FeedCity

Our first story of 2026 revealed how a destructive new botnet called Kimwolf rapidly grew to infect more than two million devices by mass-compromising a vast number of unofficial Android TV streaming boxes. Today, we'll dig through digital clues left behind by the hackers, network operators, and cybercrime services that appear to have benefitted from Kimwolf's spread.

For the past decade, I've used Mailhog for local email debugging. Besides working on web applications that deal with email, I've long used email as the primary notification system for comments on the blog.

I built an Ansible role for Mailhog, and it was one of the main features of Drupal VM, a popular local development environment for Drupal I sunset 3 years ago.

Unfortunately, barring any future updates from the maintainers, it seems like Mailhog has not been maintained for four years now. It still works, but something as complex as an email debugging environment needs ongoing maintenance to stay relevant.

I joined a recording of the Oxide and Friends podcast on Tuesday to talk about 1, 3 and 6 year predictions for the tech industry. This is my second appearance on their annual predictions episode, you can see my predictions from January 2025 here. Here's the page for this yea...

How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI I picked up a few interesting tidbits from this Wall Street Journal piece on Google's recent hard won success with Gemini. Here's the origin of the name "Nano Banana": Naina Raisinghani, known inside Google for workin...

Today's links Where did the money go? Turning a mountain of (their) money into a pile of (your) money. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Revolutionary Colossus; T-Mobile CEO v EFF; Broadband isn't gasoline. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Rec...

Why I stopped consuming content at 2x speed, and the simple rule that changed how I listen to everything.

Matthias Ott shared a link to a post from Anthropic titled “Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”, which I read because I’m interested in the messy intersection of AI and security. I gotta say: I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything quite l...

Comparing token efficiency across 19 popular programming languages using RosettaCode data - from Clojure to C, there's a 2.6x difference.

[...] the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying ...

Today's links Writing vs AI: If you wouldn't ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for you, why would you ask it to write a college essay? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: WELL State of the World; A poem in 30m logfiles; Weapons of Math Destruction; Th...

Ten, twenty years ago customers over at large corporations would often ask me what hardware they’d need to run my software. As software developers, we’d tend to be rather blasé about such questions: “whatever you have lying around!”. If pressed, we’d say you’d need this much RAM and that much storage. We thought we were doing our users a tremendous favor by being so flexible. Yet, customers were very much not happy with our responses.

15 mins and 40 seconds. That's how long it took to troubleshoot the first tech problem of 2026, and that's how far you'll need to skip through this video to hear the audio at normal volume. The problem Scott and I had is analogous

AGI is here! When exactly it arrived, we’ll never know; whether it was one company’s Pro or another company’s Pro Max (Eddie Bauer Edition) that tip-toed first across the line … you may debate. But generality has been achieved, & now we can proceed to new questions. [.....

Related: This article examines what Australia can learn from international AI safety institutes. For analysis of the Commonwealth’s AI governance failures, see Slop for the People. For state-level AI governance, see State of Play: How Australian States Are (Not) Governing AI.

On 25 November 2025, Minister for Industry and Innovation Tim Ayres announced the establishment of the Australian AI Safety Institute (AISI). With a $29.9 million commitment and operations commencing “early 2026”, Australia will become the latest nation to join the International Network of AI Safety Institutes.

A field guide to sandboxes for AI

This guide to the current sandboxing landscape by Luis Cardoso is comprehensive, dense and absolutely fantastic.

He starts by differentiating between containers (which share the host kernel), microVMs (their own guest kernel behind hardwae virtualization), gVisor userspace kernels and WebAssembly/isolates that constrain everything within a runtime.

The piece then dives deep into terminology, approaches and the landscape of existing tools.

I think using the right sandboxes to safely run untrusted code is one of the most important problems to solve in 2026. This guide is an invaluable starting point.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: sandboxing, ai, generative-ai, llms

One of the key points I repeated when talking about the state of the tech industry yesterday was the salient fact that half a million tech workers have been laid off since ChatGPT was released in late 2022. Now, to be clear, those workers haven’t been laid off because their ...

I don’t much enjoy being a lab rat to your half-baked ideas. I can tell when your approach to what I use is: “Ship it and let’s see how people respond.” Well let me tell you something: I’m not going to respond. My desire to give you constructive feedback is in direct correl...

a three-part treatment for a near-universal affliction