Denshattack, test: when a train ride reminds us that rail is fun
The Verge publishes an enthusiastic review of Denshattack, a rail shooter that advocates for a return to guided level design. We're rather in agreement.
Jul 18, 2026 4 2
SilentShield 2026 Exercises: CISA Red Team Penetrates Two Critical Infrastructures, One Without Any Detection
The CISA releases the results of its SILENTSHIELD exercises: two U.S. critical infrastructure organizations tested, two successful compromises. One issued no alerts. Meanwhile, over 100 U.S. water systems were attacked in July 2026.
Aug 27, 2026 2 1
The Visual 6502: Watching the Apple II and NES Brain Spin, Transistor by Transistor
An open-source JavaScript simulator reconstructs all 3,510 transistors of the MOS 6502—the processor behind the Apple II, Commodore 64, and NES—and lets you observe every signal in real time within your browser.
Aug 25, 2026 3 1
Visual 6502: Opening the Hood of a Legendary CPU in a Simple Browser Tab
A team of enthusiasts once depolished a MOS 6502, photographed each transistor under a microscope, and reconstructed its simulation in JavaScript. Fifteen years later, Visual 6502 is still running in a browser and remains, in our eyes, one of the most beautiful pedagogies of silicon ever made. We remember the shock, the first time a team member stumbled upon `visual6502.org`: an entire CPU, the one that powered our Apple II or our Commodore 64, simulated in JavaScript directly in the browser—not abstractly with registers and memory slots, but **transistor by transistor**, with the copper tracks lighting up to the rhythm of the clock signal. The link is back on the front page of Hacker News (69 points, 20 comments), and we went back to play. ## A CPU born in 1975, still alive in our machines The MOS 6502, released by MOS Technology in 1975 and initially sold for $25 when an Intel 8080 cost more than $100, populated the machines that made us love computing: Apple II (Steve Wozniak, 1977), Commodore PET then VIC-20 and C64, Atari 400/800 and Atari 2600, BBC Micro, and, in a derived version, Nintendo's NES (1983) in the form of the Ricoh 2A03. A small chip of about 3,500 transistors, etched at the time in 8 microns, which durably defined what an affordable personal computer was. ## What Visual 6502 does The project, launched by Greg James, Barry Silverman, and Brian Silverman, is based on a rare heritage approach: decapsulating a real chip, photographing its die under a high-resolution microscope, manually retracing the layout of the transistors, and then reconstructing the logic from the topology. The result lives on `visual6502.org`: the JavaScript simulation, published as an open project since 2010, does not model abstract logic gates—it propagates the electrical state at the level of each transistor and each track. Concretely, in the **JSSim** tab, you can: - advance half a clock cycle at a time and see the signals propagate in color on the die; - inspect any register (accumulator, X, Y, stack pointer, PC) in real time; - inject a small program in machine language directly into the simulated memory and run it; - observe how a seemingly simple instruction like `LDA #$05` physically sets precise paths in the chip in motion. It's slow—the page runs in the browser, not on GPU. It's also quite rough in terms of interface. But for someone who grew up typing `POKE` on a C64 without ever seeing what was happening behind the scenes, it's about the most moving thing you can do in 2026 with a Chrome tab. ## Why it still matters There are faster, prettier 6502 simulators, better integrated into modern IDEs. None do what Visual 6502 does: materialize the idea that a microprocessor is **a physical object**, a tangle of doped silicon, and not a Wikipedia abstraction. The same collective has indeed extended the approach to Motorola's 6800 and Atari's 2600 processor (the TIA), using the same method: decap, microphoto, reconstruction. In an era where we talk about chip design as we would about a SaaS service—"we've signed with TSMC for 3 nm"—going back to an 8-micron die that you can look at through an optical microscope does a world of good. ## Key takeaways - **Visual 6502** simulates the MOS 6502 transistor by transistor in a browser, based on photographs of a real die. - The project, launched around 2010 by Greg James, Barry Silverman, and Brian Silverman, remains online at `visual6502.org` and also covers the 6800 and the TIA of the Atari 2600. - **Try it here**: http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html - load the simulator, let it run, and finally see what the processor of your first computer was doing, physically.
Jul 24, 2026 2 1
SonicWall SMA1000: Two actively exploited 0-days, potentially chainable
The Register and The Hacker News reported on September 2, 2026, that SonicWall SMA1000 appliances are once again under active attack, with two zero-days capable of forming a full exploit chain. Immediate operational priority.
Sep 3, 2026 2 1
A malicious .git file can execute code in Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor
The Hacker News documents a new class of attack: malicious .git configurations that, when read by AI coding agents, execute attacking code. The tools meant to secure become vectors.
Sep 3, 2026 9 2
Fake software installers: disabling Windows Update and weakening Defender before intrusion
The Hacker News documents a campaign of fake software installers that begin by disabling Windows Update and reducing Microsoft Defender protections. This is no longer a classic drive-by attack: it's a preamble to a lasting intrusion.
Sep 3, 2026 2 1
An old forgotten Lenovo portal exposes 5,000 Dropbox accounts to attackers - the debt of federated identity
The Register documents how an old Lenovo login system, left in place after a forgotten SSO integration, allowed access to 5,000 Dropbox accounts. A textbook case of federated identity debt in supply chains.
Sep 3, 2026 22 3
UAC-0099 incorporates a "nuclear weapon prompt" into its malware to blind AI analysts
The pro-Russian group UAC-0099 has found an original workaround against automated analysis by LLM: embedding prompts about nuclear weapons in its malware. The AI tools trigger their filters and refuse to analyze it—a reversed jailbreak that turns AI safeguards against defenders.
Sep 2, 2026 14 3
33 hours of BGP hijacking on Softaculous: when Internet routing becomes a weapon
For 33 hours, traffic to Softaculous—the web application installer used by millions of cPanel/Plesk hosting providers—was silently redirected via a BGP hijack attack. A major exposure window for a critical infrastructure in global web hosting.
Sep 2, 2026 15 3
Pacemakers under fire, millions of stolen records: healthcare, the new frontier of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure
Cyberattacks have targeted pacemakers and exfiltrated millions of patient records in August 2026. The healthcare sector joins water and energy on the list of critical infrastructures regularly targeted.
Sep 1, 2026 12 3
HollowByte: 11 bytes are enough to saturate OpenSSL server memory
The HollowByte flaw in OpenSSL allows an attacker to send an 11-byte TLS request to inflate server memory until saturation. A rarely achieved attack-to-impact ratio, affecting a library present on millions of servers.
Sep 1, 2026 10 2