Attn. homeschool fams Reminder that my brilliant chemist wife put all of her curriculum on-line for free. Covers topics suitable for advanced Jr High all the way through early college. Check it out here: chemwithamanda.com

This is the story of FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. I was the primary author of Windows Product Activation on the operating systems side. Not the key math – those were the ACTUALLY smart guys with heads so big that they bumped the doorjamb on the way into your office. I just did the protection of and integration into the operating system. As you likely recall, Product Activation required that you have a key, and you’d have to activate it online or over the phone. But Microsoft had large corporate customers, think hundreds of thousands of PCs, and those customers did not want to have to activate every offline PC. So in that case, you would be given special “Volume Media” that could be unlocked with a Volume key. That way, a volume key could never unlock your retail CD. Now, to know what media you have, I inspect the disc image. And the Volume licensing media contained a special binary blob that I made. It was about 10MB of data, entropy stripped, hard to duplicate on Usenet at the time. And it was only present on the Volume media. That secret data, which I hashed and checked to match to the key, was Microsoft Bob. I took their disc data and compressed and encrypted it several times. Rest assured it’s encrypted and even in the AI age no one has extracted it yet. I really just needed random data, so I started with a precompressed binary image because, secretly, I was young and didn’t know if I could trust CryptGenRand  And so, if you ever tried the FCKGW key on a regular XP CD, it wouldn’t work, because you didn’t have Bob buried in your bits. But if you had the means in 1995 to download large ISO binaries or copy CDs, all it took was the key and a copy of the disc. The key itself still had to pass the product-key validation math (the part I didn’t own). Once it did, WPA simply skipped the rest of the process. That combination—valid VLK + matching volume media—is what made the install look fully legitimate, including early Windows Update checks. How it leaked RTM went to manufacturing on 24 August 2001. Retail launch was 25 October. Roughly five weeks before launch the warez group Devils0wn (often written “Devil’s Own”) posted a complete, non-beta “Windows XP Pro Corporate” ISO together with the FCKGW key. That ISO was the volume media. Pirates then started baking the key into images or just writing it on the CD with a Sharpie. The famous photo of the marked-up disc is from that scene. The most plausible source is an OEM or hardware partner that received final media early so they could ship PCs on launch day. Dell is the name that comes up most often; Intel has also been mentioned because of later source dumps. There were very few organizations that actually possessed a VLK that early, which is why the timing points at a partner rather than a random corporate customer. But I do not know. Presumably someone does. Aftermath We started blacklisting the Product IDs that belonged to the leaked keys (FCKGW decoded to one of the 640-range PIDs we later treated as toxic) in SP1. SP2 and Windows Genuine Advantage made the check more aggressive and also started blocking updates for those installs. Other, un-leaked VLKs continued to work on volume media for years; Microsoft did not kill the entire volume-licensing path, just the ones that had escaped. So the design decision was “give trusted big customers a convenient offline path.” The operational failure was that the media and one of those keys left the building before the product even reached stores. Once both pieces were public, WPA’s hardware-binding never got a chance to run. These Days If you’re curious about what I’m doing today, check out Task Manager TMOG at tmog.org where you can download the Free version! It runs fully native on Windows, Mac, and Linux!

Thirty years ago, I wrote the original Windows Task Manager because I wanted it to look and work a certain way. Which is exactly how I've built TMOG. I'm stoked to announce the immediate availability of Task Manager TMOG Beta3 for Mac, Windows & Linux. Download it for free now at tmog.org!

A recent investigation conducted by Gamers Nexus alongside Level1Techs and independent security researchers has revealed that LG smart TVs scan local networks to map nearby devices and capture microphone audio even when the screen is turned off. The collected data is saved locally and uploaded to corporate servers as soon as the television is reconnected to the internet. Technical tests executed through network packet analysis with Wireshark highlighted invasive behaviors on retail models, including the G5 OLED series. Regarding local network mapping, the television actively scans the home network to identify smartphones, smartwatches, and other connected third-party devices, collecting internal IP addresses, names of neighboring Wi-Fi networks, and their relative signal strengths. For standby audio interception, the built-in microphone, which is often present in the remote control or the TV body for voice commands, remains active when the screen is turned off to record ambient audio. For advertising purposes, part of this information is used to feed LG Ad Solutions, the corporate division dedicated to profiling and targeted advertising.

🚨 Walmart just updated their privacy policy and going forward they will be collecting all this information from you: - Name - IP address - Social media information - Browsing and search activity - Keystroke patterns - Voiceprint - Iris and retina imagery - Face geometry - Palm prints - Fingerprints - Household income - Education - Professional and employment information - Family health - Exact device location - Email address - Shipping address - Criminal history / background check - Individual preferences - Characteristics - Shopping patterns and behaviors - Spending tendencies - License plate data with automated readers in their parking lots - In-store surveillance camera footage - In-store mobile device location with Wi-Fi They will collect some of this data with their app, and some will be collected just from you walking into a store or pulling into a parking lot - Walking into a Walmart their policy lists then use their cameras to get a face geometry as something they may collect - License plate readers in parking lots with time and location stamps - If your phone is in their store and connected to WiFi they can log your location - If you call into customer service they can voiceprint How the heck is this legal?? We need new privacy laws immediately

We just created a course on Tmux. It is free for all. No sign up needed. Enjoy learning Linux with us 😎 linuxhandbook.com/courses/tm…

One of the best hands-on introductions to Linux, "Linux Fundamentals" by Paul Cobbaut, is now available on @ChapterPal. Enjoy: chapterpal.com/ebook/44dafdf… (All books and papers on ChapterPal are free to read.)

Motorola just made a move most people won’t notice yet. They’re teaming up with GrapheneOS, the team behind the most private phone software available. Until now, that level of privacy was basically limited to Google Pixels. This partnership changes that. Future Motorola phones are being designed to support it properly from day one. That means more everyday phones that don’t quietly track everything you do. No need to be a tech expert or privacy obsessive. Just better options arriving for people who want a normal phone that treats them with a bit more respect. It’s not out yet, but the shift has started. Source: motorolanews.com/motorola-th…

You don't need a Kubernetes cluster to get good at Kubernetes 😎 Found a repo with 50 hands-on Kubernetes labs you can run directly in your browser: → kubectl instead of just reading docs → Pods, Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets → HPA, scheduling, taints & tolerations → RBAC, Secrets, namespaces & quotas → Services, Ingress & real troubleshooting You get a real Kubernetes environment in the browser, with labs built around actually doing the work. Just open a lab and start breaking things. Repo: github.com/labex-labs/kubern…

An open source introduction to bash scripting for developers and system administrators. Covers fundamentals through advanced topics including variables, loops, functions, debugging, custom commands, JSON parsing, and API integrations. Structured to help automate daily devops and sysops tasks. github.com/bobbyiliev/introd…

Learn Bash Scripting for free! read.sysxplore.com/l/bashhan…

Confirmation of Anthropic’s BOOK BURNING for their AI: The Great Forgetting of the Amnesia Generation In the quiet warehouses and shipping docks of 2024, Anthropic did not merely train an AI. It staged a quiet erasure of human knowledge. While the public was still dazzled by Claude’s fluent paragraphs and polished marketing emails, the company’s engineers and logistics teams were busy executing Project Panama—an internal campaign whose own documents announced the ambition to “destructively scan all the books in the world.” The method was industrial and irreversible: buy the physical volume SOMETIMES THE LAST COPY, slice its SPINE with a hydraulic cutter, feed the pages through high-speed scanners, then pulp what remained. Millions of books: scientific research, novels, rare technical treatises, obscure monographs, volumes that had already survived wars, fires, and decades of handling—were reduced to data tokens and then to wet mulch or burned. They literally burn the evidence of this crime against humanity. The company itself preferred the darkness. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this,” the planning memos warned. A federal judge later blessed the slaughter. Because Anthropic had purchased the copies and then destroyed them, the court held, the act was “transformative” fair use. Ownership plus obliteration equaled permission. The ruling handed every subsequent AI lab a legal license to treat the printed past as disposable feedstock. That license is now being exercised at industrial scale. In 2026, companies like ISBNdb openly market pre-2022 books as the last pure reservoir of human language—text uncontaminated by the synthetic sludge that large language models themselves have already poured into the open web. Orders arrive for tens or hundreds of thousands of titles at a time. Non-disclosure agreements are standard. The preferred language is “digital preservation.” The actual outcome is the same mechanical process Anthropic refined: spine cut, pages scanned, original shredded. Rare and near-unique copies are disappearing into the same pipeline. Booksellers across continents report sudden, strange bulk orders for specialized, low-demand titles that no ordinary collector would ever buy in volume. Once the pages are gone, they are gone forever. A website can be re-uploaded. A bestseller can be reprinted. The last three surviving copies of an eighteenth-century botanical text cannot. This is not progress. It is the Great Forgetting. An entire generation of machines is being taught to speak by consuming and then discarding the physical record of human thought. The companies that profit from the resulting fluency call the process necessary, legal, and even enlightened. They speak of curated knowledge and domain-specific expertise while the spines crack and the paper is carted away. Anthropic did not invent the hunger for data, but it demonstrated openly in private documents and then under court seal how far a well-funded laboratory was willing to go to satisfy it, and how readily the law would ratify the destruction. Just to gain a temporary AI benchmark advantage. The amnesia is already here. Future models will generate elegant sentences to beat Al sorts of tests about history, science, and literature. They will do so on the ashes of the books that once contained those sentences. The generation that built these systems will leave its children fluent machines and emptier shelves. That is the real product of Project Panama and its successors: not intelligence, but a carefully engineered cultural void, papered over with synthetic prose and non-disclosure agreements. We are left to forget to remember. We are The Amnesia Generation with our brains being put into a meat grinder and fed back to us.

“No cell number, no account.” That’s what I was told. My phone has no SIM card, and I don’t use a traditional cell number. Yet I still got the account set up. Here’s what I did.

I co-founded pfSense. For the last year I've been building its successor. If you run pfSense today, you already know the reasons to look around: development you can't influence, a CE edition that feels like an afterthought, FreeBSD driver roulette on modern hardware, and a config workflow where one bad apply on a remote box means a drive. nfSensei is my answer. Built from scratch in Rust, on Linux, and designed around the things pfSense users actually complain about. Your config.xml imports. There's an importer that reads your pfSense config, shows you exactly what maps over and what needs attention, then applies it. You don't start from zero. You can't brick it from the couch. Changes stage as a candidate, diff before apply, validate through the real engines before anything is written, and auto-roll-back if you don't confirm in time. If a config ever fails at boot, the box falls back to the last good one on its own. The hardware works. Linux base means modern NICs and drivers just work — and the fast path compiles your rules to XDP at 40Gbps. Automation is native, not scraped. Everything the UI does is a documented API call — about 1,140 of them, with a built-in explorer. Your Ansible finally gets a real interface. The VPNs are current. WireGuard, IPsec, Tailscale, and self-hosted mesh — your own control plane, your keys — plus post-quantum key exchange where it counts. The experimental stuff has its own wing. Thirty-plus Labs features behind toggles: WAN bonding that fuses multiple cheap uplinks through a $5 VPS into one resilient pipe, per-flow SLA telemetry with tamper-evident audit chains, GeoDNS that steers traffic by live RTT and load, application-aware QoS, config push to a whole fleet of remote nodes, and an AI assistant on the box that reads your actual interfaces and logs using local models. Toggles are per-browser and can't touch your running config — flip things on, break them, tell me about it. Oh, and there is much more to mention here! Self-hosted, on your hardware, no cloud account, no subscription. It's NOW IN ACTIVE BETA (previously alpha) with about 40 testers, and bug reports typically get fixed in days. I want more people who know what pfSense does well and can tell me exactly where nfSensei falls short. If you are interested in testing please email me: sullrich@gmail.com. Tell me about your pfSense setup and I'll get you access. Note: Affiliates and employees of Netgate are not invited.

Anthropic pays $750,000+ a year for engineers who can build LLMs from scratch. Not how to prompt them. Not how to fine-tune them. Not how to build RAG pipelines. But how to build them from scratch. This 2-hour Stanford lecture teaches you everything. Scaling laws. Data collection. Architecture design. Post-training alignment. Free. From Stanford. Watch first. Then read this. The lecture is the theory. And this article shows you how to actually build it (with code) ↓

I've been a backend Engineer for 12+ years. Today, I'm a Principal Engineer at Atlassian. I've designed systems that handle millions of requests. Sat on both sides of system design interviews. Reviewed more architecture docs than I can count. Starting today, I'm breaking down the fundamentals of scaling for the next 25 days. If you're learning system design bookmark this thread, you're going to get a lot of learning from this.

Long, but interesting writeup. Walks through a basic setup using either Obsidian or Claude.ai

🚨 VeraCrypt 1.26.20 is here! • ⚡ Performance boost: SHA-256 acceleration on ARM64 • 🛠️ Fixed regressions: Linux Mint auth, Windows driver issues • 🔄 "Unmount" replaces "Dismount" for consistency 🔗 Release notes: veracrypt.fr/en/Release%20No… ⬇️ Downloads: veracrypt.fr/en/Downloads.ht…

Apologies, I forgot to add links in my previous post. Here are the 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐀𝐳𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐬 resource links: 📘 AZ-104 – Microsoft Azure Administrator microsoftlearning.github.io/… 📘 AZ-500 – Azure Security Technologies microsoftlearning.github.io/… 📘 AZ-700 – Azure Networking Solutions microsoftlearning.github.io/… 📘 AZ-305 – Azure Infrastructure Solutions microsoftlearning.github.io/… 📘 AZ-140 – Azure Virtual Desktop microsoftlearning.github.io/… 📘 AZ-800 – Windows Server Hybrid Core microsoftlearning.github.io/… 📘 AZ-801 – Windows Server Hybrid Advanced microsoftlearning.github.io/… 📘 SC-300 – Identity & Access Administrator microsoftlearning.github.io/… 📘 AZ-400 – DevOps Solutions microsoftlearning.github.io/…