GitHub has officially confirmed, via an X post today, that thousands of its internal repositories were breached after an employee’s device was compromised through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension.
The group alleged that it had exfiltrated internal source code and other private data, and stated that it was seeking at least $50,000 from potential buyers for the stolen material. “This is not a ransom,” the group wrote in its post, adding that it intended to sell the data rather than extort GitHub directly, and threatening to leak the repositories publicly if no buyer emerged.
TeamPCP has previously been linked to several high-profile campaigns involving platforms such as GitHub, PyPI, npm, and Docker. At the same time, malicious VS Code extensions have repeatedly surfaced in recent years as an increasingly effective vector for breaches and malware delivery.
A decade of backpacking through countries like Laos, Armenia, and El Salvador has taught me that travel makes poor therapy, finding yourself abroad won’t solve the problems waiting for you back at home, and focusing on the journey rather than the destination isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
I thought this article by a seasoned backpacker tells the other half of the story that is rarely told by the influencer, digital nomad, and travel industry – one that some of us more seasoned travelers know to be true but rarely talk about.
Modern backpack travel had its roots in things like the Grand Tour in which elites would round out their educations for the top positions in society and government by traveling Europe’s finest museums and cities. Backpacking through many countries on a shoestring budget rose during the hippie culture of the 60’s and 70’s. But now it seems to have morphed into a kind of therapy that is largely a self-focused personal journey. And as Tim Brinkhof points out after his years of travel, it’s actually a pretty poor means of therapy. That self-centered focus may not actually be healthy for you – and probably even less helpful for the communities you are traveling through. When it’s all about fulfilling your desires, what does that do to communities you travel through? When treking the Nepal mountains and you now find locals now raise yak to make the hiker’s yak-burgers, it’s clear we’ve changed how local communities think and operate.
The traveling community ethos is actually an odd little cultural bubble that is unlike real life in any country. People in hostels are usually very friendly because they’re all kind of taking a holiday together with complete strangers. People largely put aside their nationalities and politics. Backpacker community also means existing in a world in which you’re not working – or not working a job more than to pay for the next ticket. When you’re backpacking, you’re actually kind of living outside of normal society in a quasi-flux.
Every now and again you’ll find that person in the hostel that’s been back-packing it a bit too long. They’re a little bit ‘burned out’. They have been everywhere but usually sit quietly around the place. This might be their 10th time through the city and only in town to meet up with some old friend at an obscure bar. They’ve got the air of a grizzled traveling vet with stories from everywhere. They often a little bit old looking for the usual backpacker crowd. They’ve often got buckets of friends in every country; but just a list of temporary relationships. You often find they are the employees at the hostel. They also seem to be looking for something more than just travel; but can’t find a place to really land.
And this is what he talks about. Besides the wide-eyed young adventurers encountering the world for the first time – you often you encounter people that are running from problems back home, can’t decide what they want, or are more often than not, running from themselves. This was something I saw a lot of. You find people going through mid/quarter life or career crisis, others recovering from burnout, others on sabbaticals from work they hate, others trying to figure out what is next, and people who simply haven’t found a purpose or path in life.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes taking a big step back and taking a break from routine can give you perspective. Traveling definitely helped me with that over the years. It makes you ask why you have, or are, making the choices you are making. These are good things. But we’re not meant to live like that forever:
Backpack for too long, and you’ll forget who you were prior to leaving home. Backpack too often, and you’ll start to feel like you’re in a constant state of passing through, even when you aren’t on the road.
I find it interesting if you look at most of the van-life and travel blog people you followed 5 or 10 years ago, how many of them shut down. Eventually, almost all settle down and largely live ‘normal’ lives with houses, mortgages, in a communities they have connected with, or even got married/had kids. I don’t think that’s an accident.
I backpacked around Europe in my 20’s on more than a few trips. It was an economical and very fast way to see and experience a lot of new things in a short time. It was awesome – and probably the only way I could have done it as a traveler with minimal means.
As the decades went on, I made bucket lists of exotic places and experience I wanted to go see – and did at least 75% of them. Russia, Japan, New Zealand, and many others. But now in my 50’s – I stopped making that list. It was after I took a package from my job and really pulled back on my running around that I realized how much time I was wasting chasing something I was never going to find ‘out there’. I learned this from hiking every weekend. You keep chasing more and more exciting places and longer adventures to fill the same hole that you’ll still feel when it’s done. You run into the same people chasing peaks and outdoor experiences here in the Pacific Northwest. You just keep running after the next thing.
As a person of faith, I should have known this. But sometimes you have to re-learn the hard way. Travel absolutely enriches our lived experience and helps us realize that the world doesn’t have to work the same ways. Hiking was a great way to stay in shape.
But that is not what is what your heart is truly seeking. We desire meaning and relationship. You don’t find that in an ephemeral life of a backpacking community.
You’re not going find answers ‘out there’. You’re going to find them ‘in here’ – in your soul – wherever you are. Yes, there are circumstances that will make that harder and maybe environments you should leave. But some of the deepest, happiest days of my life were not spent traveling to an exotic location or some exciting show or trying an exotic dish – it was sitting in a quiet chapel praying to a God who loves me and who’s relationship with me was completely fulfilling. Without words. Without doing. Without moving. In my local church. Simply sitting in endless peace and being loved.
Try it. Instead of a big trip – take a big sit. Turn off the phone and all social media. Interiorly open yourself to something new. Go sit somewhere quietly and ask God to come into your heart and open your eyes. Give yourself to Him, and ask Him to give Himself to you.
This hack resulted in literally 100’s of packages to be compromised, signed, and shipped via NPM. It then infected end-users systems, stealing credentials and then wiping hard drives if someone tries to remove it. It then tried used those permissions to submit even more infected packages.
It did this via a clever permissions exploit via a github action. Give this a watch.
Want to create your own clothes that have lighted tape/lines like recent Tron movies? Want to create unique lighting at your next event or home? Want to wrap your car in illuminated panels?
Look no further than Ellumiglow. They sell a wide variety of wearable electroluminescent solutions for home and clothing.
The original Tron costume lighting solution supposedly was created by a company called Oryon Technologies Inc and the product was Elastolite EL Panels – but they don’t seem to exist or have a web presence anymore.
There are hobbyist selling complete Tron cosplay kits, and others that show you how to screen-print your own El clothing:
Rating exactly how well an AI does on tasks has been an open field. There are benchmarks, but there have been lots of arguments these current early benchmarks are too limited or biased. A new player is on the field and they seem to have discovered that some benchmarks are actually evaluating incorrectly a shocking amount of times.
Today we’re releasing DeepSWE, a new standard for agentic coding benchmarks.
On public leaderboards, top models often look relatively close in capability. DeepSWE shows where they actually diverge, reflecting the realistic experience of developers in their day-to-day work. pic.twitter.com/HCDcjNuTFK
— Serena Ge (Datacurve) (@serenaa_ge) May 26, 2026
A startup called Datacurve released a benchmark it says does a much better job. DeepSWE, a 113-task evaluation spanning 91 open-source repositories and five programming languages, produces a dramatically wider spread among the same frontier models.
It’s biggest shock is that it claims many benchmarks aren’t even correct. Their tests cover a pretty impressive and wider range of characteristics such as bigger, more representative tasks. They avoid what they call ‘contamination’ that results from benchmarks that rely on simple Github coding samples that some models simply regugitate vs truely generate. And most damning – they found that some benchmarks verifiers (the part of the code that verifies what the AI built is correct) gives false positive/negative rates from 8-24% of the time.
More benchmarks and more testing is valuable for evaluating models – so hopefully these guys will help push the industry to more scrutiny and reproducible real-world results.
Gabriel Woolf was re-united with the prop Sutekh mask he wore in the 1975 episodes of Pyramids of Mars. He puts the mask on and re-creates the voice perfectly. Not bad after 50 years.
Ethanol gas proports to reduce air pollution; but it’s not without side effects. Gas mileage goes down by about 3-4%. Ethanol is hygroscopic which means it attracts water and can lead to corrosion and water-fuel phase separation over time can damage rubber seals or create gum deposits.
Therefore, it’s recommended that equipment with small engines, motorcycles, classic cars, and especially watercraft should use non-ethanol gas. But where to find it?
Pure-gas.com lets you look up stations in just about any state that sells ethanol free gas. Be ready to pay for it though – usually $0.20-$1 more per gallon.
