The Wire
Curated cybersecurity and tech news — AI-summarized, source attributed.
P2P Meth: Why Today's Supply Is Purer, More Abundant, and Possibly More Dangerous
After the US and Mexico restricted pseudoephedrine sales in 2006 and 2008, meth producers pivoted to a phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) synthesis route using widely ava
Ploopy Bean brings a standalone QMK trackpoint to any computer
Ploopy is taking preorders for the Bean Pointing Stick, a standalone trackpoint device that revives the IBM-style nub pointer as a peripheral you can plug into
Quasicrystals in the Wild: Meteorites, Lightning, and an Atomic Bomb
Quasicrystals — ordered but non-repeating atomic arrangements, the 3D analog of Penrose tiles — almost never form on their own. Mathematician John Carlos Baez c
Satire: npm Shrugs at Supply Chain Attacks as 'Unpreventable Acts of Nature'
A satirical piece modeled on The Onion's recurring 'No Way To Prevent This' format skewers the npm ecosystem's fatalistic response to recurring supply chain att
Six SQL Patterns for Catching Transaction Fraud Without ML or Graph Databases
A data analyst on a program-integrity team argues that most transaction fraud detection is best handled in plain SQL against the right tables, not with machine
Turso kills its data-corruption bounty after LLM slop drowns maintainers
Turso, the team rewriting SQLite, is ending its year-old $1,000 bounty for bugs that demonstrably cause data corruption. The program paid out to five contributo
VLDB Paper Maps Out How Databases Should Actually Write to SSDs
A research paper presented at VLDB digs into the gap between how database systems issue writes and how modern SSDs actually handle them. The authors argue that
Why 'all exponentials become sigmoids' is a weak argument against AI scaling
Scott Alexander pushes back on the popular rebuttal that AI capability curves must inevitably flatten into S-shapes. The claim is technically true since no proc
Zulip founder departs for Anthropic, donates company to new nonprofit foundation
Tim Abbott, founder of the open-source team chat platform Zulip, is stepping back from full-time leadership at Kandra Labs to join Anthropic, bringing three sen
3D Movie Maker Comes to Linux After 30-Year Journey via 3DMMEx Fork
Ben Stone's 3DMMEx project has achieved the first native Linux build of Microsoft's 1995 multimedia app 3D Movie Maker, 18 months after he forked the stalled 3D
Amazon staff invent busywork to hit AI usage quotas
Amazon employees are reportedly fabricating tasks to feed into AI tools in order to meet internal pressure to demonstrate higher AI adoption. Rather than reflec
Antirez on DS4: why local AI just crossed the usability threshold
Antirez reflects on the unexpectedly fast traction of DwarfStar 4 (DS4), his single-model local AI integration project built around DeepSeek v4 Flash. He credit