News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

madradavid

Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:54AM (#50300610)
Looks like a DevOps guy is going to take the blame for this: "Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions." https://x.com/binance/status/2115993361517891592
Re:I resigned from Anthropic today on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @03:07AM (#49622414)
"No other human activity poses this level of danger." I know this is a bit over the top but let us look at some of the most pressing issues in the world today: global warming, nuclear weapons, wealth inequality, war, technology dependence. Wouldn't a much more capable LLM in the wrong hands make these accelerate faster in the wrong direction ? Many of us , me included, have this mental model of a rogue Terminator-like AI but what I am most worried about is these LLMs in the hands of people. Look at what we have done to this Planet with the tools that we have so far, we have repeatedly tried to subjugate , enslave and kill each other because of things as peety as skin colour , tribe , religion and who owns which patch of land .

I don't have faith in the human race as is to do the right thing when handed these tools , you can already see the nonsense like the fake nudes , fake news and all that other filth being pushed on social media by people with access to relatively daft models. What happens when we can package a Mythos 5 level model in a box , when any war lord , supremacist or religous zealot can access these ? , You now you have your personal bio-chemist and nuclear physicist in a box.

The tool in itself is not what I am worried about , it is the human in the loop. I don't have an answer to this but i believe it is something we should all take a moment to think about , just think what a different world we would be living if any random person could buy a nuclear weapon off the shelf ? There are extremes to both ends , you can either worry way too much or don't care at all, I believe the best place is the middle ground were we actively think this through instead of using our usually "Move fast and break things" mode..

Re:ChatGPT Is Throwing 404 on Thursday September 03, 2026 @11:05AM (#49551048)
Claude down, ChatGPt down , Grok down. This is the new "Stackoverflow is down" ... FYI Stackoverflow is not down https://downdetector.com/status/stackoverflow/
Re:My Friend Aaron on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @03:11PM (#49439082)
My god, for a minute there I thought this was real.. This resonates, I bet a number of us know or Are an “Aaron”. Thanks for this.
Re:Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with? on Friday August 14, 2026 @09:05AM (#49298170)
"Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end." This. Thank you for expressing this so eloquently. I've tried to put a finger on this and you've done that for me. I wonder what the solution could be , Ask Claude to "Dumb it down" , "Speak plain English" ? I have even thught of building some sort of "middleware" that fixes all this.
What I meant is in a lot of these compounds in Africa the “workers” are doing this willingly, it is a Job like a 9-5, these are locals who go there to get trained to do this. In other places like Malaysia, Cambodia most of these people ( usually foreigners) are enticed into these Jobs , they get to these countries with the promise of normal employment and find themselves forced into this. In many of the African countries these are now locals working in Chinese companies, trained by Chinese and protected by corrupt government officials.
African scammers used to be small scale or lone wolf type of operations. You had scammers like Hushpuppi etc who become celebrities John Gotti style. Now the Chinese have taken over , they are moving from places like Malaysia and setting up these huge scam compounds , they combine the legitimate businesses (construction, import/export) with gambling and these crypto, mobile money and pig butchering scams. This is only going to grow , no one is forced into these things, the youth willing seek work at these places, they are recruited, trained and given the tools they would never afford on their own. You have Chinese labs setup with Servers, high speed internet, USSD capture machines. Our governments won’t and do not want to do crap, the officials get the bribes , the youth get work and everyone is looking the other way. So yeah , this is only going to get worse.
CONCACAF join UEFA and reject FIFA's World Cup sell-off plan. https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49488584/uefa-boycott... . By the end of this Gianni Infantino will only be left with the Africans .
Re:Half-Baked Product on Friday July 03, 2026 @10:32AM (#48775554)
I have started a number of (failed) companies and this, this article summarizes the last 15 years of my life. A software dev trying to play startup founder.

To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.

Re:Shipping a Laptop to a Refugee Camp in Uganda on Saturday May 23, 2026 @02:28AM (#48245252)
I am Ugandan.

I've shipped electronics and Laptops for Work quite a bit, and OP is right, the system is broken, it stays this way because a lot of corrupt individuals benefit from this mess. However, OP showed a degree of Hubris here, a mistake lots of us make when dealing with foreign countries, just because it works this way here, so it should work that way in XYZ.

OP would have saved themselves lots of time and money if they'd asked Django what the best way to get that laptop shipped to them was. Lots of Ugandans in Austria ship things back daily; they just do it differently, simply hand it to someone travelling back home, there are people travelling back daily, willing to help or just pay a shipping agency a small amount and they'll handle everything.

This is a good act of charity and I applaud OP for that; however, the first mistake they made was Google "How to send a laptop overseas" , a message to Django, asking the best way to get them the laptop would have saved them time and money.

We all fall into this trap of giving people in need what we think they need instead of asking them how best we can help. Local knowledge goes a long way.

All in all, I applaud OP, not many of us would have done this.

Re:Shipping a Laptop to a Refugee Camp in Uganda on Saturday May 23, 2026 @02:06AM (#48245162)
I am Ugandan, that $200 could have gone a long way buying used locally , case in point https://jiji.ug/central-division/computers-and-laptops/lapto... , a used Macbook pro with some change to spare.
Actually you can send money (cross border payments ) to another country that also has mobile money, I can send money to a Kenyan, Tanzanian etc all I need is their Phone number. I am not sure what you mean by “holding both sides of the transaction “, when you send me money it appears in my balance (which I can check via a USSD query), it’s essentially a bank account but on USSD and sms. A lot of cross border payments are now settled via USSD. Hell I can now get a Visa/Mastercard by just dailing a code and I will have payment details with my name and address.
Interestingly in a number of African Countries (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania etc) , we have “Mobile Money”, Payments are instant, via USSD, no internet required, I can even pay online using USSD push.This is a classical example of humans using what they have to build what they need , no fancy internet enabled smart phones required. I can send money anytime instantly to my grandma deep in the village. She can withdraw from or top up her account in the numerous mobile money stalls that are everywhere. You pay school dues, medical bills , groceries via mobile money. I don’t remember the last time I visited a bank, hell I can even get an instant loan by just dailing *165# on my no internet feature phone.
Congratulations on the launch.

Totally unrelated, I am just curious about why you chose the name, as someone who is Ugandan and was born in raised in Kampala (which is the Capital City of Uganda BTW).

Congratulations again.

Re:YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts on Thursday April 16, 2026 @01:12AM (#47788881)
I am still trying to figure out why YouTube/Google is willing to die on this hill ? Surely they’ve gotten feedback or seen it in their analytics that there is a significant group of people who don’t like these “shorts”.

Them implementing this “zero minutes” thing already tells you that they have realized there is some pushback.

Why not just add an on/off toggle?

This short form , TikTok style endless scroll stuff has a junk food feeling to it , as a paying customer why can’t you just give me the option to turn this off ?

I did read that article; it is just a generic article about how funerals are expensive, you could replace Kampala with New York, and it would still hold.

My point is that the Author has picked a practice by a couple of tribes on a Continent so diverse and large you could fit the states, the UK, and still have space for 30 or so more countries, and passed it off as the norm.

Funerals can be expensive, anywhere. I don't want you going away with the impression that all these poor Africans are using up all their hard-earned savings to throw these outlandish burial ceremonies.

Re:Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead on Thursday April 09, 2026 @11:37PM (#47713308)
I am Ugandan. These kind of burials are unheard of in my country. The Author is labeling this an “African” thing which is just the usual daft nonsense. A number of Ghanaian and Nigerian tribes bury their dead like this , it is more a celebration of life. This is like taking something a small town in Louisiana does and declaring it an “American” tradition.
Total noob question here and I apologize in advance. Are these the “actual” pictures or are they “touched up” by an artist ? If they the real pictures then this is truly impressive …
Re:No, your cryptocurrency cannot work on Monday September 06, 2021 @03:47PM (#28437258)
The person who created the gist has this on their website "Available payment methods include PayPal, Bitcoin, and SEPA transfers." http://cryto.net/~joepie91/

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