Google Links Redirected Towards Phishing Scam.
Also, people are styling their spreadsheets like 1999 video games.

The "g.co" Shortcut is Now a Mandatory Security Oopsie

A new phishing campaign is leveraging Google’s own official URL shortener, g.co, to facilitate credential theft, mostly targeting Steam users. The implicit trust users place in a short, official URL is the entire premise of the attack, making it a classic failure of corporate over-convenience. Attackers were able to abuse an unverified Workspace account to send misleading emails, essentially allowing a scammer to rent a digital mailbox inside Google’s headquarters and send spam to all the neighbors.

Google has confirmed it has suspended the offending account and is now hardening its defenses against future abuse pathways leveraging g.co at sign-up. Commenters on the thread, many of whom have PhDs or are security professionals, routinely admit that the only real protection in this environment is a password manager that refuses to auto-fill your login information on a fraudulent page. We are now in a post-trust era where the only trusted party is the browser extension that is yelling at you to stop clicking things.

Nostalgia as a Service: Web Devs Recapture That Counter Strike 1.6 Vibe

Somebody built a CSS library based on the Counter Strike 1.6 user interface, which is proof that the modern web is now just recycling aesthetics from the late 90s and early 2000s instead of inventing new ones. The developer apparently looked at all the new CSS features that make websites usable and decided to use them to create something that looks exactly like a Windows 98 desktop running a half-broken 3D application. It is an incredible achievement in digital regression, perfect for a modern corporate application that wants to look authentic, like a finance dashboard or a Kubernetes control panel.

This library follows other projects like NES.css or The Sims CSS, completing the cycle of self-referential digital archaeology that keeps the web development community busy. We have a perpetual mandate to move forward, but everyone only wants to reminisce about a time when the internet was primarily composed of Geocities pages and rubber mouse balls getting schmootz in them.

Academia Solves Library Shelving Problem, Gets Close to Perfection

Computer science researchers are nearing the theoretical peak of the "library sorting problem," which is a fancy way of saying they figured out the best possible way to organize a bookshelf without having to move everything when you add a new book. The new approach, which applies to databases and hard drive files far more than it does to physical books, uses a surprising mix of past data knowledge and deliberate randomness to position empty slots.

The ultimate goal is an optimal algorithm, which is a mathematical lower bound of log n, and this new solution comes tantalizingly close. The only thing standing in the way of complete perfection is a diminutive log log n term, the tiny mathematical pebble in the shoe of a complete solution. The theoretical work is incredibly inspired, yet for most of us, it simply means the database is slightly faster when we try to insert a new row of inventory data in Q4.

Briefs

• Linux Linker: The new Wild linker for Linux is here, meaning your next multi-gigabyte C++ compilation is now only an annoying ten minutes instead of a full hour.
• Transit Logistics: A delightful visualization now lets you see how far you can get from any NYC subway station in 40 minutes, which will be helpful for the next time you need to determine the maximum effective blast radius of a corporate pizza party.
• Editor Wars: A long-form piece on The State of Vim confirms that the text editor war will continue in perpetuity until the heat death of the universe, or at least until the company that pays our salary goes under.