The Binance hacker might have just pulled off one of the smartest moves I’ve seen in crypto.
First, Tether froze $1.5 billion in USDT.
Then Circle froze another $800 million in USDC.
At that point, it looked like the hacker’s money was trapped.
But apparently, he had already planned for that.
Instead of holding the stolen USDT in a wallet, he allegedly deposited it into Aave and used it as collateral to borrow ETH.
Then he walked away.
That’s where the story gets crazy.
Tether can freeze the USDT sitting in the wallet.
But it can’t freeze the ETH he already borrowed.
So now Aave is left holding frozen collateral, while the hacker is sitting on liquid ETH.
And unless the protocol can recover it somehow, he may not even need to pay the loan back.
Two companies froze billions of dollars in seconds.
But someone who understood how to use DeFi may have found a way around both of them.
Pretty insane when you think about it.
An air-gapped computer has no Wi-Fi card, no Bluetooth chip, and no network connection. Yet every word typed on its screen radiates through the surrounding walls as a stream of accidental radio signals.
In a 2024 hardware study at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, researchers proved that standard HDMI cables continuously broadcast readable desktop displays through building walls (Deep-TEMPEST).
This attack requires no malware and no physical compromise of the operating system. An attacker sets up a directional antenna and an inexpensive Software Defined Radio in an adjacent room to intercept the electromagnetic leakage.
The vulnerability stems from the physical reality of high-speed digital video.
To drive a standard 1080p display at 60 frames per second, a computer pushes pixels over an HDMI cable using Transition Minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) at a clock rate around 148.5 MHz. While engineers treat digital data as clean ones and zeros, high-speed electrical pulses on copper wires behave as high-frequency radio waves.
Every sharp voltage transition on the video lines radiates electromagnetic harmonics across the VHF and UHF bands, spanning hundreds of megahertz.
Government defense facilities mitigate this risk by following strict military TEMPEST standards (such as NATO SDIP-27), enforcing 360-degree braided copper shielding, RF-isolated conduits, and ferrite chokes. But consumer offices and commercial hardware rely on cheap mass-market HDMI cables wrapped in thin aluminum foil. Tiny gaps in the foil, worn connector seams, or unshielded PCB traces turn the cable into an accidental transmitting antenna.
For decades, digital video was considered relatively safe from radio eavesdropping. Unlike old analog VGA cables, where voltage mapped directly to pixel brightness, HDMI scrambles video bytes into 10-bit symbols using TMDS encoding. Capturing raw HDMI radio emissions with a software-defined radio traditionally produced an unreadable smear of distorted static.
The 2024 breakthrough solved that decoding problem with machine learning.
The researchers treated the smeared radio signals as an inverse imaging problem. By training a deep convolutional neural network on noisy radio captures, the model learned to map the complex RF distortions back into clean letterforms. The system dropped optical character recognition error rates by more than 60 percentage points, allowing eavesdroppers to recover readable text, passwords, and terminal commands through building walls.
Physical air gaps protect computers from internet malware. But unless you physically shield the display cables with certified continuous ground wraps or use specialized low-harmonic fonts, every pixel on your screen remains an open radio broadcast.
🦔Delaware wants to let AI agents run companies on their own. Under the draft law, the agent could sign contracts and file lawsuits, and the person who owns the company would carry no responsibility for its harms unless they committed fraud or left it underfunded. Delaware’s Secretary of State has pitched it as a big boost to state revenue. House Oversight Chairman James Comer now wants to see how the plan came together.
My Take
Yeah, so companies already blame AI for layoffs they wanted anyway, and now they’d get to blame it in court too. Say the agent drains a customer’s account. You can sue the company, but you only get whatever money the owner left in it, and the owner gets to tell the judge a machine made the call. I don’t see who this helps besides the owners and Delaware (business fees pay for roughly a quarter of that state’s budget, so of course they’re interested). If it passes in January, I expect a rush of AI startups to file there.
Hedgie🤗
@theGhostOfRiel Kara Eastman was also sabotaged by the previous moderate Democratic rep there who trashed her and endorsed Bacon.
Moderate Dems sabotaging progressives have been the primary reason why progressives underperformed.
Moderates underperform progressives in tight races. Consultants push them anyway because corporate donors fund them and consultants pocket commissions on TV ad buys. When a progressive wins a primary, the party cuts off the money to make "progressives can’t win" a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ticket-splitting is dead, so the old moderate advantage no longer exists.
In Nebraska, the DCCC refused to air TV ads for progressive Kara Eastman, and she still nearly won. They replaced her with moderate Tony Vargas, flooded him with cash, and watched him do worse twice while union populist Dan Osborn won the district on the same ballot.
In 2020, every House Medicare for All co-sponsor won re-election, while every defeated Democrat opposed it.
Senate moderates Amy McGrath, Sara Gideon, and Theresa Greenfield burned through massive war chests only to collapse with working-class voters. Progressive Charles Booker matched McGrath in Kentucky on a fraction of the budget and beat her across rural Appalachia.
Red states routinely pass minimum wages, paid sick leave, and voucher bans while rejecting moderate Democrats on the same ticket. Now that Abdul El-Sayed, Angie Nixon, Booker, and N'Kiyla Thomas beat the machine in their 2026 primaries, don’t let party shills take credit when they overperform.
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Abdul wasn't supposed to survive the primary. Now he did, and they have to be too obvious with the ratfuck. A lot of "electability myths" are on track to be busted in midterms. Check out my breakdown of the myth here
That's how the bond system started in C12 Venice. The wealthy familes engineered a war with Byzantium, which obliged the state to borrow money from them and pay interest in perpetuity - an incredible scam. An early secondary market developed in C13 after the original prestiti loans were consolidated into a single fund called the Monte Vecchio, centred around the Rialto market where the trading took place. Traders found they could influence state bond yields by driving them up in the secondary market. This was the platform on which the early merchant-banking families rose to prominence as organised usurers. By C17 the system had migrated North to be fully institutionalised by the Dutch and the British. Basically, it was the restoration of the aristocratic debt-servicing system that had been institutionalised around 1500 BC and led to the collapse of Antiquity in C5 AD. Between that point and C12 it was temporarily repressed by Christian anti-usury laws, currency diversity/instability and the normalisation of violent retribution during the 'Dark Age'. Once again, wars are now being engineered to rescue and renew a private debt-servicing system on the verge of collapse. History rhyming.
If only fish and sharks could intertemporally optimize their populations under rational expectations, we wouldn't need ecologists and their silly dynamic models.
Unfortunately, neither species has figured out how to maximize discounted lifetime utility.
Yes, had Dexter White not overruled Keynes' bancor/ICU plan in 1944 we would be in a better situation. The creditor class will never allow international cooperation that could even out the gross inequality the debt-leveraged wealth extraction system requires. I remember Labour MPs in the 1970s who regarded money-market threats as 'treasonous'. Somehow we must restore and politicise that moral reasoning and institutionalise it in Western nations. Firm policies, central bank intervention, non-tradable bonds and capital controls would neutralise money-market discipline, allowing nations to invest public money through regional and local banks in economic renewal and crowd out the creditor class. The gross drooling over free money we euphemise as 'investor confidence' - the predatory calculations of the loan shark - would be repressed. Private capital would be left playing catch-up in supply chains, forced to invest in productive activity for moderate returns. Most businesses would survive on operating profits. It can be done, but it would require an ethical and political sea-change, a major historical disjuncture.
The term "lumpenbourgeois" was originally coined to describe the South American bourgeoise.
Unlike most local bourgeoise classes, South America's lumpenbourgeoise has no national consciousness, and sees their own states as inauthentic communities which can be sold w/o remorse.
Even in Norway, a good friend tells me, demonstrate for peace and you're condemned as a Putinist and recieve attention from the security services. At the bottom of all this anxiety, paranoia and warmongering is the unavoidable fact that the West is heading for an almighty financial crash. The East is rising, multipolarity is the future and the 4400 year old debt-servicing system the West calls an 'economy', which has created incredible wealth for the creditor class and their middle-class techies and administrators, has reached its endgame. No longer will the rest of the world allow themselves to be bullied into handing over ridiculously cheap land, labour and resources while servicing suffocating debts. It's over. The creditor class and their political-military puppets can't negotiate because they never had to and never learned - they have to go.
The US-Israeli cartel coalition in LATAM is trying to silence the whistleblower who further exposed the infamous election fixer, Parscale mentee, and likely drug trafficker Fernando Cerimedo. This is after he had her shot three times. Very grim.
The libertarian solution to child labour is to explain that children wouldn't be working in factories unless the market had determined it was their most productive use.