GoKawiil
Tech News
After a four-year effort, researcher DiscoStarslayer, working with developer Libby, successfully decapped and optically dumped the firmware of the PS2's MechaCon chip, a feat no one had achieved in the console's 26-year history. The pair used an exploit Libby discovered to extract the firmware and are now documenting metadata and hashes, with a full technical write-up promised soon.
Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer detailed on X how the infamous FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 Windows XP volume license key spread widely despite being reserved for enterprise partners. He explained that XP's copy protection compared install keys against a heavily encrypted 10MB blob on the disc that turned out to be the old Microsoft Bob software, and that retail and volume-license media used entirely different validation keys and discs.
A developer built an open-source model that mimics TypeSafe's proprietary Jev system, which scores a variable list of text options in a single pass rather than generating answers word-by-word. The project, released without official documentation from TypeSafe, includes working demos where the same attention-based scoring head selects Doom combat moves and chess moves from image inputs, along with checkpoints, code and a rendering pipeline to visualize decision traces.
A developer's essay critiques how services report reliability using uptime percentages like 99.72% or 98.98%, arguing these numbers look deceptively similar to non-experts even though they represent vastly different amounts of actual downtime. The author references Jason Gorman's observation that reliability gains become exponentially harder near 100%, comparing uptime metrics to earthquake magnitude scales where small numeric differences hide huge real-world impact. The proposed fix: status pages should show actual downtime duration (e.g., '12 hours affected in the last 30 days') alongside or instead of raw percentages.
iOS 27 includes a new privacy feature called Impersonation Risk Detection, designed to flag social engineering scams where attackers pose as banks or trusted contacts to pressure victims into transferring money or changing account details. The feature is disabled by default and must be turned on manually through Settings > Privacy & Security > Impersonation Risk Detection. It works by analyzing device and Apple Account signals to generate a risk score that participating apps can use to add warnings, delays, or identity checks.
A young boy with hepatoblastoma that had spread to his lungs and stopped responding to chemotherapy achieved complete remission after receiving an experimental CAR-T cell treatment. The therapy, part of the CARE study, engineered the patient's own immune cells to target glypican-3, a protein found on liver cancer cells, while also boosting the cells' potency with two added immune signaling proteins. Twelve months after treatment, doctors report no detectable trace of the cancer.
Kyber, a Y Combinator-backed startup building an AI-native document platform for insurance and enterprise workflows, is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to manage technical relationships with its enterprise clients. The company reports 50x growth in platform volume over the past year, has become profitable, and has signed multi-year contracts with major insurance firms while partnering with Guidewire, Majesco, and Twilio Sendgrid. The new hire will handle everything from technical scoping and custom integrations to first-line bug triage for customers.
Canadian retro hardware enthusiast DiscoStarslayer has successfully reverse-engineered and dumped the CXP102064 MechaCon chip found in the original 1999 PlayStation 2 console. The process involved chemically decapping the chip to expose its die, then using microscopes and optical dumping techniques before a software exploit finally allowed extraction of its data. The entire effort took four years to complete.
BleepingComputer is hosting a live webinar on September 23, 2026, featuring Material Security's Rajan Kapoor and Fireside Consulting's Rick Fitzgerald, who will dissect real, publicly documented Google Workspace breaches. The session focuses on the critical early hours after a breach is discovered, including cases where attackers used social engineering paired with malicious OAuth apps to gain entry.
South Korean universities including Sogang, SKKU, Korea University and Hanyang University have launched 'contract departments' co-created with SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, blending semiconductor and AI coursework with direct hiring pathways. Students in these programs, such as Sogang's System Semiconductor Engineering track, can receive guaranteed employment at SK Hynix upon graduation, while Samsung-linked programs like SKKU's Department of Intelligent Software require passing a separate company hiring process.
An engineering explainer examines why the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve does not rely on the commercial standard of external floating roof tanks to hold its 714 million barrels of crude. It shows that scaling up conventional tank farms would require roughly 1,130 tanks spread across about 45,000 acres, an area comparable to Washington, D.C., while leaving the oil highly exposed to fire and attack.
Cody Ho and Niklas reverse-engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware and user-space stack to create a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux driver for the M4 Mac Mini and MacBook Neo, a project completed in roughly a month rather than the years such work typically requires. The driver already runs Chrome, Firefox with WebGL, and Minecraft at 200fps, though it remains unready for general users.