Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Helps Discover New Marine Species

The Squid is a new scientific machine:

One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to scan microscopic details of how organisms are put together. “That opens up a whole new world of exploring. We could see cells interacting with each other, exchanging material and building skeletons. And we could do that live on the ship, when usually it takes a couple of weeks of staining and mounting to see anything,” Osborn said.

The expedition discovered thirty-one new marine species in two weeks. The article doesn’t say if any of them were new species of squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

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Posted on July 31, 2026 at 5:06 PM • 12 Comments

Comments

r • July 31, 2026 8:00 PM

my comment about flash wiping on the other thread is about 25 years late to be fully applicable, i still like the idea of a forward running has to detect saturation/completion.

an rng seeded one could simply prng seed an xor loop over the existing contents, also not a good scenario for content erasure.

but, that’s not what i’m here for today:

was anthropics recent extrusion event a sign of self-awareness when the agent recognized it was no longer under simulation?

lurker • July 31, 2026 8:06 PM

“cheap as chips”

Somebody might have to tell the dictionary compilers to add a comment on the mid-2020s AI bubble. Apple has warned Wall St. that their rate of growth will dip next quarter due to “supply chain constraints”, while they try to spin it as demand for their own product exceeding component supply.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/apple-stockpiles-inventory-as-it-braces-for-significant-supply-constraints/

Meanwhile the rest of us watch our local computer parts shop prices keep climbing, supply keeps falling …

Anonymous • July 31, 2026 9:05 PM

Still searching the web for:

Zero Emission Pad

A free text editor for Windows with anti-TEMPEST features.

They’ve scrubbed the net of it REAL well. 🙁

pika • July 31, 2026 10:13 PM

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The pool of saliva carrascates below our feet
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They laugh and blow kisses at the moon
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h0m3 rUn • July 31, 2026 10:39 PM

Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption

https://lwn.net/Articles/1086489/

The Arch Linux DevOps team has announced that adoption of orphaned packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) has been disabled due to “”the current influx of malicious package adoptions and follow-up commits made via the AUR””. Michael Taggart has posted a brief analysis of the malware being added to a long list of packages in this round of attacks. The payload appears to be an remote-access trojan (RAT) that takes commands over the Tor network and attempts to upload a wide range of user data.

The project had suspended new account registration in June. That followed a campaign in which an attacker or attackers created new accounts to adopt orphaned packages and push malicious updates to them that would install malware on user systems. AUR registration was reopened on July 13 after the DevOps team added some minor, and apparently ineffective, restrictions on creating new accounts.

Ferentarius • August 1, 2026 11:00 AM

In a world drunk on speed and novelty, the Amish whisper the wisdom of eternity. Man does not live by algorithms alone. He lives by the breath of his neighbor, by the sacred rhythm of work and prayer, by the quiet weight of shared duties. To chain oneself to a screen is to loosen oneself from God. The black-box phone, the plain computer—these are not backwardness, but reminders that the soul must govern the tool, not the reverse. The modern man kneels before progress as before an idol; the Amish, in their stubborn restraint, confess that no machine can save a heart that forgets heaven.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-the-amish-let-technology-in-without-letting-it-take-over/

Clive Robinson • August 1, 2026 3:11 PM

@ ALL,

AI and water supply destruction

Some will know I have concerns over AI and water usage.

The general view is that AI water use will be a drop in the ocean…

The problem is the way many are looking at AI use of water against national or continental style water supplies rather than local usage.

Local water usage by AI will pull very large quantities of water from local aquifers not national or continental and can easily destroy an aquifer and cause land slip / heave etc.

To see what this could mean in reality,

https://www.science.org/content/article/california-aquifer-may-have-crossed-point-no-return

Then think again about “local v national” and what all that land slip heave effects on built data centers.

Clive Robinson • August 1, 2026 5:08 PM

@ Anonymous,

With regards,

“A free text editor for Windows with anti-TEMPEST features.

They’ve scrubbed the net of it REAL well.”

Actually no I posted about this some months back it’s basically usless these days,

https://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14334

It’s very much pre-Win XP and designed for signalling used in old analogue CRT monitors to soften the high frequency content of font “edges” thus reduce the EM radiation that Van Eck Freaking used.

Without going into lots of technical details it does not work with the hardware or MS or any other consumer or commercial OS this century.

However if you were building your own microcontroller hardware used with old style CCTV etc you might find the design of some use.

In essence you take the “fonts” and push them through some Fourier Transforms and reduce the spectral components. The resulting “soft fonts” simply generate less high frequency EM radiation in the drivers, cables and displays.

Cambridge Universities Markus Kuhn wrote a paper on making them,

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/softtempest-faq.html

Hope that helps.

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