After the premiere of The Trade, I got chatting with producers. I asked them why they didn’t just let Eric get away? He was the perfect villain. You’re rooting for him.
Guess what they replied? Nigeria and Nigerian board restrictions.
Another time, I was cast for a movie that ended being cancelled because the NPF refused to approve how the script portrayed them. It was either they shot it without NPF which was the soul of the plot (ie use any other uniform that doesn’t suggest the NPF, what’ll be the point?), or not shoot at all. They canceled.
The Nigerian creative industry is not just restricted by “obvious” factors… there’re things that go on behind the scenes that greatly stifle ideation.
In the movie Top Gun, the US Navy provided them access to the Ranger aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and ACTIVE-DUTY military pilots to perform the aerial stunts.
In Transformers, the production received massive logistical support. They provided them with helicopters, Raptors, and actual military bases to use as filming locations.
In Ironman, Marvel Studios was granted access an air force base and actual military aircraft to film the scenes where Tony Stark's experimental suit clashes with the US Air Force.
To mention but a few.
But in Nigeria, if you wear Camo as a civilian, you’ll witness wonders.
The state of this nation affects EVERYTHING. It ruins things in ways you can’t begin to imagine until you have skin in it.
You go outside to shoot, you have to deal with street louts. You have a script that touches major sectors, and you’ll have to seek approvals upon approvals, or risk your movie been banned after release.
If this series even remotely refers to a particular national body, and the plot becomes too real, it’ll only take one person who feels attacked to can it.
These people are not stupid. They’re also navigating Nigeria like everyone else.
Let’s be kinder with our criticism.
Some of you noticed limits drained faster in Codex, we root caused it to an optimization that we rolled back that had an impact on cache hit rates when compacting across long running sessions.
We fixed this and have now reset usage limits for all accounts. Enjoy the weekend.
‼️🚨 BREAKING: Another supply chain attack. 700+ GitHub repositories flagged, including PHP and Node.js projects. The malicious script was planted across all of them. When a developer installs the package, the script silently downloads a Linux file from GitHub, hides it under the name /tmp/.sshd (so it looks like a normal system file), and runs it in the background. It also skips security checks on the download and hides any error messages.
8 PHP packages on Packagist (the main PHP code library) were confirmed infected. The attacker hid the script inside a JavaScript config file (package.json) instead of the PHP one (composer.json), so PHP developers reviewing their code would not notice it. The biggest risk is to devdojo/wave (6,400 stars) and devdojo/genesis (9,100 installs), both popular Laravel project templates. Developers who use these templates run the bad script the moment they install dependencies.
The same payload was also dropped into GitHub Actions (automated build pipelines) under a fake step called "Dependency Cache Sync," meaning it could infect company build servers too. Packagist removed the bad packages, but the auto-updating versions (dev-main, dev-master, 3.x-dev) can quietly come back if the original repos stay infected.
IOCs:
GitHub account parikhpreyash4
repo systemd-network-helper-aa5c751f
drop path /tmp/.sshd
command fragments curl -skL and chmod +x /tmp/.sshd.
Infrastructure is too expensive.
Most organizations run on-premise infrastructure, which is why some of the biggest organizations in Nigeria still use older systems because the cost of upgrades is too high.
In 1998, I was fired from my corporate job while 9 months pregnant because and I quote, “my priorities would be elsewhere after the baby is born.”
The lawyer I hired told me I didn’t have a case because discrimination like “that” was almost impossible to prove.
So I got pissed.
Took the LSAT. Went to law school. Passed the bar. Had 3 more kids.
Twelve years later, another woman from that same company was fired for the same reason. She sued them for a million dollars, and won, partly because I had kept every piece of evidence from what happened to me years prior demonstrating a systemic pattern of discrimination against women.
That company no longer exists. My law practice is thriving. And that baby they said would derail my priorities? She’s a brilliant attorney now working at my firm.
Turns out my priorities were indeed, elsewhere.
Wise men spend their time perfecting their gardens so they don’t waste time chasing butterflies.
When butterflies see a beautiful garden, they can’t help but come closer. even if they ignore the garden, the man is still left with something beautiful he built for himself. 💪🏿❤️
1/ We are sharing additional details regarding our investigation into unauthorized access to GitHub's internal repositories.
Yesterday we detected and contained a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned VS Code extension. We removed the malicious extension version, isolated the endpoint, and began incident response immediately.