David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳

⬅️ my Mastodon account

[David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳 @PenfoldDavid]

I'll be deleting my account before the end of the year.

You can keep in touch on Mastodon (or Bridge from Bluesky) https://t.co/t5rWikPoJv

Or dave at surname dot org

[Spycraft101 @spycraft101]

A business owner living in Brazil who disappeared in January 2023 was revealed to be a deep-cover Russian illegal agent who is now likely back in Moscow.

Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich lived in Rio de Janeiro for more than five years, where he ran a 3D printing firm called 3D Rio. He claimed to be the son of an Austrian father and Brazilian mother, and grew up in Vienna, which explained his accented Portuguese. His company had contracts with Brazilian military and government organizations. When he disappeared, he was in the final stages of closing on a new commercial space located just down the street from the US Consulate in Rio.

According to reporting by Shaun Walker in the Guardian, an Argentinian couple living in Slovenia were arrested in December 2022 and revealed to be Russian spies. Those arrests likely led Campos Wittich to be recalled by Moscow to avoid being arrested in a widening investigation. He told his girlfriend he would be attending a 3D printing convention in Malaysia, then disappeared in early January shortly after arriving in Kuala Lumpur.

Weeks later, Greek media reported that a photographer named Maria Tsalla living in Greece was actually a Russian spy named Irina Alexandrovna Smireva and she was secretly married to another Russian spy named Artem Smirev, AKA Gerhard Campos Wittich. The married couple were living thousands of miles apart, carrying out separate missions, and building entirely separate lives from each other.

A years-long investigation by Brazil’s intelligence community and law enforcement has identified at least nine Russian illegals who have used Brazilian identities to create their own legends. Many of them (including Campos Wittich AKA Smirev) were in the early stages of their decades-long missions when their new lives were disrupted by investigations and media revelations.

[Matt Johansen @mattjay]

MSRC couldn’t possibly do anything worse this week… oh. Oh ok.

[David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳 @PenfoldDavid]

@zeynep Today in half an hour ⬆️

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

"It’s unfortunate that almost none of the people behind these accounts know very much about the ancient world." Unfortunately, ignorance is not the only thing wrong with them.

@BretDevereaux on Elon Musk's X and the fascist statue accounts:

https://t.co/c4XquHEWMV

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[Zack Korman @ZackKorman]

Imagine being MSRC right now. You piss off every security researcher in the world then your boss announces this.

[Asher Davila @Asher_Davila]

I am recruiting offensive security researchers to work with me in Palo Alto Networks. The role is not yet posted:
Reverse engineering, vulnerability research, firmware analysis, secure boot, kernel internals, hardware debugging (JTAG/UART/SWD), and offensive security experience.

[David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳 @PenfoldDavid]

@Jetsonhacks Yes!

[David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳 @PenfoldDavid]

@Jetsonhacks Looking good so far, it installed the Nvidia docker gubbins too.

[David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳 @PenfoldDavid]

@0x_lun @TheAhmadOsman I'm battling on with two 1080 Ti-s and a 1080. 😳

[Jim Manico from Manicode Security @manicode]

Your AI coding assistant ships insecure code by default. Missing auth, broken JWT checks, injection.

Manicode fixes that. Secure-coding prompts + skills for Copilot, Cursor & Claude Code. Meta's CyberSecEval benchmark: .NET +80% React +27%

[email protected] if interested :)

[Assaad Razzouk @AssaadRazzouk]

India's coal power is going into a structural decline because: batteries
>Cumulative tendered energy storage capacity skyrocketed to 90GW
>Monster 3.37 GWh battery array in Gujarat was just operationalized, making it world’s largest single-location battery storage deployment outside of China, with plans to hit 10 GWh next year and an incredible 50 GWh by 2031
>State-owned utility NTPC just issued an EPC tender for a monster 7.8 GWh battery installation in Rajasthan, a size unprecedented in global BESS procurement history
>From right now until 2027, a massive deployment of 2-hour, 2-cycle battery configurations is underway across major solar hubs (like Gujarat and Rajasthan) to aggressively crush morning and evening peak demand windows
>As India charges 500GW clean energy by 2030, it's on track to deploy 61 GW / 218 GWh of grid-scale storage

The entire growth in India’s electricity demand through 2030 will be completely absorbed by renewables and storage, and total coal generation in 2030 will drop below 2020 levels: India is rapidly moving to substitute 27GW of planned "zombie" coal plants with clean capacity and battery storage to save the Indian power system $6b/year in reduced costs

When a single country has over 60 GWh of projects in active execution and another 80 GWh under tendering, the "baseload coal" argument is dead on arrival

Wires are chewing pipelines

[Yarden Shafir @yarden_shafir]

This gets even dumber. Microsoft built a VBS enclave into msedge! It protects data even from kernel drivers! That would've been the perfect place to store passwords! And they are using it to store... a bit of static configuration data.

[David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳 @PenfoldDavid]

@TheAhmadOsman Directly, yes. But using, say, a Windows laptop to ssh into your toasty GPU server is preferable to getting toasted...

[Assaad Razzouk @AssaadRazzouk]

Australia, where household energy bills are to fall 10% from 1 July 2026, is executing an industrial slaughter of legacy gas peakers
>In 1st quarter of 2026, battery systems tripled their daytime-to-evening energy shifting compared to last year. Batteries surged 1,115 MW of clean power into the evening peak, hitting a record discharge of 3,556 MW
>Batteries became the grid's primary price-setting mechanism, dictating terms in 32% of all trading intervals
>Gas-powered generation collapsed to its lowest quarterly average since 1999 (dropping to an average of just 712 MW). It's in terminal structural decline
>Average wholesale electricity spot prices plummeted by 12% y-on-y to AU$73/MWh
>In Victoria, wholesale prices crashed by 28% to an average of just AU$43/MWh
>Four million households and businesses are now generating free power, acting as the biggest power plant in the country
>One in every 25 homes has a battery today, with 415,000 active residential storage systems
>Because of this unstoppable wave of clean energy and storage, residents in Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia will receive 100% free electricity from 11:00am to 2:00pm starting next month
>Australia’s battery capacity additions surged by nearly 8 GW in a single year, a nine-fold increase. Utility-scale systems skyrocketed to 4.2 GW, while behind-the-meter household storage hit 3.4 GW
>Battery storage now commands a massive 18% of all installed dispatchable capacity in Australia (China is at 7%, the US at 5%, and Europe at 4%

Storing free solar during the day and dumping it into the evening peak has permanently flattened the daily price curve, bringing down forward electricity contract prices and passing the savings directly to consumers

Every solar + battery is a national security shield

[Ahmad @TheAhmadOsman]

Grifters shipping vibe-coded slop are everywhere now and it is getting exhausting ngl

The issue is not that they are vibe coding

- Build however you want
- Use whatever tools you want
- Ship fast, experiment, have fun

The issue is pretending the output is serious software when it belongs in the trashbin

A lot of these people are not building products

- They are producing screenshots
- GitHub activity
- Fake momentum

And naturally, these are the same folks walking around proudly showing their GitHub commit count as if “many tiny commits to a broken app” is a proxy for taste, architecture, reliability, or competence

Very happy for them though: The graph is green, the software is not

[David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳 @PenfoldDavid]

@MenchOsint YOLOing on its own! 👀

[zeynep tufekci @zeynep]

I read your article fully and carefully. It’s a an empirically poor article. I have been reporting in this space for years, resulting in full page articles in the New York Times which involved interviewing, at length, lead PIs of the billion dollar NIH research fund, NIH agency leaders at the highest level, and leading scientists working on this field. Additionally, as an academic who got interested in this important, fascinating space, I am still reading the scientific literature and regularly keeping up with cutting edge science. They’re all missing in your article!

I have written about poor definitions and I face flak from online patient communities regularly. I believe the mind/body duality as it exists is medicine is a big obstacle. Your article doesn’t have any of the cutting edge science on that! Where are the neuro-immunologists from psychiatry? Where are the sharp exercise physiologists getting out bangers in Nature?

What you have is essentially a channeling of a gripe session from one (empirically left behind and upset) faction of the mind-body duality. It’s not challenging it.

You can find patients saying stupid things online. But the idea that brain retraining is some breakthrough that’s being ignored and that people can’t talk about is complete nonsense. And your part about exercise is missing the biomedical breakthroughs in understanding from the last few years.

I don’t really do social media these days but I am informed. This one deserved clarification for the record.

[David Penfold mainly on Mastodon 🌳 🌻 🌳 @PenfoldDavid]

@RachelTobac @Google Great work!