news

Ross is finally free 🗽🤠

flat24

bitcoin

Part 1 here: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

THE DESCENT WAS stunning. Chris Tarbell, a special agent from the New York FBI office, was in a window seat, watching a green anomaly in a sea of blue as it resolved into Iceland’s severe, beautiful landscape. On approach to Keflavík International Airport, he could now see the city of Reykjavik coming into view. And just beyond that, perched on the edge of a moss-covered lava field: the massive matte-white box that housed the Thor Data Center. That’s why Tarbell and two US attorneys had come all this way. Thor was the home of a computer with a very important IP address, one that Tarbell and his FBI colleagues had discovered back in New York—the hidden server for a vast online criminal enterprise called Silk Road.

They’d been working on this case for months, as had federal agents across the country, in a wide-ranging digital manhunt for Dread Pirate Roberts: the mysterious proprietor of Silk Road, a clandestine online marketplace that functioned like an anonymous Amazon for criminal goods and services. Silk Road investigations had been launched by Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and the DEA office in Baltimore, where an agent named Carl Force had been working an undercover identity as a Silk Road smuggler for more than a year.

Tarbell and his team—known as Cyber Squad 2 (or CY2 for short and “the Deuce” for fun)—were relative newcomers to the case. The other agencies had dismissed the FBI, partly because of interagency bluster and partly because the traditional agents who thought casework was all guns and grime and grit had no respect for the eggheads from cybercrime. But in the midst of this enormous law enforcement effort—mostly fruitless so far—Tarbell and CY2 had found the first promising lead in the case.

Cybercrime agents spend a lot of time at their desks, and it was exciting to be in the field. Down below they could see Iceland’s fierce geology, all jutting rock built up from the water by volcanoes. Beneath the surrounding ocean are the massive cables that make the country an important location for web traffic; the island is nearly equidistant between North American and Europe, and its forbidding geography and climate reduce cooling costs and provide free geothermal power. One of the attorneys told Tarbell about Iceland’s tectonic forces—the North American and Eurasian plates, slowly tearing open a growing chasm. Really puts you in your place, Tarbell thought.

The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall (2015)

Design

Emacs users may be known for bringing in all sorts of diverse workflows into their beloved text editor. From the outside, I get how odd this may seem. We often treat our text editor as a platform of sorts to do our email, web browsing, calendars, project management, chat… the list goes on.

Take email, as an example. Back in 2018 I thought "managing email from Emacs… surely that's crazy-talk", yet I gave it a try just in case. 7 years later and I never looked back. I still use the excellent mu4e client.

As you become more accustomed to Emacs, you may find yourself wishing you could navigate other tasks just as efficiently. But this doesn't happen right away. The editor starts moulding to your needs, initially as you copy others's code/configurations, but this can only take you so far. Emacs truly does mould to your own needs, once you start learning a little elisp.

When comparing elisp to modern languages, one may be tempted to dismiss it as a niche language from another era. While both of those things may be true, its moulding and glueing capabilities remain just as relevant and powerful today, even in the LLM era.

Take a random workflow like extracting vocabulary from a Japanese class paper handout. While it may seem far-fetched for Emacs to handle this, it's actually fairly straightforward with a little elisp glue. Often, this consists of finding some crucial utilities and glueing them up.

![](https://m.stacker.news/74054)

A platform that moulds to your needs

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!

Here’s what it looked like:

![](https://m.stacker.news/74052)

Let me tell you how I got there.

I wanted to learn more about how the Linux kernel works, and what’s involved in booting it. So I set myself the goal to cobble together the bare neccessities required to boot into a working shell.

In the end, I had a tiny Linux system with a size of 2.5 MB, which I could boot from a USB stick on my laptop!

What you’ll get out of this article:

- A better understanding of what happens when your computer boots Linux.
- What terms like bzImage, initrd and UEFI mean.
- Ideas for how to deal with the problems that I encountered.
- And if you haven’t used Nix, it might be interesting to see how I used it to manage the tools and libraries I needed.

![](https://m.stacker.news/74053)

Building a tiny Linux from scratch

Before I rant about GitHub Actions, I'd like to set the context on where this dissatisfaction comes from. My team consists of about 15 engineers constantly pushing to the main branch. Our code lives in a monorepo split per module, which, through trunk based development, gets deployed multiple times a day.

I want to emphasize that your mileage may vary. There will be folks who say GitHub Actions are great (I also use them for smaller projects), but as with any tool, it has limits and might not be suitable for all problems. Let's look at some of them.

**GitHub doesn't care**

Of all the pain points, this is the worst one. It seems that GitHub doesn't care about fixing any of these issues or improving its product. Some of the threads have been open for years without any action taken by GitHub. A lot of these issues have been recently closed by GitHub causing a backlash from the community. There are no signs that these will be addressed based on their public roadmap.

![](https://m.stacker.news/74047)

I'll think twice before using Github Actions again

AskSN

Suggest me a Nym for my new video channel

Coinsreporter

mempool

The Mempoo Closed Source Project - shows ordinals stuff as poo emojis in blocks

k00b

charts_and_numbers

China lost ~100 billionaires and the US gained about ~80 billionaires last year

Why I’m Pausing BitEscrow to Build Nummus: A Better Bitcoin Ecosystem

TristanBietsch

Stacker_Stocks

Live Net Worth and Portfolios of Congress Members

frostdragon

How to sell BTC for USD Cash in NYC

02065574b6

AskSN: How can I print my own Bitcoin stickers?

Ross pardon coming:

HardMoney

This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it's targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM's - but really, like the plants it is named after, it'll eat just about anything that finds it's way inside.

It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse.

![](https://m.stacker.news/73921)

Nepenthes, a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers

In order to keep the high volume of media I stumble upon manageable, be able to reference it later, and keep a record of all that I see, read, watch, listen to, and generally enjoy, I’ve long had no systematic way of going about this until recently (read half a year ago). Most of what I’ll talk about in this post can most likely be replicated on other platforms, but the apps discussed here are exclusive to iOS and macOS.

**my current setup**

I used to keep a spreadsheet holding all the books, movies, and shows that I’ve read or watched, but using that spreadsheet on my phone where I log that information the most, made it feel like a chore. So I started using the apps Book Tracker and Movie Tracker for books and shows/movies respectively, and MusicBox and Play for music and (YouTube) videos respectively.

The most important piece in it all was GoodLinks, a read-it-later app, the kind of app that I didn’t know I needed. GoodLinks let me save links for later and get done with my social media doses for the day much quicker instead of reading articles right in Ivory or something.

I even used it as a bookmarking app until I found out the links aren’t archived. They’re flushed from the device storage after some time and not saved to iCloud. With my 400 links at the time, I discovered that 8 were rotten links. Mind you, my GoodLinks collection started in July of 2024 and by December of that year, 8 links were already rotten.

This put me in panic mode so I began searching for a bookmarking app that archives pages for me. Raindrop.io was at the top of search results. I had known about that app for a while, but never liked using it, especially on macOS. It just didn’t feel like the user experience I was after. That’s where Anybox comes into play. It’s a bookmark manager that can handle every file type you throw at it, just like Raindrop.io. It’s a native experience and syncs over iCloud and not some third party servers. Most importantly, the lifetime license to Anybox is just a little more expensive than the former.

Since getting that app, I’ve put 5gb worth of data into it. My entire GoodLinks library, memes, some cultural artifacts that have since been taken down, bookmarks, all in that one app. Everything follows the same tagging hierarchy I use in GoodLinks, though I modified it to fit the additional filetypes Anybox can handle. What ties all of this together is in the next section of this blog post.

**how i digest information**

I’ve tried this “new” hot thing called the Zettelkasten note taking method, but this pretentious stuff is really not for me. What I took away from this method is the principle of files over apps. What this means is that I store any notes or information that stuck in my brain in one central place which is my note taking app of choice Bear.

GoodLinks offers some highlighting with notes. Instead of storing notes about the article in GoodLinks, once I’m done with it, I move them over to Bear. The result is one central hub containing everything I know and enjoy. The aforementioned iOS apps also support deeplinking so I can link to each item from another app directly in Bear.1 Speaking of linking, Bear supports Markdown wikilinks, which I use a lot when one note references another. It’s a good thing Bear lacks the notorious Obsidian graph because that makes me link much more intentionally and not just to grow the graph.

In general I try to keep the number of items, that land in the tracking apps to begin with, to a minimum. I routinely triage what I will eventually look into and what not, so even if the backlog grows, I can trim it if necessary. When watching shows, I write down what I think – not for this blog, but for me. I might get into a conversation about this or that show/book/album/movie/topic and I would very much like to remember what I thought about it when I took it into me.

**final words**

We truly live in the Information Age. But this age doesn’t mean for us that all the information we crave is easily accessible, it’s just that we’re flooded with it. I save a ton of videos locally because I don’t trust to find them online a few months later. Been burnt way too many times, but now I also save every link I stumble upon. Most importantly, I save what I understood from it, too. Because of this large information intake, our brains rightfully can’t handle it. So we run out of memory and forget things one by one. What I did here is try and remedy this problem a little.

How I Deal with Information Overload

What equipment do I minimally need to create and print my own Bitcoin stickers at home? I want to spread them around and give them away, but want to do it efficiently as possible.

Best Dark Web Monitoring Tools

builders

Early Days with Lightning Bounties

These are my notes on refurbishing a laptop with a broken screen hinge to a NixOS home server. A coworker recommended Colmena for managing NixOS on remote machines, so I decided to give it a try. I got confused by the Colmena manual, which expects NixOS to be already set up on the remote host but doesn't clearly show how to move the existing nix (remote) config inside Colmena.

I use a TPM-backed ssh key which asks for a pin on every connection. To workaround the (documented) limitation of Colmena which requires non-interactive login, I started a ssh connection in "master mode" in another terminal. With this command running in the background, I am now able to run `colmena apply`.