This is amazing (emphasis added):

Project Zero said the exploit effectively created “a weapon against which there is no defense,” noting that zero-click exploits work silently in the background and does not even require the target to click on a link or surf to a malicious website. “Short of not using a device, there is no way to prevent exploitation by a zero-click exploit,” the research team said.

The researchers confirmed the initial entry point for Pegasus was Apple’s proprietary iMessage that ships by default on iPhones, iPads and macOS devices.  By targeting iMessage, the NSO Group hackers needed only a phone number of an AppleID username to take aim and fire eavesdropping implants.

…

Within Apple’s CoreGraphics PDF parser, the NSO exploit writers abused Apple’s implementation of the open-source JBIG2, a domain specific image codec designed to compress images where pixels can only be black or white.

Describing the exploit as “pretty terrifying,” Google said the NSO Group hackers effectively booby-trapped a PDF file, masquerading as a GIF image, with an encoded virtual CPU to start and run the exploit.

“JBIG2 doesn’t have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That’s exactly what this exploit does,” the researchers explained.

“Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, [NSO’s hackers] define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It’s not as fast as Javascript, but it’s fundamentally computationally equivalent.”

“The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream. It’s pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying,” the Google researchers added.

I wonder how many other zero click exploits are active in the wild right now.

We live in interesting times.

This article came out prior to the announcement of the creation of the first warp bubble. It provides relatively easy to understand background material on the theory of warp drive.

I wish Eric Engstrom were still alive. He died just over a year ago and planned to live long enough to travel to other solar systems in warp drive capable ships. This plan of his was one part of his recruitment speech when he wanted me to join his startup company Chromium Communications.

Today it was announced some scientists accidently created a Nano sized warp bubble. This the first step in creating a warp drive:

• DARPA Researchers Create First Genuine Warp Bubble by Accident
• Researchers accidently create a warp bubble, the first step in faster than light travel
• Scientists Claim to Create a Warp Bubble

I guess I and other friends of Eric will have to take those trips without him.

“Dark lightning” has apparently been known since 1994. However, I had not heard of it until recently. Here is what NASA said about it in 2013:

Researchers studying thunderstorms have made a surprising discovery: The lightning we see with our eyes has a dark competitor that discharges storm clouds and flings antimatter into space.

Storm clouds are sometimes producing anti-matter? Wow!