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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: StubHub and its CEO, Eric Baker, have been hit with a proposed $5-million class-action lawsuit in the United States over the company's ties to large-scale scalpers -- connections reported by CBC News last week. The suit, filed Monday by New York ticket buyer Louis Sanquini, alleges deceptive practices and fraudulent misrepresentation over StubHub's promoting itself as a "marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets." The online ticket resale giant has faced a storm of customer complaints after cancelling thousands of World Cup tickets. The company has repeatedly said it is simply a technology platform that does not buy, sell or possess tickets. However, CBC reported last week that Baker disclosed in recent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that he runs Andro Capital, a hedge fund that engages in large-scale resale of millions of dollars' worth of sports and concert tickets on the StubHub resale platform. Sanquini filed the proposed class action in the Southern District of New York, arguing consumers were kept in the dark and that he believed StubHub was a "neutral" marketplace. Lead counsel Kevin Steinberg told CBC News in an emailed statement that "consumers deserve honesty and transparency." A CBC investigation found that the CEO of online ticket reseller StubHub owns and manages a hedge fund that scalps millions of dollars of its own tickets. "While what StubHub is alleged to have engaged in and perpetrated upon millions of patrons is unfathomable, this case is about transparency and consumer trust. If companies make representations to the public, consumers are entitled to expect that those representations are complete and accurate," he said. The claim reads: "Defendants' failure to disclose this conflict of interest, while affirmatively marketing StubHub as a fan-to-fan marketplace, deceived Plaintiff and the Class and caused them to pay prices, and accept terms, they would not have accepted had the truth been known." Sanquini argues that had he known StubHub's CEO held a financial interest and that the company was helping finance professional resellers, he would never have used the resale site to buy tickets to see rock band Kiss in 2023 or to attend a New York Red Bulls-New York City FC Major League Soccer match in 2024.

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When researchers announced GhostLock, many people focused on the exploit. What stood out to me wasn't just what the vulnerability could do, but how long it had remained hidden. The flaw had lived in the Linux kernel for roughly 15 years before it was publicly identified by researchers. That means the flaw survived hundreds of kernel releases and years of upstream development before it was publicly documented. It raises an uncomfortable question about one of open source's oldest assumptions. O...

Most of us don't hear about a kernel vulnerability until a CVE lands in our inbox or the vulnerability scanner starts complaining. By then, the patch isn't new anymore. Kernel developers may have been passing it around for review, arguing over the implementation, or revising it for days before anyone outside that community noticed it. None of those discussions are secret. They're sitting in mailing list archives, Git commits, and patch reviews where they've been the whole time. The strange pa...

I am implementing a new type of crossword puzzle in GNOME Crosswords this summer. The current options are static crosswords of ‘known’ location. My project does the opposite, where it takes the words and places them wherever we can get the maximum amount of connections between the words. The pinnacle of this is a DFS backtracking algorithm because we want the words on the grid to be malleable in their placements in order to include the next word going down the list.

Previously, what I had done was attempt to erase the word letter-by-letter recursively writing NULL to each cell. However, this removed every element in the string, including the letter shared at a node between two words, leaving a gap in the word left in place.

My most current version instead focuses on state preservation. Before we even write a new word to the grid, we read the existing state of cells with focus on those connections. Now when the recursive function attempts to place a word that ends up being impossible to connect with the current setup, we look for those ‘?’ characters, erase the string, and rewrite the cushioned letter to leave the other word fully intact.

Imagine a board with CAT written across the center, and we want to place MACAW on the grid vertically. Before the algorithm writes MACAW, it inspects the board at the calculated intersection point(s) and reviews the cells of the string length.

Cell 1: Empty, Cell 2: Empty, Cell 3: C, Cell 4: Empty, Cell 5: Empty.

The board saves this state in memory using a ‘?’ in place of the empty cells as ‘? ? C ? ?’. Hypothetically this makes our board look temporarily like this in memory:

?

?

C A T

?

?

MACAW is written to the grid and then checked in the next recursive function call to ensure if it can be kept or not in that hypothetical place. If it runs successfully, we leave it as is:

M

A

C  A  T

A

W

If it returns false, we need to backtrack and erase MACAW. Rather than totally erasing the word like before, we send the ? ? C ? ? state back to our overlay function – which is responsible for writing to the grid. If it sees a ‘?’, it empties the cell. If it sees a letter, it rewrites it. That way we are only backtracking and erasing the word creating an obstacle in our program. MACAW is erased, CAT remains there for the next word to be attempted.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) have created what they describe as the world's most detailed 3D cellular atlas of the human brainstem, linking whole-brain MRI views to individual neurons across more than 500 tissue sections. The free online atlas, called Anchor, could help researchers better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, stroke, and SIDS by showing how healthy and diseased brain tissue differs cell by cell. The BBC reports: Built from high-resolution microscope images rather than costlier molecular techniques, it creates a detailed three-dimensional map of the brainstem, identifying more than 200 clusters of brain cells and nerve pathways. Eight chemical markers help distinguish different cell types, producing one of the clearest pictures yet of this vital, but poorly, understood part of the brain. The brainstem occupies only a sliver of the brain, yet it keeps people alive. It links the brain to the spinal cord and controls breathing, heartbeat, sleep, wakefulness and movement. [...] Users can zoom from the whole brainstem seen on MRI down to individual neurons while maintaining their precise spatial relationships. The researchers have made the atlas freely available online, hoping it becomes a reference tool for neuroscientists, neurologists and neurosurgeons worldwide. Its applications could also extend well beyond anatomy. By comparing healthy brainstem maps with diseased tissue, scientists may better understand disorders ranging from Parkinson's disease and stroke to Alzheimer's disease and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). More precise maps could also help neurosurgeons navigate one of the brain's most delicate regions with greater confidence.

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