Deep Fission Wants To Put Nuclear Reactors Deep Underground

November 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Today’s pressurized water reactors (PWRs) are marvels of nuclear fission technology that enable gigawatt-scale power stations in a very compact space. Though they are extremely safe, with only the TMI-2 accident releasing a negligible amount of radioactive isotopes into the environment per the NRC, the company Deep Fission reckons that they can make PWRs even safer by stuffing them into a 1 mile (1.6 km) deep borehole.

Their proposed DB-PWR design is currently in pre-application review at the NRC where their whitepaper and 2025-era regulatory engagement plan can be found as well. It appears that this year they renamed the reactor to Deep Fission Borehole Reactor 1 (DFBR-1). In each 30″ (76.2 cm) borehole a single 45 MWt DFBR-1 microreactor will be installed, with most of the primary loop contained within the reactor module.

As for the rationale for all of this, at the suggested depth the pressure would be equivalent to that inside the PWR, with in addition a column of water between it and the surface, which is claimed to provide a lot of safety and also negates the need for a concrete containment structure and similar PWR safety features. Of course, with the steam generator located at the bottom of the borehole, said steam has to be brought up all the way to the surface to generate a projected 15 MWe via the steam turbine, and there are also sampling tubes travelling all the way down to the primary loop in addition to ropes to haul the thing back up for replacing the standard LEU PWR fuel rods.

Whether this level of outside-the-box-thinking is a genius or absolutely daft idea remains to be seen, with it so far making inroads in the DoE’s advanced reactor program. The company targets having its first reactor online by 2026. Among its competition are projects like TerraPower’s Natrium which are already under construction and offer much more power per reactor, along with Natrium in particular also providing built-in grid-level storage.

One thing is definitely for certain, and that is that the commercial power sector in the US has stopped being mind-numbingly boring.

RavynOS: Open Source MacOS With Same BSD Pedigree

November 22, 2025 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

That MacOS (formerly OS X) has BSD roots is a well-known fact, with its predecessor NeXTSTEP and its XNU kernel derived from 4.3BSD. Subsequent releases of OS X/MacOS then proceeded to happily copy more bits from 4.4BSD, FreeBSD and other BSDs.

In that respect the thing that makes MacOS unique compared to other BSDs is its user interface, which is what the open source ravynOS seeks to address. By taking FreeBSD as its core, and crafting a MacOS-like UI on top, it intends to provide the MacOS UI experience without locking the user into the Apple ecosystem.

Although FreeBSD already has the ability to use the same desktop environments as Linux, there are quite a few people who prefer the Apple UX. As noted in the project FAQ, one of the goals is also to become compatible with MacOS applications, while retaining support for FreeBSD applications and Linux via the FreeBSD binary compatibility layer.

If this sounds good to you, then it should be noted that ravynOS is still in pre-release, with the recently released ravynOS “Hyperpop Hyena” 0.6.1 available for download and your perusal. System requirements include UEFI boot, 4+ GB of RAM, x86_x64 CPU and either Intel or AMD graphics. Hardware driver support for the most part is that of current FreeBSD 14.x, which is generally pretty decent on x86 platforms, but your mileage may vary. For testing systems and VMs have a look at the supported device list, and developers are welcome to check out the GitHub page for the source.

Considering our own recent coverage of using FreeBSD as a desktop system, ravynOS provides an interesting counterpoint to simply copying over the desktop experience of Linux, and instead cozying up to its cousin MacOS. If this also means being able to run all MacOS games and applications, it could really propel FreeBSD into the desktop space from an unexpected corner.

Microsoft Open Sources Zork I, II And III

November 21, 2025 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

The history of the game Zork is a long and winding one, starting with MUDs and kin on university mainframes – where students entertained themselves in between their studies – and ending with the game being ported to home computers. These being pathetically undersized compared to even a PDP-10 meant that Zork got put to the axe, producing Zork I through III. Originally distributed by Infocom, eventually the process of Microsoft gobbling up game distributors and studios alike meant that Microsoft came to hold the license to these games. Games which are now open source as explained on the Microsoft Open Source blog.

Although the source had found its way onto the Internet previously, it’s now officially distributed under the MIT license, along with accompanying developer documentation. The source code for the three games can be found on GitHub, in separate repositories for Zork I, Zork II and Zork III.

We previously covered Zork’s journey from large systems to home computers, which was helped immensely by the Z-machine platform that the game’s code was ported to. Sadly the original games’s MDL code was a bit much for 8-bit home computers. Regardless of whether you prefer the original PDP-10 or the Z-machine version on a home computer system, both versions are now open sourced, which is a marvelous thing indeed.

How One Uncaught Rust Exception Took Out Cloudflare

November 20, 2025 by Maya Posch 67 Comments

On November 18 of 2025 a large part of the Internet suddenly cried out and went silent, as Cloudflare’s infrastructure suffered the software equivalent of a cardiac arrest. After much panicked debugging and troubleshooting, engineers were able to coax things back to life again, setting the stage for the subsequent investigation. The results of said investigation show how a mangled input file caused an exception to be thrown in the Rust-based FL2 proxy which went uncaught, throwing up an HTTP 5xx error and thus for the proxy to stop proxying customer traffic. Customers who were on the old FL proxy did not see this error.

The input file in question was the features file that is generated dynamically depending on the customer’s settings related to e.g. bot traffic. A change here resulted in said feature file to contain duplicate rows, increasing the number of typical features from about 60 to over 200, which is a problem since the proxy pre-allocates memory to contain this feature data.

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Fixing A Milltronics ML15 CNC Lathe Despite The Manufacturer’s Best Efforts

November 20, 2025 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

When you’re like [Wes] from Watch Wes Work fame, you don’t have a CNC machine hoarding issue, you just have a healthy interest in going down CNC machine repair rabbit holes. Such too was the case with a recently acquired 2001 Milltronics ML15 lathe, that at first glance appeared to be in pristine condition. Yet despite – or because of – living a cushy life at a college’s workshop, it had a number of serious issues, with a busted Z-axis drive board being the first to be tackled.

The Glentek servo board that caused so much grief. (Credit: Watch Wes Work, YouTube)

The identical servo control board next to it worked fine, so it had to be an issue on the board itself. A quick test showed that the H-bridge IGBTs had suffered the typical fate that IGBTs suffer, violently taking out another IC along with them. Enjoyably, this board by one Glentek Inc. did the rebranding thing of components like said IGBTs, which made tracking down suitable replacements an utter pain that was eased only by the desperate communications on forums which provided some clues. Of course, desoldering and testing one of the good IGBTs on the second board showed the exact type of IGBT to get.

After replacing said IGBTs, as well as an optocoupler and other bits and pieces, the servo board was good as new. Next, the CNC lathe also had a busted optical encoder, an unusable tool post and a number of other smaller and larger issues that required addressing. Along the way the term ‘pin-to-pin compatible’ for a replacement driver IC was also found to mean that you still have to read the full datasheet.

Of the whole ordeal, the Glentek servo board definitely caused the most trouble, with the manufacturer providing incomplete schematics, rebranding parts to make generic replacements very hard to find and overall just going for a design that’s interesting but hard to diagnose and fix. To help out anyone else who got cursed with a Glentek servo board like this, [Wes] has made the board files and related info available in a GitHub repository.

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Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous

November 19, 2025 by Maya Posch 82 Comments

Amidst the glossy marketing for VPN services, it can be tempting to believe that the moment you flick on the VPN connection you can browse the internet with full privacy. Unfortunately this is quite far from the truth, as interacting with internet services like websites leaves a significant fingerprint. In a study by [RTINGS.com] this browser fingerprinting was investigated in detail, showing just how easy it is to uniquely identify a visitor across the 83 laptops used in the study.

As summarized in the related video (also embedded below), the start of the study involved the Am I Unique? website which provides you with an overview of your browser fingerprint. With over 4.5 million fingerprints in their database as of writing, even using Edge on Windows 10 marks you as unique, which is telling.

In the study multiple VPN services were used, each of which resulted in exactly the same fingerprint hash. This is based on properties retrieved from the browser, via JavaScript and other capabilities exposed by the browser, including WebGL and HTML5 Canvas.

Continue reading “Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous” →

Writing Type-Safe Generics In C

November 17, 2025 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

The fun part about a programming language like C is that although the language doesn’t directly support many features including object-oriented programming and generics, there’s nothing that’s keeping you from implementing said features in C. This extends to something like type-safe generics in C, as [Raph] demonstrates in a blog post.

After running through the various ways that generics are also being implemented using methods including basic preprocessor macros and void pointers, the demonstrated method is introduced. While not necessarily a new one, the advantage with this method is that it is type-safe. Much like C++ templates, these generics are evaluated at compile time, with the preprocessor handling both the type checking and filling in of the right template snippets.

While somewhat verbose, it can be condensed into a single header file, doesn’t rely on the void type or pointers and can be deduplicated by the linker, preventing bloat. If generics is what you are looking for in your C project, this might be a conceivable solution.