Gene Therapy Aims To Slow Huntington’s Disease To A Crawl

Despite the best efforts of modern medicine, Huntington’s disease is a condition that still comes with a tragic prognosis. Primarily an inherited disease, its main symptoms concern degeneration of the brain, leading to issues with motor control, mood disturbance, with continued degradation eventually proving fatal.

Researchers have recently made progress in finding a potential treatment for the disease. A new study has indicated that an innovative genetic therapy could hold promise for slowing the progression of the disease, greatly improving patient outcomes.

Treatment

Huntington’s disease stems from a mutation in the huntingtin gene, which is responsible for coding for the huntingtin protein. This gene contains a repeated sequence referred to as a trinucleotide repeat, where the same three DNA bases repeat multiple times. The repeat count varies between individuals, and can change from generation to generation due to genetic mutation. If the number of repeats becomes too long, the gene no longer codes for huntingtin protein, and produces mutant huntingtin protein instead. The mutated protein eventually leads to neural degeneration. This genetic basis is key to the heritability of Huntington’s disease. If one parent carries a faulty gene, their children have a fifty percent chance of inheriting it and eventually developing the disease themselves. Over generations, the number of repeats can increase and lead to symptoms appearing at an earlier age.
Excessive repeats in a critical gene are the root cause of Huntington’s disease. Credit: NIST, public domain
The new treatment relies on advanced genetic techniques to slow the disease in its tracks. It involves the use of a custom designed virus, which is inserted into the brain itself in specific key areas. It’s a delicate surgical process that takes anywhere from 12 to 18 hours, using real-time scanning to ensure the viral payload is placed exactly where it needs to go. The virus carries a DNA sequence and delivers it to brain cells, which begin processing the DNA to produce small fragments of genetic material called microRNA. These fragments intercept the messenger RNA that is produced from the body’s own DNA instructions, which is responsible for producing the mutant huntingtin protein which causes the degenerative disease. In this way, mutant huntingtin levels are reduced, drastically slowing the progression of the disease.

The effects of the treatment are potentially game changing, with progression of the disease slowed by 75% in study patients. Results indicate that with effective treatment, the decline expected over one year would instead take a full four years. In more qualitative areas, some patients in the trial have managed to maintain the ability to walk at a point when they would typically be expected to require wheel chairs. In typical Huntington’s cases, the onset occurs between 30 to 50 years old, with a life expectancy of just 15 to 20 years after diagnosis. The hope is that by delaying the progression of the disease, affected patients could have a greater quality of life for much longer, without suffering the worst impacts of the condition.
A microscopic image of a neuron damaged by mutated Huntingtin (mHtt) protein inclusion, visible via orange stain. Credit: Dr Steven Finkbeiner, CC BY-SA 3.0
The initial trial involved just twenty-nine patients, but results were promising. Data indicated consistent benefit to patients three years after the initial surgery. Crucially, the treatment isn’t just slowing symptoms, but there is also evidence it helped to preserve brain tissue. Markers of neuronal death in spinal fluid, which would typically increase as Huntington’s disease progresses, were actually lower than before treatment in study patients.

The therapy isn’t without complications. Beyond the complicated and highly invasive brain surgery required to get the virus where it needs to go, some patients developed inflammation from the virus causing some side effects like headaches and confusion. There’s also the expense — advanced gene therapies don’t come cheap. However, on the positive side, it’s believed the treatment could potentially be a one-off matter, as the brain cells that produce the critical microRNA fragments are not replaced regularly like other more disposable cells in the body. While it’s a new and radical treatment, pharmaceutical company UniQure has plans to bring it to market as soon as late 2026 in the US, with the European market to follow.

It’s not every day that scientists discover a new viable cure for a disease that has long proven fatal. However, through genetic techniques and a strong understanding of the causative factors of the disease, it appears scientists have made progress in tackling the spectre that is Huntington’s disease. For the many thousands of patients grappling with the disease, and the many descendents who struggle with potentially having inherited the condition, news of a potential treatment is a very good thing indeed.

Featured image: “Huntington” by Frank Gaillard.

hackaday.com/2025/11/11/gene-t…

CHAT CONTROL 2.0 THROUGH THE BACK DOOR – Breyer warns: “The EU is playing us for fools – now they’re scanning our texts and banning teens!”

Just before a decisive meeting in Brussels, digital rights expert and former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding the alarm. Using a “deceptive sleight of hand,” a mandatory and expanded Chat Control is being pushed through the back door, in a form even more intrusive than the originally rejected plan. The legislative package could be greenlit tomorrow in a closed-door EU working group session.

“This is a political deception of the highest order,” warns Breyer. “Following loud public protests, several member states including Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Austria said ‘No’ to indiscriminate Chat Control. Now it’s coming back through the back door – disguised, more dangerous, and more comprehensive than ever. The public is being played for fools.”

According to Breyer, the new compromise proposal is a Trojan horse containing three poison pills for digital freedom:

1. MANDATORY CHAT CONTROL – MASKED AS “RISK MITIGATION”
Officially, explicit scanning obligations have been dropped. But a loophole in Article 4 of the new draft obliges providers of e-mail, chat and messenger services like WhatsApp to take “all appropriate risk mitigation measures.” This means they can still be forced to scan all private messages – including on end-to-end encrypted services.
“The loophole renders the much-praised removal of detection orders worthless and negates their supposed voluntary nature,” says Breyer. “Even client-side scanning (CSS) on our smartphones could soon become mandatory – the end of secure encryption.”

2. TOTAL SURVEILLANCE OF TEXT CHATS: A “DIGITAL WITCH HUNT”
The supposedly voluntary “Chat Control 2.0” goes far beyond the previously discussed scanning of photos, videos, and links. Now, algorithms and AI can be used to mass-scan the private chat texts and metadata of all citizens for suspicious keywords and signals.
“No AI can reliably distinguish between a flirt, sarcasm, and criminal ‘grooming’,” explains Breyer. “Imagine your phone scanning every conversation with your partner, your daughter, your therapist and leaking it just because the word ‘love’ or ‘meet’ appears somewhere. This is not child protection – this is a digital witch hunt. The result will be a flood of false positives, placing innocent citizens under general suspicion and exposing masses of private, even intimate, chats and photos to strangers.” Under the current voluntary “Chat Control 1.0” scanning scheme, German federal police (BKA) already warn that around 50% of all reports are criminally irrelevant, equating to tens of thousands of leaked chats per year.

3. DIGITAL HOUSE ARREST FOR TEENS & THE END OF ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION
In the shadow of the Chat Control debate, two other disastrous measures are being pushed through:

• The End of Anonymous Communication: To reliably identify minors as required by the text, every citizen would have to present their ID or have their face scanned to open an email or messenger account. “This is the de facto end of anonymous communication online – a disaster for whistleblowers, journalists, political activists, and people seeking help who rely on the protection of anonymity,” warns Breyer.
• “Digital House Arrest”: Teens under 16 face a blanket ban from WhatsApp, Instagram, online games, and countless other apps with chat functions. “Digital isolation instead of education, protection by exclusion instead of empowerment – this is paternalistic, out of touch with reality, and pedagogical nonsense.”

URGENT APPEAL: GOVERNMENTS MUST NOW USE THEIR VETO!
Several EU governments—including those of Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechia, Luxembourg, Finland, Austria, and Estonia—have previously voiced strong opposition to indiscriminate mass scanning.
“Now, these governments must show some backbone!” demands Breyer. “Block this sham compromise in the Council and demand immediate corrections to save the fundamental rights of all citizens. The EU Parliament has already shown, across party lines, how child protection and digital freedom can be achieved together.”

Breyer demands the following immediate corrections before any government should agree:

1. No mandatory chat control through the back door: Clarify that scans cannot be enforced as “risk mitigation.”
2. No AI chat police: Restrict scanning to known child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
3. No mass surveillance: Only allow targeted surveillance of suspects based on a court order.
4. Preserve the right to anonymity: The mandatory age verification requirement must be scrapped entirely.

“They are selling us security but delivering a total surveillance machine,” Breyer concludes. “They promise child protection but punish our children and criminalize privacy. This is not a compromise – this is a fraud against the citizen. And no democratic government should make itself an accomplice.”

About Dr. Patrick Breyer:
Dr. Patrick Breyer is a jurist, digital rights expert, and a former Member of the European Parliament (Pirate Party) until 2024. As a co-negotiator of the Parliament’s position on the Chat Control regulation (CSAR), he is a leading European critic of indiscriminate mass surveillance.

patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-cont…

Real-Time BART in a Box Smaller Than Your Coffee Mug

Ever get to the train station on time, find your platform, and then stare at the board showing your train is 20 minutes late? Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) may run like clockwork most days, but a heads-up before you leave the house is always nice. That’s exactly what [filbot] built: a real-time arrival display that looks like it was stolen from the platform itself.

The mini replica nails the official vibe — distinctive red text glowing inside a sheet-metal-style enclosure. The case is 3D printed, painted, and dressed up with tiny stickers to match the real deal. For that signature red glow, [filbot] chose a 20×4 character OLED. Since the display wants 5 V logic, a tiny level-shifter sits alongside an ESP32-C6 that runs the show. A lightweight middleware API [filbot] wrote simplifies grabbing just the data he needs from the official BART API and pushes it to the little screen.

We love how much effort went into shrinking a full-size transit sign into a desk-friendly package that only shows the info you actually care about. If you’re looking for more of an overview, we’re quite fond of PCB metro maps as well.

hackaday.com/2025/11/11/real-t…

Moving From Windows to FreeBSD as the Linux Chaos Alternative

Back in the innocent days of Windows 98 SE, I nearly switched to Linux on account of how satisfied I was with my Windows experience. This started with the Year of the Linux Desktop in 1999 that started with me purchasing a boxed copy of SuSE Linux and ended with me switching to Windows 2000. After this I continued tinkering with non-Windows OSes including QNX, BeOS, various BSDs, as well as Linux distributions that promised a ‘Windows-like’ desktop experience, such as Lindows.

Now that Windows 2000’s proud legacy has seen itself reduced to a rusting wreck resting on cinderblocks on Microsoft’s dying front lawn, the quiet discomfort that many Windows users have felt since Windows 7 was forcefully End-Of-Life-d has only increased. With it comes the uncomfortable notion that Windows as a viable desktop OS may be nearing its demise. Yet where to from here?

Although the recommendations from the peanut gallery seem to coalesce around Linux or Apple’s MacOS (formerly OS X), there are a few dissenting voices extolling the virtues of FreeBSD over both. There are definitely compelling reasons to pick FreeBSD over Linux, in addition to it being effectively MacOS’s cousin. Best of all is not having to deal with the Chaos Vortex that spawns whenever you dare to utter the question of ‘which Linux distro?’. Within the world of FreeBSD there is just FreeBSD, which makes for a remarkably coherent experience.

Ghosting The Subject

The GhostBSD logo.
Although FreeBSD doesn’t have distributions the way that Linux does due to it being a singular codebase rather than a duct-taped patchwork, you do get a choice as far as difficulty settings go. You can always pick plain FreeBSD with its functional but barebones installer, which dumps you into a command line shell and expects you to jump through some hoops to set up things like a desktop environment. This is generally fine if you’re an advanced user, or just want to set up a headless server system.

In case you’re more into the ‘just add water’ level of a desktop OS installation process, the GhostBSD project provides the ready to go option for a zero fuss installation like you would see with Linux Mint, Manjaro Linux and kin. Although I have done the hard mode path previously with FreeBSD virtual machines, to save myself the time and bother I opted for the GhostBSD experience here.

For this experiment I have two older-but-quite-usable systems at my disposal: one is a 2013-era Ivy Bridge Intel-based gaming laptop that’s a rebranded Clevo W370ET, the other a late-2015 Skylake PC with a Core i7 6700K, GTX 980 Ti and 32 GB of DDR4. To give both the best chance possible I also installed a brand new SATA SSD in both systems to run the OS from.

Down To Bare Metal

GhostBSD offers two images: the official Mate desktop version and the community XFCE version. Since I have always had a soft spot for XFCE, that’s the version I went with. After fetching the image, I used Rufus to create a bootable USB stick and made sure that the target system was set to boot from USB media. First I wanted to focus on the laptop, but this is where I ran into the first issue when the installer froze on me.

After a few hours of trying various things, including trying a known good Manjaro Linux installer which flunked out with a complaint about the USB medium, I figured I might as well give a Windows 10 installer a shot for fun. This actually got me a useful error code: 0x8007025D. While it broadly indicates ‘something’ being wrong along the USB-RAM-HDD/SSD path, it led me to a post about USB 3.0 being a potential issue as it changed some things compared to USB 2.0. The solution? Use a USB 2.0 port instead, obviously.
Creating a new ZFS system partition for the GhostBSD installation. (Credit: Maya Posch)
Long story short, this sort of worked: the GhostBSD installer still froze up once it entered the graphical section, but the Manjaro installer was happy as a clam, so now that laptop runs Manjaro, I guess.

A subsequent attempt to boot the GhostBSD installer on the 6700K system went much better, even while daringly using a USB 3.0 port on the case. Before I knew it GhostBSD was purring along with the XFCE desktop sparkling along at 1080p.

I’m not sure what GhostBSD’s issue was with the laptop. It’s possible that it found the NVidia Optimus configuration disagreeable, but now I have two rather capable gaming systems to directly compare Linux and FreeBSD with. There are no mistakes, just happy little accidents.

Gaming The System

Since any open source software of note that runs on Linux tends to have a native FreeBSD build, the experience here is rather same-ish. Where things can get interesting is with things related to the GPU, especially gaming. These days that of course means getting Steam and ideally the GoG Galaxy client running, which cracks open a pretty big can of proprietary worms.
Playing the Windows GoG version of Firewatch on GhostBSD. (Credit: Maya Posch)
Annoyingly, Valve has only released a Steam client for Windows, MacOS and Linux, with the latter even only officially supporting some versions of Ubuntu Linux. This is no real concern for Manjaro Linux, just with the disclaimer that if anything breaks, you’re SOL and better start praying that it’ll magically start working again.

Unfortunately, for FreeBSD the userland Linux ABI compatibility isn’t quite enough as the Steam DRM means that it goes far beyond basic binary compatibility.

The two available options here are to either try one’s chances with the linuxulator-steam-utils workarounds that tries to stuff the Linux client into a chroot, or to go Wine all the way with the Windows Steam client and add more Windows to your OSS.

Neither approach is ideal, but the main question is whether or not it allows you to play your games. After initially getting the Linux tools setup and ready to bootstrap Steam, I got thrown a curveball by the 32-bit Wine and dependencies not being available, leading to a corresponding issue thread on the GhostBSD forums. After Eric over at the GhostBSD project resolved the build issue for these dependencies, I thought that now I would be able to play some games, but I was initially sorely disappointed.

For some reason I was now getting a ‘permission denied’ error for the chdir command in the lsu-bootstrap script, so after some fruitless debugging I had to give up on this approach and went full Wine. I probably could have figured out what the problem here was, but considering the limitations of the LSU Steam approach and me just wanting to play games instead of debug-the-FOSS-project, it felt like time to move on.

Watery Wine

The Windows Steam client running on GhostBSD. (Credit: Maya Posch)
As it turns out, the low-fuss method to get Steam and GoG Galaxy working is via the the Mizutamari Wine GUI frontend. Simply install it with pkg install mizuma or via the package center, open it from the Games folder in the start menu, then select the desired application’s name and then the Install button. Within minutes I had both Steam and the ‘classic’ GoG Galaxy clients installed and running. The only glitch was that the current GoG Galaxy client didn’t want to work, but that might have been a temporary issue. Since I only ever use the GoG Galaxy 1.x client on Windows, this was fine for me.

After logging into both clients and escaping from Steam’s ‘Big Picture Mode’, I was able to install a few games and play them, which went completely smoothly, except for the elevator scene in Firewatch where I couldn’t look around using the mouse despite it working fine in the menu, but that game is notoriously buggy, so that’s a question mark on the exact cause. Between buggy games, Wine, and the OS, there definitely are sufficient parties to assign blame to.

Similarly, while the Steam client was a bit graphically glitchy with flickering on the Store page, and trying to access the Settings menu resulted in it restarting, I was able to install and play Windows games like Nightmare Kart, so that’s a win in my book. That said, I can’t say that I’m not jealous of just punching in sudo pacman -S steam on the Manjaro rig to get the Steam client up in a minute or so. Someone please convince Gabe to compile the Steam client for FreeBSD, and the CD Projekt folk to compile the Galaxy client for FreeBSD and Linux.

It should be noted here that although it is possible to use alternative frontends for GoG instead of its Galaxy client, you need it for things like cloud saves. Hence me choosing this path to get everything as close to on par with the Windows experience and feature set.

Next Steps

Aside from gaming, there are many possible qualifications for what might make a ‘Windows desktop replacement’. As far as FreeBSD goes, the primary annoyance is having to constantly lean on the Linux or Windows versions of software. This is also true for things like DaVinci Resolve for video editing, where since there’s no official FreeBSD version, you have to stuff the Linux version into a chroot once again to run it via the Linux compatibility layer.

Although following the requisite steps isn’t rocket science for advanced users, it would simply be nice if a native version existed and you could just install the package. Based on my own experiences porting a non-trivial application like the FFmpeg- and SDL-based NymphCast to FreeBSD – among other OSes – such porting isn’t complicated at all, assuming your code doesn’t insist on going around POSIX and doing pretty wild Linux-specific things.

Ranting on software development aside, for my next steps on my FreeBSD/GhostBSD journey I’ll likely be giving approaches like this running of Linux software on FreeBSD another shot, barring finding that native video editors work well enough for my purposes.

Feel free to sound off in the comments on how to improve my experiences so far, as well as warn me and others who are embarking on a similar BSD journey of certain pitfalls.

hackaday.com/2025/11/11/moving…