Enlarge / Artist’s depiction of two dinocephalians, a group of land animals that
died out in the Captitanian extinction(s). (credit: Dmitry Bogdanov: DiBgd at English Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Capitanian mass extinction was once lumped in with the “Great Dying” of the end-Permian mass extinction, but the lesser-known extinction occurred 8–10 million years earlier. It may not have been great, but it was quite lethal, seeing as many as 62 percent of species go extinct, according to one estimate. Two new papers by different teams shed new light on the event, revealing a pattern of cause and effect that’s seen in other mass extinctions: huge volcanic eruptions, global warming, the collapse of the terrestrial ecosystem, and the spread of oxygen-starved ocean dead zones.

Ocean dead zones

Huyue Song of China University of Geosciences and colleagues from China, the US, and the UK studied mid-Permian-age rocks at a site called Penglaitan, about 300 miles west of Hong Kong. They found that there were two distinct pulses of Capitanian extinction, one about 262 million years ago and another around 260 million years ago. Those are both well before the more famous “Great Dying” end-Permian extinction, which occurred 252 million years ago, and Song’s team set out to uncover what happened.

“In a way, the extinction losses have been hiding in the shadow of the end-Permian extinction,” said Paul Wignall, a professor at the University of Leeds and a co-author on Song’s paper. “It wiped out a lot of genera of all the usual things in the sea,” adding, “a bunch of animals died on land,” as well.

Enlarge / Elon Musk at the Viva Tech fair in Paris, France, on Friday, June 16, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Elon Musk plans an appeal to the US Supreme Court after losing an attempt to terminate a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Musk claims violates his First Amendment rights. The 2018 settlement over Musk’s false “funding secured” tweets required Tesla to impose controls on his social media posts.

“Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, confirmed on Tuesday that Musk plans an appeal to the Supreme Court,” according to Reuters.

In April 2022, Musk’s attempt to get out of the settlement was rejected by a judge in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Musk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, but the ruling against Musk was affirmed unanimously by a three-judge panel.

(credit: Google)

Google just announced Play Services is dropping support for an old version of Android, and while OS development might stop at just three or four years, Play Services goes back way longer than that. Google announced Play Services is dropping support for Android 4.4 KitKat, which is now 10 years old. Support isn’t really being artificially cut off, either. Google says KitKat’s active device count is “below 1 percent,” so there’s not much reason to support it anymore.

Google’s Android Platform chart has KitKat at 0.5 percent. (credit: Google)

These devices will stop getting Play Services updates after July, and then it’s anyone’s guess as to how much longer they will work. At some point, Google will change something, and your device will become a brick. Old, unsupported Android devices can’t log in to a Google account, which is a prerequisite for opening half of the apps that come with your phone. You’ll be locked out of the Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps, and other Google products, with no way to see these old versions again. Luckily, someone saw all this coming and took screenshots of every old version.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

A recently disclosed bug in many of AMD’s recent consumer, workstation, and server processors can cause the chips to leak data at a rate of up to 30 kilobytes per core per second, writes Tavis Ormandy, a member of Google’s Project Zero security team. Executed properly, the so-called “Zenbleed” vulnerability (CVE-2023-20593) could give attackers access to encryption keys and root and user passwords, along with other sensitive data from any system using a CPU based on AMD’s Zen 2 architecture.

The bug allows attackers to swipe data from a CPU’s registers. Modern processors attempt to speed up operations by guessing what they’ll be asked to do next, called “speculative execution.” But sometimes the CPU guesses wrong; Zen 2 processors don’t properly recover from certain kinds of mispredictions, which is the bug that Zenbleed exploits to do its thing.

The bad news is that the exploit doesn’t require physical hardware access and can be triggered by loading JavaScript on a malicious website. The good news is that, at least for now, there don’t seem to be any cases of this bug being exploited in the wild yet, though this could change quickly now that the vulnerability has been disclosed, and the bug requires precise timing to exploit.