I have been waiting a bit to write my take on the election. I know a lot of people have already, and I wanted to let people make their views known while I refine mine. I am not going to make this a long post. But here is my take, with a little history so that you know where I am coming from.

I am currently, and have been for almost the last 20 years, a non-partisan registered voter. I started out when I registered as a Democrat when I first was able to vote at 18, because that was what my Grandmother was, and she was always influential in my life, especially with my love of history and politics in school (that was before computers 😊). The Democrat party then was like the Republican party before Trump, I would say. Then after Reagan, I said I identified with Republicans and switched parties. But after George W., I said, what is going on here? These parties are for themselves and not the voting public, not the ordinary citizen. That is when I changed to non-partisan.

I always like to research and listen to candidates and see how well they align with my visions and priorities. I don't care what party they are associated with, or no party.

That is my number one issue with both parties: they look out for and take care of the Party first. People's lives are not a football, soccer or any other kind of game. These are people's lives. Most people tune out politics (like my parents used to, but once retired I see people get more involved and “aware of politics”). I saw this coming, and the reason was prices more than anything. The second thing was the Iranian war, which contributed to the first, and tariffs, which again lead back to number 1. It is almost always the Economy. I have never seen prices for food, gas or anything else this high in 57 years of life, and definitely not since I started buying stuff on my own as an adult.

I also think the result of this election is a warning for both parties: in modern times people want to see results. I think they want to see results and are less concerned with our politicians worrying about social issues.

My frustration as a voter is to vote for the party in power if they aren't delivering. In my opinion the Republican party was not delivering on:

1. The Economy.
2. The rampant corruption.
3. Remembering that the Legislative branch makes the rules and the President is to execute them, not vice versa, and not the Executive branch running everything.
4. Everyone needs to follow the laws of the land, including immigration, and that includes those that enforce the immigration laws and rules.

Now that the Democrats have power, they need to fulfill the mandate, and this was a mandate, with priorities like this:

1. The Economy.
2. Do your job, don't allow the President, no matter what party they are from, to run everything, keep things equal, and keep number 1 going smoothly.

I think endless investigations will not be well received. I am not saying do nothing. I think the people working for Trump need to be held accountable for following the President and not the Constitution. The Constitution should always be the overriding factor, and if you are fired, you are fired; at least you can hold your head up. Trump is not ever going to be President again no matter what, so just ignore him. If Republicans have any chance, they need to tell Trump no and reach across the aisle more than they have, to help get the Economy and common sense back in vogue, because that is what it takes to override Trump's veto. The Founders set this up on purpose. They didn't think Party over Country, and they deliberately made things slow to evolve. While we do need refinements, I think overall our Constitution, on the majority of things, makes this Country run like no other powerhouse known. Yes, I do think there needs to be fine-tuning of the Amendments, and some new ones based on abuses by the Executive and Judicial branches and even the Legislative branch (I am looking at you for term limits for Federal offices).

These should be the priorities of the new Congress, and if the Democrats want to remain in power, they need to prove themselves. If not, in 2 years we could well see another wave swing things back to the other side. No-party voters like me are the deciding factor in elections now, not each party's extreme wings, but moderates and no-party voters. And no-party voters don't like what has been going on in either party, or at least this no-party voter doesn't.

#currentevents #opinion #politics

I've been using OBTF lately to keep track of my life, and this is a quick writeup of the things I've found.

First, I mostly like the format, but rather than just have one header per day, I've been adding one header per time I open the file and start writing. This is automated by a shell script which also syncs the file from a fossil, then commits the file after I'm done editing. See the script below (I'll pull this in as text at some point, but a screen-shot is fast right now, and you can OCR it if you need).

I'm also still using todo.sh, and have started poking at that so that when I finish a task, it will get archived, and also copied into the obtf.txt file, but that integration is a little tricky, as I'd like this to work from any of the machines I use on a regular basis. I'm also going to have to set up a fossil for my fork of todo.sh.

But the obtf.txt file is serving as a prod to get me to get all my various machines talking to my VPS so that there is a single source of TRVTH out there somewhere and I don't have to think about merging documents and such. So I've been writing scripts and such to do the things I mostly use the file for.

Specifically, here are the things I do with it:

• A daily journal. Most of the things I do that seem worth remembering get put in there.
• A place to stash ideas that I can search for later. I do this by putting IDEA somewhere in the line.
• A place to archive things I've completed from my todo list. (grep for DONE to find them).
• A place to leave random notes for myself.

Most of these are pretty simple, but as I'm using long lines in the file, I wanted to print things with a blank line between them. For example, to dump all the IDEAs out, I use the following ideas script:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f /IDEA/ {print $0, "\n"}

I also discovered that I've written over 400 entries in the OBTF file in 3½ weeks, so apparently it “works for me.” I don't go back to check things especially often, but just the act of writing them down has seemed to help my memory.

There's more coming, but mostly I'm working on getting scripts written to deploy fossils on each new machine I set up, and make them link back to the master fossil on my VPS.

In Summary: * Moving into the night meds and night prayers phase of my evening, I'm resolved to do things a bit differently tonight than for the last two nights. Rather than stay up as late (for me) as I can following basketball or football games, I'm going to make a determined effort to retire early and calmly. Tomorrow will find a Monday morning with its early chores that are never a part of the weekend mornings. So I'll want to have a good, restful sleep behind me to make the morning work better.

And I'm wishing a good, restful sleep for you all, too.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 220.90 lbs. * bp= 159/72 (62)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 banana, 4 little cookies * 08:20 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 12:00 – snacking on chocolate covered raisins * 13:45 – mashed potatoes & gravy, 4 hamburger rolls * 16:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – wake * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 06:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 12:00 – watching FOXNFL broadcast of the Colts / Cowboys game – and the Cowboys win this one, 27 to 23 * 16:30 – listening to relaxing music * 17:00 – follow news reports from various sources

Chess: * 10:50 – moved in all pending CC games

I love writing, I think I’m ok at it, and I do it a lot. One area where I consistently seem to fail at writing is finding the words for sympathy cards. I love handwritten notes and often save them, but writing them myself is extra difficult. I often sit at my desk, with a pen hovering above a blank card and completely freeze. As deeply as I think about loss and ponder how people live their lives after loss, I fall embarrassingly short when trying to express my support after someone else’s loss. Truthfully, it almost brings up a feeling of shame because I feel I should have more skill and ease in this area.

Suffice it to say though, “I’m sorry for your loss” is hot garbage.

When I told people my dad was sick, I frequently got the response of “I’m so sorry!” These people meant well, of course, and this phrase is considered the socially acceptable thing to say. The challenge for me in these interactions was my response. I often became so uncomfortable, completely unsure of any response at all. I would freeze and give an awkward smile. Thanks, I guess? My mom started responding with, “Yeah, I’m sorry too.” And weren’t we all, facing the impending loss? Still, I have wished for more a more graceful way to answer.

This awkwardness of mine extends to writing sympathy cards. I don’t want to simply say, “Sorry for your loss” because there seems to be an ocean of feelings I’d like to express. “Omg, that sucks” only works for certain recipients (although it works quite well, when appropriate). How does one express the depth of feeling, and in a way that is actually helpful?

For some reason, my smallish team at work has experienced a surprising number of losses of family members this summer. Some of them have been old and sick, like my dad. Some just sick, from chronic illness. And some neither old nor sick, making the level of shock a noteworthy factor at play. For example, one of my coworkers recently joined what I tastelessly refer to as The Dead Siblings Club. She lost her sibling in a tragic and mostly unexpected way which had remarkable and awful parallels to the loss of my little brother. I’ve been a member of this club for 16 years already, and still, thinking of the early weeks and months after that loss, they were some of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had and probably ever will. And I somehow wanted to convey to my coworker that while I don’t precisely know how she feels, I have been walking a similar path for quite a long time.

Saying to this coworker, “I’m so sorry for your loss” felt hollow and cheap. I wanted to convey so much more to her, about how I know that the feeling of anguish seems like it will never leave, but eventually things do start to look different. Eventually you can sort of learn to breathe again. I have no magic advice for this. It took years for me to be able to talk about my brother without dissolving into sobs or becoming even a bit teary. Immediately after he died, I spent about two weeks straight lying on the sofa in my parents’ den, mostly staring at the ceiling. A lot of people reached out to me at the time, and of course I appreciated their love and support, but I had no words and no energy to respond. And no matter how amazing their written support, whether cards or emails, nothing seemed to penetrate the thick fog of grief that I wading through at the time.

I often avoid asking people who recently went through a loss, “How are you?” Because honestly, what kind of question is that? I’ve always hated answering that question in this context, and so I try to skip asking it. In the case of my coworker, I did ask her how she’s been doing since her loss, but I prefaced it with the disclaimer that the question was stupid and essentially meaningless. Fortunately, she laughed. It led to a conversation about how she has really been doing, given the chaos of her past few weeks.

Is there ever a truly correct answer to show support after someone else’s loss? Obviously it very much depends on who one is talking to, what their loss was, and one’s own relationship with that person to begin with. I strive for the non-generic. Probably I miss the mark more often than I’d care to. I’d like to include some helpful phrases here for others to use in these situations, but honestly, I’m not sure I have any. I think what I have found most helpful to read is an acknowledgment of how major of a change is in my own life. Nobody can do anything about that, but it feels helpful to have someone notice that this loss turns the world upside down.

And I think that’s the most important take away here: send the card. Say something, even if it is “Sorry for your loss.” Walking around carrying grief can feel like stepping onto an alien planet, and it’s nice to be noticed in this situation, rather than trying to blend in like nothing at all has happened. The best thing to say to someone who’s grieving? I see you.

From thousands of emails to inbox zero

I filed away all my emails of the past 10 years in a single evening while listening to a podcast with one ear. And I deleted a ton of them.

I find it easier to work in a tidy environment. Take my desk: you won't find much on it but some stationery, pens and minimal tech, like my keyboard. In my inbox, chaos reigned. Once the backlog of emails crossed a certain threshold, cleaning it all up became a monumental task for me.

Over the years I have tried my share of clients (web mail, Apple Mail, Outlook (on Mac!), Thunderbird and some more exotic choices). Without success.

Now I have given aerc another try. A second chance. And I have found a setup that helped me reach inbox zero and stay there.

Aerc is an open source terminal email client that uses familiar vim-style key bindings for navigation (Neovim, my editor of choice, where I am writing this post). It comes with the responsiveness of the command line and a minimal user interface.

This time I use aerc with mbsync, a tool that syncs my entire mailbox (or parts of it) to my disk. Avoiding slow calls to my mail server has made all the difference. Now working in aerc feels fast.

In short, I fetch all email and store it locally in a mail directory. I use aerc to “do email”. That means filing, sorting, deleting, answering email. All the good stuff. Mbsync then pushes the results back to my mailbox.

Speed wasn't my only problem. I've been putting off sorting through years of emails. The prospect of infinite-scrolling through thousands of messages, determining for each what to do with it, always had to make way for more appealing tasks. Almost anything else.

With aerc the job is manageable: Imagine I want to find all my insurance receipts from last month (like one does). I know my insurance mails always use some “my-insurance.com” subdomain. And the subject always says “something something receipt”.

:filter -f my-insurance.com -H "Subject: receipt" -d last_month

I get results instantly. Even when filtering through thousands of emails. I can then move them to folders easily. I select everything with :mark -a and move it to a folder with :mv 'Folders/Insurance Receipts'. I started out with a handful of folders and added more as I needed them. They are nothing more than IMAP directories that hold emails of a certain category.

These simple tools have been all I needed. With bulk filing and deleting, a podcast on D&D and a little bit of patience, I got there. At the time of writing my inbox has been zero for a good month.

If you feel inspired, go try aerc.

A very short movie (4mn) produced by Blender Studio.

---

In a dystopian world where energy is scarce, a destitute man attempts to break into a battery factory. He soon finds himself cornered by a threat: a security droid…

https://youtu.be/UXqq0ZvbOnk?is=ORjTJkqQwUWZLm77

“Charge” © Blender Foundation / Blender Studio, dir. Hjalti Hjálmarsson — CC BY 4.0 https://studio.blender.org/projects/charge/pages/credits

#shortmovies

I’m journaling this mostly to try to just partially get it out of my system, but also to I guess digest my own emotions and understand a little bit more why I am feeling the way I am. Yesterday an and I spent almost the whole day, baking stuff, and I had started to get a crush on her again. We had also had a talking phase for a while when we first met, but the timing wasn’t right and so we did not end up dating, even though she was interested in me. But I wanted to kind of rekindle the situation because we were both kind of dating and I thought I saw a side of her that made me feel like she might be a really good match with me. But I also feel like it’s a little bit unfair for me to pass the judgment and so definitively say that that side of her that I saw was not genuine because I think it is heavily tainted by this frustration from my perceived rejection. She talked about how she dreamed of this guy that she had talked to before her last relationship and asked him out, and later she also talked about how she would think about what her future partner potentially was doing right now, and I guess I could’ve taken that as an invitation to say something like oh maybe baking for some joke about that because we were doing it together, but I think by then I pretty strongly had the gut reaction that she is not interested in me. And so I no longer really feel like I have a crush on her. And I find myself both pointing out reasons why I don’t necessarily want to be in a relationship with her, like certain icks, but at the same time, I also recognize that part of that for sure has to be me perceiving rejection, and then wanting to put the other person down in my mind as a defense mechanism the same way I think everyone does. And that’s why I’m not really trying to give too much weight to these thoughts before I have a chance to talk it out with friends or my therapist and also let it settle a little bit. But I do find that I kind of had a hit to my self-esteem in a way. And it’s this thought that I am kind of everything she wants, and also likely way more than that. I apologize for the arrogance, but I kind of want to butter myself up a bit here to protect my self-esteem. I think I am incredibly successful, I am incredibly smart, funny, attractive, I think kind and progressive in a lot of ways that she doesn’t even necessarily want, which is one of the incompatibilities, but for a lack of a better word, I guess I kind of feel like even as a provider I find it hard to think of someone else realistically being able to offer the same things that I currently do while also being kind, developed, mature, I like the other things that I take pride in myself. And I guess it’s this feeling of if I am all of these amazing things why does she not ask me on the date or something like that rather than another person. And so it feels like that must mean that in the direct comparison or competitive sense, I am less desirable. And I understand that there is so much more nuance to that and I am not being compared in any of that sense, but I think that’s kind of what leads to this gut reaction from me. And I have a feeling it would probably be smartest if I do this, so explicitly stating why that might not be true, first of all, there’s always a thing about you can be the sweetest peach on the tree, and someone just might not like peaches. But also there are our incompatibilities that also might indicate that she is looking for something different than me, and also potentially it is just one of those things where someone wants attention from people which I can also kind of understand. And there’s also the whole thing about us being friends for a while and so that makes it difficult to understand when the boundary of platonic is being pushed. And also potentially she just doesn’t want to cause drama within mutual friends or stuff like that. These are all just a couple of the reasons why she did not ask me on a date.

I think I also find myself having this feeling of betrayal or loyalty, being broken, in the same way that I originally felt when she seemed to be flirting with R, and it made me feel like we did not have something special, and that she is actively searching for this kind of connection with other people at the same time. And I feel like this is just an indicator in my mind for if we do get into a relationship, if I will be kind of constantly doubting the thing about loyalty or her interactions with other people. And I recognize that this makes me upset at her, even though we are not even dating at all. And I think that this is a bit of an extreme reaction for me because as I said, we are not dating or even going on any dates at all. I think this is just one of the cases where I potentially just have to have that self-respect of understanding that I am a catch, and I do not need to lose sleep or feel desperate towards someone who doesn’t want to pursue me either.

5 October 2026

Spending lots of time alone in Yenah's grandmother's house. Getting up early, morning coffee, and sitting down to work each day at the kitchen table. As the sun rises, the tall white satin curtain spanning the length of the living room window starts to glow; one half of the curtain is reinforced by another pink one, so the diffused light that floods into the living room is half pink and half white. It bounces off of the red-orange wood floor, which creates a warm, saturated, matte-finish environment in which highlights and edges are dulled. Magpies like to visit in the morning, and a handful of times I've seen them jockey for position on a persimmon tree through the window. They're pretty aggressive, hip-checking each other off branches. Only two small horizontally-sliding screened windows in the house open, and tree branches sprouting vibrant green cross in front of the view out of both, so the feeling is one of life in abundance outside. Plants grow well on the windowsills too.

My days here have been spent mostly in silence, but it's a busy silence. Just down the street is an elementary school, and I hear the rhythmic phases of its days—pale yellow buses snorting to a stop to deliver sleepy children in the morning, high-pitched screams as lunch hour arrives mid-day, and the frenzy of happy squeals and teachers repeatedly saying goodbye (“안녕히 가세요”) as school is let out for the day in the later afternoon. Some intermittent bells and layered chimes of groups of children singing throughout the day as well. On days where I do laundry, the laundry machine sounds like alternating white noise waterfalls and MRI-machine-like hollow knocks. Mosquitos are frequent visitors at this time of year, so a few times a day I'll also hear their sharp whines buzz by my ear (I've killed about thirty of them in the last month). The water here is so, so soft, especially compared to London, and the sinks (one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen) rush when turned on with a dutiful urgency that sounds like a mother shushing a baby. Similar to the Segokcheon Stream down the road from the house that runs all the way to the Han River.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m3yqgRyHkSU&is=Kpu6uje8TmEht4kt

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tjpgJjdk52c&is=ogPZFUCOsNAwpNMp

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mV76WmC5I4s&is=ACA6jF19jFy2Gv6f

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vON8PIbz90E&is=CXSe1HvyKnaDjDa1

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JZLjTu3N2Uw&is=vxCqNh75by9RuBCH

Yesterday's Checkmate Win.

I won this correspondence chess club tournament game yesterday with a Queen, Bishop, Bishop Checkmate on my 32nd move. We started the game on 05 October and played with a comfortable 2 days allowed per move time control. My Queen to g5 delivered the checkmate to the Black King. She is protected from capture by her c1 Bishop, and her c2 Bishop covers the King's only possible flight square. The position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and the game's full move record follows: 1. d4 d5 2. h3 Bf5 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. Nf3 Nb4 5. e3 Bxc2 6. Qd2 Qd6 7. Bb5+ c6 8. Ba4 Be4 9. Nxe4 dxe4 10. Ne5 f6 11. Nc4 Qd5 12. O-O Qg5 13. Qxb4 h5 14. Nd2 Qd5 15. Qxb7 Qd8 16. Qxc6+ Kf7 17. Bb3+ e6 18. Qb7+ Ne7 19. Nxe4 a5 20. a4 Rc8 21. Rd1 f5 22. Ng5+ Kf6 23. Nxe6 g5 24. Nxd8 Rxd8 25. Qb6+ Nc6 26. Qxc6+ Bd6 27. e4 fxe4 28. Qxe4 Bh2+ 29. Kxh2 h4 30. Qe5+ Kg6 31. Bc2+ Kh6 32. Qxg5#

And the adventure continues.

In the space of a fortnight Europe got hacked freezers in hundreds of supermarkets, thirty-odd hoax bomb threats on airliners, and a British government telling families to keep three days of food and water at home. It all looked like one story. I spent days trying to work out whether it is – and the answer is: partly, and not in the way it looks.

In Sjöbo, in southern Sweden, on the morning of 2 November the staff of the local ICA Kvantum open the shop and find the frozen food thawed. No door forced, no alarm tripped, no power cut. Somebody, somewhere in the world, in the middle of the night, told the freezers to go to 50 degrees, and the freezers obeyed. The manager writes it on Facebook with the resignation of a man who has just thrown away a stockroom: we've been hacked, they set the temperature to 50.

In the same hours, in Brussels, Stephan Moelans, managing director of Sabcobel, the company that runs the refrigeration for Delhaize supermarkets, is waking up his technicians. At one in the morning. He sends them out across Belgium and Luxembourg to do something that in 2026 sounds almost medieval: physically unplug the fridges from the network, shop by shop, before the rest of the stock melts. As he told the Belga news agency afterwards:

We began mobilizing technicians at 1 a.m. to get the situation under control

Three days later an Aer Lingus Airbus from Dublin to Rome lands at a French military base at Évreux, under fighter escort, while bomb disposal teams search it. They find nothing. On the same day some twenty other flights across Europe receive the same threat, and meanwhile the British tabloids are explaining to their readers which fourteen items to buy in order to survive an emergency nobody has declared.

Within a week you get the feeling of being inside a dystopian novel that somebody is writing too fast. I spent days collecting the pieces. This article is an attempt to put them in a row, separating what we know from what we think we understand. Because the two, as we'll see, don't coincide.

---

The week

Let's rewind the tape. In mid-October, in France, the fridges of a few hundred supermarkets (between 250 and 350 stores according to the technical reconstructions, up to 700 according to others, across the Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour Market and Leclerc chains) are driven overnight up to 50 degrees. Stock to throw away, and in a few shops the beginnings of a fire, because a fridge that heats is an appliance doing something it was never designed to do. The attack gets told as a French story, but the analysis by Sekoia picked up by Reuters finds units hit in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium too: the continent was already in it, nobody had counted it yet.

On the night between 2 and 3 November it happens again, this time on a continental scale: at least nine countries. Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia. Among the brands hit, Ikea, Delhaize, Carrefour, SuperValu (thirteen shops in Ireland). In Estonia the technicians step in within minutes and contain the damage; in Sweden ICA talks of “a limited number” of stores, which is the formula you use when you'd rather not say the number. In Athens a butcher tells the TV that his display fridge was set to 150 degrees, and that it took the technician two hours to get it back under control. And it isn't only frozen food: the same night Coolworld is attacked, the refrigeration supplier of the Établissement français du sang, the French blood transfusion service. Blood bags are not something anyone resells on the black market.

Then the emails. On Monday 2 November Hungary scrambles a Gripen to escort a Wizz Air flight from Luton to Budapest, threatened while already airborne. By Tuesday 3 the threats are already around thirty, twenty-seven according to the AP, plus a cruise ship; a Warsaw airport closes for a few hours. On Thursday 5 at least twenty-six are reported across Europe, on flights departing from sixteen countries. On Friday 6 another seventeen by noon, nine in Prague alone. Hungary scrambles its Gripens three times within an hour to escort a Brussels-Sofia and two flights out of Prague bound for Cyprus and Romania. In Dublin the headquarters of RTÉ, the Irish public broadcaster, is evacuated, and two other broadcasters receive threats the same day. Not a single device is found. Anywhere.

And finally London. On 22 October the Cabinet Office launches “Be Ready”, a three-year campaign asking families to keep enough at home for three days of self-sufficiency: water, food, a torch, a wind-up radio, cash, copies of documents. The same day the Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, backs it with a line about “increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks”, and the next day the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, defends it in person at a wildfire summit (and tells the Guardian about his own stash: beans, soup and Twiglets). From 27 October the papers start turning the same page of the government website over and over: the Independent headlines on the “attacks”, the Express on the “14 items to stockpile”, one news site on the “4 foods to have at home” (declared source: a Reddit thread...), another on the “13 things” to buy. Barclays publishes a survey: one Briton in four is stockpiling.

Four facts in fifteen days. Three of them are true. One is half true. And the question worth asking is whether they have anything to do with one another.

---

The radiator

To understand what happened in the supermarkets you need to know something supermarkets would rather not tell you: the fridge in a modern shop doesn't have a thermostat, it has a computer. It's called a controller, and in this case it's almost always a Danfoss of the AK-SM 800A series, a Danish box whose job is to let the maintenance technician check the temperatures of fifty shops from his sofa instead of driving round in a van. Convenient, and sensible too: if a display cabinet fails at three in the morning, somebody sees it straight away.

The problem is that this computer has a web page, and that web page, in hundreds of shops, was reachable by anyone on the internet. It's as if the thermostat in your house had a door onto the landing, with the key left in the lock. And as if the key were also printed in the instruction manual: many of the logins used factory passwords, the ones written in the manual you download from the manufacturer's website. After the French attack, researchers put fake controllers online to see who came knocking, and whoever came knocking tried exactly those passwords.

There was no stroke of genius. The main flaw, catalogued as CVE-2025-41450, lets you skip the controller's login screen. It was found by researchers at a security firm, Claroty, along with two others. Danfoss disclosed them in March 2025, published the fix in August 2025, and the American CISA issued an advisory the same year; Claroty's detailed technical report came out in August 2026, complete with a count of the controllers reachable from the internet: thousands. It wasn't even the first time: back in 2023 Dutch researchers had found three vulnerabilities in the same family of devices. Danfoss itself admitted that most of the systems hit were old products no longer receiving updates, and another manufacturer, Copeland, found a flaw in its own end-of-life controllers. A researcher interviewed by the Associated Press put it better than I could:

Nobody broke into these refrigeration systems with a zero-day

And the NCSC, the British cybersecurity agency, in its statement to the AP:

The cyberattack on French supermarkets was a result of exploitation of known vulnerabilities

Translated for those who don't do this for a living: the door had been open for a year and a half, everyone who needed to know knew, and in the end somebody walked in. Surprising, isn't it?

Once inside, the attacker didn't even have to write a malicious program. They pressed “defrost”, the de-icing function every industrial fridge has as standard, and held it down all night. A security expert interviewed by Gizmodo, Lamplmair, put it like this:

A freezer should never accept an instruction to heat to 50°C

Who did it, nobody knows. Two pro-Russian groups, NoName057(16) and Z-Pentest Alliance, claimed it on Telegram, posting what they say are 2,500 lines of data stolen from Danfoss, and then deleted the posts. It's worth what it's worth: NoName habitually claims anything that happens in Europe, and no security agency has confirmed. What the agencies have confirmed is that this isn't a bored teenager: researchers at Lupovis saw days of reconnaissance before the night of 2 November, with login attempts coming from “bulletproof” hosting, the kind that doesn't answer police requests. Somebody did their homework, and chose targets that don't earn a penny. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is still investigating the freezers of more than half a dozen American military commissaries that went haywire in late August, and is coordinating with the French. The FBI and four other federal agencies have published an advisory to cold-chain operators. And the head of British cybersecurity confirmed that in the UK too there has been “a small number” of incidents of the same kind.

---

The emails

The mechanism behind the threats against aircraft, as far as the police have said, is disarmingly banal: anonymous emails, sent in bulk to several airports with the list of “mined” flights. The Czech police said the email that reached Prague was addressed to the airport and that similar emails had reached other European hubs. The Danish police, on Friday, in a statement picked up by Reuters:

We are once again at Copenhagen Airport today in connection with threats directed at air traffic

And the office of the French Prime Minister:

An investigation is underway to determine the source of these alerts

In Spain the Guardia Civil received three in twenty minutes, on Air Europa departures from Madrid and Iberia arrivals from Rome and Milan. In Rome, on the other hand, one threat came by telephone to the control tower at Fiumicino. The protocol, at that point, leaves no room: the aircraft lands where it can, fighters escort it if needed, bomb disposal searches it, passengers wait on the apron. It costs tens of thousands of euros per flight and it's done anyway, because the alternative isn't on the table. In the Aer Lingus case, by the way, things went less smoothly than the press told it: according to Prime Minister Lecornu's office the fighters were sent after the pilot had failed to cooperate as expected, and pilot and co-pilot were questioned by the Évreux prosecutor before being allowed to leave. Aer Lingus says they acted impeccably. That too is part of the cost.

The number that puts things back in proportion came from Eurocontrol, the European air traffic body: the 14 flights affected on Thursday were 0.05% of the 26,300 flights on the European network that day. “Minimal” disruption, says Eurocontrol. The “flights in chaos” of the headlines never existed: the thousands of delays circulating in the same days were the normal delays of Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle and Schiphol, which produce them by the hundred every day with or without threats. The real effect of the emails isn't on air traffic. It's on people's heads, and on the coffers of the states.

Who did it, here too, nobody knows. The British government called them “malicious hoax threats”. The European transport commissioner said it's “too early” to say who is behind them, and even whether the episodes are linked to one another. Moscow denied, and there is no evidence of Russian or Iranian involvement, or of groups tied to them. There is actually one jarring note, reported by a single source and which I couldn't verify elsewhere: the threats against flights bound for Rome supposedly came from a group calling itself anti-feminist, which would suggest either several different hands jumping on the bandwagon, or a signature planted there to mislead. A private security analyst, Borie, told the AP that the European focus “could have a Russian angle”, adding straight away:

Iranian hybrid warfare is just as active in certain pockets of Europe

Experts from the various countries will meet in Brussels next week. Allow me to be sceptical: either the data exists, and then it should be made public, or it doesn't, and then there are only suspicions. And filling the headlines with a Russian threat on the basis of suspicions, I don't know whether that's more irresponsible or more reckless.

That said, the precedent everyone has in mind, without saying it too loudly, is 2024: waves of bomb threats against schools and courts in Czechia and Slovakia, about which the head of the Czech intelligence service Michal Koudelka spoke publicly like this:

There is clearly a visible Russian trace

And before that the incendiary parcels in DHL depots in Germany, Poland and the UK, where the European investigation identified 22 suspects recruited in Russia, the Baltics and Ukraine, often people in financial trouble paid for an odd job. That is evidence. This, for now, is an analogy. The difference between the two is the only thing that matters, and it's worth holding on to.

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The leaflet

And then there is the United Kingdom, where for two weeks you get the impression that the government is talking to its citizens non-stop. It isn't. The “Be Ready” campaign wasn't born this week. It had been planned at the start of the year by the Starmer government, announced in September, and was published on 22 October. And it's the British version of something the Nordic countries have done for decades: Sweden sends every household a leaflet titled “If crisis or war comes”, and has done so since 1943. A report by former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö to the European Commission, two years ago, recommended exactly those 72 hours of household self-sufficiency to all member states, and Brussels adopted it. The context is declared: last year's British national security strategy explicitly names Russian aggression, hostile cyber activity and sabotage. It's no secret, it's a public document.

On 23 October the Prime Minister defended the advice saying that “unexpected events” are becoming more common, and the Defence Secretary had his say. From there on, though, it's no longer the government talking. It's the press parroting (if only it were stochastic...) whatever sells copies. A site that checks these things, Prepared Britain, looked at the GOV.UK page on 3, 4, 5 and 6 November: no new guidance, no emergency instruction, no department telling anyone to prepare for a war. The “attacks” in the Independent's headline were a word lifted from the campaign's original text, which talks about bad weather, blackouts, water and phone outages. The Express's “14 items” were the list of 22 October. The “4 foods” came from Reddit. And in the middle of all this, the Met Office's ordinary weather bulletins ended up in the same notification stream, indistinguishable from the rest.

The only truly new thing on the British front is the speech by the head of the NCSC, the cybersecurity agency, who in the same week as the fridges talked about empty shelves and lights going out:

When food isn't on shelves, lights aren't on, businesses have gone under

He said that one day we might have to explain why we had seen the signs and not chosen well, and confirmed the British incidents tied to the controllers. That one is an explicit link between the fridges and the wind-up radio. Made by someone who has the data to make it.

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Three actors, but no director?

Having got this far, the temptation is strong, and I admit I was the first to feel it: all of this looks orchestrated. Fridges, planes, leaflets, all in the same fortnight, all pushing in the same direction: get used to it, get ready, something is about to happen that we know about and you don't. It's a legitimate hypothesis, and I put it on the table as such.

Let's call it hypothesis A: the alarms are manufactured, or inflated, to prepare the population for a crisis someone has already decided on or already sees coming. In its favour: the timing, the convergence of interests, the fact that Europe's military chiefs openly talk about a possible confrontation with Russia within a few years. The German chief of defence Carsten Breuer, in May:

Various indicators all point to one possible date of a Russian attack on NATO: 2029

and he adds “or even earlier”. His minister Boris Pistorius:

By 2029 or 2030, Putin could strengthen his army to the point where Russia would be capable of striking NATO

The French chief, Burkhard, says 2030. And the Czech general Karel Řehka:

Most of us, defense chiefs, share a similar view

Against it, though, weigh the fridges. There you have stock destroyed by the million, private companies losing real money, a supplier sending technicians out at one in the morning, blood bags at risk, American bases hit since August. It's a physical event, with real economic victims and a technical vector that anyone with a search engine for connected devices and the Danfoss manual can verify for themselves. No European government has any interest in burning its own supermarkets to educate public opinion, and it would be a strangely expensive and traceable way of doing it. The same goes for the emails: every diversion with Gripens in the air costs the state money and embarrassment, and the day one of those emails were traced back to a friendly service the political damage would be devastating. The cost-benefit ratio of “doing it to yourself” is terrible.

Then there's a number that weighs against the very premise of a “fortnight of stage direction”. Forescout counted more than twenty claimed attacks on refrigeration systems between January and October 2026, and the most active groups were precisely Z-Pentest and NoName057(16). This isn't a sudden escalation: it's the visible tail of a campaign that has been running for a year, and that only became news when it hit enough supermarkets on the same night. The feeling of orchestration comes from the media's attention threshold, not from the real density of events.

Hypothesis B: an adversary, or more than one, does real things that cost next to nothing. One email to twenty airports costs zero and moves the fighters of three countries. One manual password on a 2015 controller empties a hundred supermarkets in a night. Governments, which have long expected this phase and have written it into their documents, use the incidents to push a preparedness they already had on the agenda. It's called communicative opportunism, and it needs no director. And the media, which live on repetition, multiply the same web page into ten headlines. Three different trades, three different interests, nobody coordinating with anybody. It looks orchestrated because the interests converge, not because somebody aligned them.

And there's a third box the two-way scheme doesn't allow for. Call it hypothesis A': there is a single director, but it's the adversary. Fridges and emails are one package of low-cost hybrid warfare, calibrated to produce in democracies exactly the effect “the government is preparing us for something”. In that case the timing would be deliberate, and hypothesis B would be true for the governments and false for the attackers. It's cheaper than hypothesis A, because it doesn't require anyone to burn their own supermarkets, and more unsettling than hypothesis B, because the target isn't the stock but the trust.

The problem with hypothesis A is that it can't be refuted: any alarm confirms it, and the absence of alarms doesn't weaken it. That old genius Popper would say that a hypothesis which cannot be refuted is not a scientific hypothesis; I'd say, more simply, that it's a feeling. To keep it alive honestly you have to turn it into predictions that can fail.

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What to watch carefully, from here to six months out

If hypothesis A is true, we should see: threats that are never attributed to anyone, or attributed vaguely and without names; claims like NoName's taken at face value without verification; preparedness campaigns that accelerate regardless of whether the incidents continue or stop. Careful, though: the first two would happen even if B were true and the investigations were simply slow or classified. The only prediction that truly tells A from B is the third: if the incidents fall off and Be Ready accelerates anyway, changes tone or finds new emergencies to cite, column A fills up for real. If hypothesis B is true, we should see: arrests with first and last names, like the 22 of the incendiary parcels; a public technical report on the controllers, with the addresses and infrastructure of whoever got in; and a drop in the British alarms once the media window closes and the GOV.UK page goes back to being a GOV.UK page.

Keep count. I will too, and if in six months the column that has filled up is the wrong one, I'll try to write it here.

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References and further reading

The fridges

• Gizmodo, supermarket freezers across Europe hit with another cyberattack – the second wave, 2-3 November, with the Lamplmair quote.
• CNBC, supermarket fridges hack and Axios, Europe supermarket fridges attacks – overview of the countries and chains hit.
• PBS NewsHour, what to know about another cyberattack on European supermarket fridges – the AP piece with the NCSC statement and the “no zero-day” quote.
• The Hacker News, attackers heat French supermarket fridges – the October French attack, first technical account.
• SentinelOne Labs, Defrost and Disrupt – assessment of the refrigeration attacks, the Forescout count and the claiming groups.
• Aviatrix threat research, Danfoss controllers and Archyde, attackers target Danfoss controllers – the AK-SM 800A, CVE-2025-41450 and the default passwords.
• IndexBox, hackers targeted Europe's internet-connected fridges before the coordinated attacks and Tildee, cyberattacks target refrigeration systems – the Lupovis reconnaissance and the blood bank supplier.
• Newsweek, FBI issues warning as hackers target grocery store refrigerators and Latin Times, cyberattack on refrigeration systems – the FBI advisory and the US military commissaries.

The hoax threats

• CNN live, bomb threats on flights across Europe and Al Jazeera, hoax or bomb threats: what we know – day-by-day count of the threats.
• NPR, Europe flights hoaxes and ABC News, bomb threats targeting flights and media outlets continue – the AP reporting with the Eurocontrol figure and the Borie quote.
• NBC News, Dublin-Rome flight diverted, Euronews, Airbus from Dublin to Rome diverted to France and Irish Times, Aer Lingus pilots questioned – the Évreux diversion and what followed.

Be Ready

• Prepared Britain, government preparedness campaign and Prepared Britain, UK government stockpile food and water – the daily checks on the GOV.UK page.
• ADS Advance, UK national resilience campaign and The National, UK government advises stockpiling water and food – the launch of 22 October.
• Nation.Cymru, Burnham defends stockpiling advice and LBC, Burnham on flooding and stockpiling – the “unexpected events” line and the beans.
• NationalWorld, UK cyber attack warning and emergency kit – an example of how the page was re-headlined.
• Met Office, UK warnings – the ordinary bulletins that ended up in the same stream.
• Swedish government, the new edition of “If crisis or war comes” and MSB press release on the leaflet (in Swedish).
• EU Law Live, civil and military preparedness after the Niinistö report and European Parliament briefing on preparedness – the 72-hour recommendation.

The precedents and the generals

• Euronews, Slovakia detains two over alleged hybrid attacks – the 2024 bomb threats in Czechia and Slovakia.
• Yahoo News, Russia behind parcel fires in UK – the DHL incendiary parcels and the 22 suspects.
• European Pravda, Breuer on 2029, NV, Czech general warns Russia could attack NATO by 2029 and United24, French military chief warns Russia could strike NATO by 2030 – the defence chiefs' statements.

#Europe #Cybersecurity #HybridWarfare #BeReady #Danfoss #Infrastructure #Media #Journalism #Writing

La vie solitaire de É. Sambòko prend la suite des #Didascalies de Fenêtre sur ville. Un personnage est apparu, qui déplace la perspective de la ville et de son écriteur. Sambòko veut dire “chaussure” mais aussi “énigme” si l’on oriente autrement l’accent. Où va É. Sambòko ? L’on ne sait.

La vie solitaire de É. Sambòko – 5.1

Parfois rien n’advient du vide, celui de soi ou du dehors, qui est le même. Une forme de l’attente se glisse dans le corps d’Éros. L’œil se tient seul à la fenêtre, au bord du trou de la ville où débaroulent les choses. Et demeure à regarder le quoi, cette matière du monde, la multiple surface de ce quoi, aussi profonde que l’insensé d’un rêve. Durant des jours ou des semaines d’une éternité désœuvrée sous la pesanteur de l’air.

Courte liste d’oiseaux que dévorent les nuages, l’aréquier planté là dans une cour odorée par les eaux de vaisselle, les mousses d’un savon contre les vers de peau, le champ tendu des tôles entre manguiers : image devant Éros, que détrempent les pluies, racornit le soleil. Image dans la tête, trou de la ville ou puits des orpailleurs tombés sous le ciel blanc, on y traque le fil, la veine, on s’y ensevelit à déganguer les mots, en ne tirant souvent que terre et d’anciens os de captifs ou de chiens.

#LaviesolitairedeÉSambòko

I sometimes get frustrated by all the things that I need to do after I get out of bed, and before I can sit down here to do this. Sometimes it paralyzes me in bed, and I linger there under the warm blankets longer than I should. Now that I'm sitting here doing this, after doing all the things; I don't know what to type.

Pills, work, vaccines, therapy and doctor visits are my life right now. I suppose I'm getting shit done. Flu and covid shots last weekend. 3rd Hepatitis AB vax later today. I have had all the shots I can get now I suppose. Covid, flu, shingles, tetanus, and hepatitis all within a year.

Over three weeks now with these pills. Venlafaxine XR 37.5. Selective serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. Yesterday was my appointment to reassess the dosage, and to see how things are going. My response to them is pretty typical. Felt like shit at first, and now I don't feel much different, but sort of. Not necessarily better. Just weird. Still just weird. Tired. It has not been long enough to really know for sure how, or if, they are going to help me. Another 30 days at the lowest dose possible. By then I will know more. These pills are a subtle and slow altering of brain chemistry balance. Not like the instantaneous euphoric effects of narcotics, or a few quick shots of whiskey. The waiting to see is annoying.

It makes me think of weight loss and fitness. How when you begin altering eating habits and exercising, there are no results for quite awhile at first. You have to be consistent with it all for days and days, and have faith in the process.

I don't think I'm any more fucked up than I have been since I started thinking. So why now? Why am I getting therapy and taking pills now? Today is day 676 of sobriety, and I'm old(er). I don't have the option of medicating with dangerous amounts of alcohol. Well, I suppose that is not exactly true. The option is always there. But no. Realistically, if I want to continue being alive it is not an option. I think of this as like having strains and injury at 55 compared to at 30 or younger. Strains and injury take longer to heal now. It seems the same with these mental issues, or w'tvr'tf this should be called. Only not like it at all. This is not an achy muscle impairing my range of motion for more days than it used to when I was younger. I can work through that. This thing has become too much. I can't get over it. Or work through it. I don't even really know what IT is. I am not out of, or in control. Constantly tripping and stumbling but never falling. I need help, so I'm getting help.

Assis par terre. Regardant les fossoyeurs. Pas de larmes. Le regard épuisé et stoïque. Le regard de quelqu’un qui semble avoir tout vu.

Quand on a vu partir tant de personnes, comment trouver la force de continuer. Il y arrive.

Enterrer la personne avec qui l’on a passé 70 ans de sa vie. C’est une sensation que je ne connaîtrai jamais.

L’univers de mes grands-parents n’est pas le mien. Nos prismes sont differents. Notre vie est différente. Mais je ne sais pas si d’aujourd’hui est la meilleure époque face.