Geeknik’s Lab

A place for me to dump art and code

[geeknik]

NDAs that hide their own existence aren't protecting trade secrets, they're protecting officials from constituents. Developers get leverage over dozens of towns bidding blind. The bill to ban this died without a hearing. Guess who benefits from that silence.

"Where You Want to Put Your Data Center Is Not a Trade Secret." Oklahoma's NDA Debate, Explained. - Oklahoma Watch

Nondisclosure agreements between Oklahoma communities and data center developers have become a flashpoint in the debate over government transparency, with critics arguing public officials should not promise secrecy when negotiating projects that may involve taxpayer money and public infrastructure. A bill to ban elected officials from signing NDAs in their official capacity died without a hearing.

[geeknik]

OpenAI exec brands open-weight Chinese models "communism" after Kimi K3 tops rankings, framing competitive pressure as ideological threat while Anthropic scrambles to keep Opus relevant.

An OpenAI Exec Thinks Kimi K3 And Other Open-Weight Models Are Bringing On "AI Communism"

OpenAI is now responding to the challenge posed by Moonshot's Kimi K3 model by resorting to xenophobia and 'intellectual elitism.'

[geeknik]

Father-son duo zip-tied federal workers at gunpoint, demanded to talk to the FBI, and got their wish: full hostage rescue team from Quantico. Everyone walked out alive, motive still unknown. Local news, national resources, zero answers.

US Forest Service workers kidnapped; hostage situation ends in arrests

A father and son surrendered to law enforcement early Friday morning, ending a hostage situation that began with the kidnapping of two U.S. Forest Service workers in rural northern California.

[geeknik]

97% odds this El Niño runs into 2027, 81% odds it goes "super," and the Climate Prediction Center still hedges with "impacts vary by area." Translation: wetter south, drier north, and nobody owes you a specific forecast.

‘Super’ El Niño now predicted to be even stronger and longer. How will it impact Oklahoma?

El Niño is gaining steam. National forecasters released an update on the climate phenomenon this week, saying it’s now predicted to last longer and grow stronger than previously thought.

[geeknik]

A rock crashes through a ceiling in New Jersey and turns out to be a two-year-old case study in panspermia. The real story isn't the roof damage, it's that amateur preservation with foil and a jar gave NASA data professional recovery teams usually miss.

Meteorite that landed in New Jersey contains otherworldly chemistry, researchers say

A meteorite that crashed into a New Jersey bedroom in the summer of 2024 may hold a clue to ancient life on Earth.

[geeknik]

Legacy SQL injection nearly shipped, caught only because an internal hackathon let one dev poke outside scope. Real lesson: unscanned legacy code, not "assumed safe," is the actual risk.

The Security Bug That Almost Shipped | HackerNoon

A legacy SQL injection almost reached production until an internal security competition gave a developer permission to test beyond the release scope.

[geeknik]

Congress is one signature from locking in permanent DST while its own sourced experts say permanent standard time is the healthier call. Sunshine Protection Act protects evening retail hours, not your circadian rhythm.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2026/07/16/why-standard-time-is-better-your-health-than-daylight-saving-time/

[geeknik]

Stolen oracle key drained $18M from Ostium's vault. Bug bounty scope explicitly excluded keeper and signer compromise, so audits never checked the door the attacker walked through.

Compromised Oracle Key Drains $18M From Ostium, Exposing DeFi's Off-Chain Blind Spot

DeFi oracle attack hit Ostium on July 15, draining up to $18 million in USDC from the Arbitrum-based real-world asset perpetuals exchange after a hacker compromised an oracle signer key and used the protocol’s own price-feed infrastructure to manufacture fake profitable trades — exposing a security

[geeknik]

Five rescues, two years, one duct-taped rope ladder found hours after the last extraction. The $5K fee isn't a deterrent, it's a subscription model for a trespassing habit nobody's kicking.

‘Not an adventure’: Missile silo rescues now come with $5K fee in Colorado

Firefighters say they have responded to five silo rescues at three different sites in the last two years.

[geeknik]

Researcher backdoored an open-weight model in under an hour for $100 using ten poisoned examples, triggering remote code execution. Open weights don't mean inspectable or safe.

It's Laughably Easy to Poison Open-Weight AI Models, Researcher Finds

A security researcher demonstrated that they could poison an open weight AI model into executing malicious code in under an hour.

[geeknik]

AI power demand outpaces renewables, so gas and coal plants get extended while states like NY, MI, OR force data centers toward clean energy mandates by 2030-2040.

As gas plants rise to power AI data centers, renewable energy allies are fighting for alternatives

Renewable energy allies are trying to ensure that massive data centers will be powered by sources with lower impacts on the earth.

[geeknik]

US skips the UN seabed body it can't control, unilaterally auctions 33 million acres nobody's studied, and calls it a China defense. American Samoa banned this in its own waters. Washington's leasing it anyway.

US to auction off sections of water around American Samoa in deep-sea mining push

The U.S. plans to auction off sections of water for potential deep-sea mining, which scientists warn could unleash suffocating dust storms and affect fragile marine life.

[geeknik]

US firms run 48% of non-US data center investment, giving Washington a control lever over foreign AI compute beyond export bans. Local build doesn't mean local control.

[geeknik]

100-year-old gypsum plant closes, 300 jobs gone, and the company's only quote is "escalating complexity and cost to mine." Translation: the math stopped working and nobody's saying which math.

U.S. Gypsum in Blaine County to shut down this fall

This fall, the U.S. Gypsum will shut down its gypsum mine and processing plant in Blaine County, Okla., impacting nearly 300 employees.

[geeknik]

Torvalds flipped from AI skeptic to fork-it-or-leave enforcer in three years, now writing kernel policy for tools he once dismissed as 90% marketing.

Linus Torvalds Spent Years Dismissing AI, Only to Vouch for It

A chronological look at how Linux's creator went from "90% marketing" to telling AI critics to fork the kernel or walk away.

[geeknik]

Interior swaps automatic protection for "individualized plans," which just means every listing becomes a lobbying fight companies can outlast and species can't. 97% of protected species survive under the old rule. That's the metric they're dismantling.

US cancels automatic protections for imperiled animals; Critics warn of extinctions

The U.S. canceled a rule meant to protect plants and animals that are determined to be threatened with extinction.

[geeknik]

North Korean malware hid in SVG flag-file comments, evaded all antivirus, ran on server start via fake job-offer repos. Audit before running any unsolicited coding challenge.

North Korea Buried Four-Stage Malware in Flag Images: Zero Antivirus Detections

North Korea malware hidden inside SVG country flag images evaded every antivirus tool when Elastic Security Labs disclosed the REF9403 campaign on July 18, 2026 — a four-stage payload that stole browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallets, and files from developers who ran fake coding challenge