Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September, 2021

The tetraquarks are coming. Or are they?

  There has been grumblings since July that some of the folks over at LHC may have discovered a new fundamental particle: the dicharm tetraquark . From Quanta Magazine: [Igor]  Polyakov went away and double-checked his analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, which the Syracuse group is part of. The evidence held. It showed that a particular set of four fundamental particles called quarks can form a tight clique, contrary to the belief of most theorists. The LHCb collaboration reported the discovery of the composite particle, dubbed the double-charm tetraquark, at a conference in July and in  two   papers  posted earlier this month that are now undergoing peer review. Everybody loves a new particle. But early results from the LHC have jumped the gun before. And there is a debate about what exactly the LHC results mean. The leading alternative explanation at this point is the observation detected not a new composite particle but a rare Triangle Singulari

Here is how to mitigate CVE-2021-40444

UPDATE: Microsoft has released a patch for CVE-2021-40444 as of  9-14 ... but that doesn't mean its been installed on your systems yet, so check! The KB varies by distro, but it should be around KB5005565-KB5005568 for recent Windows 10 x64 versions. CVE-2021-40444 is a new remote code execution vulnerability in Windows that involves embedded ActiveX controls in Office document files (.doc, .docx, .docm, .dochtml).  All versions of Windows, including Server distros, are impacted. Exploits of this vulnerability are in the wild now. The Windows preview pane plays a role in the vulnerability; I haven't seen an example of the exploit, but Microsoft's recommended steps for mitigation involve disabling the preview pane for relevant file types. No security patch is available yet, but it is possible to mitigate the threat. Below, I've embedded code for a registry key that you can use to automatically patch your Windows 10 PC. The registry key simply automates Microsoft's r