nym
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npub1hn4z...htl5
Good work, glad you didn’t give up
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The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall (2015)
Part 1 here: 
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.
originally posted at 
WIRED
The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall
As Ross Ulbricht's online drug empire mushroomed, he became rich, arrogant, and sloppy. Meanwhile, the feds were closing in.
WIRED
The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 1
How a 29-year-old idealist built a global drug bazaar and became a murderous kingpin.
Stacker News
deleted by author \ stacker news ~bitcoin
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A platform that moulds to your needs
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.
originally posted at 
A platform that moulds to your needs
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 se...
Stacker News
A platform that moulds to your needs \ stacker news ~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 se...
Building a tiny Linux from scratch
Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!
Here’s what it looked like:
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.
originally posted at 
Building a tiny Linux from scratch
Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!
Stacker News
Building a tiny Linux from scratch \ stacker news ~Design
Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop! Here’s what it looked like: Let me tell you how I got there. I w...
I'll think twice before using Github Actions again
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.
originally posted at 
I'll think twice before using Github Actions again
The blog post discusses dissatisfaction with GitHub Actions due to its limitations in managing complex workflows, especially in monorepo setups wit...
Stacker News
I'll think twice before using Github Actions again \ stacker news ~Design
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 co...
Nice head and shoe!
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