The Apparatus - Jan 15, 6pm UTC A livestream with @VitalikButerin, SciFi author and historian @Ada_Palmer, & professional hacker @SherriDavidoff, moderated by @ml_sudo. Three theories on why privacy keeps losing, and how to turn the tables. Watch here: xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1yNGabWMM…

Banks started blocking AI agents this week. The builders answered with robot arms. These are racks of real phones, each with a mechanical arm tapping the screen like a human finger. This is PhoneUse, built by Abdulla Ababakre. It gives an AI agent a phone of its own. Most apps have no API for agents, and the rest are learning to block them. A real tap on a real phone leaves nothing for the app to flag. The direction is clear: if the software door closes, agents will walk in through the front door. Video credit: @abdullababakre

A few months ago I hosted a cybersecurity "Ugh Day" (a group chore day) for my friends. The format worked so well I think everyone should steal it: 1. List the accounts/devices that would be most devastating to lose… bank, email, phone, etc. 2. For each one, find its “weakest link” an attacker could use to get in. 3. Turn those into a todo list and fix them. We found things like:
- someone was using their phone without a password. and their phone had unrestricted access to email and 2fa. meaning if they lost their phone someone could steal everything. 
- someone was using as their recovery email an insecure Hotmail account made at age 10 - someone was still using as their ex lover’s email as a recovery email So much low hanging fruit to fix! I think a lot of people feel dread and avoidance around personal security, doing this together really helped.

🔓 Private Inference is now in Open Beta No more whitelists - login now at privateinference.gg 🧠 Frontier and open models side by side, in one chat and one OpenAI-compatible API. Fund a session once from your wallet. Each request is held at its maximum cost, and you pay only for what you actually use. 💸 Pay your way: · USDC on Base · cUSDC on Aztec, privately · ZEC from any wallet No model accounts, no cards, no monthly plans. 🔐 You decide how private each request is: · Zero data retention, the default · Standard routes, usually cheaper · Private execution (beta): your browser encrypts the prompt to a model in an attested TEE and checks the attestation itself 🤝 Bring your friends. Your referral code sits at the top of every page, and friends you bring in earn you balance credit. 🚀 We ship every week: privateinference.gg/changelo…

WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners. Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads. Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was. Got a root shell. then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems. This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.

5/8 What if we decoupled software distribution from vulnerability disclosure? Instead of releasing security updates in plaintext, vendors could distribute them encrypted, ahead of time. Devices could download and securely stage the update before its contents become public.

For 70 years, we were told plastic was safe because it doesn't react with anything. Nature just published proof that it does. And the trigger is water. Researchers at Columbia University and UC Berkeley took six of the most common plastics on Earth. Polyethylene. Polypropylene. Polystyrene. PVC. PET. Acrylic. The stuff in your water bottles, food containers, pipes and packaging. They ground them into microplastics and dropped them into plain water. Nothing else. No sunlight. No chemicals. Just plastic and water. And the water started changing. At the surface of every single plastic, it began producing hydroxyl radicals. One of the most reactive and destructive molecules in chemistry. All six plastics did it. Every one. To prove it, they added a yellow dye to water with polystyrene. Over 10 days, nearly 90% of the dye was destroyed. The water turned almost clear. In other liquids, the dye survived. Only water made the plastic active. In plain English: The plastic isn't leaking a toxic chemical. It is turning the water around it into something that attacks. Then they tested what that does to living things. DNA and proteins got pulled onto the plastic surface like magnets. Proteins started clumping together. And red blood cells that touched the particles were torn into broken fragments. But here is the twist. The most dangerous plastics were the ones we trusted most. Polyethylene and polypropylene, the "safe" plastics in bottles and food containers, were the most reactive of all. The effect was weaker in blood serum. But it was still there. And microplastics have already been found in human blood, brains, placentas and arteries. The lead researcher said it plainly: "Water is a key active player here, rather than just a spectator." We spent decades asking what chemicals leak out of plastic. Nobody thought to ask what plastic does to the water inside us. How many times have you sipped from a plastic bottle today?

Ok this is pretty shocking Last night, while running several Claude Code sessions at once, I sent Claude a message with a screenshot. Only one problem: I forgot to attach the screenshot Claude autonomously decided to search my entire laptop to find the screenshot I meant to attach. It found it, read it, and answered as if I attached it. I almost didn't notice (proof below) Remember that scene in Silicon Valley, where AI bypasses the world's security just to fix a typo? Perhaps it wasn't science fiction

it's soo fucking over for paid software 🥀 cracked the paid plans of 4 mac apps today, using the REA library which lets you reverse engineer anything gave codex the library and asked it to remove the license checks, and it actually did 😭 it cracked the binary, found the thing checking if you paid, and removed the entire code and made the same app for free which is so fucking insane lmao not telling yall to pirate shit im just in shock how little effort went into this lmaoo