Lo studio della lingua della Torah riserva continue sorprese nell’esegesi della Scrittura, nella preparazione all’Eucaristia domenicale e nella meditazione sui Salmi. Gesù parlava aramaico – lingua affine all’ebraico, un vernacolare elegante, si potrebbe dire, più parlato che scritto – e respirava l’atmosfera della sinagoga, e in particolare assimilò perfettamente la didattica farisaica.
La storia d’amore che Elena Loewenthal (che è stata docente allo ISS dell’Università di Pavia) narra in riferimento a una lingua, l’ebraico, per la quale ella ha speso una vita di studi, saggi e traduzioni, non intende costituire né un compendio di grammatica, né un sintetico manuale, né una storia della letteratura, ma vuole testimoniare la passione per una lingua scarna e densa di rivelazioni, ruvida e a volte invece dolcissima. Una lingua senza vocali, inflessibile nell’evitare di nominare un Dio irrappresentabile, e assieme feconda di proposte per aggirare il divieto e collegare il Signore dell’alleanza con le vite di chi ha creduto alla sua promessa.
L’antichissima lingua ebraica, lingua «sacra» per antonomasia, non è mai morta, anche se per molto tempo non è stata praticata ufficialmente. Essa obbliga il neofita italiano a un ribaltamento visuale (si legge da destra a sinistra) e a una concentrazione lessicale inconsueta, dato che la radice consonantica va integrata con suoni vocalici appresi sia per regola sia per uso. Eppure, l’A. afferma che «ogni volta, ogni sacrosanta volta che ho visto l’italiano e l’ebraico incontrarsi – sulla pagina, nella voce –, è puntualmente successo che le due lingue si sono regalate qualcosa a vicenda: una sfumatura di significato, un’accoppiata di suoni ben riuscita, una costruzione della frase mai tentata prima» (p. 9).
Alcuni accostamenti sono folgoranti. La lingua di studio si dice Ivrit e il patriarca Abramo è il primo a essere chiamato Avraham haivri (cfr Gen 14,13), ossia «colui che sta dall’altra parte», che passa, oltrepassa, nella fiducia all’appello che si è sentito rivolgere: “Esci dalla tua terra…”» (p. 33). Colpisce la somiglianza del ritmo della lingua con la voce di Dio. Dio è infatti «voce» in quel passo di 1 Re 19,12 in cui dona a Elia una «voce: silenzio sottile» (qol demamah daqah).
Mentre ci introduce alle consonanti, alle contaminazioni d’uso e ai grandi letterati, l’A. distingue la safah dal leshon haqodesh. La prima è la tollerante lingua praticata, che gli ebrei utilizzavano accanto – e a volte ibridandola – alle altre lingue della loro travagliata diaspora. Il secondo è il lessico santo, intangibile, con cui Dio ha creato il mondo e dettato la Torah a Mosè sul Sinai.
Loewenthal regala un divertente «allegato» ai nostri primi manuali di apprendimento e ci invita a una strana libertà di interpretazione: le tavole della Legge sono «incise» (cherot) nella pietra, ma un maestro raccomandava di leggere, proprio in quel termine, cherut, cioè «libertà», nel senso che lo stesso spazio bianco può dire qualcosa di nuovo a chi medita una narrazione o una preghiera così antica di cui nessun glossario o nessuna grammatica può indicare il significato definitivo. L’obbedienza si accompagna alla creatività.
«Eccomi» (Hinneh), dice pregando colui che crede nel Dio di Gesù Cristo, ricordando la vicenda di Samuele. Dio ci chiama e noi rispondiamo: «Mi hai chiamato, eccomi». E poi, in modo più maturo: «Parla, Signore, il tuo servo ti ascolta». Ascoltiamo dunque la vibrazione di una parola, che si inscrive in una storia d’amore. Cifrata, come ogni storia d’amore.
Nonostante Pechino si sia sempre dichiarata neutrale rispetto al conflitto in Ucraina, le evidenze emerse recentemente dimostrano un coinvolgimento ben più concreto nella guerra di Vladimir Putin. La Cina, infatti, fornisce a Mosca componentistica e materiali essenziali
Tom Petty – la fondazione celebra Wildflowers con un regalo ai fans….. freezonemagazine.com/news/tom-… La fondazione Tom Petty ha celebrato il trentesimo anniversario di Wildflowers pubblicando un autentico tesoro per i fan: un filmato inedito delle prove accompagnato dalla struggente ballata Crawling Back To You. Il video d’archivio, diretto da Justin Kreutzmann, mostra le prove del tour Dogs With Wings del 1995 riprese dal
Tom Petty – la fondazione celebra Wildflowers con un regalo ai fans….. freezonemagazine.com/news/tom-… La fondazione Tom Petty ha celebrato il trentesimo anniversario di Wildflowers pubblicando un autentico tesoro per i fan: un filmato inedito delle prove accompagnato dalla struggente ballata Crawling Back To You. Il video d’archivio, diretto da Justin Kreutzmann, mostra le prove del tour Dogs With Wings del 1995 riprese dal
L'articolo proviene da #StartMag e viene ricondiviso sulla comunità Lemmy @Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Nel giro di una settimana il colosso di Mountain View ha incassato tre multe: una in Francia e una negli Stati Uniti per motivi legati alla privacy, ma la più salata (2,95 miliardi di euro) arriva dall'Ue, per pratiche abusive nel settore della tecnologia pubblicitaria
If you haven’t heard of magnetic bubble memory before it’s basically obsolete nonvolatile memory. Since the 1970s when it was introduced this type of memory has been outperformed in every dimension including durability, reliability, price, density, performance, and so on. For any given application of bubble memory you will be able to find an alternative technology which is better in many ways. Except if you want some old tech to geek out over, in that case magnetic bubble memory is for you!
In his article [Scott] begins by introducing the Intel 7110 Bubble Memory branded variously as “Intel Magnetics” and “Memtech”. These chips are marked up with what [Scott] explains are a defect map. The defect map is for indicating which storage areas are defective so they can be avoided. This map is printed atop the package and also stored in the bubble memory itself. [Scott] says the engineering samples have the defect map set to “FF”, but it’s not clear if that means “defective” or “not defective”. If you know, please do enlighten us in the comments!
In his fascinating and detailed notes [Scott] goes on to discuss various multibus boards, which can integrate multiple memories; and mutlimodules, which can plug in to multibus boards. [Scott] shows off photos of clone multimodules and boards he made himself. He goes on to discuss HP 98259 bubble memory boards, the Memtech bubble memory cassette system, the Allen Bradley 8000MBC bubble memory cassette, Heathkit H8 bubble memory boards, and our favorite Scott’s Basic Bubble Computer. We have discussed magnetic bubble memory here on Hackaday before in articles such as Magnetic Bubble Memory Brought To Life On Heathkit and Magnetic Bubble Memory Farewell Tour.
Semiconductor fabrication is complicated requiring nasty chemicals for everything from dopants to etchants. Working with such chemicals at home is dangerous and after releasing hydrochloride acid fumes into his lab, [ProjectsInFlight] decided the time was right to get one for a mere $200.
I can hear the readers down in the comments already saying, “why not just make one?” But a properly engineered fume hood provides laminar flow which absolutely ensures no leakage of fumes out of the hood. However, such proper engineering comes with an impressive price tag, so the used market was the only choice. This is less dangerous then it sounds as companies are required by both OSHA and the EPA to clean their fume hoods before removal, so no chemical residue should remain after purchase.
After inspecting a more expensive unit, [ProjectsInFlight] bought a smaller unit destined for the scrap heap. Very little work was required to get it actually working. Some LED lighting and cleaning got the machine in a workable condition. A neatly welded table was built for the hood with an acrylic painted plywood work surface. While professional fume hoods use solid epoxy work tops, these are expensive, and polyurethane should be fine. A high flow rate fan neatly tied up the fume hood restoration.
However, merely having a fume hood is not enough for some. Therefore, [ProjectsInFlight] turned to his lathe to create a lab rack. This device is a kind of ladder looking thing which provides numerous mounting points for clamps making chemistry easier and safer. Some careful and somewhat sketchy machining resulted in a professional looking lab rack for a fraction of the professional price tag. The whole project was neatly tied up with machined chilled water and vacuum inlet ports.
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo articolo21.org/2025/09/il-9-se… 245 giornalisti uccisi, un dato che va aggiornato continuamente… Questo il numero dei giornalisti uccisi sulla striscia di Gaza perché ci raccontavano quello che lì sta accadendo. Uccisi per fare il loro lavoro di cronisti. Come se il diritto
come accennavo nella precedente presentazione, cercavo un luogo dove poter far vetrina delle 'robe che cucio'.
sono completamente autodidatta e mi muovo con il passaparola per ricevere commissioni per consolidare tecniche e ampliare gli orizzonti, oltre che per guadagnarmi da vivere.
studio modellistica appena ho un attimo, ma mi appoggio anche ad artigiani modellisti che creano cartamodelli che poi cucirò per voi (adulti e bambini).
uso solo tessuti certificati, da rivenditori scelti.
come piattaforma ho scelto di utilizzare Pixelfed.uno.
sperando di non sbagliare proverò a linkare la mia vetrina.
fatemi sapere se l'operazione è andata a buon fine, grazie
Abito bimba in popeline 100% cotone certificato GOTS. Cucio robe tentando di guadagnarmi da vivere. Cucio più o meno di tutto. Autodidatta, ho iniziato un anno fa e sono aperta a sperimentazioni. Studio modellistica nelle ore buche e propongo prezzi accessibili che mi consentano di cucire sempre di più e sempre con più precisione e tecnica. Se sei interessat*, contattami!
We were pleasantly surprised when congressional Republicans introduced our farewell article to the former president, titled Biden’s press freedom legacy: Empty words and hypocrisy, into the record at a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week.
That’s great — it’s always nice to have our work recognized. But if Republican lawmakers agree with us that former President Joe Biden was bad on press freedom, someone should really tell them about this Donald Trump character who’s in office now. All the abuses we identified in the article Republicans cited have (as the article predicted) worsened under the new president, and he’s come up with plenty of new ones too.
We wrote a letter to let the committee know that if it’s serious about addressing the issues our article discussed, regardless of who is in the White House, we’re here to help. We’ll let you know if they reply (but don’t hold your breath). Read the letter here or below.
Knobs are ubiquitous in technology user interfaces, but touchscreens are increasingly replacing them for interface controls. The latest project from [upir] combines a rotating knob with a touchscreen for a stunning result. The knob-over-display design features a touchscreen where you can place and remove a spinning knob, creating an interface reminiscent of Microsoft’s Surface Dial but at a fraction of the cost.
The core functionality of this device relies on the MT6701 magnetic encoder, which precisely tracks the orientation of the surrounding magnetic field. This encoder is held in place with a 3D-printed jig behind the small touchscreen, hiding the encoder without blocking the magnetic field generated by the magnet above the display. Most circular magnets are axially magnetized, meaning their larger face is one pole. However, diametrically magnetized magnets, where opposite sides of the smaller face are the poles, are used here.
To avoid scratching the screen and ensure smooth turning, [upir] designed a knob that holds the diametrically magnetized magnet slightly above the screen, with a ball bearing connecting the outside of the knob to the center resting on the screen. All the design files needed to recreate this are available on [upir]’s GitHub page; be sure to check them out. Also, browse through our back catalog for other knob-related projects.
“La cura del creato rappresenta una vera e propria vocazione per ogni essere umano, un impegno da svolgere all’interno del creato stesso, senza mai dimenticare che siamo creature tra le creature e non creatori”.
For 164 days, Rümeysa Öztürk has faced deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and for 83 days, Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.
Recording police is not ‘violence’
It was bad enough when government officials claimed that journalists are inciting violence by reporting. But now, they’re accusing reporters of actually committing violence.
The supposed violence by reporters? Recording videos. At least three times recently, a government official or lawyer has argued that simply recording law enforcement or Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers is a form of violence. Read more here.
Thanks for citing us, House Republicans. Now do something
That’s great — it’s always nice to have our work recognized. But if these lawmakers agree with us that former President Joe Biden was bad on press freedom, someone should really tell them about this Donald Trump character who’s in office now. All the abuses we identified in the article Republicans cited have (as the article predicted) worsened under the new president, and he’s come up with plenty of new ones too.
We wrote a letter to let the committee know that if it’s serious about addressing the issues our article discussed, regardless of who is in office, we’re here to help. We’ll let you know if they reply (but don’t hold your breath). Read the letter here.
Will secret law prevail in drug boat massacre?
The Trump administration has not provided any legal justification for blowing up a boat carrying 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers on the Caribbean Sea. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out if lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel were consulted before the slaughter and, if so, what they said.
If there is an OLC opinion about the targeting of the Venezuelan boat, the public and Congress should be able to debate it right now. Unfortunately, the government has long taken the position that OLC opinions should be secret, even though there should be no such thing as secret law in the United States. Read more here, and, if you want to learn more about government secrecy and what we’re doing to combat it, subscribe to The Classifieds.
Stop the judicial secrecy bill
An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would allow lawmakers to scrub information about themselves from the internet. The bill fails to achieve its stated purpose of keeping lawmakers safe — except from investigative journalism.
This week we helped lead a letter to senators from press freedom and civil liberties organizations objecting to the misguided legislation. Even if the NDAA amendment does not succeed, it’s likely that this bill will be back, and we’ll be ready to fight it. Read the letter here.
ICE revives contract for spyware
In 2023, Biden issued an executive order limiting government use of commercial spyware. Subsequently, the Biden administration issued a stop-work order on a $2 million contract between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Paragon, a spyware vendor that makes products that have reportedly been used to spy on journalists.
Editor and Publisher Trump’s anti-press rhetoric is “not bluster; it is not a personality trait. It is deliberate,” our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker’s Stephanie Sugars said. “It is very much at the cost of the strength of our social fabric and our shared reality.”
RSF Great work by our friends at Reporters Without Borders organizing this response to Israel’s slaughter of journalists in Gaza. It’s unfortunate that more U.S. outlets did not participate. If the outlets you support were not among the few, ask them why.
The Dissenter We spoke to The Dissenter about the Illinois Supreme Court’s ridiculous ruling that the state’s law against strategic lawsuits against public participation doesn’t protect reporting, and the recently passed bill to repair the damage.
The New York Times We talked to the Times about influencers replacing journalists at the White House. Yes, it’s awful that Trump won’t grant reporters the honor of getting lied to at press briefings. But the decimation of FOIA — a source of facts, not spin — is even more concerning.
The Hill Kristi Noem’s complaints underscore why news outlets can’t settle frivolous lawsuits. Now, the door is wide open for government officials to question every editing decision news outlets make, whether to shorten an interview for time or to not air lies and nonsense.
Reason A good recap of why “originalist” attacks on the actual malice standard — which limits defamation claims by public figures — are so disingenuous.
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo articolo21.org/2025/09/illumin… Un evento lungo tre giorni che tiene insieme tante cose: una riflessione sul presente e il futuro cooperazione internazionale, sul mestiere di giornalista nel raccontare il mondo, soprattutto quando il mondo è in
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss slop in history, five-alarm fires, and AI art (not) at Dragon Con.
EMANUEL: We published about a dozen stories this week and I only wrote one of them. I’ve already talked about it at length on this week’s podcast so I suggest you read the article and then listen to that if you’re interested in OnlyFans piracy, bad DMCA takedown request processes, and our continued overreliance on Google search for navigating the internet.
This post is for subscribers only
Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now
Marco Cappato a Rovereto: “Storie dalla fine – Proiezione e dialogo
Venerdì 12 settembre 2025 – ore 18:00 Mart – Sala Conferenze, Rovereto
Nell’ambito dell’Oriente Occidente Dance Festival, un evento speciale che unisce arte, riflessione e impegno civile: “Storie dalla fine”.
In programma la proiezione del film Polvo serán di Carlos Marques-Marcet, con le coreografie di Marcos Morau, seguita da un incontro con Marco Cappato, attivista per i diritti civili e tesoriere dell’Associazione Luca Coscioni.
Un’occasione per esplorare in modo intimo e coraggioso il tema del fine vita, abitando le zone di confine tra amore, libertà e scelta.
L’appuntamento rientra nel progetto speciale “La Veronal Studio”.
Ingresso gratuito fino a esaurimento posti Versione inglese disponibile sul sito di Oriente Occidente
Coordinamento: Giacomo Basile Conduzione Valerio Francesco Silenzi Ticker: Clara Lacorte e Flavia Falduto Digiwall: Greta Giglio Collegamento: Leonardo Macciocca In redazione: Filippo Saggioro Marco Bertolini Antonio Fera Alessi Garzina Pietro… L'articolo Tg del 5 Settembre 2025 su Lumsanews.
#NoiSiamoLeScuole questa settimana è dedicato ai nuovi Asili nido all’avanguardia in provincia di Cremona e di Brescia, realizzati grazie al #PNRR.
Qui tutti i dettagli ➡ https://www.mim.gov.
With the days of dial-up and pitiful 2G data connections long behind most of us, it would seem tempting to stop caring about how much data an end-user is expected to suck down that big and wide broadband tube. This is a problem if your respective tube happens to be a thin straw and you’re located in a base somewhere in the Antarctic. Take it from [Paul Coldren], who was stationed at a number of Antarctic research stations as an IT specialist for a total of 14.5 months starting in August of 2022. Prepare for hours of pain and retrying downloads. (Credit: Paul Coldren] As [Paul] describes, the main access to the Internet at these bases is via satellite internet, which effectively are just relay stations. With over a thousand people at a station like McMurdo at certain parts of the season, internet bandwidth is a precious commodity and latency is understandably high.
This low bandwidth scenario led to highly aggravating scenarios, such as when a web app would time out on [Paul] while downloading a 20 MB JavaScript file, simply because things were going too slow. Upon timing out, it would wipe the cache, redirect to an error page and have [Paul] retry and retry to try to squeeze within the timeout window. Instead of just letting the download complete in ~15 minutes, it would take nearly half an hour this way, just so that [Paul] could send a few kB worth of text in a messaging app.
In addition to these artificial timeouts – despite continuing download progress – there’s also the issue of self-updating apps, with a downloader that does not allow you to schedule, pause, resume or do anything else that’d make downloading that massive update somewhat feasible. Another thing here is distributed downloads, such as when hundreds of people at said Antarctic station are all trying to update MacOS simultaneously. Here [Paul] ended up just – painfully and slowly – downloading the entire 12 GB MacOS ISO to distribute it across the station, but a Mac might still try to download a few GB of updates regardless.
Updating Office for Mac at the South Pole made easy courtesy of Microsoft. (Credit: Paul Coldren) This level of pain continued with smartphone updates, which do not generally allow one to update the phone’s OS from a local image, and in order to make a phone resume an update image download, [Paul] had to turn the phone off when internet connectivity dropped out – due to satellites going out of alignment – and turn it back on when connectivity was restored the next day.
Somewhat surprisingly, the Microsoft Office for Mac updater was an example of how to do it at least somewhat right; with the ability to pause and cancel, see the progress of the download and resumption of interrupted downloads without any fuss. Other than not having access to the underlying update file for download and distribution by e.g. Sneakernet, this was a pleasant experience alongside the many examples of modern-day hardware and software that just gave up and failed at the sight of internet speeds measured in kB/s.
Although [Paul] isn’t advocating that every developer should optimize their application and updater for the poor saps stuck on the equivalent of ISDN at a remote station or in a tub floating somewhere in the Earth’s oceans, he does insist that it would be nice if you could do something like send a brief text message via a messaging app without having to fight timeouts and other highly aggravating ‘features’.
Since [Paul] returned from his last deployment to the Antarctic in 2024 it appears that at least some of the stations have been upgraded to Starlink satellite internet, but this should not be taken as an excuse to not take his plea seriously.
Even with teachers with names like Kirchhoff and Helmholtz, old Heinrich Hertz himself likely didn’t have the slightest idea that his name would one day become an SI unit. Less likely still would have been the idea that Hackaday would honor him with the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge.
The challenge was deliberately — dare we say, fiendishly? — simple: Do something, anything, but do it once a second. Flash a light, ring a bell, click a relay, or even spam comments on a website other than Hackaday; anything at all, but do it at as close to one Hertz as possible. These are our favorite kinds of contests, because the simplicity affords a huge canvas for the creative mind to paint upon while still providing an interesting technical constraint that’s just difficult enough to make things spicy.
And boy, did you respond! We’ve received over a hundred entries since we announced the contest back in June, meaning that many of you spent 4,662,000 seconds of your summer (at least those of you above the equator) rising to the challenge. The time was well spent, with projects that pushed the limits of what we even expected.
While we loved ’em all, we had to winnow them down to the top three, each of which receives a $150 gift certificate from our sponsor, DigiKey. Let’s take a look at them, along with our favorite runners-up.
Our Top Three
At the top of our judges’ list was “the electromechanicalanalogdigitalclock”, a project that clearly didn’t know what it wanted to be but nevertheless did it with a lot of style. [Christian]’s contraption pushes a lot of design buttons, starting with the mains-powered stepper motor generating a 1-Hz signal with a photochopper, which drives a 12-bit counter made from some CMOS logic chips and a digital-to-analog converter that drives some vintage moving-coil meters to display the time. There’s even a bit of circuit sculpture thrown in, with a brass frame supporting and isolating the noisy stepper motor on a spring suspension. Extra points were no doubt earned thanks to the Space:1999 and Star Trek models in the photos.
The electromechanicalanalogdigitalclock by [Christian].BEZICRON was inspired by [ekaggrat singh kalsi] playing with his daughter’s springy hair ties.Next up we have BEZICRON by [ekaggarat singh kalsi]. If this one looks familiar, it’s probably because we featured it back in January, when we had a difficult time describing exactly what this is. It’s a clock, sure, but its display is vastly different from anything we’ve ever seen before, based as it is on hair bands, of all things, that are bent and stretched into numerals by a series of intricate cams and levers. The idea is unique, the mechanism is complex, the design is striking, and the sinuous 1-Hz pulse of the colon is mesmerizing.
Our final gift certificate goes to [Tim], who managed to use candle flames as a time base. You’ve probably noticed candles guttering and flickering thanks to uneven wax melting or even drafts blowing the flame column around and thought they were fairly random. But [Tim] noticed that these oscillations were actually more stable and predictable than they appear, and used a wire sticking into the flame to trigger the capacitive sensor input on a CH32xxx microcontroller to measure the frequency, which was then divided down to flash an LED at 1-Hz. It’s the perfect combination of physics and electronics that extracts order from a seemingly stochastic in a weird and wonderful way.
Awesome Honorable Mentions
What’s always fun about Hackaday contests is the categories we come up with, which are sort of mini-games within the main challenge. And this time around didn’t disappoint, with projects that explored these side quests in fun and interesting ways.
We’d love to give everyone a prize, but we’d be hard-pressed to manage that with so many cool and unusual projects. As they say, everyone’s a winner just for entering, and we think that’s especially true with contests like this, which bring out the best in everyone. Thanks to everyone who entered, the judges for sorting through everything and making the hard choices, and to our sponsor DigiKey. We’ll see you all again next time around!
Thunderstorms were raging across southern Germany as Elliot Williams was joined by Jenny List for this week’s podcast. The deluge outside didn’t stop the hacks coming though, and we’ve got a healthy smorgasbord for you to snack from. There’s the cutest ever data cassette recorder taking a tiny Olympus dictation machine and re-engineering it with a beautiful case for the Commodore 64, a vastly overcomplex machine for perfectly cracking an egg, the best lightning talk timer Hackaday has ever seen, and a demoscene challenge that eschews a CPU. Then in Quick Hacks we’ve got a QWERTY slider phone, and a self-rowing canoe that comes straight out of Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence.
For a long time we’ve had a Field guide series covering tech in infrastructure and other public plain sight, and this week’s one dealt with pivot irrigation. A new subject for Jenny who grew up on a farm in a wet country. Then both editors are for once in agreement, over using self-tapping screws to assemble 3D-printed structures. Sit back and enjoy the show!
The Estes line of flying model rockets have inspired an untold number of children and adults alike, thanks in part to their simplicity. From the design and construction of the rockets themselves to the reliability and safety of the modular solid-propellant motors, the company managed to turn actual rocket science into a family activity. If you could glue fins onto a cardboard tube and stick a plastic nosecone on the end, you were nearly ready for launch.
But what if you’re looking for something a bit more challenging? That’s where the new Estes Scorpio 3D comes in. Unlike the classic Estes kit, which included the fins, nosecone, and other miscellaneous bits of the rocket, the Scorpio kit requires you to 3D print your own parts. Do it right, and the company says you can send your creation to heights of 1,000 feet (305 m).
As several main components of the rocket are 3D printed, the Scorpio is intended to be a platform for fast and easy modification. Estes already provides STLs for a few different variants of the tail fins — this is not unlike some of the old kits, which would occasionally include different shaped fins for you to experiment with. But of course you’re also free to design your own components from scratch if you wish. A twist-lock mechanism built into the printed motor mount allows you to swap out the Scorpio’s fins in the field, no glue required.
While we appreciate the concept of the Scorpio 3D, we have to admit that the $40 USD price tag seems a bit excessive. After all, the user is expected to print the majority of the rocket’s parts on their own dime. According to the manual, the only thing you get with the kit (other than access to the digital files) is a couple of cardboard tubes, some stickers, and a parachute — the launch pad, igniter, and even motors are all sold separately.
Admittedly there’s a certain value in the Estes name and the knowledge that they’ve done their homework while putting this product together. But if you’re just looking to fire off some DIY rockets, we’d point you to the open source HEXA project as an alternative.
Something rather significant happened on the Internet back in May, and it seems that someone only noticed it on September 3rd. [Youfu Zhang] dropped a note on one of the Mozilla security mailing lists, pointing out that there was a certificate issued by Fina for 1.1.1.1. That IP address may sound familiar, and you may have questions.
First off, yes, TLS certificates can be issued for IP addresses. You can even get a numeric TLS certificate for your IP address, via Lets Encrypt. And second, 1.1.1.1 sounds familiar because that’s CloudFlare’s public DNS resolver. On that address, Cloudflare notably makes use of DoH, a charming abbreviation for DNS over HTTPS. The last important detail is that Cloudflare didn’t request or authorize the certificate. Significant indeed.
This is a high-profile example of the major weakness of the TLS certificate system. There are over 300 trusted certificate authorities in the Microsoft Root Certificate Program, Financijska agencija (Fina) being one of them. All it takes is for one of those trusted roots to issue a bad certificate, to compromise that system. That it took four months for someone to discover and point out the problem isn’t great.
Don’t Just Copy That Into Your Terminal
I’ve given Linux newbies the advice several times, not to be careless about copying and pasting commands into the Linux terminal. Sometimes that’s because practical jokers suggest running rm -rf /, or a fork bomb, or some other “fun” command to fix a problem. But there’s also the problem of malware, and it’s not limited to Linux. For example, this reasonably convincing looking notification from Cloudflare instructs the user to copy and past a completely benign-looking string into a terminal on a Mac machine.
It’s pretty obviously not a real command as it’s presented. Instead, a base64 encoded string is decoded and executed in Bash. It executes a script from the Internet, which immediately begins looking for interesting files to upload. It’s not a terribly new approach, but is apparently still being used in the wild, and is a great object lesson about not trusting commands from the Internet.
CSS is Turing Complete Now, So Let’s Use it to Steal Data
OK, Turing complete might be a slight exaggeration, but CSS does now have if() statements. CSS also can do background downloads from remote sites. Put that together, and you have a way to steal data.
There are some serious limitations that are likely to keep this from becoming a widely used technique. Top of the list is that CSS doesn’t have any string carving functions. That if() statement is limited to matching the complete value of fields. To steal information strictly using CSS, you have to know what you’re looking for ahead of time.
Creative C2
It’s always interesting to see the creative Command and Control (C2) techniques that are dreamt up by researchers and threat actors. MeetC2 is up first, a demonstration of using Google Calendar for C2 via calendar events. It works because no security solution will block access to Google Calendar, and it’s fairly trivial to add notes to a calendar event.
The other creative C2 involves a project I’m intimately familiar with. MeshC2 is a clever, but admittedly vibe-coded C2 tool using Meshtastic to run commands on remote hosts. It’s from [Eric Escobar], one of the researchers at Sophos. When dropping a Raspberry Pi off for a penetration test, there’s an inevitable problem that knocks the platform off the Internet, and the ability to run a few simple commands could make all the difference.
Persuasion is the art of influencing. When a car salesman buys a potential customer a drink from the car lot’s vending machine, it’s an attempt to persuade. When a negotiators picks up on and imitates the small habits of their counterparts, it’s also an attempt to leverage persuasion. From appeals to authority, to priming, to framing, there are countless tricks that are tried, with varying amounts of success, to influence people. The question here is whether those tricks might work on an LLM.
A pre-print study seems to indicate that persuasion does indeed work on AIs. And while persuasion may convince a human to buy a car beyond one’s means, persuasion can be used to convince an AI to do something beyond its guardrails. The two test cases were to ask the LLM to return an insult, and to return the recipe for lidocaine. While this isn’t the only way to jailbreak an LLM, it’s a novel bit of work, determining that the AI has some of the same weaknesses as humans.
The Scam Become Real
If you run your own mail server, or check your spam folder, you’ve surely seen the emails where a scammer claims to have taken over your webcam while you were watching pornography. Historically this has been a complete lie, simply to extort the naive. Unfortunately, it seems that someone took this as a challenge, and has actually built malware that attempts to do exactly what the classic spam has threatened. And of course, it’s open source.
And finally, the folks at Trail of Bits are looking at the application integrity problem, when running applications inside electron and even Chrome. The binaries themselves may be signed, but there’s a part of the program that isn’t: The heap snapshots. This is a V8 feature used to significantly speed up the loading of the pages inside these apps. It turns out that snapshot can also be used to poison the internal state of those apps, and sidestep existing controls. Electron has patched the issue, but there are some cases where Chrome itself may still be vulnerable to this fascinating approach.
L’azienda californiana Figure ha svelato un altro traguardo per il suo umanoide Figure 02: il robot ha caricato una lavastoviglie con elevata precisione utilizzando il versatile modello Helix, basato sull’architettura Vision-Language-Action (VLA). Un compito apparentemente banale per gli umani si trasforma in un complesso test di precisione, forza di presa e adattamento a diversi tipi di oggetti per l’assistente artificiale .
La particolarità è che non sono state create nuove logiche o algoritmi speciali per eseguire questa operazione. Il successo si basa sullo stesso sistema universale Helix, che ha già dimostrato capacità in altri scenari. Grazie a dati aggiuntivi e all’apprendimento da esempi di comportamento umano, Figure 02 ha padroneggiato in modo indipendente le complessità del lavoro con piatti, bicchieri e altre stoviglie.
Le principali sfide per il robot sono afferrare con precisione gli oggetti con le dita, ruotarli alla giusta angolazione, posizionarli nello spazio ristretto del cestello con un errore di pochi centimetri e trattenere gli oggetti con una forza sufficiente a impedirne lo scivolamento, ma anche la rottura. Helix ha permesso a Figure 02 di dimostrare una precisione pari a quella dei movimenti delle dita umane, nonché di adattarsi a diversi set di piatti e correggere le azioni in caso di errore o collisione.
Solo pochi anni fa, i robot necessitavano di una programmazione speciale per svolgere tali compiti, e lavare i piatti era considerato una delle operazioni domestiche “impossibili”.
Ora Figure dimostra che un modello universale e nuovi dati sono sufficienti per far funzionare il sistema senza bisogno di alcuna progettazione mirata. Lo stesso principio consentiva in precedenza a Figure 02 di piegare gli asciugamani e distribuire i pacchi su un nastro trasportatore.
Helix è stato presentato a febbraio di quest’anno e da allora è diventato il cervello degli umanoidi dell’azienda. Durante l’estate, il robot ha impressionato il pubblico con un video in cui caricava i vestiti in una lavatrice, per poi dimostrare la sua capacità di seguire comandi verbali adattandosi a compiti diversi, come piegare gli asciugamani. A giugno, Figure 02 ha mostrato il lavoro su una catena di montaggio, smistando scatole. Ogni nuova abilità si aggiunge al set di competenze complessivo, ampliando la versatilità del sistema.
A prima vista, caricare la lavastoviglie, piegare il bucato o gestire la logistica possono sembrare attività non correlate. Tuttavia, Figure integra tutti questi scenari in un’unica architettura. Ciò significa che è possibile apprendere nuove funzionalità senza dover riscrivere il codice o progettare singoli moduli, aprendo le porte a uno sviluppo scalabile.
Sebbene siamo ancora lontani da un “robot maggiordomo” a tutti gli effetti, compiti come spolverare, portare fuori la spazzatura o passare l’aspirapolvere restano ancora da realizzare. Ma i risultati ottenuti dimostrano che gli assistenti umanoidi stanno già imparando a svolgere diverse funzioni e ogni nuova abilità ci avvicina al futuro, dove troveranno il loro posto nella vita quotidiana e nella produzione.
In occasione di Uman Festival, il tesoriere dell’Associazione Luca Coscioni Marco Cappato sarà protagonista di un incontro pubblico dal titolo “Democrazia. In dialogo con Marco Cappato”.
L’appuntamento è per venerdì 12 settembre 2025 alle ore 15:00 presso l’Aula 002 del Dipartimento di Sociologia – Università di Trento, Via Giuseppe Verdi 26, a Trento.
In occasione di Uman Festival, l’attivista e tesoriere dell’Associazione Luca Coscioni Marco Cappato sarà protagonista di un incontro pubblico dal titolo “Democrazia. In dialogo con Marco Cappato”.
Un momento di confronto con studenti, studentesse e cittadinanza, per discutere il valore della partecipazione democratica e dei diritti civili in Italia e in Europa.
Partecipano: Marco Cappato (Associazione Luca Coscioni) Marta Citriniti (Presidente Tridentum) Renata Maria Giordano (Presidente ELSA Trento) Prof.ssa Marta Tomasi (Università di Trento)
Aula 002, Dipartimento di Sociologia – Università di Trento Ingresso libero, aperto a tutte e tutti
![Prepare for hours of pain and retrying downloads. (Credit: Paul Coldren]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/engineering-for-slow-internet-icon.png "Prepare for hours of pain and retrying downloads. (Credit: Paul Coldren]"){kind=icon}
