms in Austin, Texas, while studying journalism and women’s and gender issues. But with activism movements roaring overseas, coupled with the lack of coverage on the impacts of the pandemic in India, she saw freelancing as an opportunity to cover issues happening in countries that face extreme press censorship for audiences overseas and in the U.S.

“A big part of my job during the pandemic, and even now, is reaching out to health care officials, regardless of what’s happening, to actually see who it’s affecting, why it’s affecting them, and what resources people need,” Madhira said. “If there’s a possibility that that information is being withheld from the public, that becomes a problem. How are we supposed to continue to inform and educate the public on how to stay safe during a pandemic or epidemic if we don’t even have that information to begin with?”

She has built close relationships with journalists on the ground in Iran, Afghanistan, India, Gaza, and the West Bank, relying on their reporting to reach audiences in the U.S. and abroad. Recognizing the privilege she holds, Madhira does her best to ensure their perspectives are reflected in her writing.

“I covered the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran very extensively,” she said. “Two journalists who I really looked up to were arrested around this time last year. I wrote a story on that, and I noticed that a lot of Iranian and Iranian American activists were reaching out to me, appreciating the fact that the story was written, because even writing about their release and the details of how they are doing and how journalism and activism is continuing within the country is a privilege.”

Over the past year and a half, Madhira has covered the medical and humanitarian infrastructure collapses in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the campus encampments in protest of Israel’s actions, and the shadowy organizations collaborating with the government to identify and persecute students and others who are critical of Israel.

“As we see less and less news coming out of Gaza, I urge people to not look away.”

Neha Madhira

With more than 180 journalists killed by Israel to date, media blackouts, and censorship on social media, Madhira writes to amplify the voices of her colleagues remaining on the ground, including those whose stories she wrote about in The Intercept.

“I have advocated for Palestine since I was a child, and at the beginning of October 2023, I was horrified at the language being used to dehumanize Palestinians,” she said. “As a journalist, I was seeing the gaps in Western media coverage and its support of Israel, and I wanted to help change this narrative in any way I could. As we see less and less news coming out of Gaza, I urge people to not look away and to pay closer attention to passive voice being used to describe the atrocities Palestinians continue to face every day.”

While the stories that Madhira tells are urgent and deserving of immediate attention, communicating with people on the ground in Gaza is a slow, challenging process. “Most of the people I’ve interviewed, whether that be journalists, or medical workers, or humanitarian workers, there is a small gap every single day that they have access to the internet, and we have used that to communicate with each other every single day,” she said. “I continue to do that because their voices are the most important and the most pertinent.”

Reporting from the U.S. on Palestine has not come without its own battles against censorship. Having experienced “shadow banning” that has limited visibility of her social media posts, she said the public must pay attention to the ways social media platforms moderate content to censor certain news, and she calls for users to consume content carefully. By amplifying journalists’ content on social media, independent reporting can reach wider audiences and fight against algorithmic suppression, Madhira added.

“There are a lot more people who are in the dark about what is happening than you would think,” she said. “There are so many nonprofit, independent newsrooms, not only in the U.S., but around the world who do incredible reporting for very little money, and it’s important to pay attention, because these journalists are some of the most skilled and experienced within their field.”

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