fidzu : computers

"A hardware wallet is supposed to be the safest place to keep Bitcoin," writes The Street, since it never connects to the internet, its keys never leave the device, and "the whole point is that an attacker would need to physically hold it to steal anything." The problem is that anyone who can reproduce the recovery seed doesn't need to possess the COLDCAR, Nerds.xyz points out. More from The Street: [The recovery seed] is supposed to come from a hardware random number generator producing 128 bits of entropy, a number so large that guessing it is computationally impossible. It wasn't. According to Block's engineering team a single code change on March 1, 2021 caused the firmware to silently fall back to a software-based generator instead of the hardware one. On Mk3 devices the effective search space collapsed to roughly 40 bits. Coinkite has confirmed that figure and called it preliminary. The gap between 128 bits and 40 bits is not a matter of degree. It is the difference between a lock that cannot be picked and one that can be brute-forced by anyone with rented cloud computing.... Chainalysis found the attacker went after the largest balances first, pulling more than $30 million in the opening ten minutes. Within about 25 minutes, roughly 594 BTC had moved out of some 500 single-signature wallets. One victim lost around $1.8 million... Coinkite has shipped fixed firmware, but with a warning that matters more than the patch itself. Updating does not repair an existing seed. A seed created with weak entropy stays weak forever. Affected users have to generate an entirely new wallet on updated hardware and move their coins to it. By Saturday morning Galaxy research was tracking 1,158.66 BTC, worth roughly $75.1 million, taken from 2,673 addresses, according to the article. And "The Coldcard exploit is ONGOING," Galaxy Research posted an hour ago on X.com. "Move Coldcard single-sig funds to safe locations immediately!" We have reported ~600 addresses we believe to be hackers holding funds stolen from Coldcard-generated weak entropy addresses to federal investigators, industry compliance firms, and cross-industry cyber investigators. Thanks to Slashdot reader BrianFagioli for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Aug 2026 1:48am GMT

The Washington Post looks at giant tech companies "feeding every available dollar into the cash-incinerating maw of AI machines." They warn "Tech superstars that once had oodles of cash left over at the end of each year are now flipping into the red..." [While optimists expect] huge corporate profits and a society-wide boost to wealth and well-being... questions about that AI vision are now growing more urgent: When, if ever, will this payoff arrive? And what will the fallout be for Americans if the titanic investment doesn't quickly deliver? "This AI thing better work out because if it doesn't ... we're going to have a problem," said Torsten Slok, chief economist at investment firm Apollo Global Management. AI costs and doubts are spreading. The U.S. stock market has swooned this summer over fear of the AI bubble going bust... The AI gamble sweeping up American fortunes is led by tech companies splurging on hulking data centers packed with computer chips and equipment needed to develop sophisticated AI models and deliver them to customers. In investor calls in the past week, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon pointed to soaring AI-related sales and business deals. Advertisers are using the technology to tailor marketing pitches and corporations and start-ups are buying access to chatbots and other AI software to boost productivity... But this spending can only continue if AI generates an even larger avalanche of new revenue to pay for it all. Financial results released over the past week show that the AI titans' mammoth costs are largely swamping the sales boost from the technology. At Google, for every dollar of cash its business generated in the past three months, $1.15 went out the door to pay for AI computer chips and equipment, land for AI data centers and other big-ticket purchases. The company is covering the difference partly by borrowing money and selling more of its stock. Next year, five leading AI companies - Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle - are projected to have negative free cash flow, which measures the cash left over after paying expenses and AI infrastructure costs. The figures, based on investment analyst projections compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence, show a stunning reversal for what have been some of the world's most cash-generating corporations... The companies remain profitable by standard financial accounting measures that spread out the costs of their AI infrastructure spending over many years... Pessimists see a bet so gargantuan that it cannot possibly pay off. The pessimists are growing louder. The Bank for International Settlements, a typically measured institution in Switzerland that advises government bankers around the world, recently warned there was risk of "economy-wide recessions" if the AI boom falters. That could mean pain for workers and communities across the United States. "I'm not saying AI is going to go away, it's just not clear to me these guys are going to make money on it," said Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at investment bank Jefferies who has correctly predictedpast financial bubbles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Aug 2026 12:12am GMT

"An itch.io game bundle put together by Necrosoft Games and The United Videogame Workers-CWA union is a new way gamers can show their support for developers who have been let go amidst the ongoing video game industry labor crisis," writes Kotaku. Launched Thursday, it's already raised $57,859 from 3,984 contributors. (Average contribution size: $14.52) The bundle is pay-what-you-want with a minimum purchase price of $10, offering DRM-free PC versions of games including A Short Hike, SkateBIRD, and my favorite game in the pack, Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure ... The bundle will be available through August 13. The gaming blog Rock Paper Shotgun shares more details, starting with this quote from the bundle's page on itch.io: "Reports say 33% of the industry lost their jobs in the last two years, and the jobs they could fill are disappearing as CEOs try to replace them with AI. It's hard for companies to adjust to the new shape of the game industry, but even harder for the people they should be employing... To address this in some small way, we have created a bundle with almost 150 games. The proceeds of this bundle will go toward a hardship fund for those experiencing layoffs." Games industry workers currently out of work or under-employed can apply to this fund, which is distributed by the United Videogame Workers, to help out with basic necessities like food and rent. As a note, this is only available to US and Canada-based devs, but there's an FAQ explaining who can apply for the fund.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 Aug 2026 10:42pm GMT

NetBSD, the operating system specifically designed to run on anything from a supercomputer to a toothpick, just released version 11.0. There's a ton of changes and improvements here, such as a brand new port to RISC-V, which supports a number of the more popular RISC-V SoCs (sadly, not the one I have just yet). NetBSD 11.0 also adds initial support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform, as well as a port to the virt68k platform, which means the Motorola 68000 port in QEMU using paravirtualized devices. Speaking of virtualisation, they're also introducing a new MICROVM kernel for x86: New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machine boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs. ↫ NetBSD 11.0 release notes There's also improved support for Linux system calls in compat_linux, the npf firewall, and much more. Of course, the list of other improvements, buigfixes, and smaller changes is long, including many changes for old, outdated, or otherwise odd architectures and platforms, as is the NetBSD way. Which other operating system proudly lists substantial improvements to their PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, and Alpha ports, among others?

01 Aug 2026 9:14pm GMT

I have a policy to effectively never link to YouTube videos. I'll gladly make an exception for this one. Reflection is one of the most powerful concepts in Computer Science. Unfortunately, not every programming language is blessed enough to have it. In the 1980s, one company, Symbolics took the concept to the logical extreme. By representing EVERYTHING as objects; they created the most powerful (and inadvertently) least private operating system ever created! The company collapsed, but the ideas live on. Some modern languages got a full dose of reflection. Some…weren't so lucky. I ranked them all, and in the end I'll show you how I dragged C++ up a tier with my brand new runtime reflection library, CallMeMaybe! ↫ Laurie Wired The GitHub description of CallMeMaybe: CallMeMaybe (CMM) is a C++ runtime reflection library built on top of P2996 static reflection introduced in C++26. CMM purposefully mirrors many of the std::meta functions to provide a uniform interface, but allows runtime introspection, dynamic invocation, and instantiation by building a runtime reflection registry. Class members can be automatically traversed and reflected by simply adding ] as an annotation. CMM implements a custom type system to completely avoid RTTI requirements. ↫ CallMeMaybe GitHub page My YouTube linking policy will remain in place.

01 Aug 2026 9:05pm GMT

"We believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards."

01 Aug 2026 6:20pm GMT

Christopher Nolan's impressionistic remix of Homer's epic poem finds the man behind the myth.

01 Aug 2026 3:19pm GMT

Reddit may still be considering ending its licensing deal with Google.

01 Aug 2026 12:30pm GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Tcl, or the "Tool Command Language", created and released by John Ousterhout in 1990, deserves a place among the greatest products of the human mind. Especially when combined with its better known graphical user interface Toolkit - Tk. In 1997 Ousterhout was awarded the ACM Software System Award for Tcl/Tk, an award given to institutions or individuals recognized for developing software systems with a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both. ↫ Armen Barsegyan Everything you could ever possibly want to know about Tcl/Tk. There's nothing to add here; if this is up your alley - and you know if it is - just go ahead and read it, and stop wasting time here.

31 Jul 2026 10:44pm GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT