Ars Technica: In comedy of
errors, men accused of wiping gov databases turned to an AI tool
US DOJ: Two Virginia Men Arrested for Conspiring to Destroy
Government Databases.
The indictment:
- On February 18, 2025, at approximately 4:58 p.m.,
MUNEEB AKHTER issued commands that deleted a DHS production database
containing U.S. government information. The database was hosted on a Company-1 server in
the Eastern District of Virginia.
- On February 18, 2025, at approximately 4:59 p.m., MUNEEB AKHTER
asked an artificial intelligence tool, “how do i clear system logs from SQL servers after
deleting databases.”
- On February 18, 2025, at approximately 5:14 p.m., SOHAIB AKHTER
stated aloud, “They’re gonna probably raid this place,” to which MUNEEB
AKHTER replied, “I'll clean this shit up.” SOHAIB AKHTER
responded, “We also gotta clean stuff up from the other house, man.”
Interesting both for work, and for thinking about environments and platforms like Emacs: Jack Rusher at Strange Loop 2022: Stop
Writing Dead Programs.
I found a taker for the TI99-4a that came into my life, but in pondering the joy of the
BASIC environment I was reminded of a lot of the Seymour Papert and Alan Kay ideas that made
their way into this talk, about how a great environment isn't just about being able to
inspect the state at a given place, but to play with it and let it continue.
My primary environment these days has been XCode, and the problems with Apple's direction on
software process are well documented, but as conditional breakpoints are apparently broken
and it's harder to change values than it was with CodeView or SoftICE back in the day, I've
been pondering this even at my level.
Darkness fell, like a cliche in a room full of poetry majors.
I've been seeing the posts about RAM, and not quite understanding what was up (especially
given that "DDR" will always mean "Dance, Dance, Revolution" to me), but allison @aparrish@friend.camp
noted
you know i'd never stopped to consider how annoying tulip mania must have been for folks
who just wanted to grow a few pretty flowers in their front garden
about Ars Technica: After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop
selling RAM to consumers
The surprise announcement from Micron follows a period of rapidly escalating
memory prices, as we reported in
November.
A typical 32GB DDR5 RAM kit that cost around $82 in August now sells for about $310, and
higher-capacity kits have seen even steeper increases.
Yikes, especially since 32G seems to be the absolute minimum for a computer these days...
Edit: Pivot to AI weighs in.
My VLC wrapped for 2026: Top artist was "Unknown Artist", top album was "Unknown Album".
Single top track was "Vocal Warmup 2.mp3".
From the creators of Oglaf, though this one is mostly SFW, some notes on owning a pony. For
the horse-y people in my feed....
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pony-club-144777978