39C3: Liberating ESP32 Bluetooth
Bluetooth is everywhere, but it’s hard to inspect. Most of the magic is done inside a Bluetooth controller chip, accessed only through a controller-specific Host-Controller Interface (HCI) pr…
Librarians Are Tired of Being Accused of Hiding Secret Books That Were Made Up by AI
AI chatbots are generating fake titles that people insist are real.
The Rise Of Fake Casio Scientific Calculators
Scientific calculators are an amazing invention that take pocket calculators from being merely basic arithmetic machines to being pocket computers that can handle everything from statistics to alge…
Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret
Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM.
Ars Technica’s Top 20 video games of 2025
A mix of expected sequels and out-of-nowhere indie gems made 2025 a joy.
The mObywatel's user interface source code has been published
After over one and a half years delay the parts of mObywatel's source code have been published, comprising the user interface of the mobile apps for Android and iOS.
We own the hardware, but not the experience anymore — Big Tech keeps building smarter, more connected devices, but the user experience feel…
Big Tech or Big Brother? We've fallen out of love with Big Tech because our devices feel less like helpful tools and more like strangers in our homes.
The ‘doorman fallacy’: why careless adoption of AI backfires so easily
Human roles are often rich and complex, and not easily reduced to a technological solution.
blog dds: 2025-12-23 — An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape
Several news outlets reported the discovery of a 1970s Fourth Edition Research Unix magnetic tape at the University of Utah in July 2025 and its successful restoration. This is a significant find, because up to now only…
Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI
Salesforces has entered a phase of public reckoning after senior executives publicly admitted that the company overestimated AI’s readiness
TIL that when Americans migrate from violent states, the risk of future violence follows them
The most violent U.S. regions — Appalachia, the Deep South and the old frontier states — are still deeply marked by a Wild West, stand-your-ground ethos, says a new study co-authored at UC Berkeley.
How Wind Nearly Took Down Boulder NTP
NTP is one of the most interesting and important, but all too forgotten, protocols that makes the internet tick. Accurate clock synchronization is required for everything ranging from cryptography …
Agentic ProbLLMs: Exploiting AI Computer-Use and Coding Agents (39C3)
This talk demonstrates end-to-end prompt injection exploits that compromise agentic systems. Specifically, we will discuss exploits that ...
[Important Update] Postiz v2.12.0 - open source social media scheduling tool
📨 The ultimate social media scheduling tool, with a bunch of AI 🤖 - gitroomhq/postiz-app
A plan for a post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (a speech at 39C3 in Hamburg on Dec 28, 2025)
Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all...
Who cares about the Baltic Jammer? – Terrestrial Navigation in the Baltic Sea Region (39C3)
Reports of GNSS interference in the Baltic Sea have become almost routine — airplanes losing GPS, ships drifting off course, and timing s...
Hacking washing machines (39C3)
Almost everyone has a household appliance at home, whether it's a washing machine, dishwasher, or dryer. Despite their ubiquity, little i...
Presenting 14 practical vulnerabilities in GPG & similar tools on stage (39C3)
Might contain zerodays. https://gpg.fail/ From secure communications to software updates: PGP implementations such as *GnuPG* ubiquitous...
Star Citizen is on course to reach $1 billion in player funding in 2026, and we still might not get to play its singleplayer campaign next …
Roberts Space Industries' sim keeps raking in the cash.
All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale (39C3)
The Deutschlandticket was the flagship transport policy of the last government, rolled out in an impressive timescale for a political pro...
AI content on Wikipedia - found via a simple ISBN checksum calculator (39C3)
I successfully failed with a literature related project and accidentally built a ChatGPT detector. Then I spoke to the people who uploade...
Expert: EU Commission wants an "unlimited special legal zone" for AI
In a legal analysis for consumer advocates, experts warn of massive protection gaps due to the planned "digital EU omnibus". Big Tech is favored.
What an unprocessed photo looks like
Here’s a photo of a Christmas tree, as my camera’s sensor sees it:
TIL the Sundance Kid lived in Canada for three years
Harry Longabaugh — better known as the Sundance Kid — is perhaps most famous for his daring bank and train robberies as part of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch. But the American outlaw’s short stint as a cowboy and businessm…
'Baldur’s Gate 2: F My Bhaal Femcel Life' - Warlockracy
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
TIL: The word Vatnik is used in Russia and other post-Soviet states for steadfast jingoistic followers of propaganda from the Russian gover…
vatnik - Vatnik (Russian: ватник, pronounced [ˈvatʲnʲɪk]) is a political pejorative used in Russia and other post-Soviet states for steadfa...
MongoBleed explained simply | MongoDB exploit
CVE-2025-14847 allows attackers to read any arbitrary data from the database's heap memory. It affects all MongoDB versions since 2017, here's a simple explanation:
Extremely rare East German game console from the late 1970s tested — only such device produced by communist GDR, bought for $1,000 at aucti…
Machine with just a few Pong variants was snagged for roughly $1,000 in an online auction.
Last Year on My Mac: Look back in disbelief – The Eclectic Light Company
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
The Untold Story of the Nintendo Entertainment System
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Petlibro: Your Pet Feeder Is Feeding Data To Anyone Who Asks
How I found critical vulnerabilities in Petlibro smart pet feeders allowing complete account takeover via broken OAuth, access to anyone's pet data, device hijacking, and private audio recordings - and how they're still…
Raspberry Pi Gets Desktop Form Factor
Before the Raspberry Pi came out, one cheap and easy way to get GPIO on a computer with a real operating system was to manipulate the pins on an old parallel port, then most commonly used for print…
Why Are Cars Getting Rid Of Android Auto?
In-car, smartphone infotainment systems are a pro for car shoppers, but not necessarily carmakers who'd rather keep your data all for themselves.
More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds
Low-quality AI-generated content is now saturating social media â and generating about $117m a year, data shows
US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack
Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm incurred by Trump’s tariffs—and it’ll boost their own economies while making goods cheaper too.
Trump, 79, Rants Incoherently About Robots and AI
The president stumbled through a word salad as he tried to reassure Americans that robots and AI would not replace their jobs.
Linux Distros Designed for Former Windows Users Are Picking Up Steam | Linux Journal
For years, Windows users frustrated with constant changes, aggressive updates, and growing system bloat have flirted with switching to Linux. But 2025 marks a noticeable shift: a new generation of Linux distributions bu…
TIL: There are just over 9,000 Mediators (a.k.a. Arbitrators, or Conciliators) in the US as of the year 2024
Arbitrators, mediators, and conciliators facilitate negotiation through dialogue to help resolve conflicts outside of the court system.
Nvidia's $20B Antitrust Loophole
The Groq deal that dodged regulators, enriched Chamath, sidestepped Saudi entanglements and a whole bunch more
The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos: new research shows that 21-33% of YouTube’s feed may consist of AI slop or brainrot videos
Kapwing’s new research shows that 21-33% of YouTube’s feed may consist of AI slop or brainrot videos. But which countries and channels are achieving the greatest reach — and how much money might they make? We analyzed s…
Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents
:Anna's Archive scraped 86M songs from Spotify covering 99.6% of streams. The 300TB archive is already on torrents.
Google Deploying Huge CO2 Battery Facilities with Company Energy Dome
A comapny has come up with an intriguing approach that stores energy in enormous domes that are filled with compressed carbon dioxide gas.
Leaker Who Apple Is Suing Says 'Screw It,' Here's the Foldable iPhone Early
The YouTuber doesn't seem fazed by Apple's threats.
AI Police Reports: Year In Review
In 2024, EFF wrote our initial blog about what could go wrong when police let AI write police reports. Since then, the technology has proliferated at a disturbing rate. Why? The most popular generative AI tool for writi…
Windows 11 25H2 Includes a Faster NVMe Driver Needing Manual Installation
Although Windows has had awareness of the NVMe storage media protocol since Windows 8.1, it turns out that the stock Microsoft driver for NVMe devices, disk.sys, offers suboptimal performance. This driver dates back to …
Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott's Continuous Glucose Monitors
I wrote last month about my diabetes diagnosis this year and my difficult choice to wear a proprietary device (called a CGM) on my arm 24/7 to continuously monitor my glucose levels. Like my friend and colleague, Karen …
Can machines suffer?
We once denied the suffering of animals in pain. As AIs grow more complex, we run the danger of making the same mistake
Nvidia GeForce Now’s Time Limit Will Stop Gamers After 100 Hours Each Month
The game streaming service will make almost all of its users pay extra for extended access.
Spotify vs. Anna's Archive
Working Notes
Packaging Stremio’s GTK4 Shell: CEF Integration Adventures
Nine days debugging one function call, and other lessons from browser-engine integration Introduction When Stremio released their new GTK4-based shell using Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) instead of Qt5/QtWebEngine, …