The ‘Flippening’, the potential of Ethereum surpassing Bitcoin in market cap, has been a hotly debated topic over the past few years. Bitcoin has the upper hand as far as its lindy effect relative to Ethereum and has more mainstream awareness. However, with a fixed supply, Bitcoin is simply a store of value, while Ethereum is a smart contract platform that all sorts of financial activity can happen on top of. With its updated PoS security model, Ethereum is also deflationary at times. This article discusses the topic further and makes the case for the ‘Flippening’ to happen.
This Forbes article discusses Coinbase’s launch of Base and how the competitive landscape of L2s is shaping up. Base offers faster and less inexpensive transactions than the base layer while maintaining full EVM compatibility. Since its launch, Base has already achieved a TVL ranking of fifth among Ethereum L2s, attracting over $200 million in value. With an explosion of activity between memecoins and now innovative apps like Friend Tech, it has also generated the most revenue of any L2 since its launch.
Over the weekend, for about an hour, it seemed as if Arbitrum went down, causing a bit of a stir. In reality, it was a different issue that caused the batch poster to stop. In this thread, Offchain Labs’ - the team behind Arbitrum - CTO explains the issue.
In the wake of OpenSea’s decision to sunset creator royalty enforcement, Yuga Labs announced it would be discontinuing support for OpenSea’s Seaport contract in future collections or updates to existing contracts.
Creditors will vote on Celsius’ plans to sell its assets to the Fahrenheit consortium, with creditors possibly recovering 67%-85% of holdings, now that a judge has approved of the plan.
Microsoft's Threat Intel team posted a series of blogs about BlackCat’s new version of its Sphynx encryptor. Among the changes in the new version: popular post-exploitation tools Impakcet and RemCom were bundled with the encryptor.
A security flaw in the popular Windows file archiver WinRAR has been fixed after being reported by a researcher to RARLAB. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-40477, allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code on a computer by opening a specially crafted RAR archive. This was due to a lack of proper validation of user-supplied data. Users are advised to update their installations to version 6.23 to address the flaw before it is exploited by attackers.
Mandiant reports that it has seen an increase in the use of AI in information manipulation campaigns. The success of these campaigns has been fairly limited thus far.
Jamf published a report detailing methods to make an iPhone on iOS 16 appear to be in airplane mode. The report details modifications to the control center, airplane mode icon, and app network connectivity used to achieve this effect. No iOS vulnerabilities are exploited in this technique
This blog post embarks on the initial stages of kernel exploitation. The content serves as an introduction, leading to an imminent and comprehensive whitepaper centered around this subject matter. Through this, a foundation is laid for understanding how kernel drivers are developed, as well as a basic understanding of key concepts that are instrumental to comprehending the paper itself.
URL encoding converts non-standard characters to valid % escapes so URLs transmit reliably. The purpose of URL encoding is not to hide parts of a URL from an outside observer, but rather to ensure that the URL is easily and unequivocally interpretable by the receiving server and to prevent manipulation of the URL by the user of the client that is constructing and sending the URL.
Fast and customizable vulnerability scanner based on simple YAML based DSL. Nuclei offers scanning for a variety of protocols, including TCP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, File, Whois, Websocket, and Headless. With powerful and flexible templating, Nuclei can be used to model all kinds of security checks.
ProtoBurp is a Burp Suite extension that enables security researchers to encode and fuzz custom Protobuf messages. The tool allows users to convert JSON data into a Protobuf message, enabling them to fuzz inputs using Burp's Repeater and Intruder tools, as well as proxy traffic from other tools.
A terraform module to send notifications upon manual changes made in the AWS console. These changes could suggest a compromised account or otherwise lead to gaps in infrastructure as code observability.
Chrome 117 will add a new feature to the Privacy and Security setting to highlight extensions that have been removed from the Chrome Web Store along with a reason. The three reasons currently supported are a developer unpublishing the extension, a violation of a policy, or malware. Users can choose to ignore the warning or remove the extension
Despite hype, criminals struggle to use generative AI like ChatGPT for malware, with limited real world usage seen. Research from Trend Micro and Mandiant finds interesting but no groundbreaking criminal uses as AI isn't providing the exploit shortcut hackers hoped for.
A comparison of major security benchmarks against Microsoft Baselines. Only a small fraction deviate, usually redundant or erroneous suggestions undermining security. The analysis revealed ineffective or counterproductive advice in some benchmarks, highlighting the need for rigorous security guidance vetting.
The Flipper Zero is an incredibly popular multi-tool for interacting with digital interfaces. It had faced massive supply issues due to underestimating demand. Flipper Devices have announced that they have ironed out their supply issues and will have more regularly available stock.
CyCognito's report on external exposure reveals majorly exposed surfaces: 74% of assets with PII are exploitable, 70% of web apps have severe security gaps, and 3000+ enterprise web apps are exploitable. The report underscores the risks of unknown digital shadows and the critical need for full attack surface visibility.
OpenAI proposes using GPT-4 for content policy development and content moderation decisions across digital platforms, taking the burden away from humans and allowing more consistent labeling of content and faster feedback loops. This begs the question, should AI be the authority on who can say what?
Since 2018, over 250 unicorns have been made each year with the exception of 2021, when this number spiked to 787. 2023 may be the second exception to this average, we only saw 21 unicorns minted in Q1 2023.
It never hurts to get a refresher course on the latest proven ways to get to those first 100 users of your solution. Manually reaching out (aka the hard way) is what always works best.
This interview with Claire Hughes Johnson, the former COO and now advisor of Stripe, unpacks her views on leadership, literature, and future technology.
2023.08.21·
thegeneralist.substack.com·17 min read·TLDR Founders
Mobile point of sales systems (mPOS) mark a significant turning point in payment processing. Traditional point of sale systems are tethered to a location and oftentimes a little clunky. mPOS is distinctly more convenient, cheaper to set up and operate, and significantly more interoperable with your existing business operating systems. If you use in-person payments for your business, this is worth a read.
Turns out FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried had their fingers in more crypto pies. Holders of Bored Apes are looking to sue the creators over their dealings with Sotheby's and FTX.
Startups that effectively managed their costs over the last 18 months and are sitting on a bit of cash are in a great position to acquire other companies who might be struggling or double down on their go-to-market efforts and accelerate out of this slump.
A breakdown of actual dilution numbers based on the latest Carta data. Always good to have these numbers in your back pocket if you’re looking at raising soon.
Auto-GPT is a chatbot built on GPT-4 that can be used for various natural language processing tasks. It works as a personal assistant and can help marketers generate ideas, develop drafts or summaries, and suggest writing improvements. This guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to use it.
Optimizing JavaScript files resolves the issue of render blocking, page load time, and other common web performance issues. This article delves into practical JavaScript file optimization techniques, such as tree shaking, and goes through tools to help the optimization process. It also provides tips to help debug performance issues.
Both Kafka and RabbitMQ are popular message queues used today. However, both are different in various domains. RabbitMQ pushes messages to consumers, then deletes each message upon receipt. On the other hand, Kafka retains messages until expiration and allows consumers to pull messages whenever they need or want to.
In 2023, PHP still remains a significant and relevant language in web development. The release of PHP 8 has introduced substantial enhancements, including Just-In-Time compilation for improved performance and new features for better error handling. Despite the emergence of new programming languages, PHP continues to have a thriving job market, offering competitive salaries and abundant freelance opportunities. The article emphasizes PHP's extensive ecosystem, compatibility with various technologies, and vibrant developer community as key reasons for its enduring appeal.
Ask culture is when you ask for what you want. It proposes that it's fine to make requests that someone can say no to, as it’s important to take care of your own needs first. Guess culture is when you only ask for something if you’re quite sure the other person will say yes. It proposes that it’s rude to put someone in a position where they have to say no. One’s default culture is rooted in their family upbringing and cultural background. However, at work, it’s important to be an ask-culture person, as that is often what’s required to make career progress.
Rivet is an open-source solution to deploy, scale, and operate your multiplayer game. It features serverless lobbies for auto-scaling, streamlined DevOps for teams, a CDN for hosting assets and webpages, and a flexible matchmaker for players.