Month: July 2025

Hacking attacks—many using ransomware—now hit US cities every few days. They are expensive to mitigate and extremely disruptive. Abilene, Texas, for instance, had 477 GB of data stolen this spring. The city refused to pay the requested ransom and instead decided to replace every server, desktop, laptop, desk telephone, and storage device. This has required a "temporary return to pen-and-paper systems" while the entire city network is rebuilt, but at least Abilene was insured against such an attack.

Sometimes, though, the hacks hit harder than usual. That was the case in St. Paul, Minnesota, which suffered a significant cyberattack last Friday that it has been unable to mitigate. Things have gotten so bad that the city has declared a state of emergency, while the governor activated the National Guard to assist.

According to remarks by St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, the attack was first noticed early in the morning of Friday, July 25. It was, Carter said, "a deliberate, coordinated digital attack, carried out by a sophisticated external actor—intentionally and criminally targeting our city’s information infrastructure."

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AYANEO has been making Windows and Android handheld game systems for years. But most are feature-packed devices with premium price tags. Some of the company’s Android handhelds have price tags that rival Windows devices from competitors. So one of the many announcements AYANEO made this week is that it’s launching a new “KONKR” sub-brand focused on […]

The post AYANEO’s KONKR Pocket FIT will be a cheaper Android handheld game console, but it still has flagship-class features appeared first on Liliputing.

After Substack shocked an unknown number of users by sending a push notification on Monday to check out a Nazi blog featuring a swastika icon, the company quickly apologized for the "error," tech columnist Taylor Lorenz reported.

"We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received," Substack's statement said. "In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused. We have taken the relevant system offline, diagnosed the issue, and are making changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again."

Substack has long faced backlash for allowing users to share their "extreme views" on the platform, previously claiming that "censorship (including through demonetizing publications)" doesn't make "the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse," Lorenz noted. But critics who have slammed Substack's rationale revived their concerns this week, with some accusing Substack of promoting extreme content through features like their push alerts and "rising" lists, which flag popular newsletters and currently also include Nazi blogs.

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Google is fond of saying its mission is to "organize the world's information," but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization? A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google's search index, and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he's still at it. Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one of Google's search tools to scrub the offending articles.

The saga began in 2023 when independent journalist Jack Poulson reported on Maury Blackman's 2021 domestic violence arrest. Blackman, who was then the CEO of surveillance tech firm Premise Data Corp., took offense at the publication of his legal issues. The case did not lead to charges after Blackman's 25-year-old girlfriend recanted her claims against the 53-year-old CEO, but Poulson reported on some troubling details of the public arrest report.

Blackman has previously used tools like DMCA takedowns and lawsuits to stifle reporting on his indiscretion, but that campaign now appears to have co-opted part of Google's search apparatus. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) reported on Poulson's work and Blackman's attempts to combat it late last year. In June, Poulson contacted the Freedom of the Press Foundation to report that the article had mysteriously vanished from Google search results.

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Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) in butterfly wings, for example, are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

In the case of peacock feathers, it's the regular, periodic nanostructures of the barbules—fiber-like components composed of ordered melanin rods coated in keratin—that produce the iridescent colors. Different colors correspond to different spacing of the barbules.

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Amid the Trump administration's ongoing efforts to wrest the power of the purse from Congress, an estimated $15 billion allotted by lawmakers to fund life-saving biomedical research via the National Institutes of Health was temporarily frozen and then said to be released Tuesday.

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the initial decision to withhold the funding came from Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump administration and Project 2025 co-author. Vought has expansive views of presidential power, the Journal noted, and has said the NIH needs "fundamental reform."

In an interview with CBS news over the weekend, Vought defended already holding up billions in congressionally allocated funding for research on things like cancer and cardiovascular disease by claiming that the NIH has been "weaponized against the American people." He made the comments after 14 Republican Senators sent him a letter imploring that he release congressionally appropriated funding, including money marked for the NIH.

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On Tuesday, The Associated Press released results from a new AP-NORC poll showing that 60 percent of US adults have used AI to search for information, while only 37 percent of all Americans have used AI for work tasks. Meanwhile, younger Americans are adopting AI tools at much higher rates across multiple categories, including brainstorming, work tasks, and companionship.

The poll found AI companionship remains the least popular application overall, with just 16 percent of adults overall trying it—but the number jumps to a notable 25 percent among the under-30 crowd. AI companionship can have drawbacks that weren't reflected in the poll, such as excessive agreeability (called sycophancy) and mental health risks, like encouraging delusional thinking.

The poll of 1,437 adults conducted July 10–14 reveals telling generational divides in AI adoption. While 74 percent of adults under 30 use AI for information searches at least some of the time, only the aforementioned 60 percent of all adults have done so. For brainstorming applications, 62 percent of adults under 30 have used AI to come up with ideas, compared with just 20 percent of those 60 or older.

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The Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 15 Gen 10 is a laptop with a 15.3 inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel, 240 Hz display, support for up to an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point processor, up to 128GB of RAM, and up to two SSDs. It’s also one of a relatively small number of laptops that comes […]

The post The new Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 15 is a Linux laptop with AMD Ryzen AI 300 and a 2.5K, 240 Hz display appeared first on Liliputing.

Officially, Microsoft will stop providing new security updates for Windows 10 PCs after October 14, 2025, a little over a decade after its initial release. It's a stick that Microsoft is using to push upgrades to the newer Windows 11, whether you install it on a PC you already have or buy a brand-new PC to meet Windows 11's system requirements.

But if you can't or don't want to upgrade to Windows 11, Microsoft has made it reasonably simple to get an extra year of Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for Windows 10, extending its official support window to October of 2026. But this won't happen automatically; users will need to enroll their PCs in the ESU program to get the updates, using an enrollment feature that Microsoft just released to Windows 10 PCs recently.

For anyone looking to get that extra year of updates, here's how to enroll your PC, how to make sure your PC is enrolled, and how to avoid paying the $30 fee that Microsoft is nominally charging for these updates.

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Builders in ancient Rome used a special kind of ancient concrete to construct their aqueducts, bridges, and buildings. But is Roman concrete more sustainable than the Portland cement used in today's concrete? The answer is more nuanced than one might think, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. Roman concrete produces as much CO₂ as modern methods, but fewer air pollutants.

As we've reported previously, like today's Portland cement (a basic ingredient of modern concrete), ancient Roman concrete was basically a mix of a semi-liquid mortar and aggregate. Portland cement is typically made by heating limestone and clay (as well as sandstone, ash, chalk, and iron) in a kiln. The resulting clinker is then ground into a fine powder, with just a touch of added gypsum—the better to achieve a smooth, flat surface. But the aggregate used to make Roman concrete was made up of fist-sized pieces of stone or bricks.

Scientists have long been fascinated by the remarkable longevity of Roman concrete; it's a very active field of study. For instance, in 2017, scientists analyzed the concrete from the ruins of sea walls along Italy's Mediterranean coast, which have stood for two millennia despite the harsh marine environment. That analysis revealed that the recipe involved a combination of rare crystals and a porous mineral. So exposure to seawater generated chemical reactions inside the concrete, causing aluminum tobermorite crystals to form out of phillipsite, a common mineral found in volcanic ash. The crystals bound to the rocks, preventing the formation and propagation of cracks that would have otherwise weakened the structures.

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