The visitor gives Cormac the branch and leaves. For a year Cormac uses the enchanting music to deal with every problem in his kingdom. Instead of listening and dispensing justice, he just shakes the branch.

In one year the stranger comes back for the first installment of the payment: Cormac's daughter.
The next year, he takes his son.
Then his wife.

Cormac is left alone. He uses the branch to dull the pain, but he eventually realizes the mistake he'd made, swapping people for easy magic.

2/3

I just realized that I have the perfect anti-AI story:

King Cormac and the Silver Branch

It's an Irish legend about a wise king who is visited by a mysterious otherworldly stranger bearing a silver branch with golden apples. Shaking the branch produces such a wonderful music that people immediately forget their pain and sorrows and daily worries.

King Cormac covets the branch, and is willing to pay whatever price the stranger sets for it.

1/3

#AI #folklore #legends #mythology

This weekend, No Starch is running a 35% off promo with code TOOMANYTABS. This is probably the last chance to preorder "The Secret Life of Circuits" at a discount:

https://nostarch.com/secret-life-of-circuits

If you do, you get PDF right away, then full-color hardcover in the mail. Preorders may or may not include exclusive horse armor DLC (proof of horse required).

ToC: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/electronics/full_toc.pdf

Sample chapter: https://nostarch.com/download/samples/secret-life-of-circuits_chapter-9.pdf

Certified organic AI-free.

Whoever decided that tasklist should truncate its output fields should have something uncomfortable inserted in their various orifices in Hell for every character ever hidden.

I'm an enemy of the state[1].

[1] As in stateful systems

> The most rebellious thing you can do is to do something the right way. The measure twice, cut once way. The do your homework way. The double- and triple-check way. The long way. The way where money isn't your only concern. The “I care about this subject and I'm going to give it my best shot” way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGu1Gv8cLQo

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@BleepingComputer/117207756865330014

Oh no! But how will security vendors write their blog posts now?

Egads.

www.yahoo.com/news/us/arti...

If a grocery store is doing dynamic pricing and you just sit there with a flipper zero recording whatever sub GHz or IR signal they are broadcasting to flip them, take the lowest real displayed price, replay it with idk something like this, is that illegal

@lcamtuf "There is no way I will *ever* fill this up!" right?

@lcamtuf In 2026 I don't even know what is "real" anymore (in general). This has been a problem with refurbished/saved HW.

Glad to see MS upgraded Win11 system requirement to a 64GB disk - this way when you buy a minimal laptop you don't have to upgrade your disk immediately after the first update eats 25GB of it (aside of the already installed OS)...

The recording of "Deobfuscation in the Age of Agentic Reverse Engineering" is now public:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-gJ6EUFoKM

We (CC @nicolodev) show how to use agents to break protections found in anti-cheats, DRM systems & commercial protectors.

Slides: https://synthesis.to/presentations/recon26_agentic_deobfuscation.pdf

Redis RCE PoC (CVE-2026-81934) https://github.com/v12-security/pocs/tree/main/redis/server_ssl

The only downside of using teehee I found so far is that every time I even *think* of using it a tiny Michael Jackson appears in my head and starts to sing...

https://github.com/Gskartwii/teehee

My energy providers website stopped working properly for me this morning. Why would it expect me to be able to also contact:

ahrefs.com
bing.com
browser-intake-datadoghq.eu
clarity.ms
doubleclick.net
facebook.net
google.com
hs-scripts.com
stapecdn.com
stripe.com
stripe.network
tiktok.com
vercel.com
wurfl.io

Just to submit a meter reading!

And no, I DO NOT want to use your sodding app!

#enshittification

VB's Péter Szőr Award, commemorating the life & work of security researcher Péter Szőr, is awarded for the best piece of technical security research published in the past year. What research deserves to win the 2026 award? Nominations close 9 Sept! https://virusbulletin.com/conference/peter-szor-award/

A couple of weeks ago I showed a preview of a new mode for Mines, in my puzzle collection. I'm pleased to say that the new Mines is now completed and live! You can now play Minesweeper on a wide range of tilings in your browser
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html
or download a desktop version from the parent page which supports the same set of grids.

As well as the support for lots of grid types, there's also a new user preference (off by default) to make it easier to play on them. When you click on a clue square to potentially clear around it, the existing flags adjacent to the square light up, to make it easier to count them and work out how many more mines you're still expecting. Particularly useful in the hat tiling, where it's easy to mistake exactly what is adjacent to what!

I expect different people will prefer different grids. Personally I think the triangular grid is particularly tricky and puzzly; the hexagonal honeycomb makes a gentle introduction; the Cairo, Floret and Kites tilings are a nice set in between those extremes; and of course the aperiodic tilings are there to keep you on your toes and ready for anything.

Many thanks to Anders Höglund for this excellent piece of work.

@simontatham In high school I spent waay too much time on a similar desktop variant. I stopped when I saw different tilings when I closed my eyes in school...

NightmareEclipse versus CrowdStrike Falcon https://github.com/MSNightmare/FalconFlank