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Category: Technical

Hackers increasingly using VS Code extensions

Hackers increasingly using VS Code extensions

The TeamPCP hacker group on the Breached cybercrime forum claimed it had gained access to nearly 4,000 private GitHub repositories via the breach.

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.

Upscaling pixel art in old Sierra games

Upscaling pixel art in old Sierra games

Old Man Yells at Code decided to write an upscaler for old Sierra games like Kings Quest and Space Quest. Upscaling old pixel art is not as simple as you would expect since the old Sierra games used vector art. He does a great job discussing the tradeoffs and making a working version – even if some of the charm of those old games is the pixelization artifacts.

Every retro sound device on an 8-bit card

Every retro sound device on an 8-bit card

Finding sound cards for your retro PC setup is hard. Used sound cards can easily run you more than $100.

PicoGUS is an 8-bit ISA sound card and CD-ROM drive emulation on the Raspberry Pi Pico’s RP2040 microcontroller. PicoGUS can emulate a wide variety of sound cards as connect your old IDE CD-ROM drives:

  • Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) – the primary focus of PicoGUS, hence the name
  • Sound Blaster 16 (OPL3) / Sound Blaster Pro 2 (OPL3) / AdLib (OPL2)
  • MPU-401 (with intelligent mode) – outputs MIDI data on 3.5mm MIDI TRS connector
  • Tandy 3-voice
  • CMS/Game Blaster
  • Game port joystick
  • Panasonic/MKE CD-ROM

It’s not quite perfect (see the compatibility list), but

Available at Joe’s Computer Museum Shop for $50

Retro IDE replacement

Retro IDE replacement

Retro computing has a hardware problem. Physical cdrom and hard drives wear out and die every year – with no replacements on the horizon as most manufacturers have quit making them decades ago.

Enter PicoIDE from the creator of the retro sound card PicoGUS (emulates Gravis UltraSound, Sound Blaster 16 (OPL3) / Sound Blaster Pro 2 (OPL3) / AdLib (OPL2), CMS/Game Blaster and Tandy 3-Voice, and supports MIDI output with MPU-401 intelligent mode emulation). PicoIDE is an IDE/ATAPI drive emulator for retro PC’s. It lets you load and run hard drive images as well as perfectly emulates CDROM drives with full redbook audio support. You run them all from a microSD card you load with images. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

  • Emulates ATAPI CD-ROM and IDE fixed hard drives
    • Images stored on microSD card
    • .bin/.cue or .iso image support for CD-ROM
    • .img/.hda/.vhd/.hdf for HDD, supporting LBA or CHS
  • Built-in CD audio analog output on 3.5mm jack and MPC-2 header, driven by TI PCM5100A DAC
  • Supports PIO modes 0-4 and multi-word DMA modes 0-2
  • Headers for SPI peripheral, external drive activity LED and action button

Pre-Order Here:  https://www.crowdsupply.com/polpotronics/picoide

Federal agencies will no longer require SBOMs

Federal agencies will no longer require SBOMs

Federal agencies will no longer be required to solicit software attestations that they comply with NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF).

The SBOM requirement has lead to a small cottage industry of scanning and CI tools that provide this functionality. It will be interesting to see how that all develops, but constantly changing industry standards and practices is not good for businesses.

The US used to thoughtfully and carefully roll out changes like this in the past. In our increasingly polarized political climate, software companies are increasingly whipsawed back and forth. Adding and removing requirements like this is not a zero-cost change. Compliance burdens cost money, time, and credibility to any company based here in the US.

AI assisted security findings are coming in

AI assisted security findings are coming in

XINT.io, with the help of AI, just demonstrated a 732 byte exploit that gets root on every major Linux distribution shipped since 2017. This is a flaw that went unnoticed for almost a decade now. You can only imagine how many more AI is going to help people find.

Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431) is a logic bug in the Linux kernel’s authencesn cryptographic template. It lets an unprivileged local user trigger a deterministic, controlled 4-byte write into the page cache of any readable file on the system. A single 732-byte Python script can edit a setuid binary and obtain root on essentially all Linux distributions shipped since 2017.

OOP’s impact on data arrangement was a 35 year mistake

OOP’s impact on data arrangement was a 35 year mistake

Casey Muratori at the Better Software Conference walks us through how data in game development (and other systems) started with simple coherent structures that were best for cpu and cache coherency layout and then morphed into hierarchies of objects that following the in-vogue trend of late 90’s programming.

This lead to changing the compile-time data arrangement from what’s best for the computer to compiling data into arbitrarily arranged memory locations that matched the real-world things you’re trying to model.

He does a great job of breaking down the history and effects of what has happened in the 20 years since. I remember going to a GDC talk in which a game developer building a racing game struggled and struggled to get performance from his OOP arranged data. In the end, he realized that he should simply lay out the data in memory linearly and got multiple times more speed.

Today, developers from racing games to AI are re-discovering that laying things out linearly and adhering to cache consistent access (ex: GPUs) is where the highest end performance is unleashed.

Use your smartphone to load old programs on an Apple II

Use your smartphone to load old programs on an Apple II

ASCII Express lets you load programs into your old Apple II (or any computer with an analog cassette port). You simply use your smart phone (or any computer’s out audio jack) plugged into the audio jack to load it into the system.
They even include a program that will take image files and via a simple basic program, accept the incoming data and then write it to one of the floppy disks – similar to ADTPro. No need for expensive drive emulation hardware.

Bopit Robot

Bopit Robot

I didn’t even realize the old Bop-It toy had an ending. The original edition ended after a maximum score of 100. The second edition went up to 200 points.

Making a core memory USB drive

Making a core memory USB drive

Despite the drawbacks and impractical nature of this device, space science researcher @dyd_Nao created a USB drive made of magnetic core memory – a technology that was used a lot in space technology of the 1950’s and 60’s.

It’s really awesome – despite the fact it only holds 128 bytes of data and is the size of a small dinner plate.