Random News not worthy of own thread

[Chips]

Not sure where to post this, but Melania has a new documentary film released recently. Well, its a bomb, a total giant flop. Amazon paid roughly $40 million to secure rights to the film. But no one is watching it.

Good. Who cares about this worthless piece of trash. or what she does!

Personally thought the reasoning behind creating it had nothing to do with profit... at least, not directly

[chew-ie]

New snowball detected: A potentially habitable new planet has been discovered 146 light-years away – but it may be -70C



@source: theguardian.com

[mr.WHO]

New snowball detected: A potentially habitable new planet has been discovered 146 light-years away – but it may be -70C



@source: theguardian.com

I don't think this would classify as habitable in Earth terms - with average -70 degree you can pretty much kiss goodbye any plantlife that base on photosythesis.
This meas no-oxygen atmosphere, so no Star Wars Hoth.

There could be a life in oceans beneth ice, near volcanic vents but this would depent if planet has plate tectonics or not (which aparently is non trivial matter as not all earth-like planets would have plate tectonics - neither Venus or Mars have them).


Still, if we'll be around, a few thousands years in future, this one will be definetly nice candidate for Terraforming,

[Usenko]

New snowball detected: A potentially habitable (for a given value of habitable) new planet has been discovered 146 light-years away – but it may be -70C



@source: theguardian.com

Fixed it!

[felter]

That is roughly only 138 quadrillion 116 trillion Kilometres from here, or 138,166,000,000,000,000 Km. Something tells me we will never get to see it up close and personal.

[chew-ie]

"We" for sure not - we have more important things to do right now. Destroying the planet, destroying our societies...

No snowball for us! Not even a cold one.

[PersonyPerson]

New snowball detected: A potentially habitable new planet has been discovered 146 light-years away – but it may be -70C



@source: theguardian.com

I read the discovery paper. I'm usually sceptical of any headlines that says "Habitable planet orbiting x star" or "Planet x distance away could harbour life", so I much rather go directly to the source. For some reason, the team behind the potential discovery decided to publish their results before they had confirmation of a 2nd transit event. Common practice is that if you detect an exoplanet candidate via the transit method, you need at least 2 (or 3 if you're determining eccentiricity) transit events of the object before you can get any meaningful results as that rules out false positives (which are very common), gives you a definitive orbital period and an official value for the planet's radius. This lot only have one transit. If I had to guess given their explanations, it's because they picked up Transit 1 through the Kepler telescope, which was powerful enough to detect Earth-sized signals around bright stars, but TESS (the sucessor transit hunting telescope) is not as powerful as Kepler and is unlikely to get any meaningful follow up results in order to detect a 2nd transit. The Kepler telescope is no longer functional.

Because they deciphered the orbital period from how long the transit was rather than getting a 2nd signal, there's a huge margin for error. It's possible that TESS could've picked up a signal, but got the orbital period wrong, so they measured the star at the wrong time. Also means that the equilibrium temperature of -68°C is also up in the air, (for comparison, Earth's is -18°C). Even the mass value is derived given the team admitted to assuming the planet has a similar density to Earth. Why make that assumption?

This is not yet a confirmed planet imo. Too many holes still yet to be filled. Hopefully they'll manage to get future radial veolocity measurements on the star to get an official mass value and somehow manage to find more transits to clear up misunderstandings in a follow-up paper.

[chew-ie]

Thanks for the details PersonyPerson

TBH I was more drawn to the snowball ^^ While I too hope for being alive when we discover a new garden eden I'm know it's a very slim chance.

[matthewfarmery]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0YsZq0p5vQ

Now that is funny, hope this new New Melania Movie Trailer gets a lot of views, funny and brutal at the same time.



Only one ticket sold. (at least that is what the trailer said. Even if shown on a plane, people would still walk out.

[felter]

If you use Notepad++ make sure you are updated to the latest version as the older version has been hacked and can be used to access your personal information, the new version removes the hack.

[burger1]

The china hack only targeted specific people vs everyone. Government officials, etc....

Firefox adding an ai off button in an update on ~ February 24. 2026.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/so ... r-AA1VAiVh

Nvidia, AMD and possibly other gpu manufacturers limiting production and production of some gpus pretty much stopped. There's now a shortage of some gpus and some gpus models that are cheaper. As a result there's a gpu shortage and gpus are on average more expensive due to the lack of availability of lower prices/margin models.

[chew-ie]

If you use Notepad++ make sure you are updated to the latest version as the older version has been hacked and can be used to access your personal information, the new version removes the hack.

And here I tried to be less paranoid in 2026 ...

[Alan Phipps]

To be less paranoid, the latest official version of Notepad++ available here today is v8.9.1 dated 18 Jan 2026, so not blindingly new.

[chew-ie]

To be less paranoid, the latest official version of Notepad++ available here today is v8.9.1 dated 18 Jan 2026, so not blindingly new.

I'm not using notepad++ - but a co-worker had 8.8.8 installed as there seems to be no auto-updater (?). v8.9.1 should be save as according to the news on notepad++ there was a security patch in december. The hint by felter might be connected to the fact that notepad++ devs gave an update on the security issue (but no new version) on 2026-02-02.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hija ... fo-update/

[decifer]

If you use Notepad++ make sure you are updated to the latest version as the older version has been hacked and can be used to access your personal information, the new version removes the hack.

That is a very blunt description of the actual issue. Misinformation living its best life these days.

IF you can redirect network traffic so that the update files are not loaded from the Notepad++ domain but anywhere else, notepad++ would not validate those files any further and possibly run malicious code. The big IF is the crucial point.
To do this you need to already have access to some point in the network that is handling network traffic and addressing.
Usually this kind of attack is done via DNS injection. They basically tell your internet address book a different address for https://notepad-plus-plus.org/. To do this they need to either change your local DNS Cache, you router, your ISP or the public DNS service you are using.
There are other ways to exploit this attack vector, but that requires them to intercept and manipulate your network traffic (man-in-the-middle-attack), which is also not easy to do with a random internet user.

This kind of attack is very work intensive and it's usually a targeted attack towards a specific entity, not the common user. It's not like they can randomly attack everyone using notepad++.

To be less paranoid, the latest official version of Notepad++ available here today is v8.9.1 dated 18 Jan 2026, so not blindingly new.

No need to be paranoid because of this one... There are other, way more concerning things happening.

[felter]

Thanks for the hate, it's always appreciated. At the end of the day it was meant as a heads-up, if you don't want to update then don't do it. If you want more information then ask, I posted in this thread as I said it was meant just as a heads-up. Mutahar (some ordinary gamers) did a good piece on it explaining what happened.

[felter]

Baldur's Gate is the next video game that is being turned into a television show, this seems to be the big thing right now, not to sure how I feel about it.

[decifer]

Baldur's Gate is the next video game that is being turned into a television show, this seems to be the big thing right now, not to sure how I feel about it.

Well WotC is mistreating the brand for years now and milking it for as much money as possible. It's a shame.
But maybe it'll be good? I didn't see the last movie, but the old ones where so bad it's almost a meme.

[decifer]

Mikey Weinstein, the president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said the nonprofit received reports from eight bases around the world that U.S. military members were being "pressured" to see "Melania."

I guess, if you're the Commander in Chief, you can just order people to watch your wife's movie
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-mili ... rff-2026-2

And please, if you want to discuss the political side of this, do it here: Trump Presidency
I just wanted to share this ridiculous story.

[matthewfarmery]

Baldur's Gate is the next video game that is being turned into a television show, this seems to be the big thing right now, not to sure how I feel about it.

It could be decent, or it could be rubbish. It will have to use a lot of CGI, and I wonder if it will follow any of the BG games, or will it be a new story? so much potential, but so much to mess on. Especailly with the license.

Really depends on a lot of factors. plus who will be in it? so a lot could go very wrong.

Edit

There are some D&D films, never watched them. I think the first one was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of ratings. Unless anyone here has seen any of the films? I guess whatever the BG film will be like, it probably will be of similar quality? So again, might be decent, or might be a total flop.