Links (58)
The Orb, CursedCTF, Social Media, xz backdoor
If there’s more to life than this, I don’t know what it is.
We Built An Orb: The making of the Steam Deck OLED launch trailer
We had the 100 Steam Decks. We knew they absolutely had to be suspended inside a giant orb.
Bribery, Botting, and other Shenanigans - Cursed CTF 2024
The admins eventually responded to our mass account creation by disabling registration, as it was costing them too much money.
Bears take a ride on swan pedalo at Woburn Safari Park
These black bears wasted no time clambering on to a swan pedalo when it appeared in their enclosure at Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire.
Keeper Tommy Babbington added the quirky paddle boat to keep the animals entertained after a large pool of water formed at the site during the recent wet weather.
Socially Sourced Startup Ideas
Somebody should build an MVP agency to launch new ideas quickly: I pay you ~$5k, give you v1 feature list, you ship in 4-6 weeks, very basic, default TailwindUI Does this exist? I’d spin up 4-5 ideas at a time if there was a shop that could churn these out at scale.
Silicon Valley tried to mass produce fancy marshmallows. It got messy, fast.
That meant he had to grow fast and figure out the engineering on the fly — the classic entrepreneurial strategy of Silicon Valley. When it works, you get Tesla; when it doesn't, you get Theranos.
This is the story of the Theranos of marshmallows.
Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing that it's almost unkillable. Which is why, despite a long stretch after Steve left when the management strategy ranged from benign neglect to spectacular blunders, traffic just kept growing.
The Irish State suggests there were around 900 deaths; campaigners argue it could be almost double. The documentary evidence is sparse, like almost everything to do with the Laundries, What we do have are the testimonies. The women from the Magdalene Laundries have begun to speak, finally, of their memories.
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
The first officially confirmed COVID case was a vendor at the Wuhan wet market. So were the next four, and half of the next 40. A heat map of early cases is obviously centered on the wet market, not on the lab. The wet market and the lab are about 6 miles away as the crow flies, or a 15 mile / half hour drive.
What we're building will allow people to interact with computers in a human way, and deliver on the promise of the original internet.
Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise
After observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz package) on Debian sid installations over the last weeks (logins with ssh taking a lot of CPU, valgrind errors) I figured out the answer:
The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.
