Technology

I've been digging through the 410 GB of Java heap dumps from TeleMessage's archive server, provided by DDoSecrets. Here's a description of the dataset, some of my initial findings, details about an upcoming open source research tool I'm going to release, and a huge list of potential TeleMessage customers.

First, some background. This "clean OPSEC" saga is unbelievable.

Mike Waltz invited a journalist into a Signal group full of high-level Trumpers where they discussed and executed bombing an apartment building full of innocent people. This led to Congressional hearings (about using a Signal group for war, not the war crimes themselves... Congress doesn't really care about those).

Later, Waltz was photographed using TeleMessage SGNL, an Israeli-made knockoff of Signal that archives messages for its customers, and that lied about supporting end-to-end encryption. Then TeleMessage was hacked, twice. The trivial vulnerability let anyone on the internet download Java heap dumps from the server. Then, DDoSecrets released 410 GB of these heap dumps, all from May 4, 2025, and is distributing them to journalists and researchers.

"The trove included material from disaster responders, customs officials, several U.S. diplomatic staffers, at least one White House staffer and members of the Secret Service," according to a Reuters report.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft don’t want you to repair your own tech, because they make a fortune from planned obsolescence. But learning to do it yourself brings empowerment.

If policymakers’ speeches and industry lobbying points are to be believed, commercial data is a strategic resource necessary to “win” the “AI race” with China. This argument demands continued widespread, unfettered, permissionless corporate access to vast troves of data (so the rhetoric goes). Not only consumer data should be accessible, but data held (and, in many cases, copyrighted by) corporations, research institu­tions, and other entities, too—all of which can be funneled into corporate AI systems, turbocharged into the military and national security apparatus, and used to gain a competitive edge, particularly against Beijing.

Indeed, there are plentiful ways that commercial data and open-source intelligence can be used to advance national security objectives and fulfill what many would agree are important governmental functions, such as hunting foreign hackers or investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine.30 Yet, the conundrum lies in the copious national security and counterintelligence problems embedded throughout the practically unrestrained private-sector data collection landscape. How­ever much might be gained by this (often nakedly self-serving) appeal to the national interest as the trump card against stronger AI and data regulations, there are too few incentives to consider what has already been lost: any semblance of anonymity, obscurity, or privacy that once enabled sensitive government entities to function safely.

Ultimately, policymakers must come to terms with the fact that U.S. national security officials, military service members, intelligence officers, and sensitive facilities worldwide already operate at a major disadvantage in the face of both state and nonstate adversaries alike. This vulnerability will only grow with time as long as we have few meaningful protections against data-brokers and other types of unfettered data collection, transmission, and use. Protecting service members from espionage, blackmail, sabotage, or worse will mean confronting a stark reality: piecemeal policing at the post-collection stage like that attempted by previous administrations cannot achieve what even a modest federal data privacy framework could. Taming the adtech market will require a great deal of political will, particularly in response to objections from would-be “national champions.”31 But the decade since the OPM hack has made one thing clear: data-dependent tech companies can champion the national economy or they can champion the national security bureaucracy, but doing the former through race-to-the-bottom data hoarding and sale will only put the latter in even greater jeopardy.

In 1994, the Microsoft designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Eno to compose music for Windows 95. The result was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, "The Microsoft Sound".

Eno shed further light on the composition of the sound on the BBC Radio 4 show The Museum of Curiosity, admitting that he created it using a Macintosh computer, stating "I wrote it on a Mac. I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them."

In 2025, the Microsoft Sound was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

Text source

Open Letter - Tools to view it without account

We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

I, however, believe the problem runs a little deeper than the economy, which is a symptom of a bigger, virulent, and treatment-resistant plague that has infected the minds of those currently twigging at the levers of power — and really, the only levers that actually matter.

The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.

This is the Rot Economy, which is a useful description for how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful — and sometimes beloved — services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth. But it’s worth noting that this transformation isn’t constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fuelled, publicly-traded incarnation.

HTML Paper

Discord has evolved from a gaming-focused communication tool into a versatile platform supporting diverse online communities. Despite its large user base and active public servers, academic research on Discord remains limited due to data accessibility challenges. This paper introduces Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024), the most extensive Discord public server's data to date. The dataset comprises over 2.05 billion messages from 4.74 million users across 3,167 public servers, representing approximately 10% of servers listed in Discord's Discovery feature. Spanning from Discord's launch in 2015 to the end of 2024, it offers a robust temporal and thematic framework for analyzing decentralized moderation, community governance, information dissemination, and social dynamics. Data was collected through Discord's public API, adhering to ethical guidelines and privacy standards via anonymization techniques. Organized into structured JSON files, the dataset facilitates seamless integration with computational social science methodologies. Preliminary analyses reveal significant trends in user engagement, bot utilization, and linguistic diversity, with English predominating alongside substantial representations of Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Additionally, prevalent community themes such as social, art, music, and memes highlight Discord's expansion beyond its gaming origins.

Hacker News Discussion

Epic Games' popular multiplayer shooter game "Fortnite" is available again on Apple's App Store in the US, capping a ban of nearly five years and marking a major win for the video game company.

Today we’re announcing SynthID Detector, a verification portal to quickly and efficiently identify AI-generated content made with Google AI. The portal provides detection capabilities across different modalities in one place and provides essential transparency in the rapidly evolving landscape of generative media. It can also highlight which parts of the content are more likely to have been watermarked with SynthID.

When we launched SynthID — a state-of-the-art tool that embeds imperceptible watermarks and enables the identification of AI-generated content — our aim was to provide a suite of novel technical solutions to help minimise misinformation and misattribution.

SynthID not only preserves the content’s quality, it acts as a robust watermark that remains detectable even when the content is shared or undergoes a range of transformations. While originally focused on AI-generated imagery only, we’ve since expanded SynthID to cover AI-generated text, audio and video content, including content generated by our Gemini, Imagen, Lyria and Veo models across Google. Over 10 billion pieces of content have already been watermarked with SynthID.