The Wire
Curated cybersecurity and tech news — AI-summarized, source attributed.
Leaded Gasoline Was Known to Poison From Day One — Industry Shipped It Anyway
In 1921, GM engineer Thomas Midgley Jr. identified tetraethyl lead (TEL) as an additive that suppressed engine knock, and by 1923 it was being pumped at filling
Limpet teeth dethrone spider silk as the strongest known natural material
Engineers at the University of Portsmouth found that the teeth of limpets — marine snails that grind rock as they feed — have a tensile strength roughly five ti
NYC to Outlaw Subscription Traps and Hidden Junk Fees Starting October
New York City has finalized a rule, effective October 1, that forces companies to offer an easy way to cancel recurring charges like gym memberships and streami
Relativity, Not Textbook Chemistry, Governs Triple Bonds in Heavy Atoms
Brown University chemists have produced direct experimental evidence that the standard textbook model of triple chemical bonds breaks down for heavy elements. C
Residential proxies turn millions of hijacked devices into a scraping arms race
LWN reports that the scraping onslaught against websites now arrives as coordinated bursts from millions of unique residential and mobile IP addresses, each tou
Roughgarden's IAS Course Traces the Line Between What Computers Can and Can't Do
A free lecture course from Tim Roughgarden, now a mathematics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, walks through the theoretical spine of computer sci
Running a PgBouncer fleet to 4x connection-pooling throughput
PgBouncer is single-threaded, so one process saturates a single CPU core no matter how large the machine is. On a 16-vCPU box, that one core becomes the through
SpaceX asks FCC to bless 100,000 Gen3 Starlink satellites and a huge spectrum grab
SpaceX has filed with the FCC for permission to deploy 100,000 third-generation Starlink satellites in very low Earth orbit, a nearly tenfold jump over the roug
The Cavefish Trap: How Winning Companies Lose the Ability to See Good Engineering
The Mexican cavefish keeps its eye genes for a million years after abandoning sight — same species, same genome, but cave-born fish shut down lens development e
US hunts for a cheaper Reaper after Iran downs ~$1B in strike drones
Leaning on MQ-9 Reapers to keep pilots out of harm's way has backfired financially: Iranian air defenses have shot down close to 30 of the hunter-killer drones
War Atlas maps 5,000 years of named human conflict in one interactive timeline
War Atlas is a browser-based data visualization that plots every named war in recorded history onto a single interactive map and timeline. It spans roughly 5,00
Why AI Coding Agents Pushed Scarf Off Haskell After 7 Years in Production
Avi Press, a longtime Haskell advocate and Haskell Foundation board member, explains why his company Scarf is migrating its backend away from the language it ha