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2026-06-05

• 10:55 UTC Distributed terrorism as ARG – Distributed terrorism as ARG this is pretty much the plot of Charlie Stross' "Halting State" (2006): teenagers are being recruited online by the FSB, in online forums and in-game chats, then assigned alternate-reality-game-style "tasks" in the real world which are actually acts of espionage on behalf of Russia. The recruitments follow a similar pattern: young people are usually approached on online channels which are well-hidden and hard to track: from Telegram to TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Discord. They are offered money, commonly cryptocurrencies, in exchange for completing tasks. Their recruiters depend on anonymity; many work for criminal groups which, like cyber hackers, may be independent from the state but co-opted by intelligence agencies for covert operations. Gaming sites — the most widely consumed entertainment media among 13- to 24-year-olds — have become an obvious hunting ground for potential saboteurs with a proven interest in problem solving. In Ukraine, the chat function in the popular online game World of Tanks is commonly used as a recruitment portal, from which agents then move the conversation to Telegram. Some state-backed agents, especially those working for Russia, also invoke the mission format and “quest” mentality of online games to entice young people to move beyond the virtual battlefield to real-world action. It is, says one western military official, “like a game of Pokémon Go, but with air defence systems”. Adrian Hon, an ARG designer, comments: I don't think this is the work of some evil genius FSB game designer. They're throwing shit at a wall and they found that: Making teens feel cool and special Giving them clear tasks escalating in difficulty Paying them £500 in crypto sticks! It is FUN to imagine you are a spy going out on a secret real world mission, getting messages from a handler. The money helps, but the main thing is that it's free, unlike practically every comparable form of real world immersive experience/pervasive game. Average British reaction: "Why teenagers spend their lives glued to screens and on non value-adding activities idk. [Buy] them footballs and chess sets and send them outside." Yes, so they can play football on the non-existent pitches that now cost money to play on and they can't get to. Everyone is like, kids should get away from screens and go outside. Motherfucker that is EXACTLY what these teen FSB recruits are doing!! They are going outside taking photos, collecting wifi SSIDs, sneaking around. I literally design games like this, except I have a fraction of their budget!!! And when I design pervasive games, we have to get public liability insurance and local govt permission and pay fees and do risk assessments. I don't make them for under-18s because god knows the red tape is a mile long. mfw we're getting outcompeted by foreign intelligence agencies Tags: fsb russia spying espionage args gaming games teens arg crypto

2026-06-03

• 12:32 UTC Kafka’s quiet observability superpower — Kafka Interceptors – Kafka’s quiet observability superpower — Kafka Interceptors Interesting Kafka trick: Kafka Interceptors have quietly existed since 2016, yet most teams overlook them as an observability superpower. This article shows how Kafka Interceptors, combined with Apache Flink, can provide lightweight, near-real-time event tracing across a Kafka-based event-driven architecture — without invasive instrumentation or expensive observability platforms. The project, confluent-kafka-isotope, uses Kafka Interceptors to collect and attach trace signals to records while Apache Flink interprets those signals using SQL and stateful processing for latency analysis, topology discovery, stuck-trace detection, and forensic replay. Tags: kafka observability flink isotope-tracing tracing event-tracing interceptors ops
• 12:32 UTC CrankGPT – CrankGPT "fully offline, human-powered local AI" -- an LLM and a voice model, running on a Raspberry Pi 5, driven off hand-cranked electricity generation! I was very sceptical, but they've put in the work to optimise the platform and choose models very carefully, and it looks like it actually runs off hand-cranked power, amazing Tags: ai llms electricity hand cranking voice raspberry-pi hacks hardware
• 11:58 UTC Grill Fanatics Restaurant Grade Marabu Charcoal (10kg) – Grill Fanatics Restaurant Grade Marabu Charcoal (10kg) I spotted Pitt Bros using this charcoal at a recent event, so that's a plug for me Tags: charcoal cooking food yum
• 09:29 UTC More on the Coinbase 07-05-2026 outage – More on the Coinbase 07-05-2026 outage More on the Coinbase 07-05-2026 outage, caused by a "thermal event" in AWS us-east-1 and its impact on the suppposedly multi-AZ Managed Kafka product: AWS's managed Kafka service failed silently. A significant portion of our event-streaming infrastructure runs on MSK, AWS's managed Kafka offering. The architectural promise of a managed Kafka service is that when individual brokers go down, the service automatically reelects partition leaders and continues to serve traffic out of the remaining brokers. The loss of an entire zone should result in reduced capacity, not unavailability. That is not what happened and this extended the outage. A defect in the AWS MSK control plane prevented automatic partition-leader reelection. Two of our MSK clusters became stuck in a "healing" state with producers unable to write. The cascading effect blocked our fee service, which blocked quoting, which is why most customers experienced this incident as broken trades and quotes rather than as a Kafka outage. Adjacent systems, including portions of our ledger pipeline, payments, and several data pipelines, were affected the same way. Additionally, one of our Kafka clusters was set up in a 2-AZ configuration that increased the blast radius and recovery time, but the MSK control plane defect impacted 2-AZ and 3-AZ Kafka clusters similarly. We worked the recovery in real time with AWS engineering, ultimately performing manual partition reassignments at 3:00 AM ET to migrate topics off the impaired brokers. Priority-zero and priority-one topics were back to full availability by 9:30 AM ET. The remainder cleared by 2:00 PM ET. In fairness, they also had a single-AZ point of failure in their architecture which they also describe there, but still, not great performance from MSK. Disappointing. Tags: msk reliability multi-az aws services kafka resiliency outages post-mortems postmortems coinbase

2026-06-02

• 10:51 UTC A 10 year old Xeon is all you need – point.free – A 10 year old Xeon is all you need - point.free Some mad scientist optimization to get Gemma 4 running on an old Xeon with no GPU Tags: google ai llms gemma gemma-4 xeon hacks
• 10:50 UTC Best Practices for TCP Connection Management on EC2 – Best Practices for TCP Connection Management on EC2 Well this is a really crappy thing for AWS to mess around with, and then hide the announcement on a "best practices" page: "With sixth-generation AWS Nitro (Nitro V6) instances, launched in June 2025 [c8, r8, etc], the default TCP connection tracking idle timeout changed from 432,000 seconds (5 days) to 350 seconds. Applications that hold idle connections open for long periods, such as [uhhh pretty much everything built on TCP - jm] may experience unexpected connection drops after migrating to these instances." They go on to recommend that you "implement keepalives and connection lifecycle management", which is great fun if you don't control the code implementing your TCP-based network protocols. This is a very fundamental change for many protocols so it'll be fun dealing with it. Kudos to Adam C in the ITC Slack for spotting this a while back. Tags: networking protocols tcp idle-timeouts aws architecture nitro conntrack idle-connections
• 10:42 UTC Current Rothko – Current Rothko I love this! Finds the weather at your location, then picks a Rothko to match. This would be great on a home dashboard. (well, it'd be better if it used a more reliable weather backend, as most times I've tried it here in Dublin, it's told me the wrong current weather conditions. But close!) Tags: location weather art fun rothko
• 10:06 UTC Coinbase MSK outage post-mortem – Coinbase MSK outage post-mortem A post-mortem from Coinbase following a significant outage partially caused by MSK, AWS' managed version of Kafka. Root cause: a thermal event (cooling system failure) inside a subset of racks within a single building in AWS us-east-1. We run a primary replica of our exchange infrastructure in a single zone, consistent with industry standards to reduce latency. To prepare for failures like this, we maintain a distributed standby, but during this incident, failures in the primary zone that were designed to be isolated were not [...] Our primary managed Kafka partitions process many terabytes of data daily and are designed with resiliency guarantees for uninterrupted operation during a datacenter failure just like this. In this case, those guarantees failed and required manual recovery. [...] There is a hint here that MSK failed to have multi-AZ resiliency despite multiple replicas configured at the application level. It will be interesting to see what the full root-cause analysis looks like.... Tags: kafka resiliency coinbase multi-az az aws us-east-1 post-mortems postmortems
• 10:00 UTC Serverless Functions Post-Mortem – Serverless Functions Post-Mortem A post-mortem for "serverless functions", the fad of 2016 Tags: serverless cloud programming architecture aws

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