This is great:
"@jnsq.org: There's a concept in cryptography called a "nothing up my sleeve" number. Sometimes it's just the smallest number with the required properties. Sometimes it's pi or e or phi."
https://bsky.app/profile/jnsq.org/post/3mgr45kgos22y
bloody hell this is amazing. As Charlie Stross noted:
They've mapped the neural connectome of Drosophila and simulated it in silico. The experimenters went on to hook up their [β¦]
https://www.rathbiotaclan.com/whole-brain-emulation-achieved-scientists-run-a-fruit-fly-brain-in-simulation/
Brute-force decompilation and re-engineering of a binary (compiled) program, using Claude. The author takes an ancient MUD binary for BBSes, running as a Win32 DLL, and uses Claude, Ghidra, and the Ghidra MCP [β¦]
https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-safe-decompilation/
Today in grim future -- AI's future of lobbying:
"The opposition appeared overwhelming: Tens of thousands of emails poured into Southern California's top air pollution authority as its board weighed a June [β¦]
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-southern-california-air-board-pollution.html
a good bit of OSS drama. The maintainers of the "chardet" library claim to have "clean room" reimplemented its code using an LLM, to relicense from LGPL to MIT. Of course that is now how this works (an LLM is not capable of "clean room", nor [β¦]
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
Crikey, this is a massive security fail by Google:
"Google spent over a decade telling developers that Google API keys (like those used in Maps, Firebase, etc.) are not secrets. But that's [β¦]
https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules
The state of anti-phishing infrastructure nowadays is shocking. This trivial action, combined with a relatively fresh domain, results in immediate blocklisting by Google:
"Digging through Google forums, I found the [β¦]
https://trysound.io/how-my-side-project-got-banned-from-the-internet/
LinkedIn are using a Peter Thiel-linked company called Persona as an identity-verification service. (Discord also tried them out for age verification, but are now apparently ditching them.) This is all a bit of a [β¦]
https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verification-privacy/
The human operator of the "MJ Rathbun" openclaw bot has finally revealed themselves, and omg, this is just as bad as one might have expected.
Basically they set it up with instructions to "try to make a [β¦]
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/rathbuns-operator.html
"AI coding agents don't notify you when they finish or need permission. You tab away, lose focus, and waste 15 minutes getting back into flow. peon-ping fixes this with voice lines from Warcraft, StarCraft, Portal, Zelda, and more β works with Claude [β¦]
https://github.com/PeonPing/peon-ping
This is an utterly bananas situation:
"Iβm a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, pythonβs go-to plotting library. At ~130 million downloads each month itβs some of the most widely used software in the world. We, like many [β¦]
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
This is really thought-provoking: StrongDM's AI team are apparently trying a new model of software engineering where there is _no_ human code review:
"
In kΕan or mantra form:
- Why am I doing this? (implied: the model should be [β¦]
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
On the counter-intuitive side effects of banning non-helmeted bike riding:
"In 1991 Australia introduced mandatory bicycle helmet laws requiring all adults and children to wear a helmet at all times when riding [β¦]
https://theconversation.com/ditching-bike-helmets-laws-better-for-health-42
"Itβs sort of hard to know how to read a manifesto like this from one of the most powerful figures in tech. Is it a sober, strategic precursor to policy papers for the next administration? [β¦]
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/dario-amodeis-warnings-about-ai-are-about-politics-too.html
This is really polishing a very stinky turd of a security "decision" in Moltbot -- an attacker simply persuades a user to click on a link which uses client-side Javascript to trigger Moltbot to load a crafted URL, [β¦]
https://depthfirst.com/post/1-click-rce-to-steal-your-moltbot-data-and-keys
I love this Feynman quote, regarding what he called "the computer disease":
"
"Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very [β¦]
https://x.com/Swizec/status/2004633162522263987
Following a repressive crackdown on protests, the government is now building a system that grants web access only to security-vetted elites, while locking 90 million citizens inside an intranet:
"Government spokesperson Fatemeh [β¦]
https://restofworld.org/2026/iran-blackout-tiered-internet/
Yiiiiikes:
"Recently I ran an experiment where I built agents on top of Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 and then challenged them to write exploits for a zeroday vulnerability in the QuickJS [β¦]
https://sean.heelan.io/2026/01/18/on-the-coming-industrialisation-of-exploit-generation-with-llms/
Deliver email messages directly into GMail using their proprietary API, instead of SMTP or IMAP. Looks like it still applies spam filtering, but this can also be disabled with a switch (via JWZ)
https://github.com/ScottESanDiego/gmail-api-client
Yiiiiikes:
"Recently I ran an experiment where I built agents on top of Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 and then challenged them to write exploits for a zeroday vulnerability in the QuickJS [β¦]
https://sean.heelan.io/2026/01/18/on-the-coming-industrialisation-of-exploit-generation-with-llms/
Deliver email messages directly into GMail using their proprietary API, instead of SMTP or IMAP. Looks like it still applies spam filtering, but this can also be disabled with a switch (via JWZ)
https://github.com/ScottESanDiego/gmail-api-client
A great example of reverse engineering an Android app and Bluetooth IOT protocol using Frida and root access on an Android device:
"Android exposes the Java classes android.bluetooth.BluetoothGatt and android.bluetooth.BluetoothGattCallback that [β¦]
https://blog.nns.ee/2026/01/06/aike-ble/
"Factchecking is seen as a go-to method for tackling the spread of false information. But it is notoriously difficult to correct misinformation. Evidence shows readers trust journalists [β¦]
https://theconversation.com/why-people-believe-misinformation-even-when-theyre-told-the-facts-271236
Bubblewrap, a Linux CLI tool which uses namespaces to sandbox a specific command (and its subprocesses):
"
Bubblewrap lets you run untrusted or semi-trusted code without risking your [β¦]
https://patrickmccanna.net/a-better-way-to-limit-claude-code-and-other-coding-agents-access-to-secrets/
CEPA: "A Moscow-based global βnewsβ network is leveraging Western artificial intelligence tools to devastating effect":
"This form of data poisoning is deliberately designed to corrupt the information environments on which [β¦]
https://cepa.org/article/russian-propaganda-infects-ai-chatbots/
update on the POP3pocalypse -- it appears that the most likely thing to work in the future will be to use SMTP forwarding to gmail, with ARC headers added. This is a comment thread detailing the rather [β¦]
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/today-in-google-broke-email-2/#comment-265285
TIL there is a defined standard for cryptographic assertions of AI-free image origination:
"
βProvenance technologies like Content Credentials β which act like a nutrition label for [β¦]
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/21/24223932/c2pa-standard-verify-ai-generated-images-content-credentials
Techniques to extend SD card lifespans in Raspberry Pi systems; putting /var/log into RAM is a nice trick
https://www.dzombak.com/blog/2024/04/pi-reliability-reduce-writes-to-your-sd-card/
the Arch Linux wiki page about SSD tuning and enabling TRIM -- extremely detailed and useful!
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive#External_SSD_with_TRIM_support
Ireland's SEAI have published a decent blog post with some real world facts about EV battery lifespans:
"In 2020 GeoTab, a telematics solution provider, published real world battery data of 6,000 EVs (BEV & PHEV) over millions of days to [β¦]
https://www.seai.ie/blog/understanding-ev-battery
