Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia

BrianKrebs · Krebs on Security · krebsonsecurity.com · 18 min

Two men in Western Australia are arrested for allegedly belonging to TeamPCP, the cybercrime group behind hundreds of malicious open-source packages and the Shai-Hulud worm. The investigation ties the 21-year-old suspect to a Perth family through leaked credentials and a HackerOne profile, and includes a Signal interview with the group's leader, who says he quit before the LiteLLM attack. Excerpted from the full report.

Hacker News: 20 points · 2 commentsComments

How the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Works

Brian Potter · construction-physics.com · 19 min

Explains the history and engineering of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, from its post-1973 embargo creation to the solution-mined salt caverns along the Gulf Coast. Details the physical limits on drawdowns: cavern creep, salt dissolution, and the disputed operational minimums cited by analysts, from 70 million to 300 million barrels. This is an excerpt from a longer piece.

Hacker News: 4 points · 0 comments

Make a Portable Wide-screen Mechanical TV

James Brown · IEEE Spectrum · spectrum.ieee.org · 6 min

Using a Nipkow drum instead of a disk, the Scanwheel packs a 4,096-by-20 electromechanical display into a 6-centimeter-wide 3D-printed case. A Raspberry Pi Pico's PIO coprocessors handle the LED modulation, allowing video streaming from a PC, and an OpenSCAD file lets others customize the drum.

Bazel Module Versions Aren’t SemVer

Andrew Nesbitt · nesbitt.io · 4 min

The Bazel Central Registry's latest-release query shows protobuf as 3.19.6, four years behind its real 36.0.bcr.1, because a strict SemVer parser rejects every newer version. The article explains Bazel's deliberately looser version format and the .bcr.N patch convention, plus the fix porting that sorting logic to Ruby and Go.

Christophe Pettus: All Your GUCs in a Row: log_directory, log_filename, and log_file_mode

Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 6 min

PostgreSQL's logging defaults are fine for a laptop, wrong for a server: data-directory logs get copied by pg_basebackup, share a disk with WAL, and sit in 0700 directories that block shippers. Since the server never deletes log files, the filename pattern is the retention policy; the article recommends a 0750 directory, daily filenames, 0640 mode, and a cron job.

Oxmiq Labs HBF in AI Compute at Hot Chips 2026

Patrick Kennedy · ServeTheHome · servethehome.com · 5 min

At Hot Chips 2026, Oxmiq Labs presents high-bandwidth flash (HBF) as a capacity tier for AI inference, not a cheaper HBM. Their rack-scale simulation shows HBF yielding 14x capacity at 0.6x bandwidth, but only when bandwidth demand is low—as in large MoE models with small batches and long-context sparse KV. The talk also details software constraints and a proposed vLLM plugin.

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Sandboxing coding agents

Micah Lee · micahflee.com · 11 min

A step-by-step setup confines an agent to a single isolated GitHub repo, a dedicated agent-only SSH signing key, and a fine-grained PAT that grants access only to that repo. The key lives in a separate SSH agent forwarded to Docker Sandboxes, so agent commits appear signed and authored as 'Micah Lee (agent)' rather than the human. A test run has a Claude agent open a signed PR in 30 seconds.

Hacker News: 2 points · 0 comments

Decoding cosmic signals with deep learning and Keras

Google Developers Blog · developers.googleblog.com · 21 min

Deep learning reconstructs cosmic-ray mass composition from the Pierre Auger Observatory's surface detectors, replacing hand-designed features with end-to-end training on simulated shower signals. The Keras model splits the data into a temporal LSTM per station and a hexagonal convolutional spatial network, exploiting the physics symmetries of the detector grid. It uses full waveforms rather than compressed charge and arrival time, avoiding information loss.

OpenClaw went viral. Meet the maintainers building and securing it.

Gregg Cochran · The GitHub Blog · github.blog · 8 min

OpenClaw's maintainers reflect on the open-source AI assistant's explosive growth—388,000 stars in under a year—and the chaos that comes with it: thousands of pull requests, many from non-developers using agents. They share lessons on rethinking trust, reviewing AI-generated code with AI, and securing dependencies, including insights from the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund.

Ladies of the ’80s

Lisa Whittington-Hill · Longreads · longreads.com · 27 min

An excerpt from a personal essay that revisits the female pop stars of the 1980s—Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Grace Jones, Joan Jett—through the eyes of a teenage girl in suburban Edmonton. It recounts Madonna's scandalous 1984 VMA performance and how these artists' defiance of gender norms shaped the author's identity, style, and sense of rebellion, while also tracing their enduring influence on later musicians.

I Wish Rockstar Cared About People As Much As It Does GTA VI NPCs

Nathan Grayson · Aftermath · aftermath.site · 7 min

Rockstar's GTA VI showcases 600,000 bespoke animations and hand-crafted NPCs, a celebration of human artistry. Yet the company simultaneously forces five-day return-to-office, fired union organizers, and faces legal action over pay inequity and crunch. The piece argues the game's human-made world cannot justify the human toll.

Selling out

seangoedecke.com · 17 min

Selling out is no longer easy, argues this essay: it takes technical skill and organizational sense. Walking through Marx, the Situationists, Sartre and C. Wright Mills, it contends that professional role-playing need not destroy an authentic inner life—the real dangers are humiliation and losing the self. The author places himself on a spectrum of compromise, choosing professionalism with guarded integrity.

Hacker News: 5 points · 0 comments

Neuroscience: We Are Not Just Our Brains

421 | Medio digital Cultura, tecnología, juegos y vida real · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · 421.news · 21 min

Neuroscience has become a secular soul, reducing subjectivity to neurochemical explanation—what the essay calls neuroscientism. Critiquing examples from the 'second brain' gut to the mereological fallacy, it argues that psychological life cannot be reduced to brain activity, defending the irreducible specificity of mind and experience.

I Came To Hell Clock For The Vibes, Then Learned A History Lesson

Maddy Myers · Aftermath · aftermath.site · 6 min

Hell Clock, a roguelite that turns Brazil's Canudos Massacre into an underworld crawl, succeeds on vibes rather than exposition. The piece follows the author from bafflement to historical reading, covering Antônio Conselheiro's ambiguous legacy and how the game's ticking timer makes each run feel more Vampire Survivors than Hades.

6 questions hanging over the race to replace Seth Moulton in Congress’ 6th District

GBH News · wgbh.org · 8 min

With no independent polling, fundraising tiers split the six Democrats vying for Massachusetts' open 6th District seat: Dan Koh has raised $4.7 million, John Beccia $4.5 million (mostly self-funded), and Tram Nguyen $900,000. The race's open questions—how hard to hit Trump, whether Biden's endorsement matters, Gaza, AI regulation, and the Moulton legacy—could let a candidate win with just 17% of the vote.

Flock cameras may not be worth the civil liberties trade-off, policing expert says

GBH News · wgbh.org · 6 min

An officer allegedly used Flock's license plate readers to track an ex-girlfriend, prompting New Bedford's council to vote to request removal or covering of its 20 cameras. Policing expert Matt Ross argues the system's benefits are limited to low-priority crimes like motor vehicle theft, making it a poor trade-off for civil liberties versus automated traffic enforcement. Massachusetts, he says, is the best place to rein it in or ban it.

Lindsay Clancy closing arguments: Both sides make final case as jury begins deliberations

GBH News · wgbh.org · 5 min

Closing arguments conclude in the Lindsay Clancy trial, leaving the jury to decide whether she was criminally responsible for killing her three children. Prosecutors argue she showed 'ordered thinking' and control; the defense blames medication and medical care, citing postpartum psychosis. The verdict will choose between life in prison without parole and commitment to a mental health facility.

A .horse by any other name: ICANN's $500M expansion of the DNS namespace

Interdependencies · Popular Posts on Scour Today · i15s.org · 18 min

In the excerpt, the new gTLD round collects 1,600 applications at $227,000 each, about $500 million before auctions. A decade after the last expansion, audits found no competition benefit; much of the 2012 namespace later sat parked or blocklisted, and 90 percent of gTLD domains carry no registrant identity. Nobody is required to say where the money goes.

Hacker News: 2 points · 0 commentsComments

Why Cherry MX ULP Keyboard Switches Deserve a Desktop Comeback

IGN · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · ign.com · 12 min

Revisiting the Corsair K100 Air Wireless, the author argues Cherry's Ultra Low Profile switch — with its 1.8mm travel and sharp tactile bump — remains a superior typing experience that the industry abandoned for Hall effect and TMR. He contends a mid-priced relaunch with good stock keycaps could finally win desktop users, as boutique boards like Mistel's AirOne prove the tech works.