ytene writes: As reported by the BBC, a team at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are reporting a hint of new physics thanks to analysis of results from exploring the so-called beauty quark. Results from the LHCb are currently standing at three-sigma -- offering a roughly one-in-one-thousand chance that the measurements reported are a statistical coincidence, still considered short of the so-called "gold-standard" of five-sigma [in which there is a one in 3.5 million chance of the result being a fluke]. If further analysis and experiments confirm these results, they might point the way to an as-yet undiscovered particle, hints of something beyond the Standard Model.

When the Star Trek franchise was awarded a special Emmy in 2018, it was William "Captain Kirk" Shatner who'd co-delivered its acceptance speech, remembers ComicBook.com. "Thank you so much. 52 years. What a gift. We're grateful... Star Trek has endured because it represents an idea — one that's greater than the sum of our parts... we watch and we reach to see the best version of ourselves..."

And now three years later, they report that Shatner "will celebrate his 90th birthday back on the bridge of the USS Enterprise." Sort of... Shatner will partake in a two-day event at the Star Trek: The Original Series Set Tour site in Ticonderoga, New York. The exhibit is famed among fans for its replica of the bridge set where Shatner gave orders as Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek: The Original Series.

The two-day event begins on July 23rd (a belated celebration coming a few months after his actual birthday in March), with the COVID-19 mask and social distancing rules still in effect... The limited $1500 all-inclusive packages will let fans participate in Shatner's 90th Birthday Dinner Celebration, take a set tour with Shatner, plus a Bridge Chat, a photo, and an autograph. Regular admission is $80 for a standard tour with a la carte photos and autographs available... The replica set is likely the closest fans will ever come to seeing Shatner return to a Starfleet bridge.
So what is William Shatner doing on Monday, the actual date of his 90th birthday? The New York Daily News reports: He's got a series airing on the History channel, he's heading overseas to shoot an episode of a television show, and is in the middle of promoting his latest feature film, a romantic comedy called "Senior Moment..."

The indie film features Shatner as Victor, a former test pilot who dates younger women and loves burning rubber behind the wheel of his beautiful 1955 Porsche.
The movie also stars Watchmen actress Jean Smart, along with Christopher Lloyd (who memorably played a Klingon in the 1984 movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.)

And meanwhile Priceline.com plans a special series of deals this week to honor Shatner's years as their spokesperson (as well as his singing in their earliest dotcom-era commercials, which revived Shatner's spoken-word singing career).

In Captain Kirk's final appearance in 1994's Star Trek: Generations, one of the last things he says is "It was fun." But it looks like in real life, William Shatner is living long and prospering.

Here's that great moment in Slashdot history when Shatner actually answered questions from Slashdot's readers. Have your own favorite William Shatner memory? Share it in the comments to help celebrate his 90th birthday!

For 30 years David E. Sanger has been covering foreign policy and nuclear proliferation for The New York Times — twice working on Pulitzer Prize-winning teams. But now as American and Chinese officials meet in Alaska, Sanger argues that China's power doesn't come from weapons — nuclear or otherwise: Instead, it arises from their expanding economic might and how they use their government-subsidized technology to wire nations be it Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe, with 5G wireless networks intended to tie them ever closer to Beijing. It comes from the undersea cables they are spooling around the world so that those networks run on Chinese-owned circuits. Ultimately, it will come from how they use those networks to make other nations dependent on Chinese technology. Once that happens, the Chinese could export some of their authoritarianism by, for example, selling other nations facial recognition software that has enabled them to clamp down on dissent at home.

Which is why Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden's national security adviser, who was with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, warned in a series of writings in recent years that it could be a mistake to assume that China plans to prevail by directly taking on the United States military in the Pacific. "The central premises of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power in establishing global leadership," he wrote, "and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a necessary precondition for sustaining such leadership...."

Part of the goal of the Alaska meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden administration is determined to compete with Beijing across the board to offer competitive technology, like semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence, even if that means spending billions on government-led research and development projects, and new industrial partnerships with Europe, India, Japan and Australia... But it will take months, at best, to publish a broad new strategy, and it is unclear whether corporate America or major allies will get behind it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: DDoS mitigation provider Netscout said on Wednesday that it has observed DDoS-for-hire services adopting a new amplification vector. The vector is the Datagram Transport Layer Security, or D/TLS, which (as its name suggests) is essentially the Transport Layer Security for UDP data packets. Just as TLS prevents eavesdropping, tampering, or forgery of TLS packets, D/TLS does the same for UDP data. DDoSes that abuse D/TLS allow attackers to amplify their attacks by a factor of 37. Previously, Netscout saw only advanced attackers using dedicated DDoS infrastructure abusing the vector. Now, so-called booter and stressor services -- which use commodity equipment to provide for-hire attacks -- have adopted the technique. The company has identified almost 4,300 publicly reachable D/LTS servers that are susceptible to the abuse.

The biggest D/TLS-based attacks Netscout has observed delivered about 45Gbps of traffic. The people responsible for the attack combined it with other amplification vectors to achieve a combined size of about 207Gbps. [...] The 4,300 abusable D/TLS servers are the result of misconfigurations or outdated software that causes an anti-spoofing mechanism to be disabled. While the mechanism is built in to the D/TLS specification, hardware including the Citrix Netscaller Application Delivery Controller didn't always turn it on by default. Citrix has more recently encouraged customers to upgrade to a software version that uses anti-spoofing by default.

Besides posing a threat to devices on the Internet at large, abusable D/TLS servers also put organizations using them at risk. Attacks that bounce traffic off one of these machines can create full or partial interruption of mission-critical remote-access services inside the organization's network. Attacks can also cause other service disruptions. Netscout's Hummel and Dobbins said that the attacks can be challenging to mitigate because the size of the payload in a D/TLS request is too big to fit in a single UDP packet and is, therefore, split into an initial and non-initial packet stream.

The Big Four all lean on the online encyclopedia at no cost. With the launch of Wikimedia Enterprise, the volunteer project will change that -- and possibly itself too. From a report: From the start, Google and Wikipedia have been in a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information Google serves up in response to user queries, and Google builds up Wikipedia's reputation as a source of trustworthy information. Of course, there have been bumps, including Google's bold attempt to replace Wikipedia with its own version of user-generated articles, under the clumsy name "Knol," short for knowledge. Knol never did catch on, despite Google's offer to pay the principal author of an article a share of advertising money. But after that failure, Google embraced Wikipedia even tighter -- not only linking to its articles but reprinting key excerpts on its search result pages to quickly deliver Wikipedia's knowledge to those seeking answers. The two have grown in tandem over the past 20 years, each becoming its own household word. But whereas one mushroomed into a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a midsize nonprofit, depending on the generosity of individual users, grant-giving foundations, and the Silicon Valley giants themselves to stay afloat. Now Wikipedia is seeking to rebalance its relationships with Google and other big tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants lean on Wikipedia as a cost-free virtual crib sheet.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages as well as other wiki-projects, is announcing the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia's content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too). Conversations between the foundation's newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, point-people on the project said in an interview, but the next couple of months will be about seeking the reaction of Wikipedia's thousands of volunteers. Agreements with the firms could be reached as soon as June.

"The Border Gateway Protocol was first described in 1989...," according to Wikipedia, "and has been in use on the Internet since 1994."

But now long-time Slashdot reader jovius reports that a startup named Syntropy "aims to replace BGP as the default routing method of the internet, by using nodes around the world to constantly gather data of the inefficiencies of the current network." The intelligence is then used to route data via the most efficient routes. Actual tests with hundreds of servers have proved that latencies can be reduced by tens to hundreds of milliseconds. The connections are by default encrypted, and jitter is also reduced.

Eventually, the company-run servers are augmented with tens of thousands of nodes run by users/smart devices, who are rewarded for their work.

The team was recently joined by former SVP at Verizon Shawn Hakl and former Chief Product Officer at AT&T Roman Pacewicz. One of the founders of Syntropy is the co-founder of Equinix and NANOG Bill Norton. Syntropy is an Oracle and Microsoft partner, and transforming into a foundation and DAO to govern the protocol work.
Decentralised autonomous routing protocol (or DARP) has just been opened for community testing, and the system is live on https://darp.syntropystack.com/.

"We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it," declared the Agile Manifesto, nearly 20 years ago. "Through this work we have come to value..."

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan

Today a new ZDNet article asks how far the tech industry has come in achieving the vision of its 12 principles — and why Agile is often "still just a buzzword." The challenge arises "because many come to agile as a solution or prescription, rather than starting with the philosophy that the Agile Manifesto focused on," says Bob Ritchie, VP of Software at SAIC. "Many best practices such as automated test-driven development, automated builds, deployments, and rapid feedback loops are prevalent in the industry. However, they are frequently still unmoored from the business and mission objectives due to that failure to start with why."

Still, others feel we're still nowhere near achieving the vision of the original Agile Manifesto. "Absolutely not at a large scale across enterprises," , says Brian Dawson, DevOps evangelist with CloudBees. "We are closer and more aware, but we are turning a tanker and it is slow and incremental. In start-ups, we are seeing much more of this; that is promising because they are the enterprises of the future." Agile initiatives "all too often are rolled out from, and limited to, project planning or the project management office. To support agile and DevOps transformation, agile needs to be implemented with all stakeholders."

Some organizations turn to agile "as a panacea to increase margins by cutting cost with a better, shinier development process," Ritchie cautions. "Others go even further by weaponizing popular metrics associated with agile capacity planning such as velocity and misclassifying it as a performance metric for an individual or team. In these circumstances, the promises of the manifesto are almost certainly missed as opportunities to engage and collaborate give way to finger pointing, blame, and burnout." What's missing from many agile initiatives is "ways to manage what you do based on value and outcomes, rather than on measuring effort and tasks," says Morris. "We've seen the rise of formulaic 'enterprise agile' frameworks that try to help you to manage teams in a top-down way, in ways that are based on everything on the right of the values of the Agile Manifesto. The manifesto says we value 'responding to change over following a plan,' but these frameworks give you a formula for managing plans that don't really encourage you to respond to change once you get going."

Google and Microsoft engineers might collaborate on the Chromium browser code, but that hasn't stopped corporate politics between the pair. From a report: Google has launched a scathing attack on Microsoft today, accusing it of trying "to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival." Google is upset about what it believes is an attack by Microsoft to undermine the company's efforts to support journalism and publishers.

In January, Google threatened to remove its search engine from Australia, in response to a law that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content. Australia passed the law in February, just days after Google caved and cut a deal with News Corp. and other publishers that ensured its services continue to be available in Australia. In the middle of all of this, Microsoft was very public about its support of Australia's new law, and it even teamed up with European publishers to call for online platforms to reach deals to pay news outlets for content. Google isn't happy about Microsoft getting involved and this is the first big public spat we've seen since the Scroogled era. "They are now making self-serving claims and are even willing to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival," says Kent Walker, Google's head of global affairs, in a blog post. "This latest attack marks a return to Microsoft's longtime practices. Walker links to the Wikipedia entry for Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), and accuses Microsoft of muddying the waters to distract from recent security issues."

"It's no coincidence that Microsoft's newfound interest in attacking us comes on the heels of the SolarWinds attack and at a moment when they've allowed tens of thousands of their customers ... to be actively hacked via major Microsoft vulnerabilities," says Walker. "Microsoft was warned about the vulnerabilities in their system, knew they were being exploited, and are now doing damage control while their customers scramble to pick up the pieces from what has been dubbed the Great Email Robbery. So maybe it's not surprising to see them dusting off the old diversionary Scroogled playbook."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Wormholes play a key role in many science fiction films -- often as a shortcut between two distant points in space. In physics, however, these tunnels in spacetime have remained purely hypothetical. An international team led by Dr. Jose Luis Blazquez-Salcedo of the University of Oldenburg has now presented a new theoretical model in the science journal Physical Review Letters that makes microscopic wormholes seem less far-fetched than in previous theories. [...] The researchers chose a comparatively simple "semiclassical" approach. They combined elements of relativity theory with elements of quantum theory and classic electrodynamics theory. In their model they consider certain elementary particles such as electrons and their electric charge as the matter that is to pass through the wormhole. As a mathematical description, they chose the Dirac equation, a formula that describes the probability density function of a particle according to quantum theory and relativity as a so-called Dirac field.

As the physicists report in their study, it is the inclusion of the Dirac field into their model that permits the existence of a wormhole traversable by matter, provided that the ratio between the electric charge and the mass of the wormhole exceeds a certain limit. In addition to matter, signals -- for example electromagnetic waves -- could also traverse the tiny tunnels in spacetime. The microscopic wormholes postulated by the team would probably not be suitable for interstellar travel. Moreover, the model would have to be further refined to find out whether such unusual structures could actually exist. "We think that wormholes can also exist in a complete model," says Blazquez-Salcedo.

"iCloud has had the occasional service issue, but its latest problem appears to be highly... specific," writes Engadget: Actor and author Rachel True claims iCloud has effectively locked her out of her account due to the way her last name was written. Reportedly, her Mac thought lower-case "true" was a Boolean (true or false) flag, leading the iCloud software on the computer to seize up. The problem has persisted for over six months, she said.

True said she'd spent hours talking to customer service, and that Apple hadn't stopped charging her for service. She could switch to the free tier, although she'd also lose most of her online storage if she did.
True has apparently resorted to imploring desperately in tweets to both @Apple and @AppleSupport. "Now that I a layman have explained problem to you a giant computer company, could u fix...?"

"A thing I've learned about life so far is I hate being the test case."

"When I get a dog I'm naming it Boolean Bobby Drop Tables True"

schwit1 shares an article from Entrepreneur: If anyone has the ability to surprise the world with his ambitious projects, it is Elon Musk . The billionaire announced that he is building a new city in Texas to be called Starbase, around the rocket launch site of his company SpaceX...

Later, he alluded to his project to colonize the red planet, hinting that Starbase would be just the beginning to go further. "From there to Mars. And hence the Stars," detailed the CEO of Tesla.

The tycoon, who is currently the second richest person in the world , said that his city will occupy an area "much larger" than Boca Chica , a place that houses a launch site for SpaceX and where the company is building its Starship rocket... Eddie Treviño, judge for Cameron County, Texas, confirmed that SpaceX informed the authorities of Elon Musk's intention: to incorporate Boca Chica into the city of Starbase . The official noted that the mogul and his company must comply with all state statutes of incorporation and clarified that the county will process any petition in accordance with the law.
Musk also tweeted that the leader of his new city "shall be The Doge," linking to a Wikipedia definition for the Venetian word doge (meaning either "military commander" or "spiritual leader".)

Musk made his remark in response to a Twitter user named Wootiez, who had asked him whether his new city would be dog friendly.

Hackaday writes: In the early years of personal computing there were a slew of serious contenders. A PC, a Mac, an Atari ST, an Amiga, and several more that all demanded serious consideration on the general purpose desktop computer market. Of all these platforms, the Amiga somehow stubbornly refuses to die. The Amiga 1200+ from [Jeroen Vandezande] is the latest in a long procession of post-Commodore Amigas, and as its name suggests it provides an upgrade for the popular early-1990s all-in-one Amiga model.

It takes the form of a well-executed open-source printed circuit board that's a drop-in replacement for the original A1200 motherboard... The catch: it does require all the custom Amiga chips from a donor board...

It's fair to say that this is the Amiga upgrade we'd all have loved to see in about 1996 rather than waiting until 2019.
Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) shares a recent video showing the latest update of AmigaOS 4 by Hyperion Entertainment, and reminds us of two "also active" Amiga OS clones — AROS and MorphOS.

Further reading: Little Things That Made Amiga Great.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Bitflips are events that cause individual bits stored in an electronic device to flip, turning a 0 to a 1 or vice versa. Cosmic radiation and fluctuations in power or temperature are the most common naturally occurring causes. Research from 2010 estimated that a computer with 4GB of commodity RAM has a 96 percent chance of experiencing a bitflip within three days. An independent researcher recently demonstrated how bitflips can come back to bite Windows users when their PCs reach out to Microsoft's windows.com domain. Windows devices do this regularly to perform actions like making sure the time shown in the computer clock is accurate, connecting to Microsoft's cloud-based services, and recovering from crashes.

Remy, as the researcher asked to be referred to, mapped the 32 valid domain names that were one bitflip away from windows.com. Of the 32 bit-flipped values that were valid domain names, Remy found that 14 of them were still available for purchase. This was surprising because Microsoft and other companies normally buy these types of one-off domains to protect customers against phishing attacks. He bought them for $126 and set out to see what would happen.

Over the course of two weeks, Remy's server received 199,180 connections from 626 unique IP addresses that were trying to contact ntp.windows.com. By default, Windows machines will connect to this domain once per week to check that the time shown on the device clock is correct. What the researcher found next was even more surprising. "The NTP client for windows OS has no inherent verification of authenticity, so there is nothing stopping a malicious person from telling all these computers that it's after 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 and wreaking unknown havoc as the memory storing the signed 32-bit integer for time overflows," he wrote in a post summarizing his findings. "As it turns out though, for ~30% of these computers doing that would make little to no difference at all to those users because their clock is already broken."

mi shares a report from ScienceAlert: The marshmallow test, or Stanford marshmallow experiment, is pretty straightforward. A child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. They are told, if they can manage not to eat the marshmallow for 15 minutes, they'll get a second marshmallow, and be allowed to eat both. This ability to delay gratification demonstrates cognitive abilities such as future planning, and it was originally conducted to study how human cognition develops; specifically, at what age a human is smart enough to delay gratification if it means a better outcome later.

Because it's so simple, it can be adjusted for animals. Obviously you can't tell an animal they'll get a better reward if they wait, but you can train them to understand that better food is coming if they don't eat the food in front of them straight away. [...] The researchers found that all of the cuttlefish in the test condition decided to wait for their preferred food (the live shrimp), but didn't bother to do so in the control group, where they couldn't access it. "Cuttlefish in the present study were all able to wait for the better reward and tolerated delays for up to 50-130 seconds, which is comparable to what we see in large-brained vertebrates such as chimpanzees, crows and parrots," the researchers said.

The other part of the experiment was to test how good the six cuttlefish were at learning. They were shown two different visual cues, a grey square and a white one. When they approached one, the other would be removed from the tank; if they made the "correct" choice, they would be rewarded with a snack. Once they had learnt to associate a square with a reward, the researchers switched the cues, so that the other square now became the reward cue. Interestingly, the cuttlefish that learnt to adapt to this change the quickest were also the cuttlefish that were able to wait longer for the shrimp reward. The team's research has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the weekend, word emerged that a hacker breached far-right social media website Gab and downloaded 70 gigabytes of data by exploiting a garden-variety security flaw known as an SQL injection. A quick review of Gab's open source code shows that the critical vulnerability -- or at least one very much like it -- was introduced by the company's chief technology officer. The change, which in the parlance of software development is known as a "git commit," was made sometime in February from the account of Fosco Marotto, a former Facebook software engineer who in November became Gab's CTO. On Monday, Gab removed the git commit from its website. Below is an image showing the February software change, as shown from a site that provides saved commit snapshots.

The commit shows a software developer using the name Fosco Marotto introducing precisely the type of rookie mistake that could lead to the kind of breach reported this weekend. Specifically, line 23 strips the code of "reject" and "filter," which are API functions that implement a programming idiom that protects against SQL injection attacks. This idiom allows programmers to compose an SQL query in a safe way that "sanitizes" the inputs that website visitors enter into search boxes and other web fields to ensure that any malicious commands are stripped out before the text is passed to backend servers. In their place, the developer added a call to the Rails function that contains the "find_by_sql" method, which accepts unsanitized inputs directly in a query string. Rails is a widely used website development toolkit.

"Sadly Rails documentation doesn't warn you about this pitfall, but if you know anything at all about using SQL databases in web applications, you'd have heard of SQL injection, and it's not hard to come across warnings that find_by_sql method is not safe," Dmitry Borodaenko, a former production engineer at Facebook who brought the commit to my attention wrote in an email. "It is not 100% confirmed that this is the vulnerability that was used in the Gab data breach, but it definitely could have been, and this code change is reverted in the most recent commit that was present in their GitLab repository before they took it offline." Ironically, Fosco in 2012 warned fellow programmers to use parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Microsoft today announced Power Fx, a new low-code language that "will become the standard for writing logic customization across Microsoft's own low-code Power Platform," reports TechCrunch. "[S]ince the company is open-sourcing the language, Microsoft also hopes others will implement it as well and that it will become the de facto standard for these kinds of use cases." From the report: Microsoft says the language was developed by a team led by Vijay Mital, Robin Abraham, Shon Katzenberger and Darryl Rubin. Beyond Excel, the team also took inspiration from tools and languages like Pascal, Mathematica and Miranda, a functional programming language developed in the 1980s. Microsoft plans to bring Power Fx to all of its low-code platforms, but given the focus on community, it'll start making appearances in Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents and elsewhere soon.

But the team clearly hopes that others will adopt it as well. Low-code developers will see it pop up in the formula bars of products like Power Apps Studio, but more sophisticated users will also be able to use it to go to Visual Studio Code and build more complex applications with it. As the team noted, it focused on not just making the language Excel-like but also having it behave like Excel -- or like a REPL, for you high-code programmers out there. That means formulas are declarative and instantly recalculate as developers update their code.

An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Perseverence rover, which is currently exploring Mars, has as it's CPU a BAE Systems RAD 750 running at a 200 Mhz and featuring 256 Megabytes of RAM with 2 Gigabytes of storage. This is a radiation hardened version of the PowerPC G3, with specs roughly equivalent to the Clamshell Ibook that Reese Witherspoon used in Legally Blond back in 2001. This follows a tradition of old tech on space rovers — the Sojourner rover which explored Mars in 1997 used an Intel 80C85 running at 2 Mhz, similar to what could have been found in the classic Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100 portable from 1983.
In a comment on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader Mal-2 argues "There's not as much distance between the actual capabilities of a CPU now and twenty years ago as there would be if you made the same comparison a decade ago." In the last 12 years or so, the CPUs have gotten more efficient and cooler-running (thus suitable for portable devices) to a much greater degree than they've actually gained new functionality. Retro computing is either going to stay stuck in the 1990s, or it's not going to be very interesting in the future.

Morgan Housel, on the art and power of storytelling: C. R. Hallpike is a respected anthropologist who once wrote a review of a young author's recent book on the history of humans. It states: "It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously ... [It is not] a contribution to knowledge."

Two things are notable here.

One is that the book's author doesn't seem to disagree with the assessment.

Another is that the author, Yuval Noah Harari, has sold over 27 million books, making him one of the bestselling contemporary authors in any field, and his book Sapiens -- which Hallpike was reviewing -- the most successful anthropology book of all time.

Harari recently said about writing Sapiens: "I thought, 'This is so banal!' ... There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I'm not an archeologist. I'm not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research... It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.

What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.

It's nothing to be ashamed of, because so many successes work this way.

The Civil War is probably the most well-documented period in American history. There are thousands of books analyzing every conceivable angle, chronicling every possible detail. But in 1990 Ken Burns' Civil War documentary became an instant phenomenon, with 39 million viewers and winning 40 major film awards. As many Americans watched Ken Burns' Civil War in 1990 as watched the Super Bowl that year. And all he did -- not to minimize it, because it's such a feat -- is take 130-year-old existing information and wove it into a (very) good story.

Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which I understand drives the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy. His latest work is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it's so well written -- he tells such a good story -- that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and the Washington Post's Book of the Year. Charles Darwin didn't discover evolution, he just wrote the first and most compelling book about it. John Burr Williams had more profound insight on the topic of valuing companies than Benjamin Graham. But Graham knew how to write a good paragraph, so he became the legend.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: The U.S. Cyber Command, headed by the National Security Agency's director, has been a part of America's Department of Defense since 2009.

Today this unified combatant command wished its followers on Twitter a happy Valentine's Day, adding "As our gift to you, we present 12 crypto challenges designed by the information security community.

"Love is in the air, find it if you can. #BeOurValentine #cryptochallenge #VDayGifts."

They shared a link to the official U.S. Cyber Command Valentine's Day 2021 Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.
There are 12 tricky puzzles in all — 3 .jpgs, 6 .pngs, 2 .mp3s and a .bmp file — and I couldn't solve a single one of 'em.

Each one has a hint — though that hint is just the number of words in the answer, as well as its number of characters.

The standard model of physics can't accommodate some observed phenomena, notes Popular Mechanics. Yet "In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension." While the "warped extra dimension" (WED) is a trademark of a popular physics model first introduced in 1999, this research, published in The European Physical Journal C, is the first to cohesively use the theory to explain the long-lasting dark matter problem within particle physics...

The scientists studied fermion masses, which they believe could be communicated into the fifth dimension through portals, creating dark matter relics and "fermionic dark matter" within the fifth dimension.

Could dimension-traveling fermions explain at least some of the dark matter scientists have so far not been able to observe? "We know that there is no viable [dark matter] candidate in the [standard model of physics]," the scientists say, "so already this fact asks for the presence of new physics...." This pocket "dark sector" is one possible way to explain the huge amount of dark matter that, so far, has eluded detection using any traditional measurements designed for the standard model of physics. Fermions jammed through a portal to a warped fifth dimension could be "acting as" dark matter...

All it would take to identify fermionic dark matter in a warped fifth dimension would be the right kind of gravitational wave detector, something growing in prevalence around the world. Indeed, the answer to the dark matter conundrum could be just around the corner.