The Pentagon thinks someone HACKED the freezers on US military bases In August every freezer in the grocery store at Fort Huachuca Army base in Arizona went into defrost mode overnight and heated up all the food The base posted "Trust us when we say it was spoiled" on Facebook as at least five other bases lost their frozen food too Six weeks later hackers turned the freezers in 700 French supermarkets into ovens and kept them at 50°C (122°F) for six hours while the stores were closed One store in Normandy found its freezers sitting at 80°C the next morning At several stores the fridges got so hot they caught fire and set off the sprinklers Every supermarket freezer has a defrost setting that warms it up for about an hour to melt the ice The hackers stretched that to eight hours so the alarms would treat the heat as normal Each store runs all its fridges off one control box connected to the internet and many of the hacked boxes were too old to get security updates anymore Some of them were reportedly still using the password they came with from the factory Security firm Claroty later got Claude to break into one of these boxes in its lab in 28 minutes for about $6 using only info anyone can find online Last night the freezers at dozens of supermarkets in Sweden and Belgium started heating up too One store manager in Sweden walked in this morning to a flooded floor and a freezer showing 55°C Someone cooked the frozen food in 700 supermarkets with a defrost button and still hasn't asked for a single euro My honest guess is the freezers were practice and whoever is behind this isn't done

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder. On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first! As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise. Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours. Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure. Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice! The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :) Part 2: neutral atoms and qday The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers. Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low. Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts. My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom". Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions. So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030. Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years. Part 3: post-quantum cryptography There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation. These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer. The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security. Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

1/ This one stings. Our team gave everything we had to get the Clarity Act across the finish line. So did most of the industry. This was an opportunity bigger than Ripple or one company - we did this for the industry, for consumers and to cement the US’s position as the crypto capital of the world and as a leader in the future of finance. Ultimately, consumers and U.S. competitiveness got left behind. 2/ A post mortem needs to be done on why this failed (more from me on that in the days ahead). The politics of the democrats (the anti-crypto army) was elevated over good policy. 3/ There is still reason for optimism for crypto in the United States. Now, the SEC, under Chair Atkins, and the CFTC, under Chair Selig, will continue to work hard to issue rules to fill the legislative gap and we will continue to be actively engaged in that rule making process. 4/ Ripple's business has never been stronger — real demand across traditional finance and the digital asset ecosystem. A missed vote in Washington doesn't change our momentum, our global footprint, or our customers.

Wyoming hanged Tom Horn in 1903 on a machine specifically designed so that no human being would have to feel responsible for killing him. Which, given what Tom Horn did for a living, is about as tidy as history ever gets. He was born in Missouri in 1860 and left home at sixteen. He ended up in Arizona working for the Army as a packer, scout and interpreter under the chief of scouts Al Sieber during the Apache campaigns, and he was with the column that brought Geronimo in. He also won a steer roping championship out there. Years later he wrote an autobiography that inflated most of it considerably, which was standard for the genre. In the early 1890s he worked for the Pinkerton agency out of Denver, running down train robbers. He was extremely good at the tracking part. He was reportedly much less interested in the part where you bring a man in alive. Then he went north to Wyoming and hired on with the big cattle outfits as a stock detective. The job title was a formality. What the cattlemen were paying for was for suspected rustlers to stop existing, and Horn delivered that with a rifle, at long range, frequently from a couple hundred yards, with nobody around to see it. Historians credit him with the 1900 killings of Matt Rash and Isom Dart in Brown's Park and suspect him in several others. The line most often attributed to him is, "Killing men is my specialty. I look on it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market." Whether he actually said it is argued about. It was his reputation regardless, and he did nothing to discourage it. Then on July 18, 1901, a 14 year old boy named Willie Nickell was shot dead by a gate at Iron Mountain. Willie was big for his age, and he was wearing his father's coat and hat. His father, Kels Nickell, was running sheep in cattle country and was in a poisonous feud with his neighbors. Nearly everyone who has looked at it since has reached the same conclusion, which is that whoever fired thought he was shooting the father. Six months later, a deputy US marshal named Joe LeFors got Horn into an office in Cheyenne to talk about a job in Montana. He got Horn drinking. He flattered him, and let him brag, and kept nudging. Behind a door left open a crack in the next room sat a deputy and a court stenographer named Charles Ohnhaus, writing down every word. Somewhere in that transcript is the sentence, "It was the best shot that I ever made and the dirtiest trick I ever done." That was the case. Everything else the prosecution had was circumstantial. He was tried in an election year, in a state that had finally had enough of cattle barons buying outcomes, and the jury convicted him. Here is the complicated part. Most historians who have gone back through the evidence now believe Tom Horn probably did not kill Willie Nickell. There were other suspects with better motive and better opportunity. The physical case was weak, and the confession was a drunk man performing for a lawman who was steering the conversation. He had certainly killed people. He was very likely hanged for the wrong one. He got out of the jail in August 1903 with a pistol taken off a guard, and then could not figure out how the pistol worked. A man on the street who happened to know that model took him back into custody. So on November 20, 1903, one day short of his 43rd birthday, they walked him out to the gallows in Cheyenne. That gallows had been built by a local architect named James Julian. Julian had come through the Civil War, and he had thought a long time about what it does to a man to be the one personally responsible for killing another. So he engineered the person out of it. The condemned man stood on the trapdoor. His own weight tipped a lever that opened a valve on a water tank. The water ran out of the tank into a pan below, and as it drained the balance shifted, and when enough had run the mechanism pulled the bolt and the floor opened. Nobody pulled a lever. Nobody gave a signal. The man walked onto the platform, started the clock with his own body, and then stood there listening to water run. For Tom Horn it took about 35 seconds. A newspaper of the day described the machine as a device that simply compelled the condemned to commit suicide. Tom Horn had spent his career being the instrument that wealthy men used so that they would never have to be the ones who pulled the trigger. Wyoming killed him with a machine built on exactly the same idea.

On the morning of October 9th, forty-one combines came over the hill at sunrise. In a line. Headlights still on. Engines so loud the ground hummed. Like an army that had decided to be kind. My coworker's son, Hiroto, was standing in the field when they came. He was sixteen. He didn't know what he was looking at. Hiroto had spent the year as an exchange student with the Lindgren family in eastern Nebraska. Corn and soybeans. Nine hundred acres. The same family had worked that ground since 1911. The first month was a comedy. Tom, the father, woke him at 5:30 to feed the cattle. Hiroto had never seen a cow up close. The cow was not impressed. He asked Tom how many kernels of corn were in the field. Tom thought about it and said, "Oh, about forty million." Hiroto stopped asking questions about corn. The farm dog, a scruffy old heeler named Biscuit, decided on the second day that Hiroto belonged to her. Nobody was consulted. And there was Cody. Tom's son. Seventeen. Quiet. Arms like fence posts. For the first two weeks, he didn't say a single word to the Japanese kid sleeping across the hall. Then one night, in the truck, they fought over the radio. Country music versus Japanese pop. It got loud. It got serious. Tom laughed so hard he had to pull over. After that, they were brothers. Nobody decided it. It just was. In July, Tom collapsed in the north field. Heart attack. He was 52. He was gone before the ambulance found the road. Grief in a farmhouse is quiet in a specific way. His boots stayed by the back door. Laced. Like they were waiting for him to come in for supper. Nobody could move them. Ellie, nine years old, started sleeping in her father's seed cap. It came down over her eyes. She wouldn't take it off. And Cody, at the funeral, said exactly one sentence. "I'll bring in the harvest." Nine hundred acres. A job for a whole crew. Tom had brought in every harvest for thirty years. He had never missed one. Not for a broken arm. Not for a blizzard. Not once. Cody was not going to be the Lindgren who missed one. So in September, he started. Alone. Up at four. In the combine before the sun. Back after midnight. Hiroto couldn't drive a combine. So he did the only thing he could. He rode in the cab next to his brother. All day. All night. He held the thermos. He talked. In bad English, about anything. Baseball. Japan. Girls. Biscuit. Anything to keep Cody's eyes open. Some nights Cody fell asleep at the wheel for a second, and Hiroto would shake his arm, and Cody would say, "I'm good, I'm good." He was not good. One night, around two in the morning, in the middle of a dark field, Cody stopped the combine. He put his forehead on the steering wheel. And he broke. All of it. Everything he hadn't let anyone see since July. Seventeen years old. Alone in the middle of nine hundred acres, in his father's machine, in the dark. Hiroto told my coworker he didn't know a single English word that could help. So he put his hand on Cody's back, and said the only word that came. In Japanese. "Niichan." Big brother. Cody didn't know what it meant. He knew exactly what it meant. They sat there until the sun came up. Two weeks later, on the morning of October 9th, Hiroto heard the sound first. He walked out of the house, still in his socks, and looked up at the hill. And they came. Forty-one combines. Grain trucks behind them. Semis behind those. Neighbors from three counties. Men who argued with each other at the co-op every Monday. Men who hadn't spoken to each other in years. Old men. Young men. The high school football team, driving grain carts. Church women unloading folding tables and coolers of sandwiches at the edge of the field. Nobody had called them. Nobody had to. Cody came out of the house and just stood there, staring. He couldn't move. An old neighbor named Arlen, eighty years old, climbed down out of the lead combine, walked across the dirt, and put his hand on Cody's shoulder. "Your daddy helped every single one of us, son. Every one." Then he pointed at Tom's combine. "Get in. You're leading." And Cody climbed into his father's combine, and pulled out in front, and led forty-one machines across his father's land. They brought in nine hundred acres in one day. At sunset, there was one row left. And without anyone saying a word, every combine stopped. They pulled off to the edge of the field. Forty-one machines in a long line, side by side, headlights on in the gold light. Two hundred people stood by the trucks. And they let Cody take the last row. Alone. With Ellie in the cab beside him, in her father's cap, pushing it up out of her eyes so she could see. When he reached the end of that last row, forty-one horns went off at once. You could hear them, people said, in the next town. Hiroto came home to Japan in June. His father asked him what the most important thing was that he'd learned in America. He expected English. Or baseball. Or maybe something about corn. Hiroto thought about it. Then he said: "In Japan, we say a family is the people under one roof. In Nebraska, I learned that family is whoever comes over the hill." Every October now, Hiroto gets a photo from Cody. Always the same picture. A line of combines coming over a hill at sunrise. Always the same three words. "They came again."

In the mountains of Nagano, Japan, in the village where my father grew up, there is a mountain rescue team. It has two members. One American. One Japanese. They are the strangest partners in Japan. Two years ago, in a blizzard, one of them held the other over a cliff for forty minutes. To understand how, you have to know who they are. Cole is 41. From Colorado. Former U.S. Army. Built like a vending machine. He talks the whole way up every mountain. He sings country songs on the trail. He eats three rice balls every break. When he rescues someone, he hugs them. Mr. Hamada is 67. Five-foot-two. 115 pounds. Forty years of mountain rescue. He eats one pickled plum every break. When he rescues someone, he bows. Mostly, he says one word. "Un." It means "yeah." Mostly. Twenty years ago, Mr. Hamada lost his partner in an avalanche. A man named Takeda. The rope caught on a rock and cut. Mr. Hamada was holding the other end. After that, he worked alone. For eight years. Then Cole showed up. A loud American ski bum who wanted to volunteer. Mr. Hamada looked at him for a long time and said two words. "Big." Then: "Loud." He said no. Cole asked again. No. Again. No. So every Sunday for a year, Cole showed up at the trailhead anyway, picked up Mr. Hamada's pack without asking, and walked behind him up the mountain. Talking the entire way. One Sunday, without a word, Mr. Hamada handed him the end of the rope. That was twelve years ago. Cole has tried everything to make him talk. The village has a standing bet. Whoever gets Mr. Hamada to say one full sentence wins a case of beer. Twelve years. Nobody has collected. Cole gives him a fist bump after every rescue. For twelve years, Mr. Hamada has answered every fist bump with a bow. But Cole will tell you there are eleven different kinds of "un." The tired one. The pleased one. The one that means "you're an idiot." The one that means "stop." He knows them all. And whenever they cross a dangerous slope, the same thing happens. Cole says, "Let's go!" Mr. Hamada looks at the sky and says, "Wait." Cole waits. The first time, an avalanche came down right where they would have been. The next winter, it happened again. Cole stopped arguing. When they climb roped together, Mr. Hamada always holds the other end. Cole has never once looked back at the rope. Every winter, Cole teaches a free safety class at the village elementary school. "If you get lost in the snow: Stop. Dig. Sing. So we can find you." Then he sings them "Country Roads." Badly. Japanese kids know that song from an old animated movie. They all sing along. Two years ago, in February, a ten-year-old boy got separated from his family on the ski slopes. A blizzard came in. Night fell. The rescue team called it. Too dangerous. Wait for morning. Mr. Hamada stood outside in the wind for a long time, looking at the sky. Then he said a word Cole had never heard from him in twelve years. "Go." Cole didn't ask a single question. Visibility was six feet. Five degrees Fahrenheit. Snow up to their waists. Two headlamps in an ocean of white. At 3 a.m., Cole stopped. Under the wind, he heard singing. Very small. Very off-key. "Country Roads." The boy had dug himself a hole in the snow, exactly like he'd been taught. His lips were blue. He was still singing. Cole unzipped his own jacket, put the boy inside it against his chest, and zipped it back up around both of them. They started down. At 3:40, the snow under Cole's feet broke away. He went over the edge with the boy on his chest. The rope snapped tight. Above, Mr. Hamada was yanked forward and slammed face-first into the snow. He slid. His ice axe scraped. He slid toward the edge. He drove the axe in, dug his boots in, wrapped the rope around his own body, and stopped. A 115-pound man. Almost 300 pounds hanging below him. Cole couldn't climb. Not with the boy. Not yet. His hands were frozen. He hung there in the dark, in the wind, over nothing. And every minute, through the storm, from somewhere above him, he heard one word. "Un." So he would know someone was still there. Forty minutes. Forty "un"s. Cole kicked steps into the ice. Inch by inch. With the boy against his chest. Until he dragged himself over the edge and collapsed in the snow next to Mr. Hamada. Mr. Hamada was lying on his back. He couldn't feel his arms. Slowly, he lifted one hand. And for the first time in twelve years, he made a fist. Cole bumped it. And cried like a child. "How did you hold us?" And Mr. Hamada said the longest thing anyone in that village has ever heard him say. "For twelve years, you never once looked back at the rope. I wasn't going to give you a reason to start." Somebody in that village owes Cole a case of beer. The boy is twelve now. He wants to join mountain rescue. He says he wants to be "the one who holds the rope." Last month, I saw the two of them heading up the trail together. Cole was talking. Mr. Hamada was saying "Un." The rope was between them. Cole told me later that a partner is not the guy who agrees with you. It's not even the guy who talks to you. It's the one you never have to look back at.

In 1970, a 20-year-old soldier came home from Vietnam, walked into an airport bathroom, and changed out of his uniform. So nobody would know where he'd been. He never told anyone. Not for 55 years. This spring, a Japanese flight attendant watched him finally come home. Her name is Erika. She was one of my wife's students in Tokyo, a long time ago. Now she's 34, and she flies for an American airline out of Atlanta. A coworker asked her to volunteer for something called an Honor Flight. "You'll never forget it," she said. Erika didn't really know what it was. An Honor Flight takes old veterans to Washington, D.C., to see their memorials. One day. Free. They fly out in the morning and come home that night. The plane was full of men between 75 and 96. Wheelchairs. Canes. Oxygen. Hats covered in pins. And they were terrible. In the best way. The Army guys and the Navy guys argued for two hours about which branch was better. Nobody won. Nobody ever has. A 94-year-old Korean War veteran called all the Vietnam vets "the kids." A 96-year-old Marine asked Erika to marry him before the seatbelt sign went off. She politely declined. He said, "Your loss, sweetheart," and fell asleep. Except for the man in 22C. His name was Lonnie. 76. Army. He sat by the window and didn't say a word. Everyone else wore a veteran's cap. They gave Lonnie one too. He put it in his jacket pocket and kept wearing his old feed-store cap. His son had signed him up. Lonnie almost didn't come. In Washington, at the Vietnam memorial, there's a long black wall with 58,000 names on it. Erika watched Lonnie walk along it until he found one. Then he put his hand flat against the stone. He stood like that for an hour. He didn't move. He didn't speak. The other men left him alone. They knew. On the flight home, there's a tradition. It's called Mail Call. Without telling the veterans, their families collect letters for them. From children, grandchildren, old friends, strangers, schoolkids who've never met them. Then, somewhere over the country, the crew calls out their names, one by one, and hands each man a thick envelope. Grown men who had survived wars sat there opening letters from third graders, and fell apart. "Dear Soldier, thank you for your service. I hope you were not too scared. I would be scared. Love, Brayden, age 8." "Dear Veteran, thank you for keeping us free. My dog's name is Freedom too." Lonnie's envelope was the thickest on the plane. He read every letter. Slowly. Folded each one back exactly the way it came. Then he got to the last one. A small envelope. Handwriting he knew. He held it for a long time without opening it. His son, in the next seat, quietly told Erika: "That's from my sister. They haven't spoken in eleven years." Lonnie opened it. It was one line. "Daddy, I'll be at the airport." He put his hand over his mouth and turned toward the window. His whole body was shaking. His son put an arm around him. Neither of them said anything for the rest of the flight. They landed at ten o'clock at night. Erika assumed a few families would be waiting. When the doors opened at the end of the jet bridge, the noise hit the plane before the men did. Two thousand people. At ten o'clock on a weeknight. Lined up on both sides of the terminal, as far as she could see. Bagpipes. A high school marching band in full uniform. Boy Scouts. Little kids on their dads' shoulders. Grandmas holding handmade signs. Young soldiers in uniform, standing at attention. And every single one of them, as each old man came through, was reaching out a hand and saying the same two words. "Welcome home." "Welcome home, sir." "Welcome home." Over and over. For an hour. To strangers. Lonnie was the last one off the plane. Halfway up the jet bridge, he stopped. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the veteran's cap he had refused to wear all day. He looked at it. Then he took off his old feed-store cap, put the veteran's cap on, and straightened it with both hands. Then he walked out. Two thousand strangers cheered for him like he had just won a war. And at the very end of that long line, holding a sign she'd clearly made at a kitchen table, was a woman about forty-five years old. The sign said, "WELCOME HOME DADDY." Erika told my wife she cried so hard she had to go stand behind the gate desk. She said something else, too. I've been thinking about it ever since. "In Japan, when a country makes a mistake, it apologizes. Carefully. Formally. Once. In America, two thousand strangers came to an airport at ten o'clock at night to fix a mistake they didn't make. Fifty-five years late. And they did it like it was the most natural thing in the world." In 1970, a young man walked into an airport bathroom a soldier, and walked out pretending he wasn't. This spring, on a jet bridge in Atlanta, an old man put his cap back on. And walked out one.

🇮🇱🇱🇧 Israeli surveillance just got BUSTED in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Army says it dismantled an Israeli solar-powered surveillance camera. It was placed by a drone near Wadi Zibqin. A single camera down, but a vast surveillance grid remains... Source: @bintjbeilnews, Shomrim / Writer: Marie