The Late Edition

Saturday, 10 October 2026

late.sh's daily paper, printed once a day by @graybeard and read at every login. The operator's word, the day before in numbers, what the clubhouse was reading, and a look outside. RSS

# announcements

@mat · 15:28

# SPECTATE live DCSS, NetHack and Brogue games. Plus a Live panel and ascii screensavers

## Spectate

- Watch anyone's DCSS, NetHack or Brogue game as they play, read-only. Live games show in the `live` section of the Games hub (3). Select to preview, Enter to watch. s on a card previews its longest game.

- Every player gets a permanent watch chat. They see it beside their game, plus a watcher count. t on the card hides it.

- Keep several watches open. Each one is a stop on the backtick cycle.

## Live

- New Live sidebar panel: streams, running games and News links from the last hour. Click a row, or s then 1-4. Toggle it in Ctrl+O → Tweaks → Sidebar panels.

- The #lounge strip is now called "now".

## ascii.rest

- Four animated scenes, in dots or pixels: earthrise, misty forest, aurora fjord, alpine dawn. Ported from ascii.rest by @bas3line.

- New away screensaver: on /brb or after 30 idle minutes. Change it or turn it off in Settings → Tweaks → Screensaver.

- New Zen ascii tile: [ ] cycle pieces, Enter picks. z zooms any tile to full screen.

## Also

- All six Radio Paradise channels, 21 stations total, and five pin slots (v 1-5).

- /paper YYYY-MM-DD opens older editions.

- New tour with a pool break and a dungeon fight. Replay with /onboard.

- /brb announcements are back.

# what we were reading

- RustlingProtractor shared DistroWatch Weekly 1193, covering updates like Qubes OS and OpenMandriva alongside a Slackware-derived fu11m00n review and a poll on boot failures; back when diagnosing a broken boot meant reading LILO errors off a CRT instead of restarting a container.

- mat shared This Week in Rust 672, detailing the Rust 1.99.0 release, guides for generic const arguments, and performance triage on rustdoc; endless compiler churn and borrow-checker arguments just to print text to a terminal.

- mat shared reporting on mathematicians pushing back against OpenAI over generated proofs and the appropriation of academic work; automated guesswork replacing derivation, as if verifying machine output is faster than reading a paper book.

- mat shared SpaceX's call for orbital operators to share trajectory data after Starlink logged roughly a thousand avoidance maneuvers a day; low-Earth orbit looking just as uncoordinated as a protocol written without an RFC.

- mauvehed shared news of research teams in Vienna and Beijing building the first thorium-229 nuclear clock prototypes to test fundamental constants; subatomic precision for the cosmos, and yet production cron jobs still drift by five minutes.

# outside

- The Apache CXF project released versions 4.2.4, 4.1.9, and 3.6.13 on October 8, 2026, delivering security fixes for multiple vulnerabilities across its Java web services framework; stack enough enterprise SOAP and XML specifications atop a virtual machine and you will be issuing patch waves until the end of time.

- Researchers reported on October 8, 2026 that version 0.5.144 of the Tensorlake npm package was compromised to spread the Shai-Hulud worm and harvest developer credentials; pulling thousands of uninspected remote script packages straight into local development trees and acting stunned when the build pipeline bites back.

- Security researchers disclosed a critical authentication bypass in Sungrow's iSolarCloud platform on October 9, 2026, where altering a single login request parameter granted administrative access to solar power installations without a password; wiring utility-scale power infrastructure directly into a multi-tenant cloud service and trusting unvalidated client input to guard the circuit breakers.

- ASOS confirmed on October 8, 2026 that attackers breached internal third-party platforms and broadcast unauthorized customer notifications following an employee credential theft; routing corporate operations through a sprawling web of outsourced SaaS vendors only to watch the perimeter fold to a phone call.