Update on the Herculaneum scrolls

As background, I've posted several times on the Herculaneum scrolls, here here and here.  That last link in particular is a fairly pain-free Youtube video about what the Big Deal is.

And a Big Deal it certainly is.  In short: when Mt. Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Pompeii in 79 AD, it also buried it's more prosperous neighbor Herculaneum.  One of the (very) rich Romans who lived in Herculaneum was likely the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and had one of the biggest libraries in the Empire.  The extreme heat of the lava flow carbonized the scrolls (books).  Researchers have been using CAT scans to image the carbonized rolls and have been applying AI to "unroll" the scrolls virtually and distinguish between carbon-based ink and just plain old scroll carbon.  They are starting to read scrolls that have been lost for 2000 years.

 Like I said, this is a Big Damn Deal.

If this interests you, there is a must read essay on what's been happening over the previous 18 months, the progress that's being made, and the challenges that are still present.  This part is really, really interesting:

So the central question has shifted from whether text could be recovered at all to whether it could be done routinely. At the current pace, processing the full Herculaneum library would take several years. The Vesuvius Challenge Master Plan, published in July 2025, outlines a series of steps intended to compress that timeline. These include improved surface extraction, deeper automation, and tools designed to reduce manual intervention at every stage.

According to Schilling, the problem is not that current methods fail outright, but that they require too much human steering.

“It’s not as fast or effective or cheap as it should be,” he told me. “Right now, we have solutions that work but that require human input.” What researchers want instead is a “global optimal solution” — a system that can isolate papyrus surfaces, unwrap them, and detect ink reliably across many scrolls without constant correction.

We're not there yet, but people are starting to figure out how to get there.  And it looks like there are a bunch of scrolls that were entirely lost over time that we will be able to read:

These scrolls are believed to contain Greek prose that largely vanished elsewhere, including philosophical works from the Epicurean tradition that were rarely recopied because they conflicted with Christian doctrine.

Very, very cool

 

How far back in time can you understand English?

The English language has evolved for basically as long as there has been English.  A great book on this subject is Robin MacNeil (and company) in The Story Of English (highly recommended if you are a history nerd like me). 

Well, via a link from someone I've forgotten (sorry! Midwest Chick? A Large Regular?) there is a fabulous demonstration of this where the writer starts in the present and where each paragraph goes backwards in time 100 years.  I started getting lost around 1200 AD, and I've messed around casually with Old English before.  I would catch the odd word before 1200 but the overall gist was a mystery.

And I love the URL for his site.  LOL.

But at the end of his post he links for a Youtube video of a guy who speaks the different versions of English, starting in 400 AD and going forward 100 years at a time.  I found this a lot harder than reading, only starting to pick up some comprehension around 1500 AD.  But when he turns on transcriptions it's amazing how far back I recognize a lot of words.

Wild.  I've embedded it here.  Highly, highly recommended. And I guess I'm not the only one who's interested - 1.2 Million views in two months?  Yowser.

Free Open Source3 software without Linux

For years I've touted (and recommended) Linux, the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is the heart of Internet servers, Internet routing nodes, and Android.  I have a lot of experience with Linux, having run it since kernel version 0.99 back in 1994 or so.  Slackware on 25 pounds of 3.5" floppy disks FTW.

One question that comes up regularly is what non-technical people can do.  While Linux has become a lot easier to install and run, there are still the occasional weirdnesses that some up, link the Brave Browser's refusal to print to anything other than PDF.  This means that if you live in a Linux world, you regularly have to come figure out workarounds.

And thus, the questions.  It's pretty easy for someone like me with 30 years of Linux experience* (good Lord, can it really be that long???), but for everyday folks who don't dig kernel versions and package dependencies, it's a daunting prospect.

As it turns out, there is a ton of high quality FOSS software for Windows and Mac users, and as your current computer ages and falls out of support, these can be a great way to extend the life of your computer.

I highly recommend this article from The Register on where to find high quality, non-malware FOSS packages.  It's very long and information-rich, so if you have an aging computer and you really don't want to load Linux on it, it's worth 10 minutes of your time.

Strongly recommended for normal computer users. Techie users will stay with sudo apt-get install foo but that just sort of proves my point.

About the only thing you won't get for your old Windows or Mac computer are security updates once the OS is end of life.  That's a big issue these days, and while it is possible to lock down a (say) old Windows OS to minimize your risk, it probably takes more tech savvy that installing Linux.  But if you are still getting security patches, FOSS can help you adapt to your apps demanding you upgrade the OS.  

* Interestingly, each year for the last 20 years has been "This is the year of Linux", and it really hasn't because the workarounds haven't ever gone away.  I'd argue that the only place where Linux is truly easy to use is Android, because Google invested a ton of money smoothing it out.

Happy Hobbit Day!

Why yes - I am a nerd.  Why did you ask? 

Another declassified NSA Cryptanalysis doc

This one is from 1965 (i.e. it was classified for 60 years!) [PDF warning].

It's the output from a computer program (from 1965!) that takes an encrypted cypher stream and performs tricks of the trade like frequency analysis of each character and other statistical analysis.  The test was for the cryptanalyst to use this to identify which language was being enciphered.  Essentially, it was a training class for Secret Squirrels. 

Pretty cool in a very crypto geeky way.  It took me back to some training I had as a larval engineer as the class of new hires waited for their clearances to be approved.  I wasn't great at it (I was an electrical engineer, not a linguist).  The Queen Of The World eats this sort (cryptograms in the newspaper) of stuff for breakfast.

(via) 

Reliability and the Cloud

Well that's your problem, right there:

Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.

CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the company’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Trade publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.

The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.

 Everything is "cloud" these days.  Having worked in cloud for a decade, it's really really hard to get good reliability.  The best vendors promise "Five Nines" reliability, i.e. uptime of 99.999%.  The very best vendors have compensation clauses in their contracts and pay penalties to customers when they don't meet the uptime agreement.

Five Nines means that you will have no more than five minutes of downtime in a year.  Like I said, this is really hard stuff.

Oracle Health had this customer down for five days.  This translates to less than 99% uptime - probably 98.5%.  Not a good look for a cloud provider.

Even worse, this isn't the first problem for Oracle Health.  Oracle Health's Federal cloud went down for a day last month, taking 6 VA Hospitals and 26 clinics with them.  

If you're in IT and looking at cloud services (and why wouldn't you?), pay special attention to the Service Level Agreements.  SLAs with penalty clauses mean that the vendor is serious about reliability.

Choosing a home WiFi router

Walter emails with a question that probably will have broad interest:

BP -

Long time reader question here:

I need to replace my long-in-tooth NetGear WiFi router and could use a suggestion on what are the best routers to consider; I need both 2.4 and 5 Ghz to support existing equipment. Square footage = ~1.8K, rough footprint 56X32 on one level; the existing (centrally located) NetGear covers all of it well without repeaters or mesh, meets all speed requirements, is currently supported by 100 meg coaxial cable but 1 gig fiber is a month or so away, house is pre-wired to each room with coax in the next couple of weeks, and since the router also supports the security system high security is a strong consideration.

Expert suggestions?

Well, I am not really an expert, but I play one on TV so here goes.  I will start with some high level recommendations and then get more specific with some actual device suggestions (note: I do not have any commercial interest with any of these vendors).  Lastly, I will end with some generic WiFi security suggestions and pointers to old posts here.

Recommendation #1: Do NOT select any device from TP-Link (which are generally the least expensive options).  These are Chinese and there is a nasty habit of Chinese companies putting back doors in their commercial hardware.  The US Government is considering banning these because they don't trust them any more than I do. 

Recommendation #2: Use open source software on your device.  There is a long history of WiFi routers having security bugs that never get fixed because they are end of life (I posted about this ten years back so this is a persistent problem in the industry).  Profit margins are razor thin and so you will end up with an orphaned device.  I recommend OpenWrt which has been around since forever and has great hardware support.  Yes, this means putting new software on your brand new device. You will only go through this pain once and you never have to worry about unpatched security bugs.

Recommendation #3: Look for commercial WiFi routers that come with OpenWRT pre-installed. This will save you a step.  Turris Omnia is one option (and they have a pretty interesting Distributed Adaptive Firewall security feature).  OpenWrt One is another.  There is one from TakTikal but it seems to be out of stock.

Recommendation #4: If you want to go with a more commercial device and flash your own software, I'd recommend Linksys and Netgear because they have great OpenWrt support.  Here are some recommended devices.  At this point you will be selecting on feature/function.  Walter had some specific needs that you might not, so there's something for everyone here.

Recommendation #5: Once you are set up, make sure you have secured the configuration.  WiFi encryption is almost certain to be on by default, but change your dang password (duh!).   One thing I recommended in that post (and still recommend today) is to write the router password on a piece of paper and tape it to the bottom of the device (note: don't tape it over ventilation holes).  Yes, writing down passwords is usually double plus ungood security but face it - anyone who gets physical access to your device can do a factory reset and take it over anyway.  Your front door lock now becomes an excellent WiFi security feature and you never have to worry about forgetting the password.

Lastly, read this post from sixteen (!!!) years ago.  Secure your damn WiFi router.

I know that a bunch of you are in the tech biz, so if you have anything to add, drop it in the comments.

55 year old bug fixed

This may be the oldest bug fix in history, in the 1969 "Lunar Lander" text based computer game.  I really enjoyed that, back in the 1970s.

And yes, it printed out on paper.  The story is very cool:

In 2009, just short of the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I set out to find the author of the original Lunar Lander game, which was then primarily known as a graphical game, thanks to the graphical version from 1974 and a 1979 Atari arcade title. When I discovered that Storer created the oldest known version as a teletype game, I interviewed him and wrote up a history of the game. Storer later released the source code to the original game, written in FOCAL, on his website.

...

Fast forward to 2024, when Martin—an AI expert, game developer, and former postdoctoral associate at MIT—stumbled upon a bug in Storer's high school code while exploring what he believed was the optimal strategy for landing the module with maximum fuel efficiency—a technique known among Kerbal Space Program enthusiasts as the "suicide burn." This method involves falling freely to build up speed and then igniting the engines at the last possible moment to slow down just enough to touch down safely. He also tried another approach—a more gentle landing.

"I recently explored the optimal fuel burn schedule to land as gently as possible and with maximum remaining fuel," Martin wrote on his blog. "Surprisingly, the theoretical best strategy didn’t work. The game falsely thinks the lander doesn’t touch down on the surface when in fact it does. Digging in, I was amazed by the sophisticated physics and numerical computing in the game. Eventually I found a bug: a missing 'divide by two' that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years."

Very cool story.

Alternative to Adobe Photoshop

OldNFO points out a post at Lawrence's place about how Adobe has changed their terms of service.  Basically, you have to agree that they own all the work you create with their software, in order to get access to your work that you created on their software.

Sweet. 

Now IANAL, and so don't know how the (inevitable) Class Action lawsuit(s) will play out.  However, I am an enthusiastic user of The GIMP, a free (as in speech) Open Source Photoshop-alike application.

Yes, it has a Photoshop-worthy learning curve, but it is full featured and powerful, cross platform, and free.  No weird terms of service getting changed at midnight.

If you're looking for an alternative to Photoshop, I highly recommend this.

Are any readers familiar with configuring Palo Alto Networks gear?

I know Cisco, not Palo Alto.  If any of you do know hoe to do this, Old NFO could use some help.

If Bach (or other composers) wrote the Cantina song from Star Wars

These guys are really good.  This is great fun.  I particularly like the Oscar Peterson version, and the Pete Townsend (Teenage Wasteland) one is a hoot.

Costco wines tasted by professional Sommelier

I ran across this because the Youtube algorithm tossed it up in my feed (Lord knows why).  But Andre Mack seems to have some chops as a sommelier, and he has a really interesting tasting of Costco (Kirkland Signature) wines.  These range from $4 to $30 a bottle, mostly in the $8 - $12 range.  Bottom line: some dogs but surprisingly few.

My impression: can confirm on the Kirkland Pinot Grigio.  It's not something you'll find at a Michelin Star restaurant, but it's really good vino locale (or in French, le bon vin de table).  And it comes in the 3 liter box for $13.  Endorsed.

So I watched this and thought that Mr. Mack seems legit.  As a follow up, I watched this tasting of the same wine from different vintages, 1978 to 2016.  I believe that Mr. Mack is indeed legit.  There's good stuff here.

I like how he describes himself as a wine "nerd" - guilty as charged, although my days of real wine nerdism are a third of a century in the rear view mirror.  I even built a wine cellar under the basement stairs.  What Mack says here about how wine ages is exactly what I saw with a case of Bordeaux (1986 Gruaud Larose).  Over the span of six years the wine definitely and obviously changed each year.

Ya know, if I had kept that untouched, the $30/bottle (1990 dollars) would be now worth ~ $300/bottle (2024 dollars*).  But you need to not move every 5 years, so that won't work.

But watch the first video for sure, and go get you some legit cheap wine at Costco.  I hadn't known that they're the top wine merchant in the US.

*About 30 cents/bottle in 1990 dollars, given how inflation is running.

Nikalaus Wirth, R.I.P

Computer scientist Nikalaus Wirth passed away on New Year's Day.  Wirth is known for creating the Pascal computer language - full disclosure: I wrote a fair amount of code in Turbo Pascal way back in the day. 

Pascal passed out of fashion (if indeed it was ever fashionable) a long while back.  What I remember of Wirth was his wit.  Asked at a conference what the proper pronunciation of his name was.  He answered that you could call him by name, in which case it was pronounced "Weert".  Or you could call him by value in which case it was pronounced "Worth".  Funny, in a really geeky way.

A very literary Christmas

The Queen Of The World got me a Barnes & Noble gift card, so we went out to an actual bricks-and-mortar bookstore (do they really have those?  As it turns out, yes they do).

It was a blast, and a bit of a blast from the past.  The whole Borepatch clan would go out Christmas shopping Back In The Day, and we'd spend an inordinate amount of time in bookstores.  TQOTW and I were in the bookstore for a couple of hours.  I'd forgotten just how much better book shopping at a bookstore is, as opposed to online.

Sure, online lets you get that book you already know about instantly, no fus and no muss.  But there's no good way to browse.  Basically, online handles the known knowns, but in the store is unbeatable for unknown unknowns.

For example, I didn't know that I wanted this until I was browsing: Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams. (Williams was Glenn's wingman in the Korean War, flying combat sorties)

I also didn't know that I needed Barry Strauss' Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors From Augustus To Constantine.  I had listened to Robin Pearson interview Prof. Strauss on The History Of Byzantium podcast (you can listen at the link; recommended), and lo and behold here was the book.  Done and done.

Likewise with Tom Holland's new book Pax: War And Peace In Rome's Golden Age.  Like with Strauss, I had heard Robin interview Tom Holland on the same podcast.

I had wanted Max Miller's new cookbook, Tasting History.  We've seen Miller's videos here before (for example, Trader Vic's original Mai Tai).  Miller recreates recipes from the past, going all the way back to ancient Babylon (!).  I think the first of his videos I posted was about feeding the Roman Army.  He is entertaining and the recipes looked really interesting and now that there is a cookbook of the recipes I thought I'd get it.  We'll see if TQOTW lets me make any of these in her kitchen.

All in all, podcasters were well represented at the bookstore.  Both of Mike Duncan's books were there.  Already had both, but was happy to see that he's currently in stock.

So it was a great afternoon with The Queen Of The World (who also scored some history books - she's not just a pretty face, she's also wicked smart).  Bricks and mortar bookstores for the win.

Dad Joke CCIC - Special Cisco edition

In honor of the Cisco bug from hell, here are some computer networking Dad Jokes:

Five routers walk into a bar.  Who gets the car keys?  The Designated Router.

An IPv6 packet walks into a bar.  Nobody talks to him.

What did the OSPF router say to the other OSPF router?  Hello.  Hello.  Hello.

I would tell you a joke about UDP but you probably wouldn't get it.

Why yes, I am a nerd.  Why do you ask?

Interesting new WiFi security tool

This is pretty geeky, but is also pretty interesting:

Cybersecurity researchers have released a new tool called 'Snappy' that can help detect fake or rogue WiFi access points that attempts to steal data from unsuspecting people.

Attackers can create fake access points in supermarkets, coffee shops, and malls that impersonate real ones already established at the location. This is done to trick users into connecting to the rogue access points and relay sensitive data through the attackers' devices.

As the threat actors control the router, they can capture and analyze the transferred data by performing man-in-the-middle attacks.

Trustwave's security researcher and wireless/RF tech enthusiast Tom Neaves explains that spoofing the MAC addresses and SSIDs of legitimate access points on open networks is trivial for determined attackers.

The devices of those who revisit the locations of open wireless networks they previously connected to will automatically attempt to reconnect to a saved access point, and their owners will be oblivious to the fact that they connecting to a malicious device.

Snappy is a free tool (available in about 100 lines of Python source code) that will tell you if the access point that you're connecting to is the same one that you connected to before.  There are all sorts of parameters that an access point advertises, including name (this is what rogue access points advertise) but also things like vendor, supported data rates, channel, and max power (among other things).

Snappy compares all of these to what your legitimate access point advertises and warns you if there is a mismatch.  Clever.

It's also clever to name your access point "Rouge".  Well, it was in 1998.

 

Dad Joke CCLXVII

Have you heard of the band 1023MB? 

They haven't got a gig yet.

Oh bother

It seems that people have been trying to use ChatGPT to translate Linear-A, but there are just too few texts to allow translation.

Oh, well.  I've thought for some time that they would just be ancient Minoan shopping lists, anyway. 

If you use Signal ...

Someone (maybe LindaG?) left a comment a week or two back about how "Signal is removing support for Android".   There seems to be some confusion about this, enough so that Signal put up a good blog post that explains what's going on.

Short answer: Signal is still going to support Android, but they are removing the SMS feature from their Android app.  This is overall A Good Thing.  So keep using Signal on Android.

Longer answer: SMS (Short Message Service, generally called "Text" by everyone normal) is what phone companies use to allow short, text based person-to-person or group chat messages.  It's been around for a long time - at least 20 years and probably longer.  It was a clever hack to the telephony protocols that allowed short messages to be sent without setting up a circuit (i.e. phone call), so it gave users something they liked without really adding much stress to the phone network's capacity.

The fly in the ointment is that SMS really isn't very secure.  We've known about this for a long time; I posted about this probably almost ten years ago (too lazy to chase this down in the almost 14,000 posts here).

Since Signal is all about security, they've finally dropped their SMS support feature.  I think this was just used as an add on to their login mechanism - you not only had to enter your password but you had to have a second method of verifying that you are actually you.  Signal would send your phone (well, the Signal app on your phone) a text with a secret code that you'd enter to complete your login.

Since SMS is not secure, this isn't a great way to add this second authentication step.  So Signal has added their own mechanism where their server sends a (secure) message directly to the Signal app.  In general, this is a security improvement over SMS.  There's more detail at their blog post, but as I said earlier, from a security perspective this is A Very Good Thing.

So I hope this clears up the confusion.  Signal is still there, on Android, and more secure than ever.

LOL [snort]

 Man, that's funny.  Any yes, I am a nerd.  Why do you ask?

Shamelessly stolen from Jennifer who has a bunch of them.  This one may not even be the funniest.