A 29-year-old bug in the Squid web proxy, dubbed Squidbleed and tracked as CVE-2026-47729, can let an authorized proxy user retrieve fragments of another user's cleartext HTTP requests, including credentials and session tokens. The security researcher who reported the flaw credited Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview for the discovery. The Hacker News reports: Squid describes this as an attack by a trusted client: someone already permitted to use the proxy, not any random host on the internet. That matches Squid's usual home, shared networks like schools, offices, and public Wi-Fi. In those setups, the attacker is just another user of the same proxy. The leak also only reaches traffic that Squid can read. Normal HTTPS rides an opaque CONNECT tunnel, so Squid never sees inside it; the exposed traffic is cleartext HTTP, plus TLS-terminating setups where Squid decrypts and inspects. The attacker also needs the proxy to reach an FTP server they control on port 21. Both FTP and that port are on by default. [...] If you patch, verify the fix, not just the version. Confirm the guard is in FtpGateway.cc, or check your distribution's backport, since distros ship their own builds (Debian packages Squid 5.7). The public thread is still inconsistent: maintainer Amos Jeffries first said Squid 7.6 carried the fix, then corrected that to 7.7, and on June 22 Debian's Salvatore Bonaccorso noted the referenced commit looks like it is already in 7.6. The fix is small, a null-terminator check before the vulnerable strchr calls, merged to the development branch in April and v7 in May. Squid 7.6 does separately patch CVE-2026-50012, an unrelated cache_digest heap overflow. The cleaner move is the one the researchers recommend anyway: turn FTP off. Chromium dropped FTP years ago, and most networks carry almost none of it, so disabling it removes this attack surface for free, whatever build you run. The risk is real but bounded. SUSE rates it moderate, CVSS 6.5, and the vector explains the score: the attacker needs proxy access (low privileges), and the only impact is confidentiality, nothing on integrity or availability.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Parliament's economic committee has backed a digital euro designed to reduce Europe's dependence on US-controlled payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard. The ECB-backed currency is targeted for launch by 2029 after a full parliamentary vote and negotiations with EU member states. Euronews reports: Under the proposal, consumers would be able to hold digital euros in a dedicated wallet, subject to a holding limit that has yet to be determined. The system would support both online and offline payments and is intended to offer a high degree of privacy, with the ECB unable to directly identify users from their payment data. The ECB would provide the underlying infrastructure, while commercial banks and payment service providers would offer digital euro services to customers. Financial institutions are expected to be compensated for their participation in the scheme, while merchants will pay fees that are expected to be lower than those associated with current card transactions. How that compensation should be structured remains one of the most contentious issues ahead of negotiations with EU member states, according to three sources familiar with the discussions. [...] The European Parliament is expected to formalise the committee's position during a plenary vote in Strasbourg in early July. Negotiations with the EU's 27 member states would then begin, with lawmakers aiming to reach a final agreement before the end of the year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, we featured a lengthy interview with tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow about his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. The prolific Doctorow is back with a provocative new book that serves as a follow-up of sorts, focusing on AI and related issues: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Doctorow doesn't actually enjoy talking about AI, but he's constantly being asked to comment on it. "I made the tactical error of being sick of talking about AI," Doctorow told Ars. "So I wrote a book about why I think it's a dumb thing to keep asking people to talk about, and now I have to talk about it." Reverse Centaur is Doctorow's attempt to "sort out the bullshit from the material reality."

In automation theory, per Doctorow, a "centaur" describes a human augmented with a technology, like machine learning, or even just driving a car or using autocomplete. A reverse centaur "is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine," Doctorow said in a speech last December. He gave the example of an Amazon delivery driver, surrounded by AI cameras monitoring their driving, who essentially serves as a peripheral to the delivery van.

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Learning something new requires effort. Learners take in new information by listening and observing. When a lot of information is presented at once in a lesson, that can create too much cognitive load for learners — a barrier to understanding and engagement.

To help you design and deliver great computing lessons, we’ve written two new Pedagogy Quick Reads focused on Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning. These research-backed principles give you practical strategies to lower your students’ unnecessary cognitive load during lessons, leading to better learning outcomes.

In this blog, we introduce the two new Quick Reads (Designing multimedia for clarity and Designing multimedia for understanding), which you can download for free to:

• Find practical tips for how you can apply Mayer’s Principles to your lessons
• Read a summary of the research behind them

The blog also includes some examples for how to apply the principles in your computing lessons.

If you’d like an introduction to the idea of cognitive load, you can find the Quick Read about cognitive load theory here.

What are Mayer’s Principles?

Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning are practical principles that will help you create clearer resources and present information in a way that avoids unnecessary cognitive load for your learners.

Mayer’s Principles are based on three related facts:

1. You can present information to learners in auditory form (e.g. spoken explanations) and visual form (e.g. written text, diagrams)
2. There are limits on how much new information people can take in at the same time
3. Teaching materials that are not well-structured can cause too much cognitive load, which negatively affects learning

Designing lessons for clarity

Our first new Quick Read focuses on the following Mayer’s Principles for making your lessons as clear as possible, so that learners can connect the information they see and hear in real time.

• Make all the information you include coherent, meaning that it is directly relevant to the learning objectives and does not distract learners’ attention
• Guide your learners’ attention by using signals such as arrows, bold text, colour, or auditory cues
• Avoid redundant information, such as a slide with a diagram and a paragraph explaining the diagram, or a slide that you speak about without adding new, complementing information
• Present related words and visuals in the same space, e.g. place your text labels, or explanations directly adjacent to diagrams, images or code segments they describe
• Present related words and visuals at the same time, e.g. by pairing narration with imagery

Designing lessons for understanding

Our second new Quick Read shares three Mayer’s Principles for how you can structure your lesson delivery to support your learners’ understanding:

• Structure lessons or demonstrations into clear, manageable stages or segments, rather than presenting the information all at once
• When you start a new topic, begin with some pre-training by introducing key terms, components, or goals and how they relate
• When you present diagrams, flowcharts, or code examples, explain this visual information using the other modality, meaning spoken narration, instead of using paragraphs of text

Applying Mayer’s Principles to your computing lessons

We suggest you consider implementing Mayer’s Principles when you next design new lessons or want to adapt materials that you reuse regularly.

Here are some ideas on how you use both sets of principles in common computing teaching scenarios.

Live coding and code walkthroughs

When displaying a new Python script or Scratch project, avoid adding long, written paragraphs of commentary to explain the code. Instead, place short text annotations or sub-goal labels directly next to the relevant lines or blocks. As you run through the code, use your pointer or live typing to guide your learners’ focus (signalling) and explain in words how the program works at the same time.

Starting a new topic such as networking

Before students move to a new topic, for example networking, consider what words or concepts your class needs to be familiar with. Allocate a few minutes at the start of your lesson for pre-training to introduce terms like LAN or bandwidth and how they relate to the lesson.

Consider how your lesson can be divided into stages to allow for better understanding (segmenting). Each stage should build on the previous one and feed into the next one. For example, when you explain how data moves across a network, you can introduce each step separately before combining them all into a complete model of a network.

Consider how you display visual information to your class. Ensuring related diagrams and labels appear close together, only include relevant materials and no decoration on your slides (coherence), and avoid simply reading out words on the slide identical forms of information (redundancy).

Supporting multilingual learners with Mayer’s Principles

Mayer’s Principles are even more important for educators teaching multilingual learners or non-native speakers. When learners need to work harder to understand the language, poor lesson design can slow down their learning significantly.

Mayer’s Principles can help you with this challenge:

• Applying the coherence and redundancy principles will allow you to make your explanations and slides as clear and concise as possible
• Using signaling will mean you help learners to follow along and know what is most important
• Presenting diagrams that illustrate computing concepts clearly will help your multilingual learners understand your spoken explanation much more easily (modality)

Intentional design for lasting understanding

By intentionally designing and presenting lessons to give the right amount of information in the clearest way, you make it easier for your students to focus and build a lasting understanding of computing concepts. When your lesson materials align with how our brains process information, learners can build stronger mental models and approach independent learning activities with greater confidence.

Read our new Quick Reads to find out more and discover the research behind Mayer’s Principles:

The post How to design and present clear computing lessons appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Ariel taught me the joys of a good collection. Seeing a collection in action? Wowie zowie! Cheers to Log’s Carving Club for sharing this gem on YouTube:

What are the different Dremel bits and burrs for? How do you use different Dremel bits? Hopefully in this Dremel bit guide, I’ll answer those questions.