At the end of February 2026 half-a-dozen security bugs were reported in the text editor Vim. Fixing them requires an upgrade to Vim version 9.2.0078 or later. This time those who write the plugins for the Nessus security scanner decided it should produces an alert for each bug rather than a single combined alert suggesting an upgrade as it sometimes does. This produced a huge jump in our total number of vulnerabilities. Several of them have been given a severity level of Medium or High.

Understanding and explaining the impact of bugs like these is not simple. Vim is not like a web browser. A web browser downloads hundreds of files every time it is used. At best the user is explicitly aware only of the HTML page at the address shown in the address bar. But this page could be pulling in dozens or even hundreds of files from various servers. The browser can potentially be attacked by putting a maliciously-crafted file on any of these servers.

In contrast exploiting a security bug in something like Vim is far more difficult. One must get a maliciously-crafted file into some package of files such as a Git repository which people will deliberately install and then edit with Vim.

So if Nessus reports that your server has a dozen vulnerabilities in Vim, the actually chances that one of the bugs will ‘get woken up’ and start doing bad things is pretty low, since nothing happens until the system administrator interacts with maliciously-crafted files, and this will probably never happen. But Nessus marks them Medium and High seriousness because for all Nessus knows users may be downloading all sorts of stuff from the Internet and could get bitten. Be that as it may, the scary reports make people nervous and sometimes fixing it is simpler than performing a risk assessement and defending it.

The problem is that Debian has not yet released a patch for this and it is not clear (to me) if they believe the theoretical risks of exploitation justify the risks of breaking something in a stable release. The only place the problem is fixed is in the unstable repository which has Vim version 9.2.0136. Prior releases still have Vim version 9.1.x. There are three possible solutions:

1. Remove the Vim package and edit configuration files using busybox vi until they get this sorted out
2. Remove the Vim package and build and install it from source code
3. Install the packages from Sid

I chose option one for most servers and option two for my development system.

My development system was at Debian 12 “Bookworm”. The problem is that Vim from unstable depends on a newer version of the C library. If I allow this upgrade, it could cause problems either with code compatibility or package dependencies. So I decided to upgrade the system to Debian 13 “Trixie” which is the current latest release and hope the C library versions would be the same. This was on my list of things to do anyway and it paid off.

After the upgrade I temporarily added the Unstable repository by creating the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-unstable.sources with these contents:

Types: deb
URIs: https://deb.debian.org/debian/
Suites: sid
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

And then:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install vim

I then removed /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-unstable.sources and updated the sources list again:

$ sudo apt-get update

I think there may be a way to make the Trixie repository the default and leave the Unstable repository in place. Then presumably Vim would follow Unstable, but I did not persue that.

The so-called Cosmonaut Ludmila recording is of a series of radio transmissions intercepted by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in May of 1961 on a channel which they believed was used by the Soviet space program. They interpreted the utterances as a distress call from a Soviet female astronaut reporting an onboard fire. Since no corresponding Soviet space mission has ever been identified, it is now widely supposed that the recording is a clumsy hoax. We carefully transcribe the recording and find that it contains no references at all to space flight, only nondescript utterances interspersed with childish patter and frivolous remarks about the heat in the radio operator’s workspace.

During the 1960’s two Italian radio amateurs, the brothers brothers Achille and Gian Battista Judica-Cordiglia, monitored radio transmissions which they believed were connected with Soviet space missions. They did this using home-built antennas and surplus US military gear. They also recruited other radio amateurs to form a worldwide listening network recruited. In several cases they believed that the transmissions they intercepted indicated that Soviet astronautsi had died due to accidents during flight.

According to the website Lost Cosmonautsii, one of the missions they monitored began with a launch on May 16th, 1961 and ended when the ship burned up on reentry on May 23rd. Their conclusion that the mission ended in loss of life is based primarily on a series of transmissions which they recorded in which a female voice supposedly reports rising temperatures and an onboard fire. The article on the Lost Cosmonauts site includes an audio recording of the transmission and a transcript translated into English.iii Though the transmission was reportedly intercepted on May 23rd, 1961, the first known public report of seems to be from the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in March 1965.iv

During the last few years this recording has attracted considerable attention on the Internet. It has been the subject of numerous blog postings, Youtube videos, podcasts, at least one short filmv, and a new interview with the the surviving Judica-Cordiglia brother.vi Frequently the recording is sensationalized, often with the aid of editing, dramatic images and moving music.vii However, there is little evidence that a manned Soviet space flight took place in May of 1961 and no other ground station is known to have received distress calls.viii This has led some to suggest that the recording is a hoax and that the speaker may be the brothers’ sister Maria Theresa who, as the Reader’s Digest reported, had been learning Russian.ix

Though there is little evidence that “Cosmonaut Ludmila”x ever existed, it does not necessarily follow that the recording is a hoax. It is perfectly possible that the Judica-Cordiglia brothers were simply mistaken in believing that it contains a distress call from space. Because it is in a language few in the West understand and the recording is so noisy that even native Russian speakers cannot understand it with ordinary effort, the question of what is actually said in it has been insufficiently explored.

Below we describe our attempt to produce a high-quality transcript of this recording in order to determine its true nature. Though we were unable to specifically identify the speaker and the activity in which she was participating, the results obtained strongly suggest that she is neither an astronaut nor a participant in a hoax.

General Characteristics of the Recording

The recording is just short of two minutes 34 seconds long. It was originally posted to Lost Cosmonauts as a Realaudio file named “cosmo.ra”. The file has a bit depth of 32, a sample rate of 11025 hertz and uses the “dnet” (Dolby AC3) codec. It is 308,956 bytes long.

Only one voice is heard, that of of female speaker. The loud background hiss and moderate distortion make it very difficult to understand what she says. The speaker seems to be interacting with an unheard second party. (Which is not unusual in interceptions of two-way radio communications.) Most of her utterances are short, and some of them are repeated many times. Most listeners familiar with Russian can pick out the phrases “I’m hot.” and “I see a flame.” and some numbers, but beyond that listeners, including native Russian speakers, are hard put to extract any coherent message from the recording.

For example, on June 16, 2009, a user on an online forum posted a link to Brian Dunning’s copy of the recordingxi and asked other members to try to transcribe it. She did not tell them what the recording was supposed to be. One of the better responses was:

At first I couldn’t even understand what language this was. Then I managed to catch some kind of digits: 32, 41, 1-2-3-4-5, 50. And then individual words such as “yes, yes, yes”, “so”, “speak”, and then something that sounded like “was transmitted” or was it “transmission”?xii Then something nasally which I interpreted as “I’m hot, I’m hot!” though that doesn’t make any sense.xiii

Another user believed she heard frivolous utterances in the recording and summarized it as follows:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Ready or not, here I come! And a whole pile of children’s rhymes and counting at the end.xiv

The recording piqued the curiosity of the forum members who asked her to tell them what it was. The original poster responded:

Thanks to everyone who listened to the recording. There really isn’t anything to tell. They asked me to listen to this recording and translate it. But I hear in this recording “don’t give up” instead of “I’m hot”. And there is the word “transmission”, “to the left”, “to the left flank”, and a whole bunch of digits. I got the impression that the woman is guiding someone, like she is giving coordinates at sea or something. How can I translate this if everyone hears something different?xv

So we see that native Russian speakers struggle to understand the recording, not just because it is noisy and distorted, but also because the utterances seem disjointed. It is particularly interesting that none of the forum participants heard references to space flight and one even reported children’s rhymes. We will return to both these points later.

The Widely-Circulated Translation

Lost Cosmonauts provides the following English translation of the recording:xvi

five...four...three ...two...one...one
two...three...four...five…
come in... come in... come in…
LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN!
COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME!
TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT!
WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?…
FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?…
YES...YES...YES... BREATHING…
BREATHING... OXYGEN…
OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS)
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL…
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL…
YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS?
WHAT?... TALK TO ME!... HOW SHOULD I
TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES…
WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW…
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW…
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW…
FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT…
I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT…
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT…
... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?…
I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A
FLAME!…
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO…
THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE
AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!…
I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER…
I AM LISTENING!... I FEEL HOT!…

In our discussion which follows we shall refer to this as the Lost Cosmonauts Translation. The text as presented in this translation does in some ways resembles a clumsy fake. We can imagine someone taking a smattering of space flight terminology from a dictionary and padded it out with a jumble of short sentences from a phrasebook. However, the transcription and translation we propose in this article differ in important ways which we believe make such an explanation unlikely.

Expectations

When we began our investigation we expected to identify the recording as one of the following:

1. A plausibly worded and voiced distress call from space. Determining whether the speaker of such a message was an astronaut or a competent actor portraying one would be beyond the scope of our investigation.
2. A intelligible message framed as a distress call from space but containing errors of grammar, usage, and pronunciation sufficient to identify the speaker as a language learner attempting a hoax.
3. A cruder hoax consisting of an incoherent jumble of words and phrases pulled from dictionaries and phrasebooks and covered with noise in an attempt to suggest a distress call which the hoaxer lacked the skills to compose.
4. A genuine radio message containing a genuine distress call but not from space.
5. Some other kind of radio message misidentified as a distress call.

Our Transcription Method

To attack the problem we started by cleaning up the audio as much as possible. We loaded the file into Audacityxvii, an audio editor, and applied a digital filter to remove background noise. This dramatically improved intelligibility. We then used the selection tool to choose each utterance in turn and listen to it repeatedly until we understood it before moving on to the next utterance.

We found this word-by-word approach necessary because, as will become clear below, Ludmila’s remarks are either arbitrary and eccentric or divorced of context because we cannot hear the other operator. This makes it extremely difficult to transcribe the words in the correct order when listening to the recording straight through. Only by playing the recording a little at a time were we able to avoid unconsciously reordering her utterances.xviii

Seemingly Lyumila is calling another station. But the format she is using is more complicated and theatrical than any real radio call procedure we were able to discover. The words “arean” and “broom” appear to be nonsense sounds chosen only as a way to attract attention.

The use of the imperative verbs “Hear, hear!” and “Speak, speak!” is perfectly proper Russian. It is not archaic, rude, or reflective of urgency as it might be in English.

This utterance can be translated as “It’s hot!” or “I’m hot!”. Literally she says “To me it is hot.” This is the standard phrase used by Russians to report their perception of the air temperature. Less than half a second later she follows this with a statement that it is “coming up on 45”, presumably 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit).

There is then a one-second pause after which she says “Four, five”, repeating 45 as separate digits presumably because the unheard radio operator at the other end did not understand.

In a business-like tone she acknowledges something the other operator said during the three-second pause immediately proceeding this utterance.

At the point where she repeats “Breathing, breathing!” the Lost Cosmonauts Translation has “Oxygen, oxygen!” instead. This is strange since dy-KHAN-iye (breathing) sounds nothing like kis-la-ROD (oxygen).

Ludmila’s utterance makes most sense if we suppose that the other operator asked “What is the problem?” Breathing is the problem. Of course astronauts do not impart important information using such terse and ambiguous utterances. They are trained to express themselves clearly in complete thoughts such as “The high temperature is making breathing difficult.”

Her report of breathing difficulties seems to alarm the other operator as seen by the fact that after a four-second pause she reassures him:

She says explicitly that she is not in actual danger. She is emphatic that she wants to drop the subject.

The Lost Cosmonauts Translation misrenders “Nothing dangerous!” as “Isn’t this dangerous?” and translates “all” without understanding of the idiom.

Ludmila is using highly idiomatic Russian with strong and correct intonation. Russian is either her native language or one she has been using in daily conversation for many years. There is absolutely no basis to the claim that her words are the garbled utterances of a beginner learning the language.

She is back to business, attending to what the other operator is saying. For the rest of the recording she will switch back and forth between communicating normally with the other operator and an increasingly silly patter about the heat.

She is telling the other operator that he may begin speaking his message because the man who is supposed to receive it is ready and listening. Presumably this man is standing next to Ludmila in the radio room. The Lost Cosmonauts translation omits this revealing utterance entirely.

She is asking for clarification of something said by the other operator.

She is telling the other operator to go ahead.

At Lost Cosmonauts this phrase is dubiously rendered “How shall I transmit?” as if she were asking for advice on to how to operate her radio. Instead she is almost certainly asking how to deliver a radio message which she has just taken down.

We do wonder when the other operator had time to speak his message. It is a consistent pattern that he gets very little time to speak. Could it be that this recording has been edited to remove uninteresting silences?

Here she is simply responding to something the other operator has said.

This part is particularly difficult to understand and interpret. She may be talking about the times at which future radio contact will take place.

She has restarted her patter about the heat. Now in a sing-song voice she begins playing with the word le-karst-va (medicine) which sounds similar to mnye zhar-ka (I’m hot.). In the Lost Cosmonauts translation her demand for medicine (presumably for an imaginary fever) is misheard as additional repetitions of “I’m hot!”.

This is the point to which she supposedly reports that the capsule is burning up. “I see a flame!” is one of the clearer utterances in the recording and Russian speakers can generally pick it out without too much trouble. In online forums they frequently object that the phrase “I see a flame!” is very rare, perhaps archaic, and certainly not what one would say to report that one’s space capsule is burning. They take this as evidence that the recording is a clumsy hoax created by someone with a poor understanding of Russian. But this argument assumes that these words really are framed as part of a distress call from space and that we need only determine whether it is real or fictional.

The delivery of this line is very interesting. Notice the two-second pause between “I see…” and “a flame!”. This, together with her exaggerated tone, suggest that she is aiming for maximum dramatic effect. Significantly her utterance seems to confuse the other operator. There is a four-second silence during which he presumably asks for clarification, she in turn asks what he said, there is another four-second pause, and she repeats her utterance twice for his benefit. Then she repeats that she is hot.

For a while we considered the possibility that she is reporting that she has sighted some kind of torch, perhaps one used to burn off natural gas from an oil field or as a signal. But this seems unlikely. We eventually concluded that this is just part of her silly patter.

As already mentioned, a number of Russians online have objected to this expression calling it archaic, poetic, or at least not a term we would expect an astronaut to use. A search of the World Wide Web confirms that its use is overwhelmingly in song, poetry, and dramatic speeches. For example, in Leonid Andreev’s 1906 play Savvaxix the title character, seemingly in the grip of madness, responds to the sound of a distant bell with these impassioned words:

Whether or not Ludmila’s outburst is inspired by this or any other literary work, her report that she sees a flame is melodramatic in wording and tone and immediately proceeded and followed by silly remarks about the heat. Under such circumstances we are not entitled to assume that she is referring to an actual fire.

And she is back to work again. She seems to be repeating some numbers which the other operator is dictating. Perhaps they are part of a message and she wants to make sure she gets them right.

Her “hello, hello” probably means that she thinks they have lost contact. It is what Russians say during telephone conversations when the other party stops responding. The Lost Cosmonauts translation has “Am I going to crash?” instead of “Hello, hello! O yeah!”. This is an extraordinary example of mishearing.

And Ludmila is back to her silly patter. She throws in a few nonsense words for good measure.

And now she is back to work.

And more of the silly patter. The recording ends five seconds after this utterance.

Observations Drawn from Our Transcript

On the basis of our transcript we can reject both the theory that Ludmila is a doomed astronaut and the theory that she is a hoaxer pretending to be a doomed astronaut. The recording contains absolutely no reference to the spaceflight concepts, activities, or equipment which figure so largely in real space communications. In particular, and contrary to what is found in the Lost Cosmonauts translation, there is no reference of oxygen, to reentry, or a possible crash. Whatever the subject matter is, it is not space flight, so it is incoherent to suggest that it is a fake space flight recording.

We are unable to determine the true identity of “Ludmila” or her workplace. We can however make a few relevant observations. The woman seems to be working as a radio operator. Her words suggest that there is a man with her waiting to receive a message, so she is likely in a radio room. Judging from her complaints, it is very hot in this radio room. She must have a very relaxed work environment since she feels free to keep up a steady stream of childish whining complaint and joking about the temperature.

We also think it likely that this recording has been edited to remove long silences when Ludmila is listening to the other operator whom we cannot hear. If he is dictating radiograms and she is speaking only to confirm some numerical details and delivery instructions that goes a long way to explaining why there is almost no comprehensible message in the recording other than her complaints about the heat.

Comparison With Soviet Spaceflight Audio

As if it were truly necessary to show that the recording described above bears no resemblance to spaceflight communications, here is a translation of the transcript of the first five minutes of audio from Yuri Gagarin’s flight on Vostok I on April 12, 1961.xx “Cedar” is Gagarin, “Dawn 1” is ground control:

Dawn 1: Ignition start…

Cedar: Acknowledged. Ignition start.

Dawn 1: Initial stage… Middle stage… Main… Liftoff!

Cedar: We’re off! The noise is slightly audible in the cabin. Everything is proceeding normally. I feel fine, I am alert, all is normal.

Dawn 1: We all wish you a good flight, everything is normal!

Cedar: Goodbye, may we meet again soon, good friends!

Dawn 1: Goodbye, may we meet again soon!

Cedar: Vibration is increasing, the noise is somewhat increased…

Dawn 1: Time 70.

Cedar: Understood. 70. I am feeling fine, continuing flight, g-forces are increasing, all good.

Dawn 1: 100. How do you feel?

Cedar: I am feeling fine. What about you?

Dawn 1: Time and speed are normal. How do you feel?

Cedar: I feel fine…

Dawn 1: Everything is in order. The machine is working well.

Cedar: [unintelligible]

Dawn 1: The nose cone has been ejected. Everything is normal. How do you feel?

Cedar: Main fairing ejected… I see the Earth… G-forces are increasing somewhat. I am feeling great. I am alert.

Dawn 1: Good for you! Everything is going well.

Cedar: I am watching the clouds, the landing site. It is beautiful, such beauty! How well are you hearing me?

Dawn 1: We hear you fine. Continue the flight.

Cedar: Flight is continuing well, g-forces increase, slow rotation, everything is born well, the g-forces are not large, I feel fine. I am observing the Earth through the navigation porthole. Everything is getting obscured by clouds.

Dawn 1: The flight is going normally. We understand you, we hear you fine.

Cedar: Second-stage shutdown has occurred.

Dawn 1: The right things are running. Final state. Everything is normal.

Cedar: I heard it start. I feel fine. I am observing the Earth. Visibility is excellent. I am alert, g-forces are increasing, I feel fine.

Unlike Ludmila who multiplies banal and irrelevant utterances seemingly for the pleasure of hearing herself talk, Gagarin and ground control speak as persons who have something to say and understand the importance of being clearly understood. Almost every utterance can be understood in isolation and just a few sentences are sufficient for us to understand that the subject is a space flight in progress.

Source of the Judica-Cordiglia Brother’s Translation

Why then did the Judica-Cordiglia brothers believe that the recording contains a distress call from a space capsule? First of all, because they were attempting to intercept messages from space. We do not know exactly when they recorded this message or at what frequency, but presumably it was at or near a frequency on which they had heard Soviet space communications before. This created an expectation that the message would be from space and a subsequent tendency to read a message about space flight into it.

The Lost Cosmonauts translation is the work of an unqualified person. The translator understood that Ludmila says numbers, says it is hot and difficult to breath, says something about danger, and says she sees a flame. But at the same time the translator seems to be unfamiliar with the basic conversational idioms Ludmila employs. Thus her “Nothing dangerous!” becomes the anxious “Is it dangerous?” and her use of “Vsyo!” to cut off discussion of her complaints about the heat is misinterpreted. Statements which do not make sense in the context of the brothers’ assumptions such as “He is listening.” are missed while other mundane words are misheard as references to space flight concepts such as “reenter” and “crash”.

Conclusion

We conclude that the woman heard in this recording is not on a space ship and is not pretending to be. Thus she cannot be a participant in any lost cosmonauts hoax. While the Judica-Cordiglia brothers probably did not set out to deceive the public with this recording, their expectations, aided by the incompetence of their translator, imposed a space narrative on the melodramatic and frivolous utterances of a bored and silly radio operator.

• i

  We have made a stylistic choice to use the English word when talking about Soviet space travelers.

• ii

  The address of Lost Cosmonauts was originally lostcosmonauts.com, but (based on the archives of the Wayback machine) it disappeared in early 2013 and reappeared at lostcosmonauts.net in late 2015.

• iii

  Schrock, John. “The First Woman in Space.” Lost Cosmonauts, November 14, 2019, https://www.lostcosmonauts.net/wom.htm.

• iv

  Scott, Jeff. “Lost Cosmonaut Rumors”, Aerospaceweb.org, July 3, 2005, https://aerospaceweb.org/question/conspiracy/q0235.shtml.

• v

  Veske, Miryam and Bremdal-Vinell, Nils. “Kosmonauta.”, September 15, 2014, https://vimeo.com/106216724.

• vi

  “Mystery of the Lost Cosmonauts.” Extremes Podcast, March 24, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZidFWLrLnU.

• vii

  Scott, Joe. “The Mysterious ‘Lost Cosmonaut’ Recording.” March 7, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZidFWLrLnU.

• viii

  Dunning, Brian. “Search for the Missing Cosmonauts.” Skeptoid, August 19, 2008, https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115.

• ix

  “Lost Cosmonauts: Did Russia Lose the 1st Astronauts in Space?” Dark Docs, July 23, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dsMELHuTA.

• x

  As far as we can discover nobody has claimed that the woman heard in the recording is necessarily named Ludmila. It is simply a common Russian female name used as a placeholder.

• xi

  http://media.libsyn.com/media/skeptoid/mc_woman.mp3

• xii

  The Russian words which the forum user thinks she may be hearing do not necessarily refer to a radio transmission. They can just as well refer to delivery of a message by other means or even delivery of a parcel.

• xiii

  Kangaroo, “Небольшой опрос.” Форум прекрасные кошки, June 16, 2009, https://www.catgallery.ru/forums/index.php?showtopic=9756.

• xiv

  Котозависимый, “Небольшой опрос.” Форум прекрасные кошки, June 16, 2009, https://www.catgallery.ru/forums/index.php?showtopic=9756.

• xv

  Kangaroo, “Небольшой опрос.” Форум прекрасные кошки, June 17, 2009, https://www.catgallery.ru/forums/index.php?showtopic=9756.

• xvi

  Schrock, John. “Traduzione Italiana [sic].” Lost Cosmonauts, November 14, 2019, https://www.lostcosmonauts.net/tradeng.htm.

• xvii

  https://www.audacityteam.org/

• xviii

  The transcription and translation were performed by the author. Though not a native speaker of Russian, he has spoken it daily for two decades and has several years experience in shortwave listening.

• xix

  Andreev, Leonid. “Савва.” 1906, https://andreev.org.ru/biblio/Savva/p016.html.

• xx

  “Звездный рейс Юрия Гагарина.” Известия ЦК КПСС, 1991 №5, https://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/i_tsk/zv-reis.html.

Since my previous article on Marconi I have tracked down the source of the extraordinary assertion made in the Provincetown Independent that the radio pioneer believed “sound never disappears from Earth”.i All the references I have found to this idea eventually lead back to the book Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner which was published in 2009ii. The story is not part of the main body of the book. Instead it is part of a teaser essay. This is what he wrote:

The story goes that, late in his life, Guglielmo Marconi had an epiphany. The godfather of radio technology decided that no sound ever dies. It just decays beyond the point that we can detect it with our ears. Any sound was forever recoverable, he believed, with the right device. His dream was to build one powerful enough to pick up Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

The phrase “the story goes” is the usual way to introduce an anecdote one suspects is apocryphal but intends to use anyway for rhetorical purposes. Later in the essay he makes its fabulous nature a bit more explicit:

Raw sound may not have much of a shelf life, but Marconi’s theory surely does. It survives as a low-level urban legend, bandied about in dorm rooms and Internet forums. I thought it was true before I even knew who Marconi was, and I have no idea where I learned it. Maybe you’ve always believed it, too. Its survival attests to a universal desire and anxiety. Our time on Earth is fleeting, the impressions we leave on it are ephemeral, but maybe there is a part of us that can outlast this dust-to-dust. Maybe our complete history is all around us. We just need to learn how to read it.

I have searched extensively online for evidence of other sources of the story, but have found nothing. Other tellings I found refer explicitly to this book, quote the first paragraph of the essay, or are based on an enhanced version written by podcaster Nate DiMeo.

DiMeo wrote in the notes to the June 1, 2009 episode of the Memory Palace podcast which is entitled These Words, Foreveriii that he was “spurred into doing it for the podcast after flipping through David (sic) Milner’s book Perfecting Sound Forever”. It is a three-minute story. After introducing Marconi and talking about his worldwide fame DiMeo says:

But we are told that in his 60’s, somewhere around the time of his fourth or fifth heart attack, the inventor began to think about mortality. Or rather he began to think about immortality. Marconi become convinced that sound never dies, that sound waves once emitted from a radio from the vibrating strings of a Stradivarius, from whispering lovers, from a baby discovering how to make a “bah” or “guh” sound for the first time. Sound lived on forever, its waves flowing permanently, but growing weaker and weaker with each moment. He just hadn’t built a radio powerful enough to tune in the signal.

Now this is wrong, but it wasn’t entirely foolish. One of the things that had made Marconi so famous was the sinking of the Titanic. Seven hundred and six people were rescued from the icy water after radiomen on nearby ships heard its distress signal. Newspapers around the world credited Marconi as their savior. Now, one of those radiomen, working the night shift on a Russian steamer, heard the signal through his headphones more than an hour-and-a-half after it was sent. This was just a physical anomaly, atmospheric conditions or whatnot.

But here was Marconi near the end of his life growing weaker and weaker with each heart attack, dreaming of a device that would let him hear lost sounds, let him tap into these eternal frequencies. He would tell people that if he got it right, he could hear Jesus of Nazareth giving the Sermon on the Mount. But he would be able to everything ever said, everything he ever said. At the end of his life he could sit in his piazza in Rome, and hear everything that was ever said to him or about him. He could relive every toast and testimonial. And we all could – hear everything: Hear Caesar, Hear Shakespeare give an actor a line-reading, hear my grandmother introduce herself to my grandfather at a nightclub in Rhode Island, hear someone tell you that they love you, that first time they told you they loved you, hear everything, forever.

Ten years before his death Marconi did suffer a heart attack followed by angina pectoris and his heart problems eventually killed him.iv But the rest of this expanded version of the story appears to be nothing more than the podcaster’s own musings on the urban legend from Milner’s book. He supposes, but does not tell us that he is just supposing, that Marconi, as his death approached, would have been keen to hear sounds from the past. And he imagines what he himself might like to hear with the aid of such a device and carelessly says that Marconi actually “would tell people” what he would like to hear.

The story about the sinking of the Titanic also starts with real details about Marconi’s involvement. The Russian steamer is real too. She was called the Birma. But then the story goes off the deep end. The wireless operators on the Birma heard the Titanic’s distress calls around the same time everyone else did, during or immediately after the scheduled news broadcast from Cape Cod. The only difference is that the radio operators on the Birma used ship’s local time in their notes while those on other ships used New York time.v The exact time difference is disputed, but it was around an hour and a half. Radio operators also reported that signal propagation was weird that night since they noted that contact was intermittent and sometimes they could not talk to ships relatively nearby while they could reach ships further away. Perhaps DiMeo misunderstood the cause of the time difference and what was meant by weird propagation leading to his claim that radio waves can get stuck in the atmosphere for hours.

Contrary to what DiMeo thinks, it really would have been “entirely foolish” for Marconi to suppose that sounds from the distance past are still coursing through the air waiting to be detected by an instrument of sufficient sensitivity and selectivity. While he was not a theoretical physicist, Marconi had a good working knowledge of how waves move and dissipate. Radio and sound waves do not bounce around like tennis balls. They spread out and dissipate quite quickly. As he told interviewer H. J. W. Dam, the power of a radio wave at the receiver decreases with the square of the distance.vi They do bounce around, but the square law means that their power falls off a cliff. And the same is true of sound waves which is why we cannot hear a human conversation more than a few dozen yards away. As the distance increases, the power of the sound wave dives toward zero until it is lost in the random movements of the air molecules.

In 1883 a volcano on the island of Krakatoa exploded with the force of 13,000 Hiroshima bombs producing the loudest sound in recorded history. On the RMS Norham Castle 40 miles away from Krakatoa the captain wrote in his log that the eardrums of over half his crew were shattered. 3000 miles away on the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues it was reported that the sound was still “like the distant roar of heavy guns”.vii Weather stations around the world recorded pressure changes on their barometers as the wave passed them. The wave circled the earth approximately every 34 hours from both directions. These waves went on for daysviii, but they did not go on forever.

Marconi was nine-years-old when this happened and so as a scientifically-curious person interested in wave propagation would have been well aware of it. If he knew such an unimaginably loud sound was undetectable after five days, then he could have no reason to suppose that a mere human voice could be detected by any conceivable means 2000 years later. More importantly, neither Greg Milner who put this extraordinary story in print nor Nate DiMeo who embellished it are able to cite any source for their claim that Marconi believed “no sound ever dies”.

• i

  Choate, Aden. “The Marconi Mythology.” The Provincetown Independent, December 27, 2023, https://provincetownindependent.org/history/2023/12/27/the-marconi-mythology/.

• ii

  Milner, Greg. Perfecting Sound Forever. An Aural History of Recorded Music. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

• iii

  DiMeo, Nate. “These Words, Forever.” The Memory Palace, June 1, 2009, https://thememorypalace.us/episode-12-these-words-forever/.

• iv

  Smulyan, Harold et al. “Wireless: The Life and Death of Guglielmo Marconi.” The American Journal of the Medical Sciences vol. 353,6 (2017): 511-515. doi:10.1016/j.amjms.2016.12.022

• v

  Lee, Paul, “The SS Birma's PV resurfaces at last”, https://www.paullee.com/titanic/Birma.php.

• vi

  Dam, H. J. W. “The New Telegraphy — An Interview with Signor Marconi.”, March 1897, https://www.fondazionemarconi.it/documenti/articoli/didattica/insegnanti/9.pdf.

• vii

  Judd, John Wesley, et al. The Eruption of Krakatoa: And Subsequent Phenomena. United Kingdom, Trübner & Company, 1888, p. 79, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Eruption_of_Krakatoa/Vk8PAAAAYAAJ.

• viii

  Judd, John Wesley, et al. The Eruption of Krakatoa: And Subsequent Phenomena. United Kingdom, Trübner & Company, 1888, pp. 57-78, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Eruption_of_Krakatoa/Vk8PAAAAYAAJ.

Nessus is a security scanner sold by a company called Tenable. It runs through a customer’s network checking to see whether the computers have any known defects which could undermine their security.

Normally this works well. Yes, sometimes the test plugins do not have access to full information and have to make assumptions which lead to false positives. But sometimes Tenable writes the test procedure incorrectly. This has happened three times in the last three weeks.

The Insecurity of Non-Existent Things

SNMP is a protocol which is used in network management. A central management computer can use this protocol to ask computers it is managing for information about their health such as how much disk space is free, or how high the CPU load is. SNMP was introduced decades ago when the Internet was a much friendlier place. As initially designed access to the SNMP monitoring agents required a password and the default password for read-only access was “public”.

Nessus looks for SNMP agents which still provide system information to anyone with the password “public”. This was good. But last month Nessus started falsely accusing computers of accepting “public” as the SNMP password. There was just one problem: these computers were not running SNMP agents at all. This was not a false positive. The result of the test was negative, but Nessus misreported it as a positive.

The effect of this was that around July 24th customers saw a huge jump in the number of their devices which supposedly had this problem, only for the problem to disappear a couple days later.

Not Watching the News

The next flock of erroneous vulnerability reports flew in from a different place: misinterpretation of a poorly-written message posted to the Debian security mailing list. This message was sent in connection with the release of Debian version 13. It announced an updated version of a spreadsheet which lists the Debian release and various dates related to their life cycle. The announcement said the updated spreadsheet was now available for installation on Debian version 11 as an update to a package called “distro-info-data”.

The problem was that the announcement of the updated spreadsheet included boilerplate text describing the updated spreadsheet as a “fix” for a “problem” and told users where to read about the “security status” of the distro-info-data package. Not entirely surprisingly, someone at Tenable interpreted this as an announcement of a security fix. More surprisingly they decided that the risk level was “high” despite the fact that no vulnerability was described and so there was no information on which to base a vulnerability assessment.

So the vulnerability reports which Nessus generated are nonsense. Debian 11 is under long-term support until August 2026. Until then it receives security patches. Nothing changed from a security perspective just because a new version of Debian was released in August 2025.

All Bugs are Old

The next problem due to allowing an assumption to take priority over the literal text of a vulnerability report. CVE-2025-54090 is described as a bug in version 2.4.64 of the Apache Web Server. The vulnerability report recommends upgrading to version 2.4.65.

The problem is that someone at Tenable assumed that this was an old bug which must be present in versions prior to 2.4.64. The report does not say that and it is not true. The bug was introduced into the code on July 7th, three days before version 2.4.64 released.

As a consequence of this misunderstanding Nessus started demanding that system administrators upgrade earlier versions such as 2.4.62 to 2.4.65 in order to fix this “high-risk” vulnerability which they never had.

Costs

Some may argue that more information is always better. I disagree. Nessus reports, particularly high-risk ones, must be taken seriously. But responding to them takes up enormous amounts of staff time. And a false report can take considerably more time to address than a true on. A real security defect can often be can be fixed quickly and crossed off the list. But a false reports requires investigation and considerable discussion until everyone involved is satisfied that it is indeed false. When the time of highly-skilled staff members is consumed so uselessly, it takes them away from activities which could actually improve security.

We can learn much about how ChatGPT works from a single question. This question was posed to ChatGPT 3.5 on February 13, 2023.

Question

Why didn’t Newton accept the Trinity?

ChatGPT’s Answer

Isaac Newton was a devout Christian, but he did not accept the doctrine of the Trinity as traditionally defined by the Church. He believed in a more puritanical form of Christianity and rejected many of the orthodox beliefs of his time, including the idea of the Trinity as three persons in one Godhead. Newton saw the Trinity as a pagan corruption of the early Christian Church, and he held that the doctrine was not supported by the Bible.

Newton’s rejection of the Trinity was a relatively minor aspect of his religious beliefs, and it did not prevent him from making major contributions to science. Nevertheless, his views on the Trinity were not widely accepted during his lifetime, and he was often criticized for his unorthodox beliefs. Today, Newton is remembered primarily for his scientific achievements, and his views on religion are of historical interest.

Analysis

While ChatGPT accurately describes Newton’s views on the doctrine of the Trinity, the rest of the text is misleading and in places outright absurd. Erroneous statements and implications include:

• That the Puritans also rejected the Trinity
• That Newton’s views on the Trinity were a minor matter
• That heterodox religious views are negatively associated with scientific achievement
• That Newton’s views on the Trinity were known to the public and criticized during his lifetime
• That Newton’s religious views had no lasting impact

Extended Discussion

The religious views of Isaac Newton have been the subject of considerable angst for his admirers. To those who regard religion as superstition and revere Newton as a hero of the Enlightenment who helped banish God from the physical universe, his intense interest in religious questions is unseemly. To mainstream Christians who are no less eager to claim Newton as their own, his rejection of what they see as the central tenant of the faith is no less disturbing. Both groups attempt to deal with this cognitive dissonance by downplaying the significance of Newton as a theologian.

Newton’s theological activities began early in he career. At the time Newton joined Trinity College, Cambridge professors were required to study theology and accept ordination as an Anglican priest within seven years. Newton, a man who did nothing by halves, took the studying part very seriously. But when he began to suspect that the Trinity was a spurious doctrine he realized that he could not in good conscience undergo ordination as a priest of the Church of England as this would require him to endorse all its teachings. Though friends he requested and received a special royal dispensation which allowed him to continue as a professor without ordination.

Newton’s writings on the Trinity are serious scholarly work with the founding texts of Christianity including an intensive investigation of the views of the Church Fathers and what texts they cited. Most of his factual claims are accepted by mainstream scholars today. Mainstream Christianity rejects only his final conclusion that the Trinity teaching is not from God.

Newton discussed his heretical views only with trusted acquaintances which included founders of the Unitarian movement and other major Enlightenment figures. They kept Newton’s views in almost perfect confidence. Even his scholarly conclusions on the authenticity of disputed Bible verses which seem to support the Trinity, which he shared with John Locke in 1690, were not published until 1754, 28 years after his death. Acquaintances in whom he had confided his views were very guarded in their statements as were the few scholars allowed to see his papers. So nearly total was the embargo that Newton biographer Sir David Brewster defended his orthodoxy as late as 1833, only revising his views in a new Newton biography published in 1855 after more of Newton’s writings were released.

Newton’s papers give no basis to claim that his theological work was a minor matter or that he kept his faith and science compartmentalized in “non-overlapping magisteria” as some try to claim today. His theological writings go far beyond the Trinity question and exceeds his scientific output in volume. His scientific work is inextricably linked to his religious views about how God acts in the world. His success in explicating laws of motion lent tremendous support to the long-standing theological theory that God is a king and the universe is a law-governed realm in which most things are controlled not by his direct action but by natural laws which he has established. His faith influenced his science and his scientific conclusions influenced the religious thought of millions.

His denial of the Trinity creates a major problem for mainstream Christians who admire him. If someone of less stature denied the Trinity, the mainstream view would be that he is no Christian. Newton absolutely denied it, not in ignorance and not in senility, but after extensive scholarly investigation. And yet the accepted form which ChatGPT regurgitates is to call him a “devout Christian”.

ChatGPT clumsily combines these two discourses of denial into an incoherent hash. Nowhere is this more evident than in the statement that Newton was still able to do science despite denying the Trinity. It is as if a Christian starts the sentence minimizing Newton’s heterodoxy and an atheist finishes it while having heterodoxy of quite another sort in mind.

The text contains other curiosities. For example it connects denial of the Trinity with the Puritan movement. This is simply false and is not the sort of error one would expect a human being to make. ChatGPT may have connected them because both are critics of the mainstream Church and use similar rhetoric. They call what they object to in the Church pagan and describing their proposed reforms as a return to an earlier form of Christianity. (It is also possible that ChatGPT has made the spurious connection through the Puritan John Newton, author of the hymn Amazing Grace.)

The statement that Newton’s views on the Trinity were not widely accepted during his lifetime and were in fact widely criticized is nonsensical considering that they were carefully concealed from the public. It would be interesting to know whether this howler is a mistake by a human author included in the training data or if ChatGPT has just picked up something commonly said of heterodox views.

The final sentence states that Newton’s views on religion, unlike his views on physics, are of only “historical interest” as if they produced no lasting effect. Even if we restrict ourselves to the Trinity question, this is dubious. Today he is almost certainly the best-known theologian representing the anti-trinitarian position. On the questions of the doctrine’s history and the Bible text his side has taken most of the scholarly ground and the passages which they identified as spurious are excluded from modern Bibles. But this is nothing compared to his influence on religious thought in general. As a figure of the Enlightenment who believed that God’s primary mode of action was through natural law rather than continuous intervention, he helped to revolutionize religious thought the world over. ChatGPT is again simply merging the expressions of those who dislike his views on the Trinity with those who would like to forget his interest in theology in general.

The only thing ChatGPT describes correctly is Newton’s views on the Trinity teaching. This is not surprising since there is now little confusion about what his views were and numerous good descriptions are no doubt to be found in the training data.

This answer gives us insight into how ChatGPT works and why it imagines plausible-sounding but false things. Lacking any understanding at all of the ideas expressed in the texts it is parodying, it connects ideas at the points where they come closest verbally rather than at the points of conceptual contact. So it erroneously traces Newton’s views on the Trinity to Puritanism because he and the Puritans use similar language to describe the Catholic Church and its doctrines. And it equates and merges the cognitive dissonance of Christians and secular thinkers with respect to Newton’s religious writing because they use similar phrases to make excuses for him.

It is obvious from the answers like this that ChatGPT is unable to recognize different perspectives and discuss them in a coherent manner. That it can produce coherent answers to other questions suggests that it was trained on coherent answers written by human authors. It is unable to produce anything new and can strive only for mediocrity.

How to get around Connection Reset on DV Lottery application:

Increase the JPEG compression on your photos until they are 60KB or smaller. Keep the dimensions at the required 600 by 600 pixels.

If you still get Connection Reset, don’t despair, you don’t need to enter everything again:

• Start a new application in a separate window or tab
• Do the Captcha
• Go back to your original application and reload the page

Bad documentation says what things are. Good documentation says what they do.

The widespread contempt for grammar in society is one of my numerous hobby horses. In school I got the impression that grammar was about diagramming sentences and placing commas. They told us that certain constructs are incorrect, but these were presented as arbitrary societal rules which serve no other purpose than to demonstrate education and get into a good college. Since this was in the 1980’s and conforming to arbitrary societal rules were seen as uncool and silly, grammar was uncool and silly.

What they did not tell us was that not only do words have meaning, but gramatical constructs have meaning too and sometimes if you use the wrong one you will not be understood. This is not always a problem in the situations of daily life since most people know what you meant to say.

But computers are complicated and very flexible. The way software works can be difficult to explain and not entirely obvious. If you are writing the manual but don’t have the grammatical chops to pull it off, your readers can be left guessing. You need to explain how data moves through a system, what steps are taken in what order. You do not need to be a grammar expert, but you need to know how to express ideas clearly, so say the data “enters” something, “is collected” from some places, that it “passes through”. You need to know how to say that one thing was replaced with another without mixing up the old and the new thing.

So pay attention to grammar. Learn to use prepositions to explain where data is and where it is going. Use real verbs. Do not say that “this is the notification e-mail address”. Say “This is the e-mail address to which a warning is automatically sent when the XYZ process stops unexpectedly.” Your users will thank you and they will be more likely to stick around because they understand how your product works and how to use it.

The phrase “no rest for the wicked” is an amalgam of two passages in the Bible book of Isaiah.

Chapter 48 verse 22 in the King James Version:

There is no peace, saith the LORD, unto the wicked.

Chapter 57 verses 20 and 21 also in the King James Version:

20 But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. 21 There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.

The assertion at Dictionary.com that the verse refers to eternal torment is not supported by the context or by any Bible commentary of which I am aware. The actual idea Isaiah expresses in his book is that humans will have a better life if they allow God to guide them. To illustrate, here are verses 17 through 19 of chapter 48 in the New International Version:

This is what the Lord says—
your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
who teaches you what is best for you,
who directs you in the way you should go.
If only you had paid attention to my commands,
your peace would have been like a river,
your well-being like the waves of the sea.
Your descendants would have been like the sand,
your children like its numberless grains;
their name would never be blotted out
nor destroyed from before me.”

So those who follow God’s advice for life as conveyed through prophets such as Isaiah will prosper. In contrast, the “wicked” (defined as those who sin by doing such things as worshiping idols or engaging in dishonest business practices) will experience unnecessary troubles in life. It is in this sense that there is no peace for them. Within Christianity the view is that all humans are sinners, just some more than others. As the Apostle Paul says “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). So even a believer could experience self-inflicted troubles due to failure to apply Biblical advice for stress-free living. Until well into the 20th century the average person would have been familiar with these ideas whether they were a believing Christian or not. So the phrase “no rest for the wicked” is a self deprecating suggestion that whatever new difficulty has arisen is a consequence of the speaker’s own failure to organize and conduct their life in the best way. An earlier version of this article was posted at https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/255570/what-do-sam-and-die-hardman-mean-by-no-rest-for-the-wicked-and-idle-hands-and#255661

Changes and Corrections

• The first passage is Isaiah 48:22, not Isaiah 48:20 as stated in earlier versions of this article
• Both passages are now quoted
• The translations from which the Bible quotations were taken are now identified

This is the first review of Star Wars published in the Soviet Union. It appeared in the Literary Gazette, a Moscow weekly, on September 7, 1977.

It is unlikely the reviewer had had an opportunity to see the film, nor would most of her readers be able to see it anytime soon. All we learn about the plot is that the main characters engage some kind of formidable tyrants in light-saber battles. The emphasis on the physical appearance of the characters suggests that posters and production stills are the primary source. Over half the text is devoted to portraying the film as a crass commercial endeavor aimed at undiscerning viewers.

The name of the film is translated as War of the Stars, a misunderstanding which was corrected in later reviews. The first month’s box office receipts appear to be overstated. The statement that a sequel will be out in a few weeks is puzzling seeing as The Empire Strikes Back was not released until May of 1980.

Mass Culture 77

Space Horror Films

By Yu. Varshavskaya

This summer American movie theaters were hit with a new wave of “movie madness”. According to the press, the film War of the Stars by American cinematographer George Lucas is breaking all box office records: $60 million profit from the first month of showings. From morning until midnight War of the Stars is shown in overflowing theaters. In order to get into the film one must either stand in line for several hours or pay a scalper a fabulous sum–50 dollars.

And so “evil spirits,” huge disasters, and giant sharks have been replaced on the American screen by horrors of truly cosmic proportion – monstrous tyrants who terrorize our Galaxy. The battle against them is waged by the heroes of the film – a certain round-faced princess, a village youth, an elderly knight of the Round Table, an ape-man, and two robots. One of them, the enormous gilded robot Threepio, is endowed with human speech. The other, Artoo-Detoo, resembles an automobile and expresses himself in “star” beeps.

The plot of the movie, as the French weekly Express writes, is rather simplistic.

But to really frighten the locals the makers of the film have employed the most modern of weapons – a laser ray with which the heroes of the film do battle as with rapiers. Nightmarish monsters are constantly appearing on the screen: a lizard-man, gnomes without faces, a living mummy with a head with rubber tubes sticking out, fantastical animals…

At the same time as shooting of this blood curdling “masterpiece” which the cinematographer George Lucas calls “the western of the future” was going on, a number of related commercial schemes were undertaken. The publisher Ballantine released a novel under the same name. Then Marvel Comic Book [sic], a publisher which specializes in comics, signed a contract with the movie studio Fox and, having divided the script into six parts, began issuing a monthly War of the Stars comic book. The press run is a million copies. Right after that the classic accouterments of “mass culture” appeared: buttons, tee-shirts, movie posters, and soundtrack records. And the children’s toys should be in the stores in time for Christmas [literally “New Year’s”, the holiday to which the Soviets had transfered the Christmas tree and gift-giving tradition]: a miniature Artoo-Detoo which makes the very same sounds as the original, and the gilded Threepio. The biggest “find” of the film, the toy laser rapier, is not invented yet, but work has already begun.

In the next few weeks there is due to appear on the movie screens of the USA a new episode of War of the Stars which is likely to be as mediocre as it will be profitable. This is not to be wondered at. The mass audience is ready to bite at such pieces of “art” in order to, when leaving the movie theater, see that things outside are fairly quiet…

A few years ago a user on Stack Exchange asked why the construction used in this English sentence is not considered a double negative.

If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me.

This question was presumably prompted by the familiar admonition not to use a double negative. This warning refers to dialect constructions such as in this sentence:

If I don’t use no microphone, no one will hear me.

Notice that in the first clause both the verb and its direct object are negated. This is negative concord because the two negatives are intended to reinforce one another. They are in concord or agreement. In standard English we would instead say:

If I don’t use the microphone, no one will hear me.

Leaving asside the question of whether non-standard forms of English should be used, the caution should not be understood literally. It does not mean that all uses of double negation violate the rules of formal English. A more precise statement of the rule would be: Standard English does not recognize negative concord as a valid construction. In standard English double negatives cancel one another out to produce a positive as in mathematics. To illustrate this a teacher might ask the children to interpret the dialect sentence above as if it were standard English. The teacher guides them to this interpretation:

I must not use a microphone if I want to be heard.

This is nonsense, but it serves to illustrate an important point: double negatives are not forbidden in standard English, they simple cancel one another out. It is only an error if negative concord was intended. For example, this use of a double negative is good literary English:

Your complaints have not gone unheard.

The “not” and “un-“ cancel one another out, so the sentence means:

Your complaints have been heard.

Though the emphasis is a little different. One negation serves to describe what the interlocutor fears while the second serves to indicate that it has not in fact taken place. Now let us return to the question from Stack Exchange:

If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me.

This sentence has two negations, but it does not display netagive concord. Nor do the negations cancel one another out (as in our example from literary English) since they are not in the same clause. Instead the two negations are in separate clauses joined in an if-then construct. We can simplify the sentence to this:

If no microphone, then no hearers.

We must use two negations in this sentence because the message is about two negations: negating the microphone negates the hearers. A version of this post was originally published as an answer on Stack Exchange: Why is, “If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me,” not considered a double negative