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Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
Heads-up: An update to this article has been posted. There have been a lot of complaints about both the competency and the logic behind the latest Epstein archive release by the DoJ: from censoring the names of co-conspirators to censoring pictures of random women in a way that makes individuals...
How to (safely) swap the contents of two files opened in (neo)vim buffers
Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
Raise your hand if you’ve been here before: you have file1 open in a vim or neovim buffer and you want to “fork” its contents over to file2, but you need to reference file1 while you do so. So you do the obvious: you open a split buffer with :sp or :vsp, run a quick :saveas file2 then hack away at...
Namecheap takes down domain hosting video archives of Israeli war crimes
Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
Namecheap.com, the popular domain name and webhosting platform, has disabled the Genocide.live domain name, which was home to a publicly accessible archive of over 16,000 videos documenting alleged Israeli war crimes, the vast majority of which were recorded since the onset of the war on Gaza in...
Strategic Takeaways from Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Weissenhaus 2025
Abel Lin
Photo: Lennart Ootes/Freestyle Chess I didn’t find as many strategic ideas this year, only the more I study chess, the less I feel I know. Nonetheless, here are some noteworthy points! A big realization from this tournament is how easy it was to fall into a bad position quickly if you...
On the Social Web Foundation…
Tom Coates
About nine months ago, I ran into Evan Prodromou at an event at Meta. The social media giant was telling an audience of Fediverse and decentralized social veterans about its plans for its social network product Threads – focused primarily on its quite extraordinary plans to integrate it with the...
libc’s random number generators and what to be aware of when seeding them
Michael
When you need pseudo-random numbers in C code, commonly used routines are random(), rand() and rand_r(unsigned int*). First and foremost, it is important to know that none of these routines produce high quality random numbers suitable for cryptographic use. But there are cases where you just need...
Hello RSS Readers, can you hear me?
Tom Coates
I’d like to ask you guys a quick favor. If you use an RSS reader to consume your online content and somehow you still find yourself subscribed to plasticbag.org after many years of abandonment and dereliction, I’d really appreciate it if you can let me know in the comments below if you see this...
Voting in Argentina
Martín Villalba
For the longest time, I thought that elections all over the world were more or less the same. Finding out that this is not the case was surprising, but not as much as what came afterwards: out of all the typical complaints, the Argentinean voting system manages to avoid most common pitfalls. So...