Passionate workers perform better. But to truly unlock potential, leaders need to focus on cultivating a unique kind of passion among their employees.
When most leaders talk about passion, they talk about workers who will work nights and weekends on their assigned tasks without questions or complaints. However, based on research assessing environments where there is sustained, extreme performance improvement, it turns out the participants in these environments all have a very specific form of passion—the passion of the explorer.
This explorative passion has three components. First, people with this passion are excited about achieving greater impact in a specific domain. This could be anything from gardening to nuclear physics. They are also excited when confronted with unexpected challenges and see them as an opportunity to achieve even greater impact. Third, when confronted with those unexpected challenges, their first reaction is to connect with others and ask for help. They realize that, no matter how smart and talented they are, they will achieve much greater impact when they come together with others.
The challenge is that large organizations are typically suspicious of people with an explorer's style of passion. Traditionalists might say these people ask too many questions, they take too many risks, and they deviate from their assigned scripts.
Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that a survey of the U.S. workforce revealed that only 14% of workers pursue their passion for exploration in their work. We need to recognize how limiting these environments are and evolve these environments so that they actually encourage us to explore.
In a rapidly changing world, one option is to encourage workers to seek out challenges that they have only recently encountered. As an example, a clinical laboratory company was experiencing increasing customer churn rates because they were not getting the answers they needed from the call center department.
The head of this department brought all his employees together and started by assuring them that they would all continue to be employed. Then, he said that their first assignment was to work with the IT department to figure out how all the routine calls they were receiving could be automated. As they freed up their time, their next assignment was to identify the really challenging calls they had never received before and come together into small groups of five employees to come up with creative answers to the customer issues.
In a short period of time, customer satisfaction went way up, and the workers in the call center department began to experience the passion of the explorer as they discovered they were able to address problems that had never been encountered before. They were being rewarded for abandoning the scripts that had consumed their work and delivering more and more value to customers in need.
One reason a passion for exploration is so important now is that it can help unleash the true potential of artificial intelligence. AI can take over most routine work, freeing workers to pursue new opportunities and challenges that are becoming more prevalent in virtually every environment. As workers are freed up from their routine tasks, they can begin to cultivate an explorer’s passion, which will help them develop capabilities such as curiosity, imagination, creativity, and collaboration. These skills can especially help workers deliver more value and put them in the best position to not be replaced
Another approach that can help cultivate the passion of the explorer is the zoom out/zoom in approach. This strategy focuses on two very different time horizons. Zooming out challenges leaders to look ahead 10 to 20 years and identify a much larger emerging opportunity to pursue. When zooming in, the focus shifts to six to 12 months. The challenge here is to identify two to three powerful initiatives that could accelerate progress towards the bigger, long-term opportunity.
By identifying a very large and inspiring opportunity in the future, leaders can help draw out the passion of the explorer among workers. This passion can become even stronger if workers can see tangible progress being made over the short-term. Plus, it can make them even more excited about participating in an effort to address opportunities that are only beginning to emerge.
Words like “dude,” “man,” “bro,” and “brah” have become staples of modern language. Today, they’re not just common terms of endearment; they are popular, powerful signals of solidarity. But how did these words become so significant, and where did they come from?
In the 1980s and 90s, “dude” was everywhere, lending its cool detached nonchalance to ordinary expressions like, “Dude, what’s up?”
The rise of “bro” as a term of address is propelled by the same forces popularizing “dude” all those years ago: the coolness it conveys and the social bonds it creates. When used to address someone directly, “dude” and “bro,” alongside “man,” all function grammatically as what are called “vocatives.”
Other English vocatives heard regularly include names and nicknames, familial terms like “dad” or “nana,” formal terms like “ma’am” or “your honor,” and group-directed terms like “hey you guys” or “y’all.”
But “dude,” “man,” and “bro” are a specific type of vocative known as “familiarizers.” Familiarizers mark a relationship as casual and provide social nuance beyond their attention-getting function. Their true power lies in how they help perform interactional work like signaling closeness or commiseration, expressing or softening disagreement, and managing conversational turns. Consider the different relational messages being delivered by the “bro” used in “Bro, you ate my pizza!” versus the one in “I love you too, bro.”
A glaring observation is that all these terms are masculine. Not only are “man,” “bro,” and “dude” about, well, dudes, but the same goes for “buddy” and “guy,” as well as the British “bruv” and the Australian “mate.”
This male-gendered leaning inspired linguists to playfully refer to this class of vocatives as “brocatives.” Feminine vocatives like “girl,” “girlfriend,” or “sis” certainly exist, but have not become broadly popular given the same male-as-norm bias that historically made “he” a default generic. In other words, we can’t unhear the femininity inscribed in “girl” while masculine vocatives’ ability to convey connection and informality over and above male-ness provides cross-over appeal to women.
While “man” and “dude” remain popular, listening in on Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s speech lends the impression that “bro” is nipping at their heels. Linguistic research based on self-reports, texts, tweets, and conversational recordings indeed shows an uptick in vocative “bro” for speakers born this century. Other variants, namely “bra” and “bruh,” are also gaining in popularity, especially in terms of self-reported usage among those who identified as non-Caucasian.
“Man” is the old timer of the bunch, with vocative roots going as far back as Old English, where it marked impatience or urged someone to action, as in “Think now, man!.” A more friendly familiarizing “man” appears colloquially in some Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writing around the 16th century.
In the early 20th century, “man” became linked with jazz culture, with African American men calling each other “man” to signal respect, fellowship, and dignity, a counter to the racist “boy” often used to denigrate them. As jazz and beat culture spread more broadly, jazz slang like “man” traveled with it.
“Dude” did not arrive on the scene until the late 1800s, when it was used to label a showy, ostentatious dandy. Its vocative era started in the 1930s and 40s when zoot-suited African American and Mexican American men turned a term of derision into one used to mark admiration and connection. Infused with counterculture cool, this new “dude” was picked up by surfers and stoners, and its promise as a familiarizer with a laid-back non-conformist vibe was fully realized.
Now, it seems, “bro” is having its day. While “bro” as an abbreviation for “brother” has long been part of English. Familiarizer use of “bro” and “bruh” gained traction in African American culture as respectful greetings in the 1900s. Expansion onto the mainstream scene likely comes by way of popular music, movies, and social media, which have made African-American language visible to young people of other backgrounds. As for “brah,” surfers are thought to have brought this familiarizer to the mainland U.S. after hearing it in Hawaiian English, though a similar form can be found in Caribbean and South African English.
The crucial thread tying all these “brocatives” together is that they initially passed through marginalized groups with counterculture caché before spreading to others who leverage this panache, sometimes spurring additional uses and meanings alongside (as with non-vocative “frat bro” and “bro culture”).
But what’s driving this intense need to use such familiarizers at all? The answer lies in changing social relations and practices which encourage use of address terms highlighting rapport, familiarity, and informality. In Shakespeare’s time, formal address terms like “lord” and “sir” were frequent ways to acknowledge relative rank, power, and status, but as more social mobility, increasing urbanization, and greater democratization have chipped away at formality and hierarchy in the centuries since, greater use of familiarizers paying heed to solidarity and equality has followed suit.
As for what’s driving the trend to switch it up from “man” to “dude” to “bro”? Well, bro, when you’re 17, the last people you want to sound anything like are the dudes that came before.
But regardless of the form they take, what doesn’t change is such familiarizers’ ability to project a sense of solidarity, jocularity, or chill detachment—a boon particularly for younger speakers where the value of sounding like you stand out while still fitting in is priceless.
Про устройство банкоматов и инженеров, которые помогают им исправно работать.
Банкоматы могут работать десятки лет, но их обновляют не по причине старости, а когда они морально устаревают, и у новых устройств новый дизайн, функции и технологии более совершенны. Например, за последние годы в Альфе произошла масштабная замена парка на новые устройства с ресайклерами.
Ресайклер (Cash Recycling) — это модуль, который принимает деньги одних клиентов и отдаёт другим. Если 10 лет назад у банкоматов были два окошка — одно для выдачи, другое для приема, — а инкассаторы регулярно выгружали наличные и загружали новые, то банкомат с ресайклером сам себя обеспечивает наличностью, а вдобавок может работать непрерывно, и принимать и выдавать крупные пачки денег.
Однако, есть и минусы. У ресайклера десятки моторов, сотни датчиков и большое количество микроконтроллеров — это большой, слаженный и сложный механизм. А чем сложнее устройство, тем больше вероятность его поломки. Поэтому подавляющая часть нашей работы, как инженеров сопровождения, связана с ресайклером.
Меня зовут Александр Костин, я ведущий инженер сопровождения электронных устройств, — помогаю банкоматам исправно работать. В статье расскажу, что чаще всего ломается в банкоматах, что такое модули, какие детали мы всегда носим с собой, почему бессмысленно думать о том, чтобы взломать банкомат, и какие модели банкоматов были похожи на Тойоты — в том смысле, что идеально ремонтопригодные.
The United States military identified Angel S. Rampersad as a third servicemember believed to have been killed in Jordan after an Iranian attack last Friday.
Lawmakers claim Commissioner Frank Bisignano used an agency email to exaggerate tax savings under the Republicans' OBBBA while inserting partisan political messaging.
Продукт, опережающий свое время и терпящий из-за этого фиаско, далеко не редкость для мира технологий. Именно таким когда-то была одна неординарная, гениальная в своей странности и очень красивая операционная система, увидевшая свет в начале 90-х…
As threats from Moscow rise and support from Washington dwindles, the German military is reinventing how it researches, funds and wields 21st-century arms.
The fledgling firm, run by the president’s oldest son and his partner Omeed Malik, has made investments in A.I. and defense technology that have tripled in value in just months.
Republicans nominated a former N.F.L. kicker in a top House battleground, a Trump loyalist for governor and an election denier for the state’s top election post.
The administration canceled federal grants to organizations across the country, accusing them of encouraging premarital sex. New criteria say programs should stress abstinence.
Charles Ross spent 50 years building “Star Axis,” a naked-eye observatory in New Mexico. Now his masterwork is ready. How to share it with a changed world?
Saudi Arabia has diverted huge amounts of oil to the Red Sea since the Iran war began, but now the Iranian-backed Houthi militants say that they intend to block that route.
In January 2025, Linda-Gail Bekker stood inside a vaccine manufacturing plant and allowed herself to believe that the first HIV vaccine candidate conceived through African science and led by Africans might finally become a reality.
Key takeaways
HIV has stubbornly resisted prevention via a vaccine. But in mRNA, scientists think they have finally found a technology to develop one.
mRNA, which was used for the successful Covid vaccines, is a way to agilely iterate and develop new candidate vaccines quickly.
Funding for HIV research has been yanked away by the Trump administration, and mRNA vaccines have faced political scrutiny, all threatening this breakthrough.
No virus has proved more evasive. Hundreds of HIV vaccines have entered testing; none has succeeded at providing durable protection against infection. And the need remains vast: In 2025, roughly 1.2 million new HIV infections were reported; anti-retroviral treatments have turned it into more of a survivable disease, but more than half a million people died from AIDS-related causes the same year. There is still no known cure.
So researchers like Bekker, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Cape Town, have more hope now, in part because there is finally a clearer idea of what an effective vaccine needs to do. It must coax the immune system into producing a particular type of protective antibody, a rare class of defender, capable of recognizing and disabling HIV despite the virus’s extraordinary diversity and rapid ability to mutate.
No one yet knows how to reliably do that. But mRNA is uniquely suited to the task of finding out, vaccinologists say. Thanks to the platform’s speed and flexibility, researchers can iterate rapidly through the otherwise laborious process of designing, testing, and refining the series of vaccine components needed to guide the body toward making those essential antibodies.
At the start of last year, Bekker and her colleagues were ready to put that strategy to the test. The clinical trial for their new mRNA-based HIV vaccine was just on the verge of enrolling its first participants. But the project depended on the same backing that had sustained HIV vaccine research for decades: US government funding. Washington had long supplied roughly 90 percent of the world’s investment in the field. Then President Donald Trump returned to office.
Within hours of his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order freezing foreign aid. The $45 million contract from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) that was supposed to fund clinical trials like Bekker’s disappeared, as did a web of other funds, many routed through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that had helped fuel the field’s progress for years.
The timing could hardly be more cruel. After 40-odd years of chasing a shape-shifting foe, scientists believe they now know what kind of immune response an HIV vaccine must generate — and have in mRNA a powerful new tool for pursuing it. But just as many researchers have finally glimpsed a path to victory, the United States and much of the funding has pulled away from the fight.
Pushing the envelope
From the outset, the target for preventing HIV was clear. Within a year of identifying the virus as the cause of AIDS in 1983, researchers had zeroed in on its envelope protein as the most promising point of attack for a vaccine.
Protruding from the virus’s surface in knobby clusters, the envelope protein acts like a molecular grappling hook, latching onto immune cells before pulling the virus itself inside. Without this feature, HIV cannot infect a cell.
Much as the coronavirus spike protein would later become the basis for Covid vaccines, this protein on the surface of HIV seemed an obvious bullseye. But identifying the target didn’t mean researchers could hit it. Most of what the immune system sees of the envelope protein is actually just a decoy. The parts that stick out and draw the strongest immune response are also its most changeable, differing from one strain to the next and mutating freely whenever antibodies close in, leaving the body to waste its firepower on a target that keeps slipping away.
Candidate vaccines kept making the same mistake. They would elicit plenty of antibodies, but not the kind that could keep up with the virus. Time and again, promising candidate vaccines generated excitement in the laboratory, only to come up empty when it mattered most in large-scale clinical testing.
The field’s fortunes started to change in the late 2000s when researchers began studying the small fraction of people living with HIV who developed antibodies capable of recognizing the virus’s concealed, conserved features. Though these hard-won antibodies came too late to protect their makers, they gave scientists a molecular blueprint for the defenses a vaccine would need to build.
As the field came to learn, these “broadly neutralizing antibodies” do not appear overnight but rather after years of battle with the virus.
The challenge, then, was to design a vaccine that would not just trigger an immune response but guide a person’s immune system through the same evolutionary journey. This would require a succession of vaccine components to prompt a carefully choreographed process within the body, rather than the single, fixed target that suffices for shots against measles or hepatitis B.
It was a strategy rooted in rational design but dependent on trial and error. Progress would come through a steady stream of small proof-of-concept studies, each informing the next generation of vaccine candidates. Ordinarily, it would take at least a year — often longer — to manufacture and prepare each vaccine iteration before it could be tested in people.
But then the Covid pandemic rocketed mRNA into the spotlight.
The mRNA advantage
mRNA technology upends the old recipe of vaccine development. Conventional shots work by showing the immune system a mugshot of the enemy: a killed or weakened germ, or one of its proteins, grown batch by batch in vats of cells or eggs. An mRNA vaccine takes a different route. Rather than supplying the mugshot, it supplies the instructions to draw one: a short, lab-printed strip of messenger RNA, the molecule cells normally use to ferry genetic directions from DNA to their protein-making machinery.
Inject the right sequence, and it will program the body’s own cells to become tiny factories, producing the target protein and presenting it to the immune system as if it were the real intruder. Because it is all just code, refining a design means editing text, not rebuilding a factory — the work of days, not months.
“We’ve been able to design vaccines in real time,” said University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine assistant professor Ted Kreider, who is a specialist in infectious diseases.
To HIV researchers, the appeal was obvious. HIV’s greatest weapon was its ability to shift and adapt. Now, at last, a vaccine could, too.
The timing was ideal. Just as researchers were beginning to map the path to an effective vaccine, mRNA offered a way to move down that path at speed. With vaccine designs no longer bottlenecked by design and manufacturing, what once might have taken decades of stepwise vaccine development could, thanks to mRNA, be compressed into years.
Across a growing number of clinical trials, researchers are now testing different vaccine components, different sequences, and different delivery platforms, searching for the combination that most effectively nudges the immune system toward a truly HIV-thwarting response.
A paper published last month in Nature offered one such path forward, showing in monkeys that a painstaking sequence of eight shots could coax the immune system into producing potent antibodies capable of neutralizing a broad range of HIV strains. But even the study’s authors see a catch. “It’s still too many [shots] to be practical in humans,” said Dennis Burton, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research who worked on the project.
Whether mRNA ultimately becomes the vaccine itself — or simply the tool that helps researchers discover it — remains an open question.
The fundamental challenge for now, after all, is vaccine design, notes Mark Feinberg, president and CEO of IAVI, a nonprofit research organization focused on developing vaccines against HIV. And for that task, he says, “the most obvious advantage of mRNA is simply the speed of getting an idea from the laboratory to the clinic.”
But if the technology reaches the finish line, researchers say it could offer other advantages as well. Because the protein is made inside the body’s own cells rather than in a lab, it folds and displays itself much as it would on the real virus, giving the immune system a more faithful target to train against. That way, when the real virus arrives, the body already knows its true face.
It also gives vaccine designers an unusual number of knobs to turn, notes Kristie Bloom, an mRNA vaccine researcher and molecular biologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. By altering the vaccine’s formulation, dose, or genetic design, researchers can shape not just the magnitude of the immune response but also its balance: favoring antibody-producing B cells, virus-killing T cells, or some mix of the two.
With mRNA, “there’s quite a bit of flexibility,” she said.
Not so fast
For all the putative upsides, however, mRNA does carry some baggage. There are concerns about public acceptance given the intense backlash and misinformation campaigns that followed the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. And though those shots ultimately proved remarkably safe, with very low rates of serious side effects, a peculiar skin problem has emerged in early-stage trials of mRNA vaccine candidates for HIV specifically.
In two separate trials reported last year, around one in 12 participants who received mRNA-based HIV vaccines manufactured by Moderna developed chronic urticaria, a form of persistent hives that in some cases endured for years. The vaccines encoded different portions of HIV’s envelope protein, yet both produced the same unexpected side effect.
The fact that the reactions appeared across distinct vaccine designs — but never before in Moderna’s other mRNA vaccine programs — has fueled suspicion that something about HIV’s envelope protein itself may be involved. Even so, no clear explanation has emerged.
“We’ve ruled a bunch of things out,” said William Schief, a professor at Scripps Research’s department of immunology and microbiology who doubles as vice president for protein design at Moderna, “but there’s no smoking gun.”
Schief is continuing to investigate the source of the immune reactions. But not wanting an unresolved safety signal to bring the program to a halt, he and his collaborators have pressed ahead with lower-dose versions of the vaccine, betting that the hives will fade while the desired immune response remains intact.
That strategy is now being evaluated in an IAVI-backed trial led by Bekker in South Africa. Known as IAVI G004, it has yielded encouraging early results. (Unlike the African-developed vaccine whose launch was derailed by the USAID funding freeze, this study is testing a different mRNA vaccine candidate, manufactured by Moderna.)
At the lowest dose tested, just one-tenth of the amount used in the original studies, the hives that had troubled earlier trials never materialized, Bekker said. Her team has since moved on to a somewhat higher dose, seeking the sweet spot between safety and immune potency.
All of these discoveries and challenges along the way have helped map a path forward. “We know what we need to do,” said Barton Haynes, director of the Human Vaccine Institute at the Duke University School of Medicine. The task for them now is to move through the necessary iterations as quickly as the science — and the funding and political landscape — allow.
“A black hole”
When Bekker and her team learned about the sudden funding cut that would halt their African-designed, USAID-funded vaccine study in January 2025, they were already in Tanzania to prepare its launch. They immediately had to stop work on the project, which had been years in the making. “It was like falling into a black hole of depression,” she said.
And the setbacks kept coming. With prominent vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. overseeing US health policy, the federal government moved to undermine both vaccine science broadly and mRNA technology in particular.
The NIH, in addition to terminating dozens of smaller HIV-related grants, began winding down its flagship Consortia for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD) program, which has long served as a cornerstone of global HIV vaccine research, while other federal agencies curtailed support for mRNA vaccine projects across multiple disease areas.
At the same time, South Africa, the continent’s leading center for biomedical research, found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs over allegations of anti-white discrimination. New federal research grants were no longer permitted to support collaborations with South African scientists, severing ties that had underpinned years of international HIV research.
“That’s a perfect storm to prevent us from building on the most exciting science HIV vaccines have had in 45 years,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, a nonprofit dedicated to HIV prevention access and policy.
Yet for all the financial and political disruption, the scientific momentum hasn’t stopped. Philanthropic organizations and governments elsewhere have stepped up to help fill the funding gap, allowing key trials to move forward, although in scaled-down forms with more modest ambitions.
The Africa-led effort that Bekker had dreamed of was salvaged, with emergency backing from the South African Medical Research Council, albeit in diminished form and built, in the end, on the same protein-based technology that mRNA was meant to leapfrog.
The only mRNA-based HIV vaccine study that is actually underway in Africa is IAVI G004: a program designed by US scientists, not by locals, and funded largely by the Gates Foundation.
A longtime backer of HIV research, that foundation is estimated to invest around $70 million annually — with $64 million being invested in 2022, and $70 million in 2026 — across a global portfolio of HIV vaccine programs. That’s a substantial sum, though only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars once provided by the NIH, USAID, and other federal agencies.
For now, some of that funding continues to flow. But even what remains is far from assured. The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget would slash the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — the NIH institute that has long anchored HIV vaccine science — along with the Office of AIDS Research that coordinates HIV research across the entire NIH, leaving the field’s longer-term future in doubt.
“We’re not going to be able to fill the gap that’s been left by the US government,” said Nina Russell, director of TB& HIV research and development at the Gates Foundation. Still, she says, the foundation remains determined to keep the most promising vaccine programs moving forward: “We are super committed to it.”
All of these changes have left the research field daunted, but not hopeless. “It’s been a very disruptive time,” said Burton, who leads one of the CHAVD research hubs. But he remains convinced the field is on the right track. “The pieces of the puzzle are in place,” he said. “It’s obviously been a long, long journey, but you can begin to see the end.”
A higher bar
The funding crisis and political challenges are not the only forces reshaping HIV vaccine development.
For much of the HIV epidemic, which has killed over 40 million people worldwide, even a partially effective vaccine might have been enough to transform the course of HIV. Today, however, vaccine researchers are also competing against long-acting preventive drugs that can protect people for months at a time with just two injections.
These drugs are an enormous step forward for HIV protection, but they also raise the standard the vaccine field must meet, Warren said. “The bar for a licensed vaccine that is going to have a public health impact has gotten much higher,” he said.
But these prophylactic drugs, which began as daily pills and have evolved into long-acting injectables, are only as good as the systems that deliver them. Cost, stigma, and the need for regular clinic visits have limited access in many countries with the highest HIV burdens. A vaccine, by contrast, that provided years of protection after a handful of doses could overcome many of those barriers.
That is precisely why many scientists view the current retreat of the US government with such alarm. After decades of disappointments and billions of dollars in investment, the field finally believes it has a coherent strategy for building an effective HIV vaccine.The fear is that momentum could stall just as researchers have begun to see a path across the finish line. As a result, what once seemed like a scientific problem increasingly looks like a political one.
For Bekker, the current moment feels all too familiar. In the early 2000s, South Africa’s government embraced AIDS denialism, delaying the rollout of lifesaving treatments and forcing researchers and clinicians to battle both the virus and the state. A quarter-century later, she says, the political opponent has merely changed address to Washington, DC, threatening once again to undermine the fight against HIV and cost countless lives.
“When politics interferes in science,” Bekker said, “that is the death of scientific progress.”
Bekker still does not know whether the vaccine she watched being manufactured last year will ever reach the people it was designed to protect. She and her colleagues still hope to carry out the made-in-Africa mRNA vaccine trial they spent years designing — if they can find a way to pay for it. But Bekker remains convinced that the scientific strategy behind it is the right one, and that mRNA may yet do for HIV what it did for Covid-19, rapidly transforming decades of scientific groundwork into an effective shot.
She only hopes politics does not succeed where HIV itself has failed in slowing the field’s progress. “We should only be fighting the virus,” Bekker said. “But we’re fighting the administration and its policies, and that is a waste of our energy.”
Olivia Rodrigo, Noah Kahan and Morgan Wallen have all dealt with audience effluence in recent weeks – but that’s only one part of a fearsome subculture that has built up around fandom, endurance and ‘getting barrier’
The front row of a gig is a sacred space. When you love an artist, you want to be as close to them as possible, without a view obscured by someone else’s hairdo. You want the possibility that the artist will pluck you from the crowd, form a deep and enduring connection and end up marrying you. Or at least notice you.
Last month, Olivia Rodrigo revealed how acutely she had noticed some of the fans lining the barriers at her shows. “People wear diapers so that they can be front row,” she said, adding, to everyone’s absolute horror: “That’s been an experience as a performer that I have smelled.”
This is no aberration, and while genuine medical needs should be taken into account, situations down the front have clearly got out of control. Also last month, video of a very stoic stadium worker cleaning up human excrement at a Noah Kahan gig went viral and prompted Kahan himself to post on X: “If you have to poop at a show please dear god just go to the bathroom lmao.” This week, a fan of US country star Morgan Wallen complained that he, his brother and his niece were urinated on by another concertgoer, and police are investigating. Must we be subjected to headlines such as “Someone Also Shit Their Pants at a 5 Seconds of Summer Concert”? And in 2024, someone urinated on the floor of the standing section of a Sabrina Carpenter concert, causing a run on a fairly horrifying item called a “pit diaper”, whose mere existence speaks to a wider problem.
A reminder that my colleagues are covering the latest out of the Middle East at our dedicated live blog.
Donald Trump took to Truth Social a short while and noted that the US will destroy one bridge or power plant, including those near Tehran, “any time” that Iran “shoots a ship” in the strait of Hormuz.
В рамках партнерского взаимодействия с Positive Technologies мы протестировали платформу MaxPatrol 360, и в этой статье расскажем о ее возможностях и особенностях применения в процессах SOC.
Еще одна платформа для SOC?
Современные центры мониторинга кибербезопасности работают в условиях высокой насыщенности инструментами: SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) собирает события ИБ и выявляет из всего потока подозрения на инциденты; EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) ловит сложные атаки на конечных точках; NTA (Network Traffic Analysis) анализирует сетевой трафик, а отдельные классы решений помогают с инвентаризацией активов и управлением уязвимостями.
При расследовании инцидентов аналитики многих SOC по‑прежнему вынуждены переключаться между несколькими консолями, вручную поддерживать единообразие экспертизы и синхронизировать процессы через почту и мессенджеры. В холдингах и корпорациях с географически распределенной инфраструктурой возникают дополнительные сложности: часть информации теряется, подходы к детектированию и реагированию начинают различаться от филиала к филиалу, от сети к сети, от контура к контуру, за которыми следит SOC.
Продукт Positive Technologies MaxPatrol 360 появился как ответ на этот разрыв между набором инструментов и цельной операционной картиной. Он решает задачи централизованного управления расследованиями, запуска защитных мер, управления экспертизой и не только. Обо всем по порядку.
Все, кто так или иначе касался OSINT, слышал о Shodan — один из самых популярных инструментов. Удобный графический интерфейс, поиск портов, интернет вещей и все такое. Но нет предела совершенству и у нас есть и ShodanX.
Нет, это не новая версия Shodan, и не супер-пупер хацкерский форк. Это - инструмент, который работает как CLI-инструмент для автоматизации разведки, который использует данные Shodan, и не является самостоятельным ресурсом. К чему все это надобно?
Во втором квартале 2026 года специалисты Threat Intelligence экспертного центра безопасности Positive Technologies (PT ESC) продолжили отслеживать активность группировок, атакующих российские организации. За отчетный период собран и верифицирован массив индикаторов компрометации по результатам расследования инцидентов, мониторинга группировок и анализа образцов вредоносного ПО.
Разбираемся, кто был активнее всего, какие отрасли атаковали чаще прочих и какие технические приёмы группировки использовали с апреля по июнь — от резолва C2-адреса через блокчейн Bitcoin до антибот-шлюзов, отсекающих песочницы.
Выпущен Jmix 3.0, и это самый значительный шаг, который фреймворк сделал за последние годы. Этот релиз перестраивает основу на современном технологическом стеке, оставаясь полностью совместимым с предыдущими версиями, что делает миграцию гладкой и простой. Наряду с обновлением платформы, 3.0 представляет набор функций, которые активно используют ИИ и предоставляют гибкость в рантайм.
Ниже приведён краткий обзор основных новых возможностей. Полный список изменений, включая все критические изменения, доступен в разделе Что нового документации.
Prosecutors seek a one-year sentence and heavy fine after chef garnished dish with insects not approved for consumption
Prosecutors in South Korea have asked a court to sentence the owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant to one year in prison for serving a dessert topped with ants, an insect not approved for consumption under local food safety law.
The request, made on Monday, also sought a 20m won (£10,108) fine for the company that runs the restaurant, Yonhap news agency reported.
10 лет в .NET, отпуск в Альпах и pgAdmin, который меня достал.
Начало июля, горный воздух, а в голове рабочая фрустрация. Ну сколько можно ждать по 30 секунд, пока pgAdmin разродится ради одного короткого запроса? Из инструментов с собой только смартфон и лимиты Claude Code. Challenge accepted.
За выходные, целиком с телефона, не написав руками ни единой строчки кода, я собрал первую рабочую версию нативного GUI для PostgreSQL. Дальше две недели вечернего кодинга, 17 релизов, и проект уже в Microsoft Store.
Встречайте: NativeAOT, взлетает за ~100 мс, весит всего 19 МБ, ноль трекеров, лицензия MIT.
Написал об этом подробный пост. Без лишней воды и успешного успеха рассказываю: как агент тащил разработку (от кода до дебага в песочнице) и где ему всё-таки нужна была менторская рука, какие грабли подкинул NativeAOT и как бесплатно выкатиться в Microsoft Store без покупки дорогого Authenticode-сертификата.
Заходите почитать, а в конце проголосуйте в опросе, какую фичу пилить следующей: ER-диаграммы, визуальный дифф EXPLAIN, UI для бэкапов или локальный AI?
JD Wetherspoon has issued its fourth profit warning in seven months, with the pub chain blaming worse-than-expected sales, despite the World Cup, as it struggled with rising costs for food, workers, energy and property taxes.
Shares in the pub chain tumbled 10% on Wednesday morning as its chair, Tim Martin, warned that profits would fall short of forecasts when it reports full-year earnings in October.
Prosecutors seek a one-year sentence and heavy fine after chef garnished dish with insects not approved for consumption
Prosecutors in South Korea have asked a court to sentence the owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant to one year in prison for serving a dessert topped with ants, an insect not approved for consumption under local food safety law.
The request, made on Monday, also sought a 20m won (£10,108) fine for the company that runs the restaurant, Yonhap news agency reported.
Армия Израиля подтвердила начало реализации плана по созданию «пилотной» зоны на юге Ливана. Создание таких зон предусмотрено трехсторонним рамочным соглашением между Ливаном и Израилем, которое было подписано в Вашингтоне в конце июня.
В ночь на субботу украинские дроны атаковали два склада крупнейшего российского маркетплейса Wildberries — в подмосковной Электростали и под Тамбовом. Склад в Московской области почти полностью выгорел вместе с товаром сотен продавцов, которые начали публично жаловаться на многомиллионные потери в социальных сетях. Русская служба Би-би-си поговорила с пострадавшими продавцами, юристом и экономистом о последствиях этих ударов.
С января 2027 года во Франции дети младше 15 лет не смогут пользоваться социальными сетями. Соответствующий закон во вторник одобрил парламент страны. Это первое в Европе государство, где вводится «цифровое совершеннолетие», хотя разговоры о необходимости таких мер ведутся уже во многих странах.
В 2024 году я переводил исследование Hive Systems, лежащее в основе регулярно появляющихся в интернете цветных таблиц «времени взлома паролей». Тогда главным изменением по сравнению с предыдущими годами стал переход от MD5 к bcrypt, что приводило к парадоксальной картине: вычислительные мощности растут а скорость перебора уменьшается. Алгоритм bcrypt требует гораздо больше вычислений, чем MD5, но это не должно создавать иллюзию безопасности. В большинстве систем (в частности в Windows) алгоритмы по прежнему остались уровня MD5.
В июле 2026 года Hive Systems опубликовала очередное обновление. На этот раз авторы не только заменили оборудование, но и изменили саму модель нарушителя: вместо одной условной машины с большим количеством видеокарт используется реально арендуемый кластер из двух узлов с конкретной стоимостью аренды.
Новая работа интересна измеренными показателями и оценкой стоимости атаки. Но воспринимать цвет таблицы как оценку безопасности конкретного пароля по-прежнему нельзя. Более того, в тексте Hive Systems есть спорные и местами просто некорректные утверждения. Поэтому я отказался от идеи опубликовать просто перевод оригинальной статьи и сделал разбор методики, результатов и ограничений исследования.
Меня зовут Саша Сойфер — я физик‑океанолог, работала на обоих полюсах, жила на Шпицбергене, писала статьи, делала замеры в тропиках и в северных крошках‑озерах на моторке. В общем, много времени провела в любовном изучении природы.
Параллельно с этим я всю жизнь увлекалась музыкой, и, работая с измерениями рек, вдруг подумала, что будет круто выявить звук гидрологических данных. Почему именно их?
Уровень реки — первичная метрика её «силы», от которой будет зависеть её напор, перенос вещества и так далее. Во‑первых, обычно у уровня рек есть выраженная сезонность, и это яркая точка пересечения с акустикой, так как звук синтезируется через периодические гармоники. При этом важно, что уровень реки меняется сильно и достаточно быстро: помимо четкого годового хода, он реагирует на атмосферные условия. Это легко сложилось для меня в цельную историю: озвучив архивные данные, можно сравнить, как прошёл каждый год, какой тренд в целом в жизни реки и какие краткосрочные события с ней происходили.
Вдобавок, в России обширная сеть гидрологических постов — это даёт простор для построения художественного высказывания.
Уже проговорилась, что из доступных гидрологических параметров для создания звука я выбрала уровень рек. Чтобы не слить данные, я работала не с абсолютными значениями, а относительными и немного их аугментировала — так, что это не оказывает влияния на звук, но не позволяет восстановить точные значения. (; Для проекта я выбрала Енисейский бассейн.
Multimillion-dollar lawsuits accusing companies of profiting from seized assets have overcome key legal hurdles, but reclaiming the physical properties is far from easy.
Хабр, привет! На связи Антон Ботвинников, директор по продукту SDS TROK.
S3 — модное слово. Его вставляют в питчи, роадмапы и презентации так часто, что даже человек, который не до конца понимает технологию, умудряется звучать убедительно, называя это вслух. Мы тоже решили быть в теме и в новом релизе SDS TROK добавили поддержку S3. Очень просили заказчики. Хочу рассказать, что получилось.
27-year-old leaves Real Madrid after six years at club
‘Arsenal is one of the top clubs in the world,’ she says
Arsenal have continued their rebuild of the squad by signing the Spain goalkeeper Misa Rodríguez on a free transfer. The 27-year-old arrives after spending the last six years at Real Madrid.
The WSL side have already added Georgia Stanway (Bayern Munich), Selina Cerci (Hoffenheim), Ona Batlle (Barcelona) and Géraldine Reuteler (Eintracht Frankfurt) as they aim to challenge for the league title. Last season they finished second, four points behind champions Manchester City.
Italian football federation confirm interest in Guardiola
Mancini and Pirlo also linked with national team vacancy
Financial “exceptions” are in place to allow Pep Guardiola to become Italy’s next head coach, the president of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC), Giovanni Malagò, has said.
Guardiola left Manchester City at the end of last season after winning six Premier League titles, three FA Cups, five League Cups and the Champions League during a hugely successful 10-year reign.
Всем привет! Меня зовут Никита Векессер, я занимаюсь продуктами в области AI-инфраструктуры.
За последний год большие языковые модели в enterprise прошли короткий, но заметный путь: от экспериментов в отдельных командах до интеграции в рабочие процессы. ИТ-команды поднимают локальные модели, бизнес-пользователи ходят в облачные сервисы, разработчики подключают AI-агентов к IDE, а внутренние продукты начинают использовать LLM как часть своей логики.
Именно под эту задачу мы делаем StarGuard AI — шлюз безопасности для больших языковых моделей.
Агенты сейчас обсуждают все подряд. Меняются фреймворки, появляются MCP-серверы, облака обещают «агента из коробки». Но в центре любой такой схемы по-прежнему одна и та же вещь — LLM: она читает контекст и формулирует следующий шаг. А между запросом к агенту и самой моделью — ещё несколько слоёв.
Сама модель всего лишь предсказывает вероятности следующего токена; снаружи нарастает луковица обёрток — о них и речь. Если собирать агента не из готового конструктора, понимание этой логики помогает быстрее найти источник проблемы: поломки могут быть не в модели, а на каком-то уровне рядом. Я пришёл к агентам из ML: для меня каждый новый слой появлялся поверх уже знакомого — поэтому дальше рассказываю от модели наружу. Идея статьи пришла после очередного совместного поиска бага с технической командой: захотелось собрать заметки в один обзор, чтобы в следующий раз было проще объяснять.
