Matthew McPherrin dug old root certificates out of archived Netscape and IE installers and found a 512-bit E-Certify CA root that Netscape 4.51 shipped as trusted in 1999, then factored its key on ordinary hardware. He used Claude Code to extract and catalog the ancient roots along the way.
A June fire at TeraWulf's Lake Mariner campus in upstate New York found no working alarm, no suppression system, and dry hydrants, and the fire chief says his crew went in blind. Ars traces the ownership tangle behind the site: TeraWulf operates it on land leased from its own CEO, Fluidstack will run it, Google guarantees the lease, and Anthropic is a customer.
The AfD won an outright landslide in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the first time the party has come close to governing a state on its own. Reuters reads it as a rebuke of Chancellor Merz's reform agenda and a stress test for the mainstream parties' firewall against the far right; Merz says he will double down on the reforms regardless.
OpenAI published a pair of pieces on recursive self-improvement, including data on how its own researchers use coding agents. Simon notes the chart of AI spend per researcher jumps sharply in late July and guesses that is when staff got internal access to the model that became GPT-6 Astra.