A global law enforcement operation targeting the Phobos ransomware gang has led to the arrest of four suspected hackers in Phuket, Thailand, and the seizure of 8Base's dark web sites. The suspects are accused of conducting cyberattacks on over 1,000 victims worldwide.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/legal/police-arrests-4-phobos-ransomware-suspects-seizes-8base-sites/

Here's a really long shot ...

Back in the dark ages ... 1990 ... I published a joint paper with Ron Read, but I'm unable to locate my paper copy, and I'm not sure it ever made it to a digital copy.

Does anyone here have a copy of:

R.C. Read, C.D. Wright,
Computing with three-colourable graphs: a survey,
Ars Combin. 29 (1990)225–234

All information gratefully received.

Thank you.

(If you're interested I can tell you what it was about)

Anthropic (Claude LLM) AI Company doesn’t want people using AI for their resumes or any part of Interview for software developer or IT jobs at their office. How ironic? LOL. The company says AI tools are flooding their system with bogus résumés and too many applicants. They can't find real talent even using their own AI system where candidates lie about their skills.

Just released AFL++ v4.31c: SAND mode, LLVM 20 support, Python 3.13 support, bug fixes, better performance ... https://github.com/AFLplusplus/AFLplusplus/releases/tag/v4.31c

lemme show you 140,000 (!) places in code where certificate verification is switched off when using libcurl: https://github.com/search?q=CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER%2C+FALSE&type=code

NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-5: iRISC reverse engineering, finding SHA256 https://irisc-research-syndicate.github.io/2025/02/10/finding-sha256/

In 1959, police were called to a segregated library in S. Carolina when 9 year old Ronald McNair refused to leave.
He later got a PhD in Physics, and died in 1986, one of the astronauts on the Challenger space shuttle.
That same library is now named after him.

"I did not think; I investigated."

German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen died #OTD in 1923.

On 8 November 1895, he produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The non-SI unit of radiation exposure, the roentgen (R), is also named after him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_R%C3%B6ntgen

Books about Röntgen at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=R%C3%B6ntgen&submit_search=Search

#books #physics

Oh, joy, my Mikrotik switch is leaking VLAN broadcast traffic to edge ports.

do you think the people who work at google have old google hidden away somewhere or are they also slogging through a mire of dog shit every time they try to search the internet

I just got this popup by visiting nytimes.com-- frightening.

it says it gives tracking info to 207 companies, including precise geolocation for tracking physical in-store purchases (what?).

oh, and the link to the 207 companies list ones that are absolutely frightening. I am a paying subscriber and they do to subscribers (if they innocently say yes)? is this for real?

Is this popup only because I am in Europe, and it is on monday morning at 6am? Anyone else?

“We just launched a 16TB archive of every dataset that has been available on data.gov since November. This will be updated day by day as new datasets appear. It can be freely copied, and we're sharing the code behind it to help others make their own archives of data they depend on.” Harvard Library Innovation Lab (via BlueSky)

https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2025/02/06/announcing-data-gov-archive/

https://bsky.app/profile/harvardlil.bsky.social/post/3lhjzh7f54226

#archival

Me: "Working with software teams hasn't changed me at all"

Also me: "I better write up documentation about the workflow I'm using to compile this manuscript and citations sooner than I think I'm gonna need it because some part of this WILL break (including my mind)"

"Coding is to Programming, what typing is to writing" -- Leslie Lamport.

Microsoft Research: GenAI can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving.

Microsoft: *sells GenAI aggressively into the Education 365 packages*

Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee and others, ‘The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers’ (ACM CHI 2025). https://advait.org/files/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf

Remember Aaron♥️

Fuck #Meta

Unsealed court documents from February 5th, 2024, in Kadrey v. Meta show Meta (formerly Facebook) illegally torrented 81.7TB of data from "shadow libraries" such as Anna's Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen to train Meta artificial intelligence.

Highlights include:
- A senior AI research at Meta says, "I don't think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line there."

- Another AI researcher says, "using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold" ... "SciHub, ResearchGate, LibGen are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protectec by copyright and they're infringing it".

- In January 2023, Mark Zuckerberg attends a meeting which is heavily redacted in court documents. However, he says "we need to this move this stuff forward" and "we need to find a way to unblock all of this".

- Fast forward to April, 2023, Meta employees discuss using a VPN to conceal Meta IP address ranges when torrenting data. Meta employees also discuss the need to involve lawyers if something goes astray. The unredacted court records show a Meta employee saying, "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right 😂".

I think there's a general need for education regarding influence operations (and my focus is on those by Russia) here on the fediverse.

1) No, Russia isn't just pushing right-wing agendas/topics. The _stated_ purpose, from 1997 IIRC, is to sow division in the west. That means that there's roughly an equal chance that a raging leftwing lunatic is on Russia's payroll as your average Tate-Musk-Trump-Orban-Fico fanatic.

2) "Doomism" is a goal. The more we are complaining on how bad things are - the more successful they are. A great way to counter these influence operations is to talk about how _good_ things are. Because there's plenty of awesomeness in our society (I'm not from the US - that's a global perspective) to share.

3) These operations are _long term_. The troll factories aren't just newly created accounts spamming out the same message everywhere. That online magazine that has published for 10 years could be a sleeper influence operation. A person _living in Germany_ spending time online just as anybody else could too.

4) You're getting influenced. Basic psychology says you cannot avoid it (the anchoring effect). The only thing you can do is to be aware of it, and actively working against the very goals of the influence operations.

Remember what those were now again?

#InfluenceOperations #Russia #MAGA #Politics