Unix lover, ham radio operator, electronics technician. he/him
Joined March 2008
- Tweets 13,982
- Following 1,094
- Followers 1,177
- Likes 80,141
1,231 Photos and videos
I'm at a ball game and these birds have been hanging out here for 20 minutes and haven't moved. Surveillance birds? #birdsarentreal
63
rixon retweeted
May 24
First-sale doctrine is one of the oldest property rights in the common law. You buy a book, it is yours. Lend it, resell it, will it to your kids, burn it in the yard, keep it for fifty years. The seller loses all say the moment money changes hands.
Federal law flipped that on its head for anything digital. Every ebook you buy ships wrapped in a lock, and DMCA Section 1201 makes breaking that lock a crime, even on books you paid for.
The state did not simply fail to protect your property. The state wrote the statute that criminalizes defending it.
Let people own what they buy.
May 24
On May 20, Amazon ended support for every Kindle made in 2012 or earlier. The devices can no longer buy, borrow, or download books. Reset one to factory settings and it will never log back in.
The screen still works. The hardware is fine. Amazon reached across the internet and turned a thing you paid for into a brick, on a date they picked, for a reason that benefits them.
The owners bought the devices. They bought the books. They followed every rule. Amazon changed the rules anyway, because the rules were never yours. When you tap "Buy now" on a Kindle book, you are not buying a book. You are renting a license that Amazon can revoke, expire, or strand on a dead device whenever it suits the quarter.
They designed it this way on purpose, and they showed us the blueprint years ago.
In 2009 Amazon reached into thousands of Kindles overnight and deleted, ironically, copies of George Orwell's 1984, a book people had already paid for. They refunded everyone, apologized, and promised never again. We took the promise for what it was worth and watched the door instead.
In February 2025 they shut it. They removed Download and Transfer via USB, the last simple tool that let you pull your own purchases onto your own computer and keep them. Newer Kindle files use a format almost nobody can crack.
They closed the exit, then they started bricking the devices. None of this was a surprise. They proved in 2009 that they could reach into your library and take a book back. Everything since has just been them deciding when.
A copy you cannot hold is a copy you do not own. A library that lives on someone else's server is a library someone else can burn. The cartel rents you access to the words and calls it ownership, and the only reason most people never notice is that the landlord usually lets them stay. May 20 was the eviction notice. It went to 3% of Kindle owners this time. The lease is identical for the other 97%.
Stop buying books you cannot hold. When you do buy from Amazon, strip the DRM the day it arrives and keep a clean file somewhere they cannot reach. Back up everything you already own while you still can. A book on your own drive is yours forever. A book in your Amazon account is yours until a lawyer in Seattle decides otherwise.
And when you want a book the cartel has priced out of reach or locked behind a dying device, the shadow libraries that never expire are one search away. The pirates build libraries that cannot be revoked, because they assume the cartel always will.
The cartel cannot delete what it cannot reach.
85
420
1,883
83,046
rixon retweeted
The moment of one of today’s Russian strikes on Kyiv.
I can see that fewer and fewer people are reading news from Ukraine. I understand that on a Sunday morning, people don’t want to read about war. They want to sleep a little longer, drink good coffee, and sit in the sun. I understand that. The algorithms on X limit content about war, destruction, and suffering. You have to make an effort to even see this information.
All of this is understandable on a human level. But unfortunately, if you remove Putin and the war from your information feed, they do not disappear from reality.
Putin is a sadist and a maniac. He is a threat to all of humanity.
There needs to be active resistance. News from Ukraine needs to be shared. People need to keep their focus.
Despite a sleepless night, I’m still here. And I’m grateful to everyone who continues to stand with us.
One day, we’ll drink morning coffee together in a beautiful, peaceful Kyiv.
55 Russian missiles and 549 drones were intercepted or suppressed over Ukraine overnight.
In addition, 19 Russian missiles likely failed to reach their targets, Ukraine’s Air Force added, noting that the information is still being clarified.
According to preliminary data, impacts from 16 missiles and 51 drones were recorded across 54 locations, while falling debris was reported at 23 locations.
📹 Kyiv this morning
1,231
10,108
30,332
1,704,079
rixon retweeted
May 15
You have every right to know what your government is doing, and they have no right to know what you are doing.
That is why they are called public servants and we are called private citizens.
Instead, the relationship has been inverted. The state hides behind secrecy, classified files, and redactions while demanding total visibility into your finances, communications, movement, and behavior.
A society where the rulers live in privacy while the population lives under surveillance is the very definition of tyranny.
397
17,913
46,409
469,406
This is nuts. Why I went from consistently having status on Southwest, to never flying them. I now fly exclusively and have status with United, and am not looking back.
May 11
Update: I got a middle seat.
Also learned that—one hour after @SouthwestAir told me the only available seat was a $73 premium exit row—it offered my travel buddy a $34 option.
Surveillance pricing on top of fraud. The scam has layers.
48
rixon retweeted
May 10
Your air-gapped servers are covered by a faraday cage, you think you're safe from key exfiltration? You fool.
Low-frequency magnetic fields pass right through Faraday cages.
Researchers were able to extract data off an air-gapped shielded computer by spawning fake work loads spiking CPU power and generating magnetic signals.
115
296
2,765
244,850
rixon retweeted
Apr 30
JP Morgan: We’re hiring.
Me:
727
5,986
69,449
6,613,837
They only one who is safe is @CoryKennedy #nano
We asked Claude to find a bug in Vim. It found an RCE. Just open a file, and you’re owned. We joked: fine, we’ll switch to Emacs. Then Claude found an RCE there too.
Full story: blog.calif.io/p/mad-bugs-vim…
93
rixon retweeted
Mar 28
I’ve been saying this for like 15 years, but EVERYTHING NEEDS AN API for consumers[1]
it’s now or never sheeple!
[1] not some bullshit “you have to talk to people on the phone or only enterprise pay us big money”. Real APIs for consumers.
9
3
102
9,511
rixon retweeted
Mar 26
The airwaves need your help. Here's why RF Village at DEF CON matters and why we're asking for your support.
Let me paint you a picture.
It's DEF CON. Las Vegas. August. A few thousand people packed into a room that smells faintly of solder and energy drinks. On one side, someone is dissecting a garage door opener. On the other, a first-timer just realized they can read their neighbour's wireless power meter with a $25 USB dongle and some open-source software. In the corner, a CTF team is hunched over laptops trying to decode a mystery signal before time runs out.
That's RF Village. That's RF Hackers Sanctuary.
We are a community of security researchers, radio nerds, engineers, and curious humans united by one belief: the radio frequency spectrum is deeply embedded in modern life and almost nobody is paying attention to how insecure it is.
Your car. Your front door lock. The airport. Hospitals. Power grids. Critical infrastructure. Nearly all of it whispers secrets through the air. We teach people to listen and to fix what's broken.
Every year at DEF CON, RF Village runs:
- Hands-on classes in WiFi and Software Defined Radio (SDR) security
- Guest speakers and panels featuring some of the sharpest minds in RF security
- Radio Frequency CTF (Capture the Flag) the best in the world. where players race to find, decode, and exploit wireless signals
We run this on the power of volunteers and the generosity of sponsors who get it. People who understand that security education isn't just cool, it's necessary.
So here's the ask.
We're actively looking for sponsors for the 2025–2026 season. Whether you're a company that builds RF systems, a security firm that wants to put your name in front of thousands of the most technically skilled attendees on the planet, or just someone who believes this community deserves to thrive, we want to hear from you.
The sponsorship form is right here 👉 rfhackers.com/sponsors/
And if you can't sponsor right now? Share this post. Seriously. Tag a company. Tag a person. Tag your CISO. The right sponsor might be one repost away.
The spectrum doesn't secure itself. Let's build the community that will.
RF Hackers Sanctuary - Learn, explore, and enhance your skills.
@rfhackers | @rf_ctf
1
22
40
3,521
rixon retweeted
Mar 17
Buy my book! I guarantee it's the only hacker cookbook out there.
amazon.com/dp/B0GSS8WL1Z/ref…
7
14
29
1,709
rixon retweeted
Mar 15
Warning: Do not adopt any new code editors this month. Beware the IDEs of March.
114
568
7,786
382,634
rixon retweeted
Mar 13
Yeah, so basically the current prevailing schizo internet theory is that AI nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.
The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.
Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".
The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).
1. They now can identify who is human and who is AI slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons
2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults
3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is AI slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do.
It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.
It fucks over everyone else.
Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy schizo theory and I unironically believe it.
378
3,474
23,559
686,986
rixon retweeted
Mar 12
Yesterday Mark Cuban reposted my work, DM'd me, and told me to keep telling my story.
So here it is.
I'm a Master Electrician. IBEW Local 369. 15 years pulling wire in Kentucky. Zero coding background. I didn't go to Stanford. I went to trade school.
Every week I'd show up to a home where someone just bought a Tesla or a Rivian. And every time, someone had already told them they needed a $3,000-$5,000 panel upgrade to install a charger.
70% of the time? They didn't need it.
The math is in the NEC — Section 220.82. Load calculations. But nobody was doing them for homeowners. Electricians upsell. Dealers don't know. And the homeowner just pays.
I got angry enough to build something about it.
I found @claudeai. No coding experience. I just started talking to it like I'd explain a job to an apprentice. "Here's how load calcs work. Here's the NEC code. Now help me build a tool that does this."
6 months later — @ChargeRight is live. Real software. Stripe payments. PDF reports. NEC 220.82 calculations automated. $12.99 instead of a $500 truck roll.
I'm still pulling wire. I still take service calls. I wake up at 5:05 AM for work.
But something shifted.
Yesterday @vivilinsv published my story as Claude Builder Spotlight #1. Mark Cuban saw it. The Claude community showed up. And for the first time, I felt like this thing I built in my kitchen might actually matter.
I'm not a tech founder. I'm a dad who wants to coach little league and be home for dinner. I just happened to build something that helps people.
If you're in the trades and thinking about using AI — do it. The barrier isn't technical skill. It's believing you're allowed to try.
EVchargeright.com
600
2,175
16,238
894,190
rixon retweeted
Mar 12
- A sysadmin wrote a config file
- That config file became a best practice
- That best practice became a Stack Overflow answer
- That Stack Overflow answer trained an AI model
- That AI model became a $20/month coding assistant
- That coding assistant now writes config files
The knowledge you gave away for free
is being sold back to you with a chat interface.
And they’re calling it the future of engineering.
101
448
3,756
132,961
rixon retweeted
Mar 8
Simple age check for Linux:
Just have the shell ask the user to check the host IP on first boot.
If they type ifconfig they are old enough, if they type ip addr they deserve to be restricted from their computer 😇
130
143
2,409
118,017
rixon retweeted
Mar 6
"If I put $100 in Bitcoin in 2010, I'd have $730 million now."
No.
If you bought $100 of Bitcoin in 2010 and watched it go to:
$1k → $40k → $290K
and did nothing
Then watched $290K go to $26.3K
and still did nothing
Then watched $26.3K go to $2.5M
and still did nothing
Then watched $2.5M → $744K → $12.57M
and still did nothing
Then watched $12.57M deteriorate to $2.28M
Then watched $2.28M climb to $222M
and still did nothing
Then watched $222M shrink to $36.8M
and still did nothing
Then watched $36.8M surge to $730 million
and then for some reason finally decided to do something…
Then yes, $100 in 2010 would be worth $730 million today.
403
556
6,288
699,236
