It sounds like a joke, but there’s (bitcoin) treasure to the amount of $775 million in a UK garbage dump. The guy who lost the bitcoin is now trying to buy the dump.
Category: Technology
Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.
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Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji – clever nerdery here. I’d imagine this gets fixed in places that would be susceptible to malicious code.
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WikiTok to infinitely scroll Wikipedia
WikiTok infinitely scrolls Wikipedia, randomly loading articles.
From the developer, Isaac Gemel, Ars Technia describes WikiTok as
… a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It’s also thrilling because you never know what’s going to pop up next.
A fun bookmark to avoid doomscrolling.
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More details on the Musk Coup
Three articles regarding the ongoing Elon Musk coup.
The newsy bits from the Verge, Elon Musk’s rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government, particularly the GSA:
The GSA, an agency most of us have never had to think about, is in charge of buildings, sure. But also it runs an awful lot of the technical infrastructure of the government — it is basically the feds’ IT. If the US government were a brain, the GSA is the brain stem, the part that manages heartbeats and breathing so they’re below the level of thoughts.
The US Treasury has designated DOGE an insider threat:
Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”
And Mike Masnick sums it up, No people didn’t vote for this:
The campaign promised economic relief: cheaper eggs and lower gas prices. Instead, voters got an unelected tech billionaire systematically dismantling federal agencies, surrounded by a coterie of 4chan edgelord trolls LARPing as cabinet secretaries, all operating without congressional oversight or constitutional authority. They voted for economic stability and got the effective end of the American Constitutional Republic instead.
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The evil housekeeper problem
The evil housekeeper problem refers to a concept in computer security where once somebody is in the room where your computer is, security of that device can no longer be guaranteed. And right now, we are seeing this play out in real time with Elon Musk and DOGE.
You might think that there would be technical measures to stop someone right out of high school from coming in and changing the code to a government system. That the system could require two-factor authentication to deploy the code to the cloud. That you would need a smart card to log in to a specific system to do that. Nope—all those technical measures can be circumvented by coercion at the hands of the evil housekeeper.
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Backing up government data sets
Fascist bureaucrats don’t like facts that contradict their agenda. Backing up government data sets as an act of resistance.
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10 technologies for 2025
MIT Technology Review posted their prognostications for what 10 technologies will make an impact in 2025. Maybe this will be the year of the robotaxi. Interestingly, cow burps, a significant source of methane, might receive relief.
Cow burps are one of the largest sources of agricultural emissions—and one of the trickiest ones to solve. A food supplement that significantly reduces the amount of methane that cattle belch is now available in dozens of countries. Other products, which might prove even more effective, are likely on the way.
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The best DeepSeek explainer
Stratechery with the best DeepSeek AI explainer. It’s broad in describing the general applications and industry impacts, as well as parsing the technical bits of what they did.
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A network of AI-generated newsletters targeting “small town America”
Nieman Labs reports that “a network of AI-generated newsletters targeting “small town America.” All run by one person.
It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S. Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: “to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community.”
We need to add AI generated awareness to the media literacy skill set.
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Map of whiskey producing countries
For some time, I’ve been meaning to play with web friendly mapping and visualization tools such as d3.js, datamaps.js or crosslet.js. D3 is quickly becoming the defacto standard for displaying statistical visualizations on the web, and other libraries are hooking in to add additional capabilities, like mapping. Communicating data effectively is the future, if not right now, and being able to get that data on to the web efficiently is a valuable skill.
Like all skills, you need experience, and as a beginner it’s often best to dive in and muck around. It’s helpful, too, to have a purpose, or an itch to scratch when playing around with new tools. In my case, I wanted to create a map of countries that produce whisk(e)y.
First, I needed which countries produced whiskey. There’s no real definitive list, thus I used a composite of sources. And by produce, I mean distill. Also, I may have missed some countries or left them off if I could not corroborate what info I did find. Note, Scotland, Wales, England are part of the United Kingdom.
Next, I chose datamaps.js as my mapping tool. It looked straight forward and minimal. Tweaking a few settings, I set the default map color to grey and whiskey producing countries to red. To tell the tool to flag countries, you use an international three letter abbreviation and assign it an attribute. For example, here’s the designation for Australia:
AUS: {
fillKey: 'MAKES'
}Datamaps.js can also add other contextual information in its rollover of a country. Say you know how many distilleries there are for a country, you can add an additional property.
Below is a screenshot of the map. Click here to view the map of whiskey producers in the world.
Countries colored red are those that distill whisk(e)y.