NASA is going back to the Moon! We’ll follow the crew of Artemis II every step of the way.
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This Week In Security: Flatpak Fixes, Android Malware, And SCADA Was IOT Before IOT Was Cool
Rowhammer attacks have been around since 2014, and mitigations are in place in most modern systems, but the team at gddr6.fail has found ways to apply the attack to current-generation GPUs.
Rowhammer attacks attach the electrical characteristics of RAM, using manipulation of the contents of RAM to cause changes in the contents of adjacent memory cells. Bit values are just voltage levels, after all, and if a little charge leaks across from one row to the next, you can potentially pull a bit high by writing repeatedly to its physical neighbors.
The attack was used to allow privilege escalation by manipulating the RAM defining the user data, and later, to allow reading and manipulation of any page in ram by modifying the system page table that maps memory and memory permissions. By 2015 researchers refined the attack to run in pure JavaScript against browsers, and in 2016 mobile devices were shown to be vulnerable. Mitigations have been put in place in physical memory design, CPU design, and in software. However, new attack vectors are still discovered regularly, with DDR4 and DDR5 RAM as well as AMD and RISC-V CPUs being vulnerable.
The GDDR6-Fail attack targets the video ram of modern graphics cards, and is able to trigger similar vulnerabilities in the graphics card itself, culminating in accessing and changing the memory of the PC via the PCI bus and bypassing protections.
For users who fear they are at risk — most likely larger AI customers or shared hosting environments where the code running on the GPU may belong to untrusted users — enabling error correcting (ECC) mode in the GPU reduces the amount of available RAM, but adds protection by performing checksums on the memory to detect corruption or bit flipping. For the average home user, your mileage may vary – there’s certainly easier ways to execute arbitrary code on your PC – like whatever application is running graphics in the first place!
Bacteria Marching To The Beat Of A Tiny Drum
Traditionally, identifying a bacterium requires peering through a microscope. Researchers from TU Delft want to trade your eyes for your ears when identifying bacteria. This is possible because they’ve crafted nanoscale drums that convert bacteria’s movement into sound.
The technique originated when Delft researchers noticed something odd. If a living bacterium were on a graphene sheet, it would beat a distinctive pattern that you can detect with a laser. Each drumhead consists of two graphene sheets laid over an 8-micrometer-wide cavity. The sheets are less than a nanometer thick.
The sounds are due to the subtle motion of the tiny lifeform. Scientists have known about these motions, but previously had to measure them en masse. The tiny drums can respond to a single organism, typically about 1 to 10 micrometers in size.
Graphene makes this sensor possible because it is thin enough to behave like a drum with such a tiny force, yet also strong enough to support the bacterium. At first, the technique was simply to determine if antibiotics were killing the bacteria. However, they found that specific bacteria produced audio with unique spectrograms.
It is foolproof, but machine language models can identify among three common bacteria with nearly 90% accuracy. The next step is to reduce the high-tech research setup to something practical for a hospital or doctor’s office. Early prototypes are now in use in two hospitals.
We’ve seen the benefits of automated microscopes that can detect a particular disease. This technology, refined, could go even further.
Running DOOM On…a TrueType Font?
Over the years, DOOM has been ported to many things; think of any arbitrary device and chances are it can run the classic shooter. But what about something more esoteric like [Artem]’s DOOM in a TrueType font?
Okay, it’s not technically a port of DOOM, but it’s still very cool. TrueType actually has a bytecode used for hints to the render and, while not made for this, it’s just complete enough for this demo to run. Either to increase the over-engineering, or just to make it all a bit easier, [Artem] makes a simple DSL and a matching compiler written in Python.
All of this allows the byte code intended to implement serifs run arbitrary code, in this case, ray casting the walls for a DOOM demo. The final bytecode is 6,580 in size and, assuming your font renderer implements this, is very playable.
While this project’s implementation of the game is a bit abstract, the version of DOOM that you can run over DNS is the real deal.
Reflecting On Microsoft Windows Vista In 2026
It’s a bit of an understatement that at release Windows Vista rather fell flat. Much of the problem was due to how rushed of a release it was, with incomplete driver support and various glitches in the OS that ought to have been ironed out prior to release. In a retrospective, [SteelsOfLiquid] takes a look at what used to be the most infamous Windows OS until the arrival of first Windows 8 and subsequently the popcorn-fest that is Windows 11.
After a brief re-run of the development history and initial release of Vista, the OS is installed on a Core 2 Duo E8400 with 4 GB of DDR3 and a Geforce 310 card. This being the first NT6-based Windows version (with Microsoft jumping up to version 10 with Windows 10), it’s still got a lot of working software for it in 2026. Some have argued that Windows 7 is basically Vista SE in the vein of Window 98, so it doesn’t face the same software and driver hurdles as e.g. Windows XP does.
Thus the video focuses mostly on the software that was provided with the OS, giving a detailed look at an OS that many of us skipped in favor of sticking to Windows XP to the despair of Microsoft who had to push back that OS’s EOL by a few years as a result. For those of us who joined in the hate-fest against Vista it feels somewhat nostalgic to look back at an experience that in 2026 terms would have been less rough than trying to use Windows 10 or 11 until years of updates made at least the former not entirely terrible to use.
Here’s hoping that Windows 12 will be more of a modern Windows 7, especially in the GUI department, as it’s so nice to have a colorful OS interface with some tasty skeuomorphism rather than monochrome, flat icons.
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USB, Abstracted
Modern technology builds on abstractions. Most application programmers today don’t know what a non-maskable interrupt is, nor should they have to. Even fewer understand register coloring or reservation stations for instruction scheduling, and fewer still can explain the physics behind the transistors in the CPU. Sometimes tech starts out where you need to know everything (programming a bare-metal microprocessor, for example) and then evolves to abstraction. That’s where [WerWolv] wants to get you for writing USB code using the recent post USB for Software Developers.
Many USB tutorials assume you want to know about the intricacies of protocol negotiation, information about the hardware layer, and that you are willing to write a Linux kernel module to provide a driver. But thanks to abstraction, none of this has been absolutely necessary for many use cases for a long time.
While the post focuses on Linux, there is libusb for Windows. We presume the same principles would apply, more or less.
[Kerry Wong] Finds SMD Test Clips
One of the many problems you run into when you work with SMD parts is trying to probe the little tiny pins. While we usually watch [Kerry Wong’s] videos for the oscilloscopes, it makes sense that he’d also be looking for probes. The video below shows some cheap probes from China that can clamp onto tiny QFP pins.
The probes look a little like tiny needles, but the needle part isn’t conductive. When you push them, very tiny and rigid clamps come out. On the other end is a pin that will take a female header or, of course, you could connect another test lead to that pin.
Upgrading A MacBook Neo Using A 1 TB IPhone NAND Flash
For some reason the newly introduced MacBook Neo appears to be the subject of a lot of modding, though a recent mod by [dosdude1] leans into the fact that this laptop has been assembled using what are effectively iPhone 16 parts inside a laptop case. This consequently means that there’s an overlap with certain iPhone 16 components, such as the NAND Flash. Incidentally storage on the Neo is limited to 512 GB when you purchase it from Apple, which is weird since the same SoC in the iPhone 16 Pro happily uses 1 TB.
Even if it was just a price point thing that Apple went for, there’s seemingly nothing standing between a Neo owner with a hot air gun and sheer determination. As long as you’re comfortable soldering a fine-pitched BGA NAND Flash package, natch.
Of course, there was always the possibility that Apple used a different NAND Flash package footprint, but the installed 256 GB model chip that comes installed matches the replacement 1 TB model K8A5 chip as hoped. This just left disassembly and preparing the PCB for a storage replacement. Removal of the BGA underfill and desoldering the old chip without taking out surrounding SMD parts is definitely the hardest part, but handled in the video with the equivalent of an IC spatula and a temporary removal of some capacitors.
Interestingly, the uncovered IC footprint shows a whole perimeter of unused pads that might target other NAND Flash packages. Regardless, the new chip installed fine, giving the Neo 1 TB of storage and a slightly faster read/write performance.
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