Friday, 6 November 2026

Brazil: Hamilton’s 400th start, and a Verstappen penalty can’t be ruled out

Interlagos is where Hamilton won his first title in 2008, and Sunday will be his 400th grand prix start; only Alonso has got there before him. The fight for second is still three points wide: Verstappen 261, Hamilton 259, Russell 250. Verstappen has used his allowance of most power-unit parts, and while GPblog understands Red Bull isn’t planning an engine change this weekend, it says a grid penalty can’t be ruled out.

Leclerc skipped Thursday’s media day after the birth of his daughter (Dino Beganovic drives his Ferrari in FP1). At the press conference Verstappen said he’d “installed antivirus” on his car after the standard-software bug that stalled the Malaysian start. Race is 4am Monday Sydney time.

GPblog — Hamilton 400th · Verstappen penalty · “Antivirus”

Alan Jones, Australia’s 1980 world champion, dies at 80

Jones died on Thursday after a short illness, three days after his 80th birthday. He won Williams’ first drivers’ title in the FW07B in 1980 and took 11 grand prix wins. Williams called him “a true Australian icon and a Williams legend”; Mark Webber and the Australian Grand Prix Corporation also paid tribute. Expect a moment of recognition at Interlagos.

RaceFans · Speedcafe

*sshole: long passwords open locked accounts on musl systems without PAM

Relevant to anyone shipping Alpine, OpenWrt, Buildroot or Yocto images. Since 2012 musl’s crypt() returns "*" on failure, and it fails for passwords over 256 bytes. That "*" then matches the "*" placeholder used for locked accounts, so sshd built without PAM lets any 257-byte password into root or a key-only deploy user.

The page says OpenSSH 10.6p2 fixes it; the immediate mitigation is PasswordAuthentication no. LWN and Alpine have picked it up.

sshhole.com · LWN

An obscure transform codec turns out to be perfect for the N64

Dominic Szablewski ported Aikku93’s ULC codec (MP3-family, but with a simple nibble-based coefficient format and noise fill instead of Huffman coding) to the N64, moving the transform onto the RSP vector coprocessor as about 1,400 lines of 16-bit fixed-point assembly in 3 KB of its 4 KB data memory.

44.1 kHz stereo decodes at about 4% CPU and 5% RSP, with quality near Opus. It’s now in Libdragon’s preview branch, and a Half-Life port uses it to fit roughly 2,500 sounds and 27 music tracks on a 64 MB cart. He credits Codex with helping optimise the RSP code; the C is handwritten.

phoboslab.org

After a decade of reverse engineering, DOS Wing Commander gets co-op

Two brothers found the ships’ position, velocity and orientation by diffing DOSBox memory snapshots (64 slots of 12 bytes), then wrote stubs that call the game’s own firing and damage code inside its Borland overlays once per frame. The 2015–2020 project was revived this year: it now runs in the browser via Emscripten DOSBox, with a Go lobby server, room codes over WebRTC and optional voice chat. Bring your own GOG installer.

wcmulti write-up · GitHub

Factoring a 512-bit key to unlock the T-Mobile Sidekick, 20 years too late

Danger stopped issuing developer keys in 2010. The author of this post found Danger’s self-signed 512-bit RSA developer certificate in factory firmware preserved on archive.org and factored it with CADO-NFS: about 1,175 core-hours across 7 machines, 8.5 hours wall-clock. With the private key rebuilt they reproduced the original developer key byte for byte and put a Sidekick 3 into developer mode. Side quests: a browser DangerOS simulator and a partial rebuild of Danger’s servers.

x86.cx (4 Nov)

Lemmings walkers that treat the web page itself as the level

A playground where little Lemmings-style walkers navigate the page’s own layout: stairs, platforms, cards and lines of text all act as floors, there’s a pit to fall into, you can pick them up and throw them, and resizing the window quickly flings them into the air. A neat demonstration of letting the document be the terrain, and a good prompt for thinking about wind and terrain as the level in a balloon game.

Walker Playground · GitHub

Fortnow: “another step towards Optiland”

In a 4 November post Lance Fortnow admits he underestimated how quickly AI would start finding proofs, pointing to OpenAI’s machine-generated, formalised Navier–Stokes repository. He still thinks P vs NP needs new techniques AI won’t find, and that the claimed ETH-breaking algorithm will “never” beat practical SAT solvers. There’s still no independent verdict on the ETH claim from ethdiscussion.blog.

Separately, Terence Tao has posted a round-up of recent interviews ahead of his new book, out 10 November, including the New Yorker’s “The Year Math Changed Forever.”

Computational Complexity · Tao’s blog

Azrieli Prizes go to retuned instruments, fixed media and a grandmother’s folk songs

The 2028 Azrieli Music Prizes went to Luis Arias (Spain), whose Optimized for Loneliness sets fixed media against 15 players to explore how digital media changes Andalusian Holy Week processions; Linda Bouchard (Canada), for Le Saguenay, Saki-nip; and Mathew Rosenblum (US), whose Tamim combines mezzo, retuned instruments and recordings of his grandmother singing Yiddish and Ukrainian folk tunes in a microtonal texture. Each prize is worth over A$255,000, including a Montreal premiere in 2028.

Limelight

Bear McCreary’s Rings of Power Season 3 album lands 13 November

It’s a 22-track album with vinyl and CD to follow from Mutant Records. It includes a new song with AURORA, “Morning Shall Come” (out 6 November), and closes with a children’s-choir arrangement of “Where the Shadows Lie.” The score is already HMMA-nominated; that ceremony is 18 November.

The Futon Critic (Amazon release)

NASA’s twin Mars probes fire their engines over southern Australia this weekend

The two ESCAPADE spacecraft each make a powered Earth flyby, burning for about 9 minutes over southern Australia. Burns start at 8:51pm AEDT on Saturday 7 November and 9:51pm AEDT on Monday 9 November. NASA says you’ll most likely need a telescope to pick them out as dim moving points; JPL Horizons gives coordinates. They reach Mars in September 2027 to study how the solar wind strips the atmosphere.

NASA ESCAPADE blog

Webb: interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has water ice like ours

JWST looked at 3I/ATLAS three times around perihelion. The 3-micron water-ice band was clear but the usual 1.5 and 2.0-micron features were weak, and the comet was unusually blue. That fits tiny ice grains mixed with dark dust. After perihelion there were signs of crystalline ice and larger ice-rich clumps, resembling some Kuiper Belt objects. The result suggests ice behaves the same way around other stars.

Universe Today

Why birds speed up to slow down

A Manchester model of unpowered landing shows a pigeon-sized bird could, in principle, touch down at zero speed without flapping. It would have to arrive at more than twice cruising speed and trade that for height, climbing about 20 m over about 60 m. Real birds flap and swoop to fit into tight spaces, and ground landings leave the legs to absorb whatever speed is left, which is a trade-off that may have shaped skeleton evolution. Speed into height is a nice mechanic for anything that flies.

University of Manchester (2 Nov)

SETI listens at the game-theory meeting point

The Allen Telescope Array is surveying the anti-solar point: the patch of sky from which aliens using the transit method would see Earth cross the Sun. The logic is a Schelling point, a place both sides might independently pick without communicating. A pilot over 17 hours logged about 1.9 million signals, all human-made. Results from 121 more nights are still to come.

Universe Today

Cast announced for Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door

Simon Burke, Kala Gare, Ethan Jones and Naisa Lasalosi make up the cast of this concert-style Peter Allen show, directed by Hayden Tonazzi with Steven Kramer leading the band. It plays the Hayes Theatre from 13 January, then Riverside Live at PHIVE in Parramatta from 10 February 2027. Nearer term, the mid-November openings (A Beautiful Noise at the Lyric from 14 November, Whispering Jack from 15 November) are coming up.

The Scoop

Your 389 becomes the 378; bus bans continue; RLWC semis Sunday

From the bus changes starting Sunday 15 November, route 389 merges with the Bronte section of the 379 to become the new 378, running Bronte–Pyrmont/Ultimo–CBD every 10 minutes during the day and every 20 minutes early and late, seven days a week. The page doesn’t give a separate date for the Eastern Suburbs changes, so 15 November is likely but not confirmed.

RTBU bus work bans continue with no end date. Drivers are refusing buses with dashboard warning lights or without full tanks, so expect delays and cancellations in the east, the north and on some CBD routes. On Sunday the RLWC semis are at Allianz: gates open at 4pm, with Australia v Fiji (women) at 5:45pm and Australia v Samoa (men) at 8:05pm. Tickets include transport, and there’s Sunday trackwork on many lines. The Powerhouse Parramatta opening festival starts Saturday; the F3 ferry from Barangaroo goes there.

Transport NSW — bus changes · Bus industrial action · RLWC semis · Powerhouse festival