On this day (1626): “Dutch colonist Peter Minuit organizes the purchase of Manhattan Island from Native Americans for 60 guilders worth of goods, believed to be the Canarsee Indians of the Lenape.” Comic interlude:
“Oak trees are delaying spring to starve caterpillars” [Science Daily]. “k trees have a surprising response when caterpillars become too abundant. If a tree experiences heavy infestation in one year, it shifts its schedule the next spring by delaying leaf emergence by about three days. For caterpillars, this small delay has big consequences. When they hatch, the leaves they depend on are still sealed inside buds, leaving them with nothing to eat. This simple adjustment proves remarkably effective. A delay of just a few days sharply lowers caterpillar survival and cuts feeding damage to the trees by about 55 percent.”… “This discovery fundamentally changes our previous understanding of the onset of spring in the forest,” says theDr. Soumen Mallick, a postdoc at the University of Würzburg’s Biocentre]. Instead of simply responding to temperature and weather, trees can also adjust their timing based on biological threats like insect outbreaks.” • But I’m not seeing a mechanism. How does the tree “remember” last year to determine a “threat” this year?
“Make Your Own Micro Forest” [Offrange]. “[T]he Miyawaki method [is] an approach to reforestation developed by a Japanese botanist. It places a dense, diverse assortment of native species in close proximity to one another in an effort to rapidly regenerate degraded land…Miyawaki forests — alternately described as micro, tiny, or pocket forests because of their small stature — have been spreading internationally for years… In 2019, [Pennsylvania’s] Horn Farm planted what it believes was the first Miyawaki-style forest in the Eastern U.S. — more than 500 native trees in a 12-foot-wide strip along Route 30. Roughly 100 feet long, it features five major species and 23 supporting species. Six years later [(!!!)], a thriving overstory of oaks, hickories, and sycamores stands nearly 30 feet tall, surrounded by redbuds, dogwoods, and shrubs including elderberry and viburnum. Bluejays and robins nest in the branches, pollinators gather among their host plants, and predators like wasps feed on agricultural pests. On a bright morning in early October, the forest was thick enough to nearly drown out the sights and sounds of the highway just a few paces away. It’s ‘infinitely eye-catching’ for anyone who spends time near it, Leahy says, but more importantly it’s a haven for biodiversity and a boon for soil, air, and water remediation.” And: “Akira Miyawaki developed his namesake reforestation technique in the 1970s, inspired by the small protected forests of indigenous trees that surround Shinto shrines and the need for Japan to address the mounting threat of industrial pollution. The method was organized around the concept of “potential natural vegetation” — the overstory, understory, shrubs, and herbaceous species that would occupy a given piece of land if not for human intervention.” • Well worth reading in full, especially given that traditional (globalist?) reforestation efforts — including the US Forest Service —plant seedlings “some 10 to 12 feet apart to allow each one to thrive.”
“We Are Bombarding America’s Forests With Roundup” [Mother Jones]. “[U]nbeknownst to most people, logging companies and the US Forest Service have been spraying massive amounts of herbicide in clear-cut and fire-ravaged forests of California—and throughout the nation. And not just any herbicide, but glyphosate, a potent and problematic weed killer best known by the brand name Roundup…. Bayer, the multinational conglomerate that acquired Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to thousands of people who say Roundup gave them cancer or other ailments. (Bayer says its herbicide is safe when used as directed.) But the company, which has hired lobbyists with deep ties to the Trump administration, may have notched a win in February, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order deeming glyphosate critical to national security. He even invoked the Defense Production Act to bolster domestic production of the herbicide and extend some immunity from lawsuits to its manufacturers… The Forest Service and private loggers say they use glyphosate because it helps commercially attractive conifers like pine and Douglas fir rebound faster after fires and timber harvests. It does so by killing deciduous trees, native shrubs, flowering plants, and anything else that might compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight. In short, a key rationale for spraying a disputed chemical in natural settings boils down to executives and regulators treating forests, including our national forests, as tree farms.” • Yes, a Miyawaki forest would be hard to farm….
“On Humanity’s Earliest Attempts to Make a Home” [Literary Hub]. “Rather than a single stroke of genius, the story of human habitation is one of gradual evolution, unfolding over millions of years through the collaborative acts of countless generations…. This history begins in the trees, roughly 14 to 18 million years ago, according to evolutionary biologists, when our great ape ancestors likely developed sleeping platforms. They would bend and weave together branches, twigs, and leaves, creating what we might call the first beds. Building these rudimentary and temporary platforms—something modern gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees still do—would have offered protection from predators and blood-sucking insects. Perhaps they offered escape from ground-level humidity as well…. But the real transformation came when our hominin predecessors, the forebears of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, broke from this pattern. While apes continued to build fresh nests each night, abandoning them in the morning, our hominin ancestors began experimenting with something surprisingly revolutionary: permanence.” • Well, on some timescale.
Dad Joke of the Day: What’s blue and smells like red paint? Blue paint!
“Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2” [Unsung]. I’m not a PhotoShop power user, so most of this goes right over my head. But this detail screams problematic: “[U]ndoing after moving a slider no longer works, because the ⌘Z keystroke is now swallowed by a UI element that doesn’t know what to do with it.” Holey moley, I undo sliders in LightRoom (another Adobe product) all the time. I make a mask more saturated with a slider. I don’t like the result so I ⌘Z. Now I can’t do that? WTF? “I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For Photoshop here, nothing I see indicates any change in course or clientele – and yet all of these good moments in UI that used to help me out no longer exist. Plus, all those transgressions are solved problems. Those issues are not buried in pages of heavily litigated patents, or in seven collective brains of world-class interface designers whose driveways are presently occupied by cash-filled trucks sent over by frontier companies. This isn’t some long lost art that requires archaeologists to decipher. This feels like carelessness and laziness in face of basic UI engineering; in a likely internally-motivated effort to refresh the interface, the team threw an entire nursery worth of babies with the bathwater.” • Exactly what Apple did with its horrid “Liquid Glass” UI. Here’s an example of the horror from my RSS reader, NetNewsWire:
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On the left, we see a list of articles in a feed. One item in the feed is selected, and shows as blue. (The text of the item is on the righthand side of the window, cropped out.) Above the list is meta: Information about the list. On the right, we see what happens when we scroll the selection up under the meta: Because Liquid Glass makes the meta transparent — that’s the selling point — the blue shows through. The blue makes the meta unreadable; and the reversed out meta makes the selection unreadable. And highly paid UI/UX engineers in Cupertino perpetrated this. And this is not a botch NetNewsWire; the problem of content showing through meta is ubiqitous with Liquid Glass.
“Photoshop’s ‘Modern User Interface’ Sucks (and Doesn’t Feel Modern)” [Daring Fireball]. “Shades of Héliographe’s devastating critique of the history of the app icon for Pages: ‘If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.’”
Fortune: “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.” —John Kenneth Galbraith
“One tiny exploit gives full Linux access: all kernels since 2017 are vulnerable” [cybernews (from this aggregation)]. “All Linux kernels released after 2017 are vulnerable to critical privilege escalation bugs. A tiny 732-byte exploit grants root privileges across all major Linux distributions, with containerized environments being especially vulnerable. The proof of concept and patches are publicly available. Attackers with initial access to a Linux system can run a tiny script as any unprivileged user, gain complete access, and even escape Kubernetes containers. Security researchers at Theori disclosed a critical logic flaw in the Linux Kernel that gives users a root shell. The proof-of-concept is just 732 bytes of Python code, using only standard library modules and requiring no extra dependencies. Dubbed Copy Fail, and tracked as CVE-2026-31431, the exploit is “a straight-line logic flaw,” requiring no race conditions or kernel-specific offsets.”
“Severe Linux Copy Fail security flaw uncovered using AI scanning help” [The Verge]. “Nearly every Linux distribution released since 2017 is currently vulnerable to a security bug called ‘Copy Fail’ that allows any user to give themselves administrator privileges. The exploit, publicly disclosed as CVE-2026-31431 on Wednesday, uses a Python script that works across all of the vulnerable Linux distributions, requiring ‘no per-distro offsets, no version checks, no recompilation,’ according to Theori, the security firm that uncovered it.” And: “Copy Fail was identified by Theori’s researchers with assistance from their Xint Code AI tool. According to a blog post, Taeyang Lee had an idea of looking into the crypto subsystem of Linux and created this prompt to run an automated scan that identified several vulnerabilities in ‘about an hour.’” • I never said AI wasn’t good for anything….
“The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed” [Ars Technica]. “’‘Local privilege escalation’ sounds dry, so let me unpack it,’ researcher Jorijn Schrijvershof wrote Thursday. ‘It means: an attacker who already has some way to run code on the machine, even as the most boring unprivileged user, can promote themselves to root. From there they can read every file, install backdoors, watch every process, and pivot to other systems.’” DOGE? Oh, DOGE! More: “Linux distributors frequently stick with older kernel versions and backport fixes into them. There’s no indication in the disclosure deadline that Theori ever contacted the distributors. With the exploit available before fixed distributions were available, the disclosure amounts to something very similar to a zero-day vulnerability being dropped, although the stiffer term is probably ‘zero-day patch gap.’” Thanks, guys. And: “The severity of the threat posed by CopyFail and the likelihood of active exploitation is high enough to warrant all Linux users to investigate their systems immediately. Individual distributors provide useful mitigation guidance, as does the post by Schrijvershof linked above [here].”
“CISA says ‘Copy Fail’ flaw now exploited to root Linux systems” [BleepingComputer]. “CISA has warned that threat actors have started exploiting the ‘Copy Fail’ Linux security vulnerability in the wild, one day after Theori researchers disclosed it and shared a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. Tracked as CVE-2026-31431, this security flaw was found in the Linux kernel’s algif_aead cryptographic algorithm interface and enables unprivileged local users to gain root privileges on unpatched Linux systems by writing four controlled bytes to the page cache of any readable file…. ‘Same script, four distributions, four root shells — in one take. The same exploit binary works unmodified on every Linux distribution,’ Theori said. ‘If your kernel was built between 2017 and the patch — which covers essentially every mainstream Linux distribution — you’re in scope.’” • What’s a poor sysadmin to do?
“Linux Kernel Tainted by Software Patents That Make Linux Worse and the ‘Linux’ Foundation is Compiling Bribes to Enable This (Promotion of Monopolies and Tolerance of Software Patenting)” [TechRights]. “Today (or tomorrow) we need to reboot. 2 days ago we made plans to patch the kernel due to this bug - with coverage across the Net chronicled in this page. Hence the reboot for the kernel upgrade. A few years ago, as an associate correctly points out, it would have been possible to hot-patch. That was about a decade ago. Then Oracle and others stepped in and obstructed/monopolised this to upsell their offerings. The code was available. But that option was apparently killed off by software patents.” • Can any linux mavens comment?
Word of the Day: “Someone or something described as flamboyant has a very noticeable quality that attracts a lot of attention. Such a person or thing is often strikingly elaborate or colorful in their behavior or display. Associate the word flamboyant with bananas flambé and the word’s fiery etymology will be seared in your mind. Flamboyant, which was borrowed into English from French in the 19th century, can be traced back to the Old French word flambe, meaning “flame.” In its earliest uses flamboyant referred to an ornate style of Gothic architecture popular in France and Spain, which featured waving curves suggestive of flames. Eventually, the word developed a more general second sense for anything eye-catching or showy.” • Nothing to do with “buoyant,” in other words.