Daily Archives: 2025-09-08

Software packages with more than 2 billion weekly downloads hit in supply-chain attack

Posted on 2025-09-08 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: A whole pile of one-liner packages used all over the place, compromised by a basic phish. I reiterate: I sincerely believed for some time that node/npm was a joke about bad design. Despite knowing that people take it seriously, I'm not entirely sure I was wrong.

Hackers planted malicious code in open source software packages with more than 2 billion weekly updates in what is likely to be the world’s biggest supply-chain attack ever.

The attack, which compromised nearly two dozen packages hosted on the npm repository, came to public notice on Monday in social media posts. Around the same time, Josh Junon, a maintainer or co-maintainer of the affected packages, said he had been “pwned” after falling for an email that claimed his account on the platform would be closed unless he logged into a site and updated his two-factor authentication credentials.

Defeating 2FA the easy way

“Sorry everyone, I should have paid more attention,” Junon, who uses the moniker Qix, wrote. “Not like me; have had a stressful week. Will work to get this cleaned up.”

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All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity

Posted on 2025-09-08 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Not something I directly care about, but an impressive project. We're going to lose more and more culture to dead DRM and dead online distribution, and this is a model effort to avoid that.

Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late '00s. The community was working to get around Apple's onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That "master library" would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.

All at once, then slowly

GitHub user Olsro, the originator of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project, tells Ars that he lucked into contact with three people who had large iPod game libraries in the first month or so after the project's launch last October. That includes one YouTuber who had purchased and maintained copies of 39 distinct games, even repurchasing some of the upgraded versions Apple sold separately for later iPod models.

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