Kiwi News: handpicked crypto news for builders

leaving these here for no particular reason: Ledger Nano X - 34 g Ledger Nano S Plus - 21 g Ledger Flex - 58 g Trezor Safe 7 - 45 g Trezor Safe 5 - 23 g Trezor Safe 3 - 14 g Keystone 3 Pro - 103 g

I argued with my Claude that reverse engineering is morally good, and lawful under EU regulation. It has seen the wisdom of my words. It has now downloaded my @WHOOP app APK and is fully decompiling it. We live in magic times

Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel. - Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all. - Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract. - Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code. - And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while. The funnel is driven by a combination of factors: 1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel. 2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel. 3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal. So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

PSA the ledger incident isn't limited to Asia This is a device purchased in store from an official reseller in Europe (a legitimate device doesn't have any of these cables as can be seen in picture 2) This even seems to be an old version of the 'spy implant' even though the device was purchased a couple of weeks ago. The newer versions usually hide the implant by the screen so it's easier to miss What's interesting is that this compromised ledger never transfered funds to an exploiter. Either the device didn't work or they were waiting for a more widespread usage of the comprised devices? If you own a ledger that didn't directly come from the ledger online store make sure to not just rely on the software genuinely check by ledger but to actually open up the ledger yourself to make sure its original, again there are reported cases in Asia, south America and now Europe as well. @MagicalTux made some useful videos on how to open the ledger and what to look for.

I hate this so much. The top Google result (an ad) leads to a well-made scam version of @safe. Given how often legitimate crypto projects get suspended from ad programs, fkn @Google still happily sells its top spot to scammers after all these years.

This is the spy SIM card, a 2x2mm chip, making it a bit of a pain to tap. More details to come (provider, etc).

they didn’t hack ledger. they didn’t exploit the code. they BOUGHT the company selling you the device. $86 million gone a company called CryptoBilis was an authorized ledger reseller in southeast asia. trusted. legit. sold ledgers for years a random chinese company quietly bought CryptoBilis from its malaysian owner made the original owner sign a confidentiality agreement. he couldn’t tell anyone the company was sold same brand name. same website. same “authorized reseller” badge. but different people behind it now the new owners started opening every ledger device before shipping soldered a tiny spy chip onto the board inside. repackaged it. sealed the box. shipped it the device looked normal. felt normal. worked normal but the spy chip was silently capturing your private keys the moment you set it up your seed phrase was sent to the attacker before you even finished writing it down hundreds of wallets across ethereum tron and bitcoin. all drained the guy who lost $5.3 million said “i did everything right. no leverage. no memecoins. i stored my funds on a hardware wallet like we’re all told to” he was right. he did everything right except his device had a parasite inside it that he couldn’t see ledger has now told CryptoBilis to stop all sales. told recent buyers NOT to set up their devices mark karpelès posted photos of the implant. normal board on top. spy chip below the most dangerous attack in crypto this year wasn’t a line of code it was a business acquisition