It’s been more than a quarter century since the Y2K bug threatened to disrupt the not-so-modern world, and while the patching efforts of global IT heroes prevented a millennial mess, the problem persists as a Dutch dev just found a new instance of the numeric nightmare. While working on an emulator for the venerable Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series of “minicomputer” systems manufactured between the 1950s and 1990s, Folkert van Heusden spotted an unpatched Y2K bug in the Network Time Protocol daemon in BSD 2.11. To be fair, it’s not like van Heusden stumbled onto a potentially devastating issue that’s simply waiting to cause chaos: Not only was the bug specific to the PDP-11/70, a system that entered service in 1975, but it also requires a Precision Standard Time, Inc.(PSTI) receiver manufactured by defunct hardware maker Traconex used to pick up time signals broadcast by short wave radio stations managed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. Even at that point, the bug won't instantly break network time, as a would-be attacker must take several steps to configure the ancient mahicnes in a way that causes the error. Van Heusden’s writeup explains how to trigger the flaw. “I'm writing a PDP emulator,” van Heusden told The Register in an email. “I'm also very much interested in time keeping on computers. That combined, I dove into the NTP-implementation on the PDP. When adding emulation for the PSTI-device, I suddenly noticed 19126 for the year.” Unsurprisingly, when the PSTI receiver actually produces the correct output, the system throws an error that the time offset between the PDP emulator and the emulated PSTI device is a bit “excessive.” Only by 17,000 years, give or take a couple centuries. Luckily, van Heusden has coded a fix that’ll bring the times back in sync, eliminating what may be one of the few remaining Y2K bugs still floating around in the wild - after all, when’s the last time you heard of a forgotten (or, in this case, overlooked due to technological obsolescence) Y2K bug being patched? If you want to tinker with a 50-year old emulated system running a 35-year old operating system, the good news is that the PDP and its 16-but CPU ran at 5MHz and needed just 4 MB main memory - a spec that van Heusden’s PDP-11/70 emulator can easily run on modest hardware like a Raspberry Pi Pico, and it’s available on GitHub. Just be sure you patch that Y2K bug if you plan to tinker with time keeping. ®

We've all seen it: an unexpected management meeting that turns up in your calendar. It could mean HR wants a quiet and perhaps terminal word, or, in the case of NASA, something altogether different. During a chat with Space.com, NASA astronaut Bob Hines explained that the meeting was engineered to ensure all five Artemis III astronauts would be in the same room together and introduced face-to-face. The process space NASA uses to select astronauts has long been shrouded in mystery. The first American man in space, Alan Shepard, recalled in Light This Candle that his assignment to the Mercury 7 – the first batch of NASA astronauts – came from a caller who said, "We'd like you to join us. Are you still willing to volunteer?" Shepard later learned he would be the first American man in space during a meeting with fellow astronauts Gus Grissom and John Glenn, plus the Director of the Space Task Group, Bob Gilruth. Gilruth said, "Alan Shepard will make the first suborbital flight." Several factors went into that decision, including the seven Mercury astronauts rating their peers. In his memoir, Riding Rockets, Space Shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane recalled receiving a summons, along with four crewmates, to the office of then Director of Flight Operations, George Abbey. In that meeting, Abbey apparently asked: "We've been looking at the mission manifest, and think it's time to assign some more crews. I was wondering if you would be interested in STS-41D?" The whys and wherefores were unimportant. The astronauts were just delighted to get an assignment. These days, an unannounced management meeting with invitees a person might not normally see on a request is apparently how things are done. How those invitees are picked, however, remains a little opaque. With luck, NASA has sorted out the Outlook problem that bedeviled Artemis II, in which an astronaut plaintively told controllers, "I have two Outlooks, and neither one of those is working." Artemis III is, after all, set to be a very complicated mission, and, if all goes to plan, the crew will have fewer than 18 months to train. That is considerably less than the three years the Artemis II crew spent preparing for their mission to the Moon. The crew of four – three NASA astronauts and one European Space Agency astronaut (with Bob Hines as back-up) – will ideally rendezvous with two commercial spacecraft to check out docking operations and, in the case of Blue Origin, enter the vehicle. All this will take place in Low Earth Orbit as a precursor to the Artemis IV mission, which NASA expects will land humans on the Moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. The meeting reportedly happened two weeks before the public announcement of the crew, and NASA's chief astronaut, Scott Tingle, told the group, "Look around. This is your Artemis 3 crew." Hines told Space.com, "That was a really, really cool way to find out." Certainly better than being presented with a pink slip by HR and a box to pack your possessions. ®

UBUNTU SUMMIT At a Canonical event, we didn't expect a presentation on using Red Hat's container management tools, but if this is something you might need, it does sound useful. At Ubuntu Summit 26.04, Red Hat Principal Software Engineer Joseph Marrero Corchado presented a talk called Bootc: Use your container knowledge and infrastructure to build and deploy your Ubuntu hosts. Although Ubuntu is very strong in the desktop Linux space, in large corporate server environments, Ubuntu is just another distro among many. This can be a good thing: it is just another Linux distro, and that means that it's perfectly possible to deploy and manage it using existing FOSS tooling. Marrero introduced himself by saying that he works at Red Hat, but personally runs Ubuntu – and has been doing so for long enough that he has some original media from Canonical's ShipIt program, which the company discontinued in 2011. While we were surpised to see a Red Hat engineer presenting a talk at the summit, it's not unprecedented. System76's Pop!_OS distro is based on Ubuntu, but it overlaps with other distros as well. It has its own desktop and eschews Snap for Flatpak – and yet, at the previous Summit, System76 boss Carl Richell presented a talk about it. The year before, the Academy Software Foundation's talk started by telling us that Rocky Linux strongly dominated the SFX industry. Our plan here isn't to recap the entire talk. It's up on YouTube now, and if this is the sort of thing that sounds interesting, it's probably a good use of 42 minutes of your time. bootc grows up We've mentioned the bootc toolchain a few times on The Register. Back in April 2024, we reported that Fedora 40's immutable editions were being rebuilt as bootable containers. Two years and four more Fedora releases later, the toolchain is getting more mature, as we covered in April with Fedora 44, and we linked to Quentin Joly's explainer, Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment, which is still one of the best we've read. Now bootc has graduated to the point of being a CNCF incubator project. The new project website has a slightly better explanation: Transactional, in-place operating system updates using OCI/Docker container images. The tools for creating and managing OCI containers are familiar to many sysadmins now, and the idea of bootc is to make it possible to manage complete OS images, either for VMs or for bare metal, using the same tooling. Marrero explained bootc by saying that it lets you perform OS installations and upgrades with OCI containers, which lets you define and ship your customized images of the Ubuntu OS as OCI container images. This allows transactional in-place updates, with rollback. This tech is already in real-world public-facing use: SteamOS uses bootc, and he pointed to the Bootcrew project, which maintains a growing collection of bootc images of different OSes, including Ubuntu, SteamOS, openSUSE, and Debian. What's special about these images is that each one is a container, but with a kernel. So this means that it can run on metal, but you can run (and test) it in continuous integration as well. Ubuntu on bootc is still Ubuntu; it's just a different way to deploy it. Doing it this way is an alternative to Canonical's own Ubuntu-image system, which uses standard Ubuntu and Canonical tools, the apt command, normal repositories, and so on. Instead, bootc uses container tools and container images, and a container registry in place of Ubuntu's apt repositories. Marrero has his own experimental Ubuntu-bootc image on GitHub, whose description says: An Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ("Resolute Raccoon") bootable container image with cloud-init and podman built-in, designed for use with bootc and bcvk. (For the record, bcvk is the bootc virtualization kit, which "helps launch ephemeral VMs from bootc containers, and also create disk images that can be imported into other virtualization frameworks.") The idea is that this lets you manage and deploy a server, cloud, or desktop OS, along with all its tools and all its applications, from a single central point that you control. This replaces a whole raft of configuration management tools, including local update management, and eliminates the need for tools such as "Puppet, Chef, or shell automation." The images are constructed using composefs – specifically, the Rust-based composefs-rs – which in turn builds on existing and established Linux tools such as overlayfs, the EROFS read-only filesystem, and fsverity for integrity-checking. He noted that some of Ubuntu's metadata initially stopped composefs from working, but he and the Bootcrew team found it and fixed it. He also offers an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with bootc – Getting Started Guide, which "walks you through converting an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS VM into a bootc-managed system using composefs. By the end you will have an immutable, image-based Ubuntu system that can be updated atomically via container images." He also demonstrated the tech live on stage using a few demonstration images he'd built beforehand. First, he deployed an empty default Ubuntu installation, with no additional tools. Running it under QEMU took just a couple of seconds. Then, by adding another single-line container file layered on top, he added the tmux terminal multiplexer. He also used wget to demonstrate that no web server was running and the VM didn't respond to HTTP requests, then switched the existing VM to a different image with Apache and a demo page installed, which took only about a second to deploy, followed by a VM reboot. He also demonstrated that it really was Ubuntu, that snapd was present and working, and installed LXD to prove the point. The "bootable containers" toolchain has visibly matured since we first encountered it, and the demo was quite impressive. This vulture is very happy that he no longer has to run servers for a living, and is positively delighted that he has no use for any of these tools. Even so, it's impressive to see that without all that much work, Ubuntu can be slotted into a very different set of management tools and function quite happily. ®

Matthew Butterick is a lawyer, programmer, writer, and designer. He’s written a long, interesting piece about the inherent risks of AI called Extinction-Level Capitalism. It is well-worth a read; I’ve excerpted several passages here but urge you read the whole thing.

In prac­tice, certain people in a capi­talist liberal democ­racy tend to get increas­ingly rich. Absent coun­ter­mea­sures, the wealthy gain control of the polit­ical appa­ratus, thwarting liberal-demo­c­ratic norms. This tension between capital and poli­tics is a long-consid­ered topic. A key early work was, of course, Karl Marx’s Capital (about which more later). In the current era, Mancur Olson’s book The Rise and Decline of Nations set out how small groups with a shared interest (which could include capital concen­tra­tion) can effec­tively under­mine stable soci­eties. More recently, econ­o­mists Robert Reich (“How Capi­talism is Killing Democ­racy”), James Galbraith (The Predator State), and Yanis Varo­ufakis (Tech­nofeu­dalism: What Killed Capi­talism) are among those who have studied the esca­lating polit­ical conse­quences of rising wealth inequality. The synthesis might be: as more wealth becomes concen­trated in the hands of fewer citi­zens, liberal democ­racy weakens, because whichever citi­zens are losing economic rele­vance will also lose polit­ical rele­vance. A nation sending many of its citi­zens toward economic irrel­e­vance risks becoming polit­i­cally illib­eral.

Sci-fi plots are opti­mized for cine­matic impact. So as a metaphor for AI risk, they can lead to faulty intu­itions. Among real­istic AI risks, we can expect that most will be boring, slow, and depend on minimal extra tech­nology. Whether AI will cause literal human extinc­tion is esoteric—a light­ning strike. But AI could easily induce future economic and polit­ical condi­tions that most Amer­i­cans today would consider intol­er­able—a cancer that extin­guishes a certain way of life. Nobody’s going to make a movie about boring AI risks. But they comprise the majority of worri­some AI outcomes.

Marx’s obser­va­tion has a subtler impli­ca­tion too. New tech­nology often holds itself out as the starting point of a narra­tive: from now on, every­thing is different. When we consider the tech­nology alone, that narra­tive domi­nates. But when we zoom out and consider the histor­ical context, the new tech­nology becomes the current endpoint of a much longer polit­ical narra­tive.

What would Marx say to AI critics—social, legal, economic, polit­ical—that have arisen so far? Maybe that we’re missing the bigger picture. That as a human inven­tion, AI may be the starting point of a new tech­no­log­ical narra­tive. But as an affront to human workers, it continues a long tradi­tion of capi­talist tech­nolo­gies, begin­ning with the Indus­trial Revo­lu­tion (if not earlier).

When we think about AI risk, we’re neces­sarily making guesses about the future. But when we frame AI in the narrow sense of new tech­nology, we’re primarily consid­ering a time­line that starts now. Whereas when we shift to thinking of AI as a capi­talist instru­ment, we’re consid­ering a time­line that starts centuries ago and has evolved contin­u­ously into the present. We can and should study those existing economic and polit­ical trends, because those will likely shape the future trajec­tory. Put differ­ently: AI may be new. But it’s not immune to history.

“Tech­nology always makes certain jobs obso­lete; new ones will arise.” AI’s predicted labor replace­ment is unprece­dented in three ways: the diver­sity of tasks replaced; its outsize effect on highly educated workers; and the back­drop of 50 years of wage stag­na­tion. Automa­tion-driven tran­si­tions aren’t neces­sarily easy, even when they’re narrow and the economy can absorb the workers. Those who hand­wave over the details should study histor­ical exam­ples. When you tell a large group of workers that their skills no longer have economic value, you risk a polit­ical and social tinderbox. Recall Carl Benedikt Frey’s comment: “the short run can be a life­time”.

Along these lines, I expect that to succeed finan­cially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a signif­i­cant number of existing tech compa­nies and grab their revenue for itself. By the process described above: Big AI essen­tially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these compa­nies. Tech compa­nies compete to adapt their busi­nesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replace­ment story will grow into a company-replace­ment story. Many of those tech compa­nies—and their share­holders in the public markets—may also find that AI is a poisoned chalice.

The value of the concen­trated resource creates what Jeffrey Frankel calls “a polit­ical contest to capture owner­ship”, which in turn encour­ages the emer­gence of auto­cratic or oligarchic insti­tu­tions captured by an economic elite who seek to retain control of the resource. The process is self-rein­forcing in two ways. First: the economic elite uses its wealth to repress polit­ical oppo­nents. Second: as the govern­ment derives more income from the concen­trated resource, it relies less on taxa­tion of citi­zens, which weakens demo­c­ratic account­ability.

I could have easily excerpted the whole thing.

Tags: anthropic · artificial intelligence · business · capitalism · Google · Matthew Butterick · openai · usa

gnsk has added a photo to the pool:

Als je puur kijkt naar het aantal gewonnen prijzen, is hij een van de meest succesvolle trainers uit de clubhistorie van Feyenoord. Toch klonk in zijn laatste seizoen steeds vaker de roep om zijn vertrek en vertrok hij destijds met een dubbel gevoel. Waarom keert Giovanni van Bronckhorst terug bij Feyenoord?

We over-5os should worry less about our crepe necks and sunspots and more about our listening skills – and the pettiness we bring to social media

When I was young, there was a huge list of things you shouldn’t do, or specifically wear, over the age of 30; there were fewer explicit rules about what you should and shouldn’t wear over the age of 50, but they were all implied by the fact that it was 20 years since you’d been 30. Then someone lampooned the whole business – it was strikingly memorable but, teeth-gnashingly, not memorable enough that I can remember who it was – with a definitive list of Never Wear This Over 30, which included “a necklace made of ears”. The entire discourse was buried that day, and I never thought about it again, until the weekend, when I was walking up some stairs with a mirror all the way up. That, I could not help but notice, is a very 90s walking style.

I guess we all learned it from Bez out of Happy Mondays, the man specifically employed (if you would use such a LinkedIn word for it) to bring happiness to the nation with his physical joie de vivre: leading with the shoulders, as if you’re in a ferocious hurry to get to the front of somewhere, with your neck hunched in to bypass the attention of the authorities because of all the drugs you are about to either sell or buy, the rest of your body an afterthought.

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• Move comes after thrashing in opening game in Mexico

• Tunisia still to face Japan and Netherlands in Group F

Tunisia sacked their head coach, Sabri Lamouchi, on Monday after ⁠a 5-1 defeat by Sweden in their first World Cup game. The Tunisian ⁠football federation ⁠announced ​his dismissal on its Instagram account.

“An agreement has been officially reached ⁠to dismiss coach Sabri Lamouchi,” the statement said. “Plans are under way ‌to appoint ‌Mondher Kebaier as the national team ‌coach [on an interim basis].”

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An increasing number of people are finding trail running relatively late in life – and they’re reaping the health benefits

Earlier this year, 62-year-old Karla Wagner placed second in the 100-mile division of the Grandmaster Ultras, an Arizona trail-running event designed for 50-and-over runners in the age group known as “grandmaster”.

For most of her adult life, Wagner, who is from Lander, Wyoming, avoided running because it triggered her asthma. But when asthma meds improved, she added trail running to her fitness mix and became completely hooked in her early fifties.

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STOCKHOLM (ANP/AFP) - De Britse fabrikant van vliegtuigmotoren Rolls-Royce gaat drie kleine kernreactoren bouwen in het zuidwesten van Zweden. Dat maakt het Zweedse energieconcern Vattenfall, dat Rolls-Royce hiervoor heeft geselecteerd, maandag bekend. Het is volgens beide bedrijven voor het eerst in ruim veertig jaar dat het land nieuwe kernreactoren krijgt.

De zogenoemde Small Modular Reactors die Rolls-Royce gaat bouwen, komen bij de bestaande Ringhals-kerncentrale. De drie reactoren met elk een vermogen van 470 megawatt moeten straks jaarlijks ongeveer 12 terawattuur (TWh) aan elektriciteit opwekken. Vattenfall-topvrouw Anna Borg verwacht dat de eerste reactor mogelijk rond 2035 gebouwd kan worden.

Zweden stemde in 1980 in een niet-bindend referendum voor het afbouwen van kernenergie en heeft sindsdien zes van zijn twaalf verouderde reactoren gesloten. Het land besloot in 2023 om kernenergie flink op te schalen om aan de stijgende vraag naar stroom te kunnen voldoen.

BARCELONA (ANP/RTR/DPA) - Vrienden en familie hebben Lewis Hamilton door zijn moeilijkste dagen geholpen, de dagen waarop negatieve gevoelens over zijn overstap naar Ferrari hem somber stemden. "Zij hebben mij gered. Echte mensen die me kennen en nooit aan me hebben getwijfeld", vertelde de 41-jarige Brit over zijn bevrijdende overwinning in de Grote Prijs van Barcelona-Catalonië, de 106e GP-zege in zijn carrière, maar pas de eerste voor Ferrari.

Het duurde 31 grands prix voordat de zevenvoudig wereldkampioen zijn eerste zege bij de Italiaanse renstal kon vieren. Hamilton bekende dat het jaar 2025, zijn eerste bij Ferrari, af en toe een hel was. Het lukte hem na zijn jarenlange succesvolle periode bij Mercedes niet te presteren in de rode bolide. "Ik begon met groot enthousiasme, maar daarna volgden er veel twijfels en negativiteit en die hielden het hele jaar aan. Ik ben ook maar een mens, dus er waren momenten dat die negatieve verhalen me diep raakten van binnen. Toen had ik de mensen nodig die me altijd hebben gesteund."

Zij motiveerden hem om niet op te geven. "Je moet in de kern in jezelf blijven geloven en nooit aan jezelf twijfelen. Ik heb harder getraind dan ooit en het team geeft me nu ook het vertrouwen; ze geloven in de veranderingen waar ik om heb gevraagd. Het is langzaam allemaal samengekomen. Ik ben nu heel gelukkig, het zit goed. Ik hou van wat ik doe, er is geen beter gevoel dan racen in een Formule 1-wagen."

Het lijkt erop dat de Amerikaanse realityster Kim Kardashian ook een rol heeft gespeeld in de opleving van Hamilton. Dat is althans de mening van Toto Wolff, de vorige teambaas van Hamilton bij Mercedes. "Die twee lijken het heel goed met elkaar te kunnen vinden. Misschien helpt het om een ​​vriendin te hebben. Mij hielp het om een partner te hebben en een stabiel gezinsleven."

WIJK BIJ DUURSTEDE (ANP) - De vijf mannen die nog vastzitten na de rellen bij een anti-asieldemonstratie in Wijk bij Duurstede, komen maandagavond vrij. Dat meldt het Openbaar Ministerie. Ze blijven nog wel verdachten. De twee anderen die aangehouden werden, kwamen eerder al vrij.

De mannen werden aangehouden wegens openlijke geweldpleging, het niet voldoen aan de identificatieplicht en het overtreden van het noodbevel dat was afgekondigd. Ze zijn niet voorgeleid aan de rechter-commissaris. Het OM moet nog besluiten over verdere vervolging.

Yellow Brick Ramble by Daisy McGuire is an ongoing webcomic about a child called Tip runing away from the witch Mombi, making friends and exploring Oz. It's a retelling of Frank L Baum's The Marvelous Land of Oz as a trans story (moreso). It's fun, light and coming in to its final stretch.

Daisy previously created (and completed) Pepsiphobia (née Gastrophobia) – a long-running webcomic about an amazon single mother and her child in ancient Greece.

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