On October 29, traders on Polymarket, the prediction market, watched their money walk out the door. About $2.7 million was drained from 726 wallets in less than an hour.
Here's the part that should get everyone's attention: Polymarket's own code wasn't what got hacked.
Read the full story here:
https://thehackernews.com/2026/11/hackers-steal-about-27-...
HOW IT HAPPENED
Like almost every website today, Polymarket loaded scripts from outside companies. One of them was a small page-speed monitoring script from a vendor called DebugBear. Nothing to do with trading. Just a tool to measure how fast the site loads.
According to DebugBear, attackers compromised its domain's DNS records through its registrar and swapped that harmless script for a malicious one. Every signed-in trader who loaded Polymarket was now running the attacker's code in their browser, with their session wide open.
The malicious script didn't need anyone's password. It used the trader's own logged-in session to move positions to the attacker or sell them off at bad prices and pull the funds out. The requests were signed by the trader's own account and went through Polymarket's normal system. To the platform, it looked like the users were doing it themselves.
Polymarket did respond well. They pulled the script within the hour, reset sessions, paused trading and refunded the affected wallets: about $3.9 million in total, including people who lost money during the trading pause. Credit where it's due.
But the lesson doesn't change.
ONLINE IS NEVER 100% SECURE
I've been around this stuff since the AIM days, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: there is no such thing as 100% secure online. Never has been, never will be.
You can have a solid platform, good developers and real security, and still get burned by a little script from a company you've never heard of. That's what a supply-chain attack is: they don't break down your front door, they come in through someone you trusted.
Every website you use loads code from dozens of places: analytics, ads, chat widgets, fonts, speed monitors. Each one is a door. Most of the time nothing happens. But it only takes one.
PEOPLE JUST HAVE TO BE CAREFUL
You can't control a company's DNS or their vendors. But you can control your own habits:
- Don't keep more money on any platform than you can afford to lose. Exchanges, wallets, betting and prediction sites: treat them like a wallet in your pocket, not a bank vault.
- Log out when you're done, especially on sites that move money. An open session is exactly what this attack used.
- If your wallet or app asks you to sign or approve something you didn't start, REJECT it. Every time.
- Use separate accounts or wallets for trading and for savings.
- Turn on two-factor authentication everywhere, with an authenticator app instead of SMS when you can.
- Watch your accounts. The faster you notice something wrong, the faster you can act.
- When a breach hits the news, act on it. Log out, check your activity, change what needs changing.
FOR THE DEVELOPERS
If you run a site where people log in, trade or pay: every third-party script on those pages has the same power as your own code. Cut what you don't need, pin and verify what you keep (Subresource Integrity), lock it down with a strict Content Security Policy, and keep anything non-essential off the pages where money moves.
AI, crypto, prediction markets: the tools keep changing, but the rule from the old days still holds. Trust nothing completely, verify what you can, and be careful out there.
— Seven
While we wait for life, life passes.
Your RAM Is Not His to Take: Sam Altman and the War on the Personal Computer
I started on a beige CRT with a few megabytes of RAM, and that machine changed my life. It was mine. Nobody rented it to me, nobody metered it, and nobody in a boardroom decided whether I deserved it. Everything I've built since started with one simple idea: a regular person owning a powerful computer.
So when I read that OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, thinks that idea is a problem, I had to say something.
In an interview on the Cheeky Pint YouTube channel, Altman called running AI on your own computer "quite terrible." His reasoning: from a "global allocation perspective," it's wasteful for everyday people to keep the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computers, used only a fraction of the time, when it could be running at full utilization in the cloud. His cloud, of course.
Read the full story here:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/o...
Let's call this what it is.
This is greed dressed up as efficiency. OpenAI's business is selling access to closed models that run in its data centers. Every gigabyte of RAM in your PC is a gigabyte you can use to run AI yourself, for free, privately, without a subscription. Of course he thinks that's "terrible." It's terrible for his business model.
And it's authoritarian at its core. "Global allocation" is the language of someone who believes he should decide who gets resources and who doesn't. Your memory, your hardware, your ability to compute: in his worldview, that belongs in a data center where it can be "maximized," meaning monetized and controlled. You don't own a computer anymore. You rent a window into his.
Think about where that road goes. If the hardware lives in his data center, then the rules do too. What you can run, what you can say to the model, what it will answer, what it logs about you. Owning your own machine is one of the last real freedoms in technology. It's what let a kid like me learn to code, break things, build things and figure out how the world actually works. Take that away and you don't get a smarter society. You get a dependent one.
This isn't anti-AI. I build with AI every day. This very site was built with it, and I'm amazed at what it can do. AI is here, and it should be used wisely: to put more power in people's hands, not less. The danger isn't the technology. The danger is people like Sam Altman deciding that the rest of us should only be allowed to touch it through a paywall they control.
The personal computer was a revolution because it took computing out of the hands of a few institutions and gave it to everyone. Men like Altman want to reverse that, and they'll tell you it's for efficiency, for the greater good, for "global allocation."
Don't buy it. Keep your RAM. Run your own models. Own your machine.
— Seven
So when I read that OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, thinks that idea is a problem, I had to say something.
In an interview on the Cheeky Pint YouTube channel, Altman called running AI on your own computer "quite terrible." His reasoning: from a "global allocation perspective," it's wasteful for everyday people to keep the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computers, used only a fraction of the time, when it could be running at full utilization in the cloud. His cloud, of course.
Read the full story here:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/o...
Let's call this what it is.
This is greed dressed up as efficiency. OpenAI's business is selling access to closed models that run in its data centers. Every gigabyte of RAM in your PC is a gigabyte you can use to run AI yourself, for free, privately, without a subscription. Of course he thinks that's "terrible." It's terrible for his business model.
And it's authoritarian at its core. "Global allocation" is the language of someone who believes he should decide who gets resources and who doesn't. Your memory, your hardware, your ability to compute: in his worldview, that belongs in a data center where it can be "maximized," meaning monetized and controlled. You don't own a computer anymore. You rent a window into his.
Think about where that road goes. If the hardware lives in his data center, then the rules do too. What you can run, what you can say to the model, what it will answer, what it logs about you. Owning your own machine is one of the last real freedoms in technology. It's what let a kid like me learn to code, break things, build things and figure out how the world actually works. Take that away and you don't get a smarter society. You get a dependent one.
This isn't anti-AI. I build with AI every day. This very site was built with it, and I'm amazed at what it can do. AI is here, and it should be used wisely: to put more power in people's hands, not less. The danger isn't the technology. The danger is people like Sam Altman deciding that the rest of us should only be allowed to touch it through a paywall they control.
The personal computer was a revolution because it took computing out of the hands of a few institutions and gave it to everyone. Men like Altman want to reverse that, and they'll tell you it's for efficiency, for the greater good, for "global allocation."
Don't buy it. Keep your RAM. Run your own models. Own your machine.
— Seven
A New Site, Built With AI — And a Time Capsule
If you've been here before, you'll notice things look a little different.
I thought long and hard about how I wanted this site to look and feel. I didn't want a template, and I didn't want another dark page full of lists. I wanted something that told my story: where I came from in the old days of AIM progs, VB6 and late-night coding, and where I am now, with C#, the cloud and AI. Old code, new code, same curiosity.
So I did something I wouldn't have imagined back then. I built it with AI.
The site was designed and coded with Claude, and the artwork was generated with Gemini. The circuitry, the blue universe, the desk with the old CRT, the frozen archive, Athena. I described what I saw in my head, and we went back and forth until it was right. Every page, the animations, the boot screen, even the custom AIM-style 404 page came out of that collaboration.
I'll be honest: I'm amazed at what I can do with AI. Twenty years ago it took me weeks to put a site together, slicing images in Photoshop and fighting tables in Notepad. Now I can sit down with an idea and watch it come to life in an afternoon. The curiosity that got me into code in the first place is the same. The tools have just caught up to the imagination.
THE TIME CAPSULE
The other big change is a new section called the Time Capsule.
Before feeds and frameworks, there were the sites I kept open in another window. The ones I learned from, borrowed from, and still pull up from time to time. I wanted a place to keep them, not just as links, but the way they actually looked.
So the Time Capsule restores them from the Wayback Machine and plays them back in an old Internet Explorer window on a CRT, complete with a dial-up connection and the page loading in line by line. Right now it holds:
- Aimfilez (2002): where I saw my first AIM prog
- Shadowness (2002): the dark, Flash-era digital art scene
- Spoono (2003): where a lot of us learned how the web was built
- Echoica (2006): Michelle Echo's Photoshop brushes, all over my early graphics
- milw0rm (2006): str0ke's legendary exploit archive
- My own milw0rm author page (2006): exploit #1775, published under my name. At the time, that was an honor and a major accomplishment for me
- Poison Ivy (2007): a RAT with a beautifully simple site
- Esoteric Code (2010): my own site, back in the day
The Time Capsule replaces the old Pairings section. Cigars and spirits are still part of my life, but honestly I don't have the time to keep that section going, and it never really belonged on this site. This site is about code, the old internet, and where it all led. The Time Capsule fits that a lot better.
More sites are coming. If there's an old site you remember from that era, let me know.
Thanks for stopping by.
— Seven
I thought long and hard about how I wanted this site to look and feel. I didn't want a template, and I didn't want another dark page full of lists. I wanted something that told my story: where I came from in the old days of AIM progs, VB6 and late-night coding, and where I am now, with C#, the cloud and AI. Old code, new code, same curiosity.
So I did something I wouldn't have imagined back then. I built it with AI.
The site was designed and coded with Claude, and the artwork was generated with Gemini. The circuitry, the blue universe, the desk with the old CRT, the frozen archive, Athena. I described what I saw in my head, and we went back and forth until it was right. Every page, the animations, the boot screen, even the custom AIM-style 404 page came out of that collaboration.
I'll be honest: I'm amazed at what I can do with AI. Twenty years ago it took me weeks to put a site together, slicing images in Photoshop and fighting tables in Notepad. Now I can sit down with an idea and watch it come to life in an afternoon. The curiosity that got me into code in the first place is the same. The tools have just caught up to the imagination.
THE TIME CAPSULE
The other big change is a new section called the Time Capsule.
Before feeds and frameworks, there were the sites I kept open in another window. The ones I learned from, borrowed from, and still pull up from time to time. I wanted a place to keep them, not just as links, but the way they actually looked.
So the Time Capsule restores them from the Wayback Machine and plays them back in an old Internet Explorer window on a CRT, complete with a dial-up connection and the page loading in line by line. Right now it holds:
- Aimfilez (2002): where I saw my first AIM prog
- Shadowness (2002): the dark, Flash-era digital art scene
- Spoono (2003): where a lot of us learned how the web was built
- Echoica (2006): Michelle Echo's Photoshop brushes, all over my early graphics
- milw0rm (2006): str0ke's legendary exploit archive
- My own milw0rm author page (2006): exploit #1775, published under my name. At the time, that was an honor and a major accomplishment for me
- Poison Ivy (2007): a RAT with a beautifully simple site
- Esoteric Code (2010): my own site, back in the day
The Time Capsule replaces the old Pairings section. Cigars and spirits are still part of my life, but honestly I don't have the time to keep that section going, and it never really belonged on this site. This site is about code, the old internet, and where it all led. The Time Capsule fits that a lot better.
More sites are coming. If there's an old site you remember from that era, let me know.
Thanks for stopping by.
— Seven
New Coding Language?
Stainless
by Xeons
Stainless is an experimental general-purpose language.
It reaches for the performance of C and C++ with the flexibility of something higher-level.
It is a deliberate mongrel. The syntax, namespaces, and attributes come from C#, with one large cut: Stainless has no exceptions. The value semantics, layout, and ABI come from C and C++. Reference counting and the borrowed-parameter convention come from Swift. Monomorphized generics come from C++ and Rust. Variants come from the ML family, by way of Swift and Rust. Runtime metadata lives as plain tables in the binary, as in Swift and Go.
Where those ideas disagree, the choice is written down in the docs—along with the reason—because the interesting part of the experiment is which combinations hold together.
github.com/xeons/stainless
by Xeons
Stainless is an experimental general-purpose language.
It reaches for the performance of C and C++ with the flexibility of something higher-level.
It is a deliberate mongrel. The syntax, namespaces, and attributes come from C#, with one large cut: Stainless has no exceptions. The value semantics, layout, and ABI come from C and C++. Reference counting and the borrowed-parameter convention come from Swift. Monomorphized generics come from C++ and Rust. Variants come from the ML family, by way of Swift and Rust. Runtime metadata lives as plain tables in the binary, as in Swift and Go.
Where those ideas disagree, the choice is written down in the docs—along with the reason—because the interesting part of the experiment is which combinations hold together.
github.com/xeons/stainless