> Three hours later, the same GDID visited the retailer’s own website, through the same Tzulo proxy address used to set up the ngrok account.

This article, and most articles about this, doesn't explain where FBI got that GDID from. Ok, Microsoft has a list of IP addresses that has been used by a computer with a certain GDID, but FBI needs to get the GDID in the first place, and then try to bind that to a person.

I found another article that explains the process a bit better:

> Stokes got caught because he used the same Windows device for everything, and the GDID stitched all of it back together after the fact.

> Scattered Spider members phoned the jewelry retailer’s IT help desk from Google Voice numbers, posed as locked out employees, and talked support staff into resetting three accounts, two with administrator privileges. From there they installed a tunneling tool called ngrok to get past the retailer’s network defenses, moved roughly 77 gigabytes of data to Amazon cloud storage using ngrok [...]

> Investigators later subpoenaed ngrok and found the account used in the attack had been created on May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC from a VPN proxy IP address run by Tzulo, a hosting provider. The IP was a dead end. VPN proxies do that. But the GDID is built different.

> Microsoft’s records showed that at that exact same minute, a Windows device carrying GDID g:6755467234350028 had visited the ngrok signup page. Three hours later, the same GDID visited the retailer’s own website, through the same Tzulo proxy address used to set up the ngrok account. It gave the FBI a device, that don’t rotate the way VPN exit nodes do.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/10/you-cant-fully-disa...

Although this doesn't explain where Microsoft got that traffic data from. How do Microsoft know which sites a computer visit?

https://rover-xingyu.github.io/TTT3R/

This looks really interesting, especially when combined with gaussian splats.

- Yes, yes that's right.

- Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the vibe coding software people?

- Well, I'll tell you why... because... engineers are not good at dealing with customers...

- So you physically take the specs from the customer?

- Well... No. My secretary does that... or they're faxed.

- So then you must physically bring them to the software people?

- Well... No. ah sometimes.

- What would you say you do here?

- Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so the prompt engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!

Maybe I'm overthinking things, but to me "user" implies a different more subordinate role where you take what you get, there's no "the customer is always right" when it comes to "users".

https://www.engadget.com/2202099/the-most-popular-grok-featu...

This is worth $2.25 trillion?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738652

Points: 25

# Comments: 8

Seems like a really good model to use in an IDE when you still want control over the code structure then.