Struggling small biotech firms are pivoting into cryptocurrencies, rebranding as "crypto treasuries" or stockpiling digital assets like Ether and Litecoin as a last-ditch effort to boost share prices amid stalled funding and weak drug pipelines. Bloomberg reports: Shares of 180 Life Sciences Corp., now doing business as ETHZilla, tripled after the Peter Thiel-backed company said it had accumulated Ether tokens worth over $350 million. Less than two weeks later, the stock's gains have been erased. In July, Sonnet BioTherapeutics Holdings soared 243% in one volatile session on plans to transform into a public crypto treasury while MEI Pharma Inc. initially doubled on plans to sell shares to fund a Litecoin treasury.

Such about-faces are a tried-and-true formula for small firms when funds are low and shares are under pressure. For drugmakers it can be a sudden shift to chase after trendy new treatment targets, still other companies rebrand with buzzwords like artificial intelligence to juice returns. Now some biotech executives are using digital coins to pump new life into flagging shares. So far in 2025, at least 10 biotechs have announced a pivot into digital assets. The announcements frequently spark frenzied, but short-lived, spikes in shares. "If they're low on ideas, if they can't find relevance in drug development, they're going to try to justify their existence as management in another way," according to Mike Taylor, lead portfolio manager of the Simplify Health Care ETF. "You have a handful of companies trying to reinvent themselves into some other tangent. And, most, if not all won't work out."

Several readers have shared this report: In February, when the Def Con hacker conference released its annual transparency report, the public learned that one of the most prominent figures in the field of social engineering had been permanently banned from attending. For years, Chris Hadnagy had enjoyed a high-profile role as the leader of the conference's social engineering village. But Def Con's transparency report stated that there had been multiple reports of him violating the conference's code of conduct. In response, Def Con banned Hadnagy from the conference for life; in 2022, the social engineering village would be run by an entirely new team. Now, Hadnagy has filed a lawsuit against the conference alleging defamation and infringement of contractual relations. The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on August 3rd and names Hadnagy as the plaintiff, with Def Con Communications and the conference founder, Jeff Moss, also known as "The Dark Tangent," as defendants. Moss was reportedly served papers in Las Vegas while coordinating the conference this year.

There are few public details about the incidents that caused Hadnagy's ban, as is common in harassment cases. In the transparency report announcing the permanent ban, Def Con organizers were deliberately vague about the reported behavior. "After conversations with the reporting parties and Chris, we are confident the severity of the transgressions merits a ban from DEF CON," organizers wrote in their post-conference transparency report following the previous year's conference. Def Con's Code of Conduct is minimal, focusing almost entirely on a "no-harassment" policy. "Harassment includes deliberate intimidation and targeting individuals in a manner that makes them feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, or afraid," the text reads. "Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. We reserve the right to respond to harassment in the manner we deem appropriate."

Annual Las Vegas hacker gathering DEF CON has officially called off its physical conference for this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Register reports: In what was pretty much a foregone conclusion, the organizing team today said the in-person event would not be held in 2020. It had been slated to take place in August. This comes after the more formal Black Hat USA event, usually scheduled to run the same week as DEF CON in Sin City, was shelved as an in-person shindig, due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic forcing everyone to stay home where possible. Both shows will tentatively take place as web streaming affairs this summer. For DEF CON 28, this means a 'Safe Mode' online gathering, with video streams and a Discord server, between August 6 and 9. "Even if a vaccine were to be discovered tomorrow it would not be soon enough to test, manufacture, distribute and administer in time for people to safely to travel by August," explained Jeff "The Dark Tangent" Moss.

"Too many states have stayed open or are reopening, people partied for far too long, and the lack of federal coordination gives me no hope that things will get back to normal this year. I also worry that the conferences that postponed to later this year will be caught up in the 'second wave' after restrictions start to ease and they will end up having to cancel. Because of this, postponing for DEF CON was not an option."

GameSpot calls it "like an AOL chat room" combined with Netflix. The Guardian reports: You log in, share a viewing link with friends, choose one person to be in charge of picking what you watch and, as your chosen show plays out in the bulk of the screen, a chatroom pops up on the right-hand side. You can discuss the show with the people in your room, or argue, or flirt, or veer wildly off-tangent because you've realised that you've picked an absolute dud to watch.

Right now, Netflix Party feels absolutely necessary. Self-quarantine has atomised us, and if this is the closest we can get to watching films and TV shows with our friends, then we'll grab it with both hands. But then again, even if this wasn't a time of enormous struggle, Netflix Party would be a terrific idea. Because the biggest downside to this vast glut of non-linear content is that nobody watches the same thing at the same time any more. There are no more water cooler series, because everyone at the water cooler has to tiptoe around the fact that they might be a few episodes ahead of everyone else, and one stray spoiler slip might ruin it for everyone else.

Television has always been a social pursuit, but this element has been lost in recent years.
"Twenty servers were added today to help more people spend time together without leaving home," notes Forbes.

This week Stack Overflow's CEO/founder Joel Spolsky spoke to Clive Thompson, the tech journalist who just published the new book Coders: the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World . "It's a sort of ethnographic history of this particular tribe," explains a blog post at Stack Overflow, "examining how software developers fit into the world of business and culture and how their role in society has shifted in recent decades.

"The official conversation kicked off after a 15-minute tangent on Joel's collection of Omni magazine and the formative role this publication had for both men." Some excerpts: Clive: The question in my mind is, who is interested in this? What gets them bit by the bug so they are willing to crawl over all the broken glass that is the daily work.

Joel: In my time, it was the absolute control. Whatever code you wrote, that's what executed. There was no translation. It wasn't like, well the flour was kind of old, and I tried to make the souffle but it collapsed. Unlike so many things you will try to accomplish as a child or an adult, where you work on something but it doesn't turn out as you expect it to, with code it will do exactly what you told it. Even if that's not what you meant. You might suddenly realize you're obeying me to the point of making me angry.

Clive: The monkey's paw thing. I shouldn't have wished for that.

Joel: But the computer is still being completely obedient.

Clive: That thrill is a common thread I found in my research, from the 1960s through today. I will talk to people in their 80s who worked on machines the size of an entire room, and it's the same damn thing talking to a 15-year-old girl at an afterschool program working on a raspberry pi or P5. There is something unique about the micro-world that is inside the machine, qualitatively different from our real world.

Joel: It's sort of utopian. Things behave as they are supposed to. The reason I put a question mark on that, as programmers move higher and higher up the abstraction tree, that kinda goes away.

Clive: I think the rise of machine learning is an interesting challenge to the traditional craft of software development. Some of the people I spoke with for the book aren't interested in it because they don't like the idea of working with these indeterminate training systems... there is something unsettling about not really knowing what's going on with what you're building.

Joel: I just picked up Arduino a year ago and that was enormously fun because it was like going back to C, instead of all these fancy high-level languages where you don't know what they are going to do. It offered a really detailed level of control. If something doesn't work, you can figure it out, because everything is tractable.
They also discussed the future of coding -- and took a fond look back at its past. Spolsky remembers his first exposure to computers was an interactive terminal system connected to a mainframe that ran FORTRAN, BASIC, and PL/I programs. "Many, many years later I realized there was no way they had enough memory for three compilers and in fact what they had was a very simple pre-processsor that made Basic, FORTRAN, and PL/I all look like the same mush.

"It was a very crappy subset of each of those three languages."

CSS, or the language that styles and arranges how page elements appear on a website, will soon get support for trigonometry functions such as sine, cosine, tangent, and others, ZDNet is reporting. From the report: The new trigonometry functions were approved at the end of February in a meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) CSS Working Group. The new functions approved and set to join the CSS standard are: Sine - sin(), cosine - cos(), tangent - tan(), arccosine - acos(), arcsine - asin(), arctangent - atan(), arctangent (of two numbers x and y) - atan2(), square root - sqrt(), square root of the sum of squares of its arguments - hypot(), and power of - pow().

Almost a year ago you had a chance to ask professor Kevin Fu about medical device security. A number of events (including the collapse of his house) conspired to delay the answering of those questions. Professor Fu has finally found respite from calamity, coincidentally at a time when the FDA has issued guidance on the security of medical devices. Below you'll find his answers to your old but not forgotten questions.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Former vice president Al Gore sat down with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg at this year's SXSW conference to talk about the future — specifically, what Gore sees as the dangers and opportunities awaiting the planet for the next few years. Gore drilled down into what he referred to as the "stalker economy." The rise of apps such as SnapChat, which allows smartphone users to control how long friends can view messages, is emblematic of people reaching the "gag point" with pervasive recording and surveillance by government and business. "Our democracy has been hacked," Gore also told his audience, referring to the U.S. Constitution as "our operating system." While there's never been a "golden age" of American Democracy, he added, the perils emerging today are new. "If a Congressman or Senator has to spend five hours a day begging special interests or rich people for money," he said, they'll be more concerned about how what they're saying will appeal to those interests—rather than their constituents. In yet another tangent, Gore railed against genetic engineering, including Spider Goats, which are goats with spliced spider DNA that allows them to secrete spider silk along with their milk. The goats breed, extending that trait to future generations. Gore sees such things as a case of science run amok, alternately creepy and scary."

krow writes "HP Cloud is offering free access to Open Stack via its public cloud. Adoption of the Open Stack APIs is growing, and we [note: 'krow' is also known as Brian Aker, once Slashdot's 'database thug,' later the creator of the Drizzle database, and now an HP Fellow] are offering up access to push tool integration and adoption around the APIs. Most recently we have been able to add support for on-demand Jenkins orchestration via the JCloud's plugin. API as well as console access is being made to the computer, object storage, and CDN interfaces. There are images being provided for different Linux distributions, and additionally images for Bitnami, ActiveState's Stackato, and Enterprise DB's Postgres images."

MassDosage writes "Apache JMeter written by Emily H. Halili is very much an introductory guide to using Apache's open source JMeter testing tool. Unfortunately a book that should have been good fodder to whet the appetites of testers is spoiled by shoddy editing, poor writing and very little content that isn't already included in JMeter's own user manual." Read below for the rest of MassDosage's review.

ancientribe writes "Jeff Moss, aka 'The Dark Tangent,' and founder of the Black Hat security conference and DEFCON, the world's largest hacker conference, has been named VP and CSO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Moss will take on the position of Black Hat Conference Chair, where he will continue to play a key role in the development of conference and training content."

krow (Brian Aker, long-time MySQL developer) writes "Richard Stallman's comments on the Oracle Acquisition of Sun left me scratching my head over his continued support of closed-source licensing around open source software. Having spent more than a decade in the MySQL community, I feel that his understanding of the dual-license model is limited, and is at odds with his advocacy of free software. For this reason, I believe his recent statements concerning it need to be addressed. By pushing for the right to turn GPL-licensed software into the heart of a proprietary business model, he is squandering an opportunity for advocacy of open source within the European Union."

Barence writes "Intel has stunned visitors at IDF by showing off the world's first four-screen laptop. The oddly-named 'Tangent Bay' has three miniature touchscreens set horizontally into the case below the main, full-sized panel. It is a fully functional prototype: delegates were able to scroll photos around the touchscreens by swiping with a finger. The idea smacked a little too much of the ill-fated Vista SideShow." Seems strange that they would put the screens above the keyboard. I think embedding an iPhone type touchscreen in place of the trackpad would be a far more useful thing.

Wolfgang Kandek writes "Hacker Jeff Moss, founder of computer security conferences DEFCON and Black Hat, has been sworn in as one of the new members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) of the DHS. Moss, who goes by the handle 'the Dark Tangent' says he was surprised to be asked to join the council and that he was nominated to bring an 'outside perspective' to its meetings. He said, 'I know there is a new-found emphasis on cybersecurity, and they're looking to diversify the members and to have alternative viewpoints. I think they needed a skeptical outsider's view because that has been missing.'"

spacefiddle writes "Computerworld has an article about a presentation from Gartner analysts in Las Vegas claiming that Windows is 'collapsing', and that Microsoft 'must make radical changes to the operating system or risk becoming a has-been.' Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald provided an analysis of what went wrong with Vista, and what they feel Microsoft can and must do to correct its problems. Larry Dignan of ZDNet has his own take, and while he agrees, he suggests that the downfall of Windows will be slow and drawn-out. As an interesting tangent to this, there's also a story from a few days prior about Ubuntu replacing Windows for a school's library kiosks, getting good performance out of older hardware. '[Network administrator Daniel] Stefyn said he was "pleasantly surprised" to discover that the Kubuntu desktops ran some applications faster with Linux than when they ran on Windows. An additional benefit of Windows' departure from student library terminals saw the students cease 'hacking the setup to install and play games or trash the operating system.'"

Rob wrote to mention a Computer Business Online review piece about new anti-trust action against Microsoft on both sides of the Atlantic. From the article: "Other examples of anticompetitive behavior cited by Tangent include bundling of Outlook with Office and Active Directory with Windows Server, as well as the bundling of Windows Media Player and Windows Media Server with its desktop and server operating system respectively. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on Tangent's complaint, other than to acknowledge that it was being reviewed, but was more forthcoming in responding to a fresh complaint lodged with the European Commission by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS)."

Next Generation tries to take a look at what Sony is up to with the PS3, without going off on a rumour-filled tangent. Their thought? Sony is after something much bigger than the gaming market. From the article: "The big play is for the high definition DVD market, and in this context, an early launch, with small hardware numbers and threadbare games software support might just be a good move. This play potentially represents Sony's most important move in its entire history. Imagine; a royalty for Sony on every single DVD sold between 2006 and 2012 or thereabouts. No wonder Bill Gates hates Blu-ray."

Edge Online has a short piece on Xbox VP Peter Moore's announcement of the Live Arcade's full potential. Gamespot has a list of the planned titles, which is thoroughly impressive, including hits like Bejeweled 2, SmashTV, and Wik:Fable of Souls. From the Edge article: "Amongst the 40-odd developers slated for further Live Arcade development are Namco, SEGA, Konami, Capcom, SNK Playmore and Hudson Soft providing a selection of their retro titles, as well as the usual lineup of casual PC game producers like Wild Tangent, PopCap, and GarageGames, but the two most unexpected additions to the list are Mizuguchi's upstart Q Entertainment and AntiGrav/Guitar Hero developers Harmonix."

Gamespot's series of "The Greatest Games of All Time" rolls on with a look at Final Fantasy IV. Dubbed Final Fantasy II in the states, it was easily one of the best games to be released for the SNES. From the article: "The narrative in Final Fantasy II gripped you and shook you like a rag doll right from the beginning of the game. Your introduction to the protagonist, Cecil, took place on the deck of a military airship that had been ordered to extort a magic crystal from an innocent town (not a very heroic vocation). After his complicity in this war crime, the conscience-wracked Cecil was dismissed from the military and sent on an errand to a nearby town, along with his best friend Kain. Using generic archetypes for characters (like Final Fantasy's White, Black, and Red Mages, for instance) was standard operating procedure in RPGs at the time, but Final Fantasy II went off on a far more interesting tangent."

nazarijo writes "The security world has been taken by storm by intrusion prevention system (IPS) products in the past couple of years. After all, a typical intrusion detection system (IDS) only alerts you that something malicious may have happened, and an IPS reacts to it and can prevent the attack. Action in this scenario is obviously preferred to a passive bystander. Still, the IPS solution space is confusing to many." Read on for the rest of Nazario's review of a book designed to erase that confusion.