neo

WASHINGTON—A CIA official has been charged with leaking top-secret classified documents that revealed information last month about Israel’s plans for a military strike against Iran, according to U.S. court documents and people familiar with the matter.

Asif William Rahman was arrested in Cambodia on Tuesday and transported to a federal court in Guam to be charged. He was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia on two counts of willful transmission of national defense information, charges that can result in years in prison.

Court documents filed Wednesday say Rahman possessed a top-secret security clearance and had access to sensitive compartmented information. The documents don’t state that he worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, but people familiar with the matter confirmed his employment at the spy agency.

Rahman worked overseas for the CIA in Cambodia and elsewhere, one of the people said. It isn’t publicly known what sort of work he did for the spy agency.

In October two leaked classified reports from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes imagery gathered by American reconnaissance satellites, appeared on Telegram and X. The files were circulated by a pro-Iran account, Middle East Spectator, which says it received them from an anonymous source.

The leak set off a scramble within U.S. spy agencies—which have suffered a number of significant unauthorized disclosures in recent years—to identify the source of the breach. Officials were worried about the possibility of more disclosures, though it appears the leak was limited to the original documents. The Federal Bureau of Investigation previously acknowledged investigating the leak.

The leaked reports assessed Israel’s planning for a possible Iran attack, including the types of aircraft and munitions its military could use. They also described Israeli air-force exercises involving air-to-surface missiles, believed to be in preparation for aerial strikes inside Iran. One of the reports says the U.S. hadn’t seen any sign an attack would involve nuclear weapons, a capability Israel is known to possess but doesn’t publicly confirm it has.

The motives for Rahman’s alleged leaks weren’t immediately clear. His arrest took place the same day that Jack Teixeira, a former Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, was sentenced to 15 years in prison over a leak of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents last year on the social-media platform Discord.

Teixeira’s leaks were more voluminous and wide-ranging than the pair of documents allegedly disclosed by Rahman, and authorities said their releases were done to impress anonymous friends on the internet. Teixeira pleaded guilty in March 2024.

I contacted Amazon customer service for the first time since I got my Kindle PW3 in 2017 with "Special Offers". Even after years of ads they want the full $20 to disable the special offers. I said thanks, but not for me! But as part of this process to get them to remove the special offers I preemptively turned on the WiFi on my Kindle for the first time in a long while. Somehow doing so deleted all of my Calibre-managed ebooks. I'm not kidding.

BTW, if you have a kindle do not connect it to WiFi! Especially if it's still on a blessed older firmware. You do not want to let it accidentally upgrade to a version that cannot be jailbroken, not until you are in full control and awareness of the upgrade process yourself.

So with nothing to lose and all my ~~apes~~ ebooks... gone, I said to hell with it. I jailbroke my Kindle following the instructions here (THANK GOODNESS I WAS ON A JAILBREAKABLE FW). This process involves wiping the contents of your Kindle, which effectively already happened to me.

Then I followed the instructions here to install MRPI + KUAL. MRPI is like a command line package installer and KUAL is a GUI one.

In my jailbreak journey I also referenced this page https://blog.fabricemonasterio.dev/kindle-jailbreak/ for some tips and workflow ideas, including how to get a dictionary for the next step...

Which brings me to the Knock Out punch of why this was at all worth it. I installed https://koreader.rocks/. KOReader is an alternative ebook reader interface. By analogy, the experience is like taking your old mp3 player and installing RockBox on it to make it actually good. KOReader is similar, but it isn't a fully alternative operating system. It just kills the default React Native interface process and loads its own when you choose to use it. It also supports epubs natively. It is way more featureful and customizable compared to the default Kindle reader. In fact, it's a bit overwhelming at first. After getting a bit more used to it, I really appreciate what it does, and the advanced customization it offers.

I will admit that navigating its UI is a bit clunkier than Amazon's UI, but I will take a bit of clunky any day when it adds native epub and superior pdf support.

So now I have a Kindle that can load an alternative, superior interface, get epubs pushed to it wirelessly with Calibre, shows me the book I'm reading on the lock screen, and doesn't display or present any advertisements anywhere. I really like my Kindle again.

sorry, i should have picked a lower resolution poster image whoops (e: fixed)

Also holy shit this movie still kicks so much ass. I rewatched it recently and i was blown away by how excellent it still is 25 years later. Most movies do not age this well.

200 OK? What if it's better than OK?

The beloved romhacking.net website is moving to read-only, and will not accept new submissions or updates.

Announcement here.
https://www.romhacking.net/

Commentary here for a peek behind the curtain as to why, esp. pushing back against the "dishonest and hate filled group" part of the announcement.
https://cohost.org/gideonzhi/post/7131478-rip-rhdn

Consider https://arstechnica.com/robots.txt or https://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt and how they block all the stupid AI models from being able to scrape for free.

Trivially simple script to automatically decrease the horizontal margins on the chat and video containers on hextube. By default both left and right margins are 15px per container. I set them to 1px for a 56px gain in chat and video viewing area. It's free real estate.

// ==UserScript==
// @name        New script hexbear.net
// @namespace   Violentmonkey Scripts
// @match       https://live.hexbear.net/c/movies*
// @grant       none
// @version     1.0
// @author      -
// @description 3/1/2024, 10:31:12 PM
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
    'use strict';
      document.getElementById("chatwrap").style.paddingLeft="1px";
      document.getElementById("chatwrap").style.paddingRight="1px";
      document.getElementById("videowrap").style.paddingLeft="1px";
      document.getElementById("videowrap").style.paddingRight="1px";
})();

What is ViolentMonkey?

ViolentMonkey is an open source browser extension and small alternative to GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey. It can run custom JavaScript in your browser for you automatically to modify page behavior. If you install the extension you can create a new script and copy and paste the one I wrote above. Always beware of installing untrusted scripts that you don't understand.

Without realizing what I was getting myself into, I wrote some code using C11's threads.h (EDIT: every time I use the angle brackets < and > they just get eaten, even in the code snippet block.) I'm realizing after the fact that this is basically only supported on Linux (gcc/clang). This is my target platform, but I guess if I could cross compile to Windows or macOS that would be nice, too.

C's threads nominally appear to be a great feature. Finally, a standardized and straightforward interface to threads that would be cross-platform compatible. The reality appears to be anything but.

So is it worth just replacing that code with pthreads? Is there some near-term development on C threads that might make this worthwhile to use? I'm kind of surprised it hasn't really caught on some 12 years after the standard was introduced.