Richard "RMS" Stallman announced he's back on the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation, 18 months after he resigned in a hailstorm of controversy over comments suggesting Jeffrey Epstein's underage victims were "entirely willing." Read more.

MIT reports some of its researchers have figured out how to use X rays to virtually unravel and even read centuries-old letters that were carefully folded and "locked" in the days before envelopes were invented and offered some measure of privacy. Read more.

Winthrop School Superintendent Lisa Howard says state and federal investigators have joined local police in looking at who might be attacking Winthrop's Internet provider and making it difficult for students to participate in remote learning in recent days. In e-mail to parents yesterday afternoon, she wrote: Read more.

MIT News reports on efforts at the Institute to study the human microbiome - all the zillions of microorganisms that cohabit in your body - to see if there are ways to improve human health. One example: Microorganisms living in the digestive tract have been linked to several diseases, including Type 2 diabetes, several cancers and Alzheimer's.

The robots at Waltham's Boston Dynamics get their grooves on.

A scientist's curiosity about an odd RNA discovery at MIT in the 1970s led to him winning a Nobel Prize and laid the foundation for the work that led to today's Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for Covid-19. MIT News interviews Phillip Sharp about what happened after he read a report that one virus's RNA was longer inside the nucleus of a cell it had invaded than it was in the rest of the cell and he wondered why.

Which'll teach you to get on the Internet at 7 a.m. on a Sunday, but in any case, the issue was a routing misconfiguration at Level 3, one of the larger Internet backbone providers (i.e., they provide the giant pipes that connect your Internet provider to Web sites' Internet providers).

A technical explanation from Pair Networks (UHub's Web hosting service): Read more.

Above the Law reports Boston-based Ropes & Gray recently told associates to remove TikTok from their phones - even their personal phones, if they use those to connect to the firm's e-mail and case systems. Seems the firm is concerned that the app could phone home with at least some of the contents of the phones - including potentially sensitive client information.

The City Council today voted unanimously to bar police and other city agencies from using facial-surveillance software except for specific criminal investigations - and even then only if the data is not generated by city-owned cameras. Read more.