An insane press release from an insane administration:

"Secretary Noem Terminates Inept FEMA Employees After Uncovering Massive Cyber Failures, Demands Accountability"

According to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, she fired two dozen IT employees at FEMA over an alleged security incident in which "no sensitive information was extracted from any DHS networks."

To Noem, the real problem isn't cybercriminals outside of FEMA who want to break in, it's the "deep state" bureaucrats who are the real threat, the insider.

"When DHS stepped in to fix the problem, entrenched bureaucrats worked to prevent us from solving the problem and downplayed just how bad this breach was. These deep-state individuals were more interested in covering up their failures than in protecting the Homeland and American citizens’ personal data, so I terminated them immediately."

"The entrenched bureaucrats who led FEMA’s IT team for decades resisted any efforts to fix the problem. Instead, they avoided scheduled inspections and lied to officials about the scope and scale of the cyber vulnerabilities."

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/08/29/secretary-noem-terminates-inept-fema-employees-after-uncovering-massive-cyber

The always on-point Risky Business newsletter notes FEMA insiders who spoke to CNN shortly after the firings last Friday painted a totally different picture and described the ousted IT team and its leaders as "extremely competent" and "highly respected."

"At this point in time, and taking into account the declining credibility of any statements coming out of the Trump administration, it is unclear if a breach even took place or if Noem and the DHS are trying to make up reasons to fire FEMA staff to bring in their loyal lackeys into the agency instead."

"The White House has been grasping at straws for months to find reasons to fire FEMA staff and leadership."

"It previously administered lie detector tests to FEMA top officials and fired the FEMA CFO after she made payments authorized by DOGE a day before."

"According to multiple reports, the Trump administration is intent on disbanding the agency altogether, or at least downsizing it to minuscule levels and leaving US states to handle their own natural disasters."

https://risky.biz/RBNEWS472/

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/29/politics/noem-fires-fema-employees-cybersecurity

Today we say goodbye to Nintendo Network. As of writing this message, Nintendo has shut down their online infrastructure for the Wii U and 3DS after 12 strong years. We know many of you here have fond memories from this generation, playing iconic titles such as Mario Kart 7, Splatoon, Super Mario Maker, and more. Today marks an end of a chapter in gamings history, and I'm sure many of you wondered why we have stayed so silent for most of the day.

Despite this chapter ending for Nintendo, it's just getting started for Pretendo! We won't be going anywhere, and we have many more plans for the future (such as expanding our infrastructure to allow for 3rd party servers, to allow games not under our scope of support to be brought back seamlessly through other teams). We will remain hard at work improving our servers, both in terms of over compatibility with more games and improving the performance of said games as well.

Before we get into the main part of the announcement, I would just like to extend one last, giant, thank you to everyone who helped support us recently! The amount of network dumps we obtained is outstanding, getting data for nearly all games! This will be such a valuable resource for us moving forward, as we no longer have a way to see these servers in action. These network dumps are invaluable to life of Pretendo, and we couldn't have done it without you all :purple_heart:.

With that, we have 2 big things to announce:

Patch updates

A new release of both Nimbus and Inkay has been released! You MUST install these new releases moving forward, as they contain critical updates required to keep multiplayer match making working! Download the latest versions here:

• https://github.com/PretendoNetwork/Inkay/releases/latest
• https://github.com/PretendoNetwork/Nimbus/releases/latest

Hackless Wii U Connections

Today we are finally announcing our private hackless Wii U connection method; SSSL! This new connection method exploits a bug in the Wii U SSL module introduced in firmware version 5.5.5 which allows us to support Wii U users WITHOUT HOMEBREW, using only a DNS change! For information on the setup and limitations of SSSL (as well as other updates regarding Pretendo moving forward), see our full blog post and updated Wii U guide:

• https://pretendo.network/blog/4-8-24
• https://pretendo.network/docs/install/wiiu

PLEASE BARE WITH US AS WE HANDLE THE LARGE INFLUX OF NEW USERS. OUR SERVERS MAY BE UNSTABLE FOR A WHILE AS WE SORT THINGS OUT

not often does somebody drop the mic in the 3rd paragraph of a 7-page talk, but Schneier did:

“In this talk, I am going to make several arguments. One, that there are two different kinds of trust—interpersonal trust and social trust—and that we regularly confuse them. Two, that the confusion will increase with artificial intelligence. We will make a fundamental category error. We will think of AIs as friends when they’re really just services. Three, that the corporations controlling AI systems will take advantage of our confusion to take advantage of us. They will not be trustworthy. And four, that it is the role of government to create trust in society. And therefore, it is their role to create an environment for trustworthy AI. And that means regulation. Not regulating AI, but regulating the organizations that control and use AI.”

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-trust.html