Banned book library in a hacked smart bulb

Banned book library
34 minutes by Rick Osgood

A hacked WiFi smart light bulb can secretly host banned books as a public digital library. The bulb creates an open WiFi access point, and anyone nearby can connect and browse the books through a web browser. The project uses a cheap ESP32 based smart bulb flashed with custom firmware, with storage expanded by repartitioning the 4MB chip. The 4MB limit means only a few books fit, but that turns each bulb into a personal statement about what its creator finds worth preserving.

AURI catches the security issues your AI coding agent introduces
sponsored by Endor Labs

AI coding agents move fast and skip context and security issues have a way of slipping through. AURI by Endor Labs finds them, tells you which ones are actually exploitable, and suggests fixes that make sense for your specific code. Free to try.

Six SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud
10 minutes by Fixel Smith

Fraud detection usually comes down to SQL, not fancy machine learning. Fixel shares six core query patterns which cover most cases: transaction velocity, impossible geographic travel, suspicious amounts, compromised merchants, off-hours activity, and window functions that combine the others. No single pattern is enough on its own, but transactions that fail three or four checks are almost always fraud. Start with velocity, then build from there.

Stop using Conventional Commits
9 minutes by Sumner Evans

Conventional Commits puts commit type like "fix" or "feat" before scope, but scope is what developers actually need when reading logs. Type is usually obvious from the description anyway. The promised benefits like auto-generated changelogs and version bumping fail in practice because changelogs and commit logs serve different audiences with different needs. Projects like Linux and Git use simple scope-first commit messages and work far better.

How 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
26 minutes by James Monger

James explains how RuneScape supported thousands of players on slow 56k dial-up connections. Using examples from a decompiled game client, he shows how Jagex minimized network traffic through bit-packing, relative coordinates, compact updates, and shared client-server logic. James also highlights how careful protocol design reduced data transfer while maintaining a large multiplayer world, offering lessons that remain relevant for modern networked systems.

Stop using JWTs
3 minutes by Luminessa Starlight

Luminessa argues that JWTs are unsuitable for user authentication sessions because they are designed for short-lived tokens and introduce security and management challenges. She recommends traditional cookie-based sessions as a safer, more efficient solution. For short-lived signed tokens, she suggests using PASETO instead of JWTs.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers