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Category: blockchains

It’s Ethics. Not Tech Ethics

Every startup now has an “AI breakthrough.” Often a blockchain one, too.

Then I noticed a second fad growing just as fast: the ethicists. AI ethicists. Blockchain ethicists. Startup ethicists. VC ethicists. Unicorn ethicists. Someone called them “ethics natives.”

So back in 2024 I wrote a short, blunt piece arguing something that still gets me in trouble:

There is no such thing as tech There is only

And one other thing, which I’ll let the piece name for itself.

This isn’t a word game. Most of the #AIEthics I see starts with the trolley problem and works outward from edge cases. I think that’s backward, and in the piece I explain why it may do more harm than good.

Continue reading “It’s Ethics. Not Tech Ethics” | >

Hackers poison arrayref Rust crate to push infostealer malware

Hackers compromised the maintainer account behind the widely used Rust crate arrayref to introduce malware that executed on developers’ systems during compilation.

Within a 23-minute window, the attacker also poisoned two other crates, append-only-vec and internment, in the same supply-chain attack.

The arrayref crate is a popular Rust library with more than 53 million downloads over the past 90 days that is used by cryptography, graphics, and blockchain tools.

AI Companies Are Buying—And Destroying—Antique Books. Here’s Why

In 2006, Vernor Vinge published a novel in which a company digitizes a university library by destroying it. Books stripped from their bindings. Pages blown through the air, photographed in flight, reassembled as searchable data. The paper goes to pulp.

The novel is Rainbows End. Vinge set it in 2025.

He was off by a year.

Every #AI lab now wants text written before machines started writing, and that means old paper. So books get bought by the million, spines get sliced off, pages get fed through high-speed scanners, and the originals get discarded. Rare editions included. A US federal judge has already ruled the practice legal. Buy the book, destroy the book, keep the file.

Authors, archivists, and librarians have started organizing against it.

Vinge wrote it as a warning. The industry read it as a workflow.

Continue reading “AI Companies Are Buying—And Destroying—Antique Books. Here’s Why” | >

Navigating Challenges and Opportunities in MultiOmics Integration for Personalized Healthcare

The field of multi-omics has witnessed unprecedented growth, converging multiple scientific disciplines and technological advances. This surge is evidenced by a more than doubling in multi-omics scientific publications within just two years (2022–2023) since its first referenced mention in 2002, as indexed by the National Library of Medicine. This emerging field has demonstrated its capability to provide comprehensive insights into complex biological systems, representing a transformative force in health diagnostics and therapeutic strategies. However, several challenges are evident when merging varied omics data sets and methodologies, interpreting vast data dimensions, streamlining longitudinal sampling and analysis, and addressing the ethical implications of managing sensitive health information. This review evaluates these challenges while spotlighting pivotal milestones: the development of targeted sampling methods, the use of artificial intelligence in formulating health indices, the integration of sophisticated n-of-1 statistical models such as digital twins, and the incorporation of blockchain technology for heightened data security. For multi-omics to truly revolutionize healthcare, it demands rigorous validation, tangible real-world applications, and smooth integration into existing healthcare infrastructures. It is imperative to address ethical dilemmas, paving the way for the realization of a future steered by omics-informed personalized medicine.

Dysphoria IoT Botnet Adds Blockchain C2 and Victim Relays After JackSkid Disruption

The lineage runs through JackSkid, one of four IoT botnets targeted in coordinated U.S., German, and Canadian law-enforcement actions on March 19. Court documents attributed more than 90,000 DDoS commands to JackSkid alone.

Within days, Nokia Deepfield and Comcast’s threat lab documented the operator falling back to an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain, m3rnbvs5d[.]eth, for command-and-control (C2). XLab’s Dysphoria timeline opens with a JackSkid sample captured on March 25, six days after the disruption, that resolves C2 through the same domain.

XLab found that the burrberry[.]eth record encodes distribution-node IPv4 addresses, while 24carnforth2merseyside[.]sol supplies other infrastructure records. The DDoS sample asks a distribution node over HTTP for a current server list, and the listed endpoints are infected machines relaying traffic to the real controllers. The design keeps those controllers one step removed from the addresses exposed to bots.

New Dysphoria DDoS botnet spreads to 200k devices worldwide

A botnet called Dysphoria has compromised around 200,000 devices across the world and is using them for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and traffic relay operations.

According to QiAnXin XLab cybersecurity researchers, Dysphoria evolved from the ‘jackskid’ and ‘fbot’ malware by adding a covert blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) resolution mechanism.

Specifically, the botnet uses Ethereum ENS and Solana SNS domains to retrieve infrastructure information, while C2 addresses are concealed inside fake IPv6 strings and recovered using a custom byte-transformation algorithm.

Miasma Malware Targets npm Packages and GitHub Actions in Supply Chain Attack

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged yet another evolution of the supply chain attack linked to the Mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Hades malware family that has compromised a new set of npm packages, even as it has propagated to the Go ecosystem.

“The latest activity includes malicious npm releases affecting LeoPlatform and RStreams packages, GitHub Actions workflow abuse, and a related Go module compromise involving the Verana Blockchain project,” Socket said.

The end goal of the campaign, as before, is to harvest developer or maintainer credentials and weaponize the stolen data to spread across package registries, repositories, and trusted developer workflows.

Glassworm botnet disrupted after resilient C2 infrastructure takedown

The Glassworm botnet targeting developers in software supply-chain attacks has been disrupted after researchers took down its resilient command-and-control infrastructure relying on Solana blockchain transactions and the BitTorrent DHT network.

In a coordinated operation conducted yesterday, CrowdStrike, Google, and The Shadowserver Foundation cut off the botnet operators’ access to four distinct command-and-control (C2) channels designed to resist conventional disruption efforts.

Glassworm campaigns have been ongoing since October 2025 and initially targeted developers with malicious OpenVSX and Microsoft VS Code extensions that stole cryptocurrency wallets and developer credentials.

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