Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

Why frontier AI has broken the open CTF format, hollowed out the scoreboard, and made competitive CTF performance a weaker signal than it used to be.

Matlab: Communications Toolbox

A 0-click exploit chain for the Pixel 10

We recently published an exploit chain for the Google Pixel 9 that demonstrated it was possible to go from a zero-click context to root on Android in just tw...

How to Write to SSDs [pdf]

Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)

Since around 2009, methamphetamines have been made with phenylacetone (P2P). Is there a chemical different causing schizophrenia?

SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud

The actual queries I run when I'm hunting fraud in transaction data. Velocity, impossible distances, suspicious amounts, merchant clusters, off-hours buys, and window functions.

California bill would require patches or refunds when online games shut down

Publishers would have to offer "independent" play patch or refunds after server shutdowns.

Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64

England Runestones

Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals

I love quasicrystals---like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they've very rare in nature. They're created only by the most exotic and violent events: a high-speed collision of asteroids, lightning hitting a downed power cable in a sand dune---or an atomic bomb! Amazingly, the first 3 kinds of naturally occurring…

California's Battery Array Is as Powerful as 12 Nuclear Power Plants

Ploopy Bean: a trackpoint for every computer

The sigmoids won't save you

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The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme

The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy advantage of oxygen. New research finally explains how this is possible.

I Bought a “Junk” PSP From Japan

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

Orthrus-Qwen3: up to 7.8×tokens/forward on Qwen3, identical output distribution

Fast, lossless LLM inference via dual-view diffusion decoding. - chiennv2000/orthrus

Research on mildew contamination affecting the sound quality of analog tapes

Since 1947, analog tape recording has become the dominant method of sound recording and has been widely used in music, cultural outreach, scientific research, and news gathering, producing a large number of important audio archives. However, due to the presence of adhesives, mildew often develops on the tape magnetic layer and edges, posing a serious threat to long-term preservation and sound quality. ATR-FTIR and SEM were used to characterize the chemical and physical properties of magnetic tape. Penicillium and Aspergillus were used to prepare samples with different coverage degrees of mildew, and the corresponding audio samples were analyzed using Praat. The relationships between spectral characteristics, acoustic parameters, and mildew