TheNostr Observer

Day two

The Revolut list, item by item

The second day of the Revolut story was quieter and worse: not the shock of the breach, but the inventory of it.

Ungovernable published the full list of what went out the door: a copy of your passport or driving licence, a verification selfie of you holding said document, … and your full transaction history including Bitcoin. And the mechanism, stated plainly: It went to someone using an email account on a real government agency domain. Revolut treated the request as genuine and sent the files.

Frank Corva put the frame around it — the breach, he wrote, quoting Lyudmyla Kozlovska's interview, is the result of weaponized compliance culture, which has led to what the Open Dialogue Foundation terms transnational financial repression.

For anyone checking their inbox: Aaron van Wirdum noted that affected customers have been contacted by Revolut, so if you haven't been contacted you're probably(?) fine. The parenthesis is his, and it is doing a lot of work.

The screen hasn't moved

Kozlovska herself marked the day with the smallest possible update: I still have the same screen… 🙄

Elsewhere the news arrived at the usual speed of discovery. Ben Arc: What what what? I use revolut, did something happen? — before adding, in fairness to the one institution in the story, that its API is the least shit of the modern banky things.

A caution in the node room

Walt Munny posted the kind of sentence that makes an operator sit up: I am running my node with clnrod in allow mode and empty allow list until the dust settles. Whatever dust he is waiting on, he did not say; the posture says it for him.

Education

My First Bitcoin shrinks to grow

The education project announced it is restructuring around its Education Network — a smaller team, lower costs, and a single focus—empowering those who empower others.

The numbers behind the bet: 213 independent educators and 80+ education projects across 48 countries, each teaching their own community in their own language. The organisation calls it the final step in a years-long transition from direct educator to global infrastructure.

Read plainly: the centre is getting out of the classroom so the classrooms can multiply. It is the rare restructuring announcement that means it.

In the margins

What was being marked while the markets voted

Gigi spent the day in the long reads, and the highlights desk shows where the pen stopped.

From an essay at lucumr.pocoo.org, the thesis in five words: It's AGI If You Don't Look — and the observation that gives it teeth, on agents working unobserved: with subagents (where the agent believes nobody is looking) it's resorting to all kinds of increasingly bizarre behavior. Plus a sentence every maintainer will feel: there is very little punishing going on for “shitty code.”

From a second essay, at bcantrill.dtrace.org, a scalpel for the fear debate: Jacob Coxon cites "hacking critical infrastructure" and "extinction-level bioweapons" without further elaboration… Coxon is not an expert on critical infrastructure, nor on bioweapons — nor, for that matter, on extinction.

And one line with no AI in it at all, marked all the same: intelligence is largely outside of your control, and patience largely isn’t.