Daily Archives: February 4, 2026

Sudo’s sole maintainer looking for money to keep utility updated

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It’s hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.

It’s a common trope in the open-source computing community that a small number of solitary maintainers do a disproportionate amount of work keeping critical software going, often with little recognition or support. Ubuntu Unity and the NGINX Ingress Controller are just two examples we’ve covered in recent months, and now we can add another, far more critical one to the mix.

Sudo, for those not familiar with Unix systems, is a command-line utility that allows authorized users to run specific commands as another user, typically the superuser, under tightly controlled policy rules. It is a foundational component of Unix and Linux systems: without tools like sudo, administrators would be forced to rely more heavily on direct root logins or broader privilege escalation mechanisms, increasing both operational risk and attack surface.

“For the past 30+ years I’ve been the maintainer of sudo,” developer Todd C. Miller notes on his personal webpage. “I’m currently in search of a sponsor to fund continued sudo maintenance and development. If you or your organization is interested in sponsoring sudo, please let me know.”

Miller has been maintaining sudo since 1993. According to sudo’s website, Miller’s former employer, Quest Software, served as sudo’s sponsor beginning in 2010, but its sponsorship of sudo ended in February 2024, which coincides with Miller’s departure from Quest subsidiary One Identity.

Archived copies of Miller’s website suggest he’s been looking for a sudo patron since then.

That said, sudo updates haven’t dried up since then, with plenty of updates released since February 2024 according to sudo’s changelog, so Miller is clearly still working on it – and it definitely still needs updates.

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Source: Sudo’s maintainer needs resources to keep utility updated • The Register

USS Preble Used HELIOS Laser To Zap Four Drones In Expanding Testing

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The U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Preble used its High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system to down four drones in a demonstration last year, Lockheed Martin has shared. Earlier this month, the Navy’s top officer said his goal is for directed energy weapons to become the go-to choice for warship crews when it comes to defending against close-in threats. However, the service has continued to face significant hurdles in fielding operational laser weapon systems.

“Speaking of amazing technology, we successfully used a shipboard laser system, Lockheed Martin’s HELIOS, to knock an incoming UAV [uncrewed aerial vehicle] right out of the sky,” the company’s CEO Jim Taiclet said during a quarterly earnings call last week. “The HELIOS weapon system successfully neutralized four drone threats in a U.S. Navy-operated counter-UAS [uncrewed aerial systems] demonstration at sea, showcasing an opportunity to eliminate drone attacks using lasers, and saving U.S. and allied air defense missiles for more advanced threats.”

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HELIOS, which also carries the designation Mk 5 Mod 0, is a 60-kilowatt-class laser directed energy weapon designed to be powerful enough to destroy or at least damage certain targets, such as drones or small boats. As its name indicates, it has a secondary function as a ‘dazzler’ to blind optical sensors and seekers, which could also be damaged or destroyed in the process. In the past, Lockheed Martin has talked about potentially scaling HELIOS’ power rating up to 150 kilowatts.

A close-up look at the HELIOS laser installed on the USS Preble. USN

HELIOS has been integrated on Preble since 2022, and is currently the only Navy ship equipped with the system. Several other Arleigh Burke class destroyers have received lower-powered Optical Dazzling Interdictor (ODIN) laser systems. The Navy has installed more experimental high-energy laser directed energy weapons on other ships in the past.

A look at an ODIN system installed on the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Stockdale. USN

Preble successfully downed at least one drone using HELIOS in a previous test in 2024. That milestone was disclosed in an annual report from the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) released in January 2025.

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There are still significant questions about the demonstration last fall, including how rapidly the USS Preble was able to shift HELIOS from one target to another and how long it took each one to be effectively neutralized. The proximity of the drones to the ship and what kinds of profiles they were flying are also unknown.

A single laser can only engage one target at once. As the beam gets further away from the source, its power also drops, just as a result of it having to propagate through the atmosphere. This can be further compounded by the weather and other environmental factors like smoke and dust. More power is then needed to produce suitable effects at appreciable distances. Adaptive optics are used to help overcome atmospheric distortion to a degree. Altogether, laser directed energy weapons generally remain relatively short-range systems.

A graphic depicting an Arleigh Burke class destroyer firing a HELIOS laser. Note that the beam would not be visible to the naked eye during a real engagement. Lockheed Martin

In addition, laser directed energy weapons, especially sensitive optics, present inherent reliability challenges for use in real-world military operations. Shipboard use adds rough sea states and saltwater exposure to the equation. There is also the matter of needing to keep everything properly cooled, which creates additional power generation and other demands.

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Challenges to the Navy’s directed energy future clearly still remain. In speaking last month, Caudle was optimistic for the future, but he has been open about difficulties in the past. At the SNA symposium in 2025, the admiral, then head of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, said he was “embarrassed” at the state of his service’s directed energy weapon developments.

“I am not content with the pace of directed energy weapons,” Vice Adm. McLane had also said back in 2024. “We must deliver on this promise that this technology gives us.”

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Source: USS Preble Used HELIOS Laser To Zap Four Drones In Expanding Testing

In the meantime: British laser weapon downs drones off coast of Scotland (high speed drones), November 2021

First trial on British Army vehicle for high-powered laser weapon (July 2024)

Dutch air force reads pilots’ brainwaves to make training harder, but doesn’t necessarily make them better

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Evy van Weelden at the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre, Amsterdam, and her colleagues used a brain-computer interface to read student pilots’ brainwaves via electrodes attached to the scalp. An AI model analysed that data to determine how difficult the pilots were finding the task.

“We are continuously working on improving [pilot] training, and what that looks like can be very different,” says van Weelden. “If you’re not in the field, it sounds very sci-fi, I guess. But, for me, it’s really normal because I just see data.”

Fifteen Royal Netherlands Air Force pilots went through training while the system switched between five different levels of difficulty – accomplished by increasing or decreasing the visibility within the simulation – depending on how hard the AI model determined they were finding missions.

In later interviews, none of the pilots reported noticing that the system was altering the difficulty in real time, but 10 of the 15 pilots said they preferred the changing tests to a pre-programmed exercise where difficulty ramped up incrementally in regular steps.

But crucially, none of the pilots showed any improvement in terms of how well they accomplished tasks within the adaptive simulation compared with a rigid one. In short, pilots liked the mind-reading set-up, but it didn’t make them better pilots.

The problem could be the unique nature of people’s brains, says van Weelden. The AI model was trained on data from another group of novice pilots, then tested on the 15 study participants. But it is notoriously hard to get AI models that analyse brainwaves to work on the whole population. Six of the pilots in the test showed little change in difficulty level readings, indicating that the AI system may not have correctly interpreted their brain data.

 

Read more

We’re about to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer

 

James Blundell at Cranfield University, UK, says similar technology is being studied for use in real aircraft to ensure pilots are in control. “They’ve looked at whether we can detect startle – like being in a bit of a panic – and what the aircraft might then do to calm you and then reorientate you,” says Blundell. “So you’re upside down, [and the aircraft might say] you really need to look at the attitudes, you need to look at the information that’s down here, that’s going to bring you back to straight and level.”

These systems have shown promise in isolated scenarios, but it remains to be seen whether brain-reading technology can be used to improve safety in aeroplanes. “There’s a long way to go [in order to achieve that],” says Blundell.

 

Reference:

arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2512.09014

Source: Dutch air force reads pilots’ brainwaves to make training harder | New Scientist

ChatGPT and Claude outage disrupted use on 3/2/26

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If you had trouble using ChatGPT today, you aren’t alone. The AI chatbot experienced a partial outage for many users this afternoon, with Down Detector saw reports reaching more than 12,000 reports around the peak point of the issue today.. OpenAI issued a status update shortly after noting that “elevated error rates” were occurring for ChatGPT and Platform users. That problem was marked as resolved at 5:14PM ET.

While the initial outage may be repaired, OpenAI does still have an active status alert up. It’s only for the fine-tuning component of its API service. But the end may also be in sight for that final issue, because the current statement from the company is “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovering.

Another AI chatbot, Anthropic’s Claude, also experienced an outage today. It listed similar issues with “Elevated error rate on API across all Claude models.” That status was resolved by 1PM ET.

Source: ChatGPT is back up after an outage disrupted use this afternoon

Why did SpaceX (like China and Rwanda) just apply to launch 1 million satellites? Space Squatting part 3

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China applied for 200,000 satellites in January. Rwanda for 327,000 in 2021.

Staking this claim with the ITU means that other satellite operators filing to launch into the same orbits must demonstrate to the ITU that they will not interfere with their operations. Under ITU rules, at least one satellite must be launched seven years after China’s initial filing, with another seven years then allowed to finish launching all the proposed satellites.

“If you file ahead of someone else, if you meet your deadlines, those other operators should not interfere with you,” says Tim Farrar, a satellite communications consultant in the US, adding that China’s large filing for so many different orbits might signal some uncertainty in the structure of this constellation. “It gives them freedom of choice of what they want to do,” he says. “There’s very little penalty to doing it this way.”

Source: China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites, likely just to reserve the orbital area and stop others launching there – space squatting

We are only a month into 2026, yet it’s already clear what one of the major space stories of the year is going to be: mega-constellations, and the ongoing attempts to launch thousands of satellites into Earth’s orbit.

The latest development is that SpaceX has asked the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to launch 1 million orbital data centre satellites. The request is unprecedented. The previous largest filing with the FCC, also by SpaceX, was for 42,000 Starlink satellites in 2019.

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In the company’s latest filing on 30 January, and also shared in an update written by CEO Elon Musk, SpaceX said it wants to develop vast orbital data centres in space to power AI.

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The filing preceded the announcement on 2 February that SpaceX would acquire xAI, another of Musk’s companies that owns the social media site X and the controversial Grok chatbot. “If AI is what they want the orbital data centres for, then it’s a bit of a bundled package,” says Ruth Pritchard-Kelly, an expert in satellite regulation in the US.

SpaceX is not alone in its ambition to put many more satellites into orbit. On 29 December, China submitted an application with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations body that allocates portions of the radio spectrum in space, to launch 200,000 satellites into orbit. While there is no defined limit on how many satellites can safely be launched, previous studies have suggested it might be possible to operate millions of satellites in orbit, although anything above 100,000 is considered to become extremely hard to manage.

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It will take the FCC months to decide whether to approve SpaceX’s request, during which time it will open the application to public comments, while a separate filing will also need to be made with the ITU. If the FCC does approve it, SpaceX would normally be given a deadline of six years to deploy half the constellation – a requirement usually stipulated by the FCC – but SpaceX has asked for this requirement to be waived because it argued the satellites would mostly communicate by optical link, and not cause interference in radio.

SpaceX said it would operate the satellites between 500 and 2000 kilometres in altitude on slightly polar orbits, mostly above where Starlink currently operates. The size of each proposed satellite is unknown but, presuming they are similar in size to current Starlink satellites and each Starship could carry about 100 such satellites, it would take 10,000 Starship launches to complete the constellation.

Presuming a launch every hour, as suggested by Musk, it would take just over a year to deploy 1 million satellites. SpaceX says it would preserve the safety of Earth orbit by placing the satellites into “disposal orbits” at the end of their life either high above Earth, where it would take centuries for them to fall back to the planet, or into an orbit around the sun.

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Orbital data centre satellites might be even brighter than many existing satellites because they would not only require large reflective solar panels to generate power but also large radiators to expel heat into the vacuum of space, like those on the International Space Station.

Whether SpaceX is serious about launching 1 million satellites is another question: it might instead be something of a joke by Musk, says Pritchard-Kelly, given the absurdity of the number.

[…]

Of course, Amazon / Blue origin wants to launch project Kuiper, so this may a way to stop competition from finding space up there.

Source: Why did SpaceX just apply to launch 1 million satellites? | New Scientist