Game de­vel­oper Rebecca Heineman has died af­ter be­ing di­ag­nosed with can­cer last month. The news was shared to Bluesky by Heineman’s friend, Heidi McDonald, while the most re­cent post on Heineman’s GoFundMe is a good­bye mes­sage stat­ing that her health was rapidly de­te­ri­o­rat­ing, and she was en­ter­ing pal­lia­tive care. Heineman was 62, and the GoFundMe will re­main live to help her fam­ily make fi­nal arrange­ments.

Born in 1963, Heineman ini­tially made a mark on the in­dus­try by win­ning a na­tional Space Invaders tour­na­ment in 1980 in New York, be­com­ing the first for­mally rec­og­nized US cham­pion of any videogame. She went on to have a far-reach­ing ca­reer, be­ing cred­ited on 67 games ac­cord­ing to MobyGames.

Heineman co-founded Interplay in 1983 along­side Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, and Troy Worrell. The de­vel­oper and pub­lisher was the source of many foun­da­tional PC games, in­clud­ing Wasteland, Fallout, and Baldur’s Gate. Heineman de­signed and pro­grammed a num­ber of games at Interplay, with her most promi­nent de­sign credit be­ing The Bard’s Tale 3: Thief of Fate.

Heineman’s friend and col­league from Interplay, Brian Fargo, shared a re­mem­brance of the de­vel­oper on X. “Rebecca Heineman sadly passed away,” Fargo wrote. “Known her since the 80s when I’d drive her to work, one of the most bril­liant pro­gram­mers around. A real gut punch ear­lier to­day when she mes­saged me: ‘We have gone on so many ad­ven­tures to­gether! But, into the great un­known! I go first!!!’”

Later, in the ’90s and 2000s, Heineman made a name pri­mar­ily as a pro­gram­mer, par­tic­u­larly on ports like the Macintosh ver­sions of Wolfenstein 3D, Baldur’s Gate, and Icewind Dale. The saga of Heineman over­com­ing a de­ranged busi­ness­man to solo pro­gram the ill-fated 3DO port of Doom in mere weeks has be­come a bit of an in­ter­net leg­end: Here’s Digital Foundry and Heineman her­self re­count­ing the tale.

Heineman pub­licly came out as trans­gen­der in the 2000s, and was mar­ried to fel­low games in­dus­try leg­end Jennell Jaquays. Heineman was the re­cip­i­ent of Gayming’s 2025 Gayming Icon award, with the site writ­ing that “her ad­vo­cacy for LGBTQ+ in­clu­sion, ac­ces­si­bil­ity, and di­ver­sity in tech has in­spired count­less de­vel­op­ers and play­ers.”

Jaquays died of com­pli­ca­tions from Guillain–Barré syn­drome in January 2024, and Heineman was blind­sided last month by an ag­gres­sive can­cer di­ag­no­sis. She turned to GoFundMe to help with the costs of treat­ment, where fans, friends, and in­dus­try peers showed up to sup­port the de­vel­oper.

Heineman shared the mes­sage last night that her health was rapidly de­clin­ing.

“It’s time. According to my doc­tors. All fur­ther treat­ments are point­less,” Heineman wrote. “So, please do­nate so my kids can cre­ate a fu­neral wor­thy of my key­board, Pixelbreaker! So I can make a wor­thy en­trance for re­unit­ing with my one true love, Jennell Jaquays.”

Game de­vel­op­ers have be­gun shar­ing their own con­do­lences and re­mem­brances in the wake of Heineman’s death.

Rebecca was one of the founders of Interplay and pro­grammed & de­signed for some of the most in­flu­en­tial games of my youth, no­tably Bard’s Tale I & III and Wasteland. She will be missed.— @jesawyer.bsky.social (@jesawyer.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:17:03.191Z

What a re­mark­able hu­man, and what a re­mark­able thing to know that she passed be­mused at read­ing her own eu­lo­gies. Rest in peace, Rebecca. Thank you for every­thing.— @ramiismail.com (@ramiismail.com.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:15:53.662Z

Rebecca was in my life be­cause she reached out to me, a stranger, be­cause she’d caught wind of a lay­off I was im­pacted by. Her achieve­ments were great, and so too was her kind­ness.— @jyoungman.bsky.social (@jyoungman.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:15:53.699Z

Rest well, you leg­end, you pi­o­neer, you won­der­ful soul. I’m lucky to have known you, though briefly. Please share her legacy by re­post­ing Heidi’s mes­sage. 💖— @caseymongillo.bsky.social (@caseymongillo.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:15:53.712Z

in the early 2000s Rebecca took the time to chat over IRC with a teenaged and gen­der-con­fused Me on the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of tran­si­tion - in a time where be­ing out as trans on­line was some­thing that could get you so­cially os­tra­cized. I owe her a lot for that and only hope I can pay it for­ward.— @moomanibe.bsky.social (@moomanibe.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:15:53.675Z

Microsoft is mov­ing for­ward with its plans to turn Windows 11 into a full-fledged “AI” op­er­at­ing sys­tem amidst Copilot back­lash.

The first big move in that di­rec­tion is an ex­per­i­men­tal fea­ture called “Agent Workspace,” which gives AI agents ac­cess to the most-used fold­ers in your di­rec­tory, such as Desktop, Music, Pictures, and Videos. It will also al­low AI agents to have their own run­time, desk­top, user ac­count, and abil­ity to al­ways run in the back­ground if you turn on the fea­ture.

As soon as I in­stalled Windows 11 Build 26220.7262, Windows Latest no­ticed a new tog­gle “Experimental agen­tic fea­tures” in­side the “AI Components” page in the Settings app > System.

This turns on “Agent Workspace,” but it does­n’t work right now, and if you’re won­der­ing, it’s only avail­able to Windows Insiders in the Dev or Beta Channel.

If you’ve ever used ChatGPT, you might have come across ‘Agents.’ AI Agents have their own in­ter­face, and they nav­i­gate just like a hu­man.

For ex­am­ple, if you ask ChatGPT’s Agent to book a trip, it’ll open Chromium on Linux in an Azure con­tainer, search for the query, visit dif­fer­ent web­sites, nav­i­gate each page, and book a flight ticket us­ing your saved cre­den­tials. An AI Agent tries to be­have like a hu­man, and it can per­form tasks on your be­half while you sit back and re­lax (spoiler: you don’t).

That’s the core idea Silicon Valley is try­ing to sell. However, it does­n’t work as well as com­pa­nies like OpenAI and Perplexity claim.

Up un­til now, these Agents have been lim­ited to cloud con­tain­ers with Chromium and Linux ter­mi­nal ac­cess, but as Microsoft wants Windows 11 to be­come an “AI-native” OS, it’s adding Agent Workspace.

Agent work­space is a sep­a­rate, con­tained Windows ses­sion made just for AI agents, where they get their own ac­count, desk­top, and per­mis­sions so they can click, type, open apps, and work on your files in the back­ground while you keep us­ing your nor­mal desk­top.

This fea­ture is com­pletely op­tional and is never turned on by de­fault. To test it, I turned on the fea­ture, and Microsoft cre­ated an ex­tra “workspace.” It’s very sim­i­lar to how Windows Sandbox or Workspaces in Microsoft Edge work, but it could be a po­ten­tial se­cu­rity dis­as­ter, as even Microsoft is warn­ing about risks.

When Windows spins up this ex­tra work­space, it gives it lim­ited ac­cess (like spe­cific fold­ers such as Documents or Desktop) and keeps its ac­tions iso­lated and au­ditable.

Each agent can have its own work­space and ac­cess rules, so what one agent can see or do does­n’t au­to­mat­i­cally ap­ply to oth­ers, and you stay in con­trol of what they’re al­lowed to touch.

“The cre­ation of the agent work­space where agents can work in par­al­lel with a hu­man user, en­abling run­time iso­la­tion and scoped au­tho­riza­tion,” Microsoft noted in a sup­port doc­u­ment. “This pro­vides the agent with ca­pa­bil­i­ties like its own desk­top while lim­it­ing the vis­i­bil­ity and ac­cess­ing the agent has to the user’s desk­top ac­tiv­ity.”

You might find the idea of Agent Workspace a bit sim­i­lar to Windows Sandbox. Microsoft ar­gues that Windows Agent Workspace is more “efficient” than a vir­tual ma­chine, such as Windows Sandbox, be­cause:

* The agent still has se­cu­rity iso­la­tion

* and gives you con­trol… as you can al­low the Agent to ac­cess your per­sonal fold­ers even when it’s run­ning in a sep­a­rate iso­lated in­stance. Or you can see the logs.

“The over­all ex­pe­ri­ence and se­cu­rity model are ac­tively be­ing re­fined to sup­port key prin­ci­ples of trans­parency, safety, and user con­trol,” Microsoft says.

While Agent and Sandbox have sim­i­lar­i­ties like iso­la­tion, Sandbox does not have ac­cess to your per­sonal files or fold­ers. In Windows Sandbox, Microsoft cre­ates an iso­lated and hard­ware-based vir­tu­al­iza­tion, and even a sep­a­rate ker­nel to keep the sand­box com­pletely sep­a­rate.

When you turn off Sandbox, all of its ac­tiv­i­ties are deleted. We can’t say the same for AI agents.

When you turn on the fea­ture, you’re giv­ing agents ac­cess to apps and even lo­cal fold­ers, such as Desktop, Music, Pictures, and Videos.

I dug a bit into the im­ple­men­ta­tion, and it looks like Agent Workspace has lim­ited ac­cess to your lo­cal folder in­side (C:\Users\\). When the tog­gle “Experimental Agent fea­tures” is en­abled, Windows gets read and write ac­cess to the fol­low­ing fold­ers: Downloads, Desktop, Videos, Pictures, and Music.

These fold­ers are called “Known fold­ers,” a fea­ture that Microsoft added with Windows Vista.

Since Agent work­space is us­ing known fold­ers, it can al­ways lo­cate these fold­ers (Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Videos, Pictures, Music) even if you’ve redi­rected the lo­ca­tion else­where in the filesys­tem.

To run things for you. Simple. Agent Workspace re­quires ac­cess to apps or pri­vate fold­ers to per­form ac­tions on your be­half. Microsoft in­sists that it’s tak­ing care of se­cu­rity im­pli­ca­tions by giv­ing Agent Workspace its own au­tho­ri­sa­tion (a sep­a­rate ac­count, sim­i­lar to your user ac­count), run­time iso­la­tion.

Each agent will have its own de­fined set of dos and don’ts.

The idea is to give Agents their own back­yard on your PC, and let them run in the back­ground all the time. You’ll be able to mon­i­tor the logs and keep an eye on agent ac­tiv­ity.

While each agent gets its own ac­count, in­de­pen­dent of your per­sonal ac­count, an agent would still need ac­cess to your apps.

Now, when you turn on the fea­ture, Microsoft is giv­ing ac­cess to all your in­stalled apps that you can use. But you can specif­i­cally in­stall apps for your agents. Or you can main­tain dif­fer­ent user ac­counts on Windows, and then in­stall apps for those spe­cific users. If this is­n’t an un­nec­es­sary so­lu­tion to a prob­lem no one had, then what is…?

In our tests, Windows Latest ob­served that the ex­per­i­men­tal tog­gle warns of po­ten­tial per­for­mance is­sues, and it makes sense.

AI agents are go­ing to run in the back­ground all the time and use RAM or CPU, de­pend­ing agen­t’s ac­tiv­ity. However, Microsoft’s early bench­marks sug­gest they won’t re­ally drain PCs of their power. Microsoft won’t give us the num­bers for ob­vi­ous rea­sons.

Microsoft only says AI Agents will use a lim­ited amount of RAM and CPU.

By de­fault, these agents are light­weight, but the catch is that some Agents could be re­source-in­ten­sive. We’re go­ing to find out later.

Ironically, this new agen­tic ex­pe­ri­ence has been an­nounced af­ter Microsoft’s Windows boss promised to im­prove Windows for every­one, in­clud­ing de­vel­op­ers.

As Windows Latest re­ported re­cently, when Microsoft’s Windows boss teased an “Agentic” fu­ture for Windows, hun­dreds and thou­sands of users crit­i­cised the lead­er­ship. Microsoft’s ex­ec­u­tive closed the replies/​com­ments on his post to calm the pub­lic, but the move back­fired as more users started sham­ing Windows’ Agentic shift.

Later, Microsoft’s Windows boss promised that it would make Windows bet­ter for every­one, and it deeply cares about de­vel­op­ers.

“We know we have work to do on the ex­pe­ri­ence, both on the every­day us­abil­ity, from in­con­sis­tent di­alogs to power user ex­pe­ri­ences. When we meet as a team, we dis­cuss these paint points and oth­ers in de­tail, be­cause we want de­vel­op­ers to choose Windows,” says Pavan Davuluri, who is the boss of Windows and de­vices at Microsoft.”

“….I’ll boil it down, we care deeply about de­vel­op­ers,” he added.

While the Experimental Agents Feature is op­tional, it makes it quite ob­vi­ous Microsoft will not stop in­vest­ing in AI for Windows 11, and Agentic OS is the fu­ture, whether you like it or not.

This is a post that we don’t take any joy in writ­ing. When we wrote last month about our agree­ment with Core Devices, we went into it be­liev­ing that co­op­er­a­tion be­tween Core and Rebble would be the best de­ci­sion for the Pebble com­mu­nity. Core would spear­head the de­vel­op­ment of brand new watches, and we’d be there to pro­vide our Rebble Web Services to go with them.

Unfortunately, our agree­ment is al­ready break­ing down. We hoped that by putting on a kind face, and pub­lish­ing an op­ti­mistic-sound­ing blog post along with Eric, that we’d be able to col­lab­o­rate in a way that met our re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to you, our users. We knew that nei­ther of us would be able to get all we wanted, but we thought we had enough com­mon ground that we could serve Pebble users to­gether.

Rebble has been work­ing since the be­gin­ning to keep the Pebble ex­pe­ri­ence alive — main­tain­ing the App Store, build­ing new ser­vices like Bobby, and run­ning front­line sup­port for peo­ple keep­ing their Pebbles tick­ing the whole time. (The Pebble App Store that Core of­fers right now is backed by Rebble!) But Eric and Core re­cently de­manded that, in­stead of work­ing to­gether, we need to just give them all of our work from the last decade so that they could do what­ever they want with it. And in Eric’s lat­est newslet­ter, he has­n’t told you the truth about where the work that makes his busi­ness run came from. We’d rather have co­op­er­ated with them to build some­thing great to­gether, but we’ve reached an im­passe. So now, we’re ask­ing you — our com­mu­nity — what to do with Core.

How we got here

Nine years ago, Eric Migicovsky’s com­pany, Pebble Technology Corporation, went out of busi­ness and dropped sup­port for the hun­dreds of thou­sands of Pebble smart­watches out there. Rebble — and our com­mu­nity! — put to­gether a Herculean ef­fort to sal­vage the data that was left on the Pebble app store.

Since then, we built a re­place­ment app store API that was com­pat­i­ble with the old app store front end. We built a stor­age back­end for it, and then we spent enor­mous ef­fort to im­port the data that we sal­vaged. We’ve built a to­tally new dev por­tal, where y’all sub­mit­ted brand new apps that never ex­isted while Pebble was around. So far, we’ve spent hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars on stor­ing and host­ing the data. And the hu­mans who run the Rebble servers have also spent in­cred­i­bly late nights up­grad­ing Kubernetes clus­ters, re­spond­ing to out­ages, and gen­er­ally keep­ing things tick­ing.

What you now know as the Pebble App Store from Eric’s new com­pany, Core Devices, is the re­sult of nearly a decade of our work. The data be­hind the Pebble App Store is 100% Rebble. And the App Store that we’ve built to­gether is much more than it was when Pebble stopped ex­ist­ing. We’ve patched hun­dreds of apps with Timeline and weather end­point up­dates. We’ve cu­rated re­moval re­quests from peo­ple who wanted to un­pub­lish their apps. And it has new ver­sions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we’ve run!

We’ve been ne­go­ti­at­ing with Eric for months now. We’ll com­pro­mise on al­most every­thing else, but our one red line is this:

Whatever we agree on, there has to be a fu­ture for Rebble in there.

We want to give Core’s users ac­cess to the Rebble App Store. (We thought we agreed on that last month.) We’re happy to com­mit to main­tain­ing the Web Services. We’d be happy to let them con­tribute and build new fea­tures. And what we want in re­turn is sim­ple: if we give Core ac­cess to our data, we want to make sure they’re not just go­ing to build a walled gar­den app store around our hard work.

The prob­lem is, Core won’t com­mit to this. Core wants un­re­stricted ac­cess to do what­ever they want with the data that we archived and have spent the last years cu­rat­ing, main­tain­ing servers for, and keep­ing rel­e­vant. If we gave Core the rights to use the App Store data how­ever they want, they could build their own Core-private App Store, re­place Rebble, and keep any new changes pro­pri­etary — leav­ing the com­mu­nity with noth­ing.

We’ve asked Eric about this every time we talk. He has oc­ca­sion­ally said ver­bally that that is­n’t their plan… but when it comes time to put it in writ­ing, he has re­peat­edly re­fused to guar­an­tee that. A week ago, we asked him to chat about this one more time — he de­layed our con­ver­sa­tion, and then in the in­ter­ven­ing time, scraped our app store, in vi­o­la­tion of the agree­ment that we reached with him pre­vi­ously.

We’re sad that the Rebble com­mu­nity has had ten­sion with Core Devices ever since Google re­leased the orig­i­nal PebbleOS source code. We’ve been pretty quiet about it for a while — we thought that we had a chance of work­ing to­gether if we tried hard not to frac­ture the com­mu­nity. But by now, a ver­bal promise is­n’t enough.

When the code was re­leased in January, we im­me­di­ately branched the repos­i­tory and started main­tain­ing PebbleOS. The Rebble com­mu­nity be­gan port­ing an open-source Bluetooth stack to PebbleOS, to sup­port clas­sic Pebble de­vices. Eric men­tions this in his blog post, but what he does­n’t say is that Rebble paid for the work that he took as a base for his com­mer­cial watches!

Shortly af­ter, Core forked PebbleOS away from pub­lic main­tain­er­ship. Back in June, they said that they would merge back pe­ri­od­i­cally; it’s now November, and we’re yet to see any­thing get merged back. Multiple ef­forts to con­tribute to PebbleOS were put on hold while we waited for Core to merge up­stream. It never hap­pened. Eric, in his blog post, now says that he will run PebbleOS as a “benevolent dic­ta­tor­ship”.

Rebble’s work is the back­bone of Core in other ways. The Core Devices app is based on libpeb­ble3; in Eric’s blog post, he said that Core built it. The re­al­ity is that it started life as libpeb­blecom­mon, which Rebblers wrote as part of our mo­bile app pro­ject (Cobble), and we funded through the Rebble Grants pro­gram. The work that we did to­gether saved Core a month or two of en­gi­neer­ing ef­fort at the be­gin­ning; Core took Rebble’s work, added to it, and then paid us back by putting a more re­stric­tive li­cense on their con­tri­bu­tions and wrap­ping a closed-source UI around it.

A few months ago, Core promised that they would let Rebble main­tain and own the de­vel­oper site, af­ter Rebblers spent days mak­ing it build again, im­port­ing new con­tent, etc. Then, in Eric’s orig­i­nal pro­posed agree­ment, he de­manded not only that Core pub­lish the de­vel­oper site on their do­main, but that we re­move our copy of the de­vel­oper site and redi­rect to theirs.

These have been blows to our com­mu­nity, to be sure. We’ve tried not to let this af­fect our ne­go­ti­a­tions: we want to work to­gether. But we went into this wary, know­ing what a promise from Core meant.

The last straw was two weeks ago. We’d al­ready agreed to give Core a li­cense to our data­base to build a rec­om­men­da­tion en­gine on. Then, Eric said that he in­stead de­manded that we give them all of the data that we’ve cu­rated, un­re­stricted, for him to do what­ever he’d like with. We asked to have a con­ver­sa­tion last week; he said that was busy and could meet the fol­low­ing week. Instead, the same day, our logs show that he went and scraped our servers.

Rebble’s goal is to have a com­mu­nity-dri­ven place to de­velop for these watches that we all love — to­day, and also in the fu­ture, if (love for­bid!) some­thing were to hap­pen to Core Devices.

If we gave Eric an un­re­stricted li­cense to our data, he could do the same thing he did to our firmware work, and our mo­bile app work. He’d have the right to take it and build his own app store — and the work that we’ve done to­gether as a com­mu­nity for the past decade would no longer be in our con­trol.

We watched this hap­pen ten years ago when Pebble went un­der (Rebble has been around longer than Pebble and Core com­bined by now!). We don’t know that Core can com­mit to sup­port­ing this ecosys­tem in the long term. After all, the war­ranty on Pebble 2 Duo is 30 days long, and early users are al­ready re­port­ing that their but­tons are falling apart!

But even if Eric has the best in­ten­tions now and can find the funds to keep Core afloat, you could imag­ine that OpenAI, or some­one else, would want to ac­quire Core and make him an of­fer he could­n’t refuse. We’ve watched this play out so many times, from so many other com­pa­nies, in the decade since — a prod­uct we love gets re­leased, and then gets killed off, an­other vic­tim of closed-source en­shit­ti­fi­ca­tion for profit. We love these watches, and we’d be sad if that hap­pened. And more to the point, we love this com­mu­nity that we’ve been a hub for.

This is your choice

In our last post, we said that Rebble be­longs to you. We mean it. These are the apps that you’ve writ­ten and con­tributed to your fel­low Pebblers. These are the watches that you spent so long car­ing about and lov­ing. This is your com­mu­nity, where you make awe­some hap­pen. So we see two di­rec­tions from here, and we need the com­mu­ni­ty’s help to de­cide.

If y’all would like, one op­tion is that we could ag­gres­sively pro­tect the work we’ve done, and try to pro­tect the com­mu­nity go­ing for­ward. If Eric had the fore­sight to back up this data nine years ago and main­tain it him­self, there’s noth­ing we could say about this. But he did­n’t, and we, to­gether, did. We made it ab­solutely clear to Eric that scrap­ing for com­mer­cial pur­poses was not an au­tho­rized use of the Rebble Web Services.

This gets ugly in a hurry, but we have le­gal re­sources that can pro­tect us. We’d rather spend our time on build­ing a next-gen­er­a­tion open source mo­bile app than spend it on a fight, but if it’s what we have to do, we’re not afraid. If we want to keep what we built, we’re go­ing to have to use our en­ergy to pro­tect it.

The other op­tion is that we could just let Eric do what­ever he wants. Eric be­lieves that our data­base should be free for any­one to make their own copy of, be­cause we are a non-profit Foundation. We don’t agree, but maybe you do! Nothing has to live for­ever, and we’ve done great work to­gether. If the com­mu­nity prefers that we pass the man­tle on­wards, we’ll do what y’all think is right.

These are both painful op­tions for us. And to be clear, we’d rather do nei­ther! If Eric and Core are will­ing to give us a le­gal com­mit­ment that they’re not just go­ing to kick us out, and that they’ll work with us, we’d much rather do that. We’re happy to let them build what­ever they want as long as it does­n’t hurt Rebble. Eric, you’re the best in the world at mak­ing quirky hard­ware for peo­ple who gen­uinely love what they wear. We’re great at build­ing a com­mu­nity. Use our locker, use our time­line, use our App Store — we’ve built it just for you. Just as long as we can work to­gether as part­ners.

But in the mean time, we’re here at a cross­roads.

We need you

For our friends who have sup­ported us over the past years: we’re sorry that you’re caught in the mid­dle of this. We think Rebble can be the hub of com­mu­nity, and Core can make awe­some prod­ucts, and these don’t have to be in con­flict. Eric’s new de­vices, Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2, look ab­solutely amaz­ing! We want to sup­port him in mak­ing beau­ti­ful hard­ware long into the fu­ture — with­out ex­pos­ing our users to the clas­sic walled gar­den en­shit­ti­fi­ca­tion trap.

But we want your in­put. If Eric and Core can’t play nice, we need you, our com­mu­nity, to tell us what to do. We’re se­ri­ous: if you think we should do some­thing dif­fer­ent, we will. So we’re post­ing this on Reddit /r/pebble and a hand­ful of other places. We’ll be (gulp!) read­ing the com­ments — the top rated and the long tail — to try to un­der­stand what the com­mu­ni­ty’s sen­ti­ment is. We’ll be watch­ing the dis­cus­sion on Discord. And, of course, if you want, you can e-mail the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors di­rectly. We’d like to hear from you.

Yours in hope — so many of us from the Rebble team over the past 9 years, in­clud­ing: David, Joshua, Will, Ruby, Stasia (LCP), Siân (astosia), Harrison (Link Sky), Lavender, Ben, Ephraim (gibbiemonster), Jakob (Jackie)

The other day, some­one told me, “I can’t imag­ine you ever be­ing awk­ward with peo­ple.” And I thought, oh God, yes, say it to me again, again, put it in my veins. Tell me I’m a nat­ural per­former. There are no sweeter words.

Because of course the ab­solute op­po­site is true. I’ve tried so hard to learn how to con­nect with peo­ple. It’s all I ever wanted, for so long. I can still re­mem­ber the pain of my youth, when the bright­ness of my ex­pe­ri­ence felt like a wasted gift, a rude ex­cess, with­out any­one to meet me in it. And I re­mem­ber how many years of de­lib­er­ate prac­tice were re­quired to se­cure rou­tine pleas­ant in­ter­ac­tions with my fel­low hu­man be­ings. I was born with­out so­cial aware­ness, and I in­stalled mine bit by bit.

Looking back, it’s clear to me now that my in­crease in so­cial skill was­n’t lin­ear, like build­ing a lit­tle more strength with every trip to the gym. Instead, I had six dif­fer­ent par­a­digms of con­nec­tion — six en­tirely dif­fer­ent ideas of how to ap­proach peo­ple — that I moved through on the way to my cur­rent method.

As a child, I was abra­sive and abrupt, ex­citable and sen­si­tive. Interacting with me was ex­haust­ing. And my po­si­tion in the hi­er­ar­chy re­flected it. I was prob­a­bly the most se­verely bul­lied kid at my school, be­cause I was one so­cial notch above chil­dren who were so pitiable it would be rude to mock them.

In early ado­les­cence, not much had changed. My clos­est friends were the hosts of This American Life, which I dis­cov­ered through a we­b­comic about video games. On first lis­ten, I rec­og­nized that the adults on that show were un­like me. They were witty and ur­bane, con­fi­dent but self-dep­re­cat­ing. And, since I adored them, I fig­ured that to be adored, I should be like them. Thus, I de­ter­mined that I would fash­ion my­self into an in­ter­est­ing per­son to lis­ten to, and this re­mained my ap­proach through­out most of my un­der­grad­u­ate ed­u­ca­tion.

Thus, in my teens, dur­ing/​af­ter a spell of play­ing the ukulele in pub­lic to at­tract at­ten­tion, I:

* Got good at telling dra­matic sto­ries about my life

* Developed opin­ions about schol­arly sub­jects, like Roland Barthes, Werner Herzog, and so on

In essence, I be­came an ex­am­ple of ob­nox­ious pre­coc­ity, a heart­felt young word­cel.

This earned me a bit of ap­proval. But the ap­proval was po­lar­ized. My act only worked on those who val­ued a par­tic­u­lar kind of cul­tural in­tel­li­gence — every­one else just found it tir­ing. And even when it worked, which it did chiefly on cam­pus, it was dis­tanc­ing. There was a pre­sen­ta­tional qual­ity to my in­ter­ac­tions, which lim­ited the pos­si­bil­ity of real di­a­logue. At the time, I could see that I was­n’t yet one of the gang, but could­n’t see why. I was demon­strat­ing my eru­di­tion: surely that was enough to be in­ducted into the ranks of the so­cially ac­cepted?

The lim­its of my ap­proach, and how to move be­yond it, only be­came clear when I worked in restau­rants.

After be­com­ing NPR-ish in col­lege, I went in­sane for a bit. Like, real men­tal ill­ness, dark night of the soul, wan­der­ing the streets mut­ter­ing to my­self, con­stant sui­ci­dal urges.

When I re­cov­ered, I found my­self work­ing as a bus­boy at a high-end pizza restau­rant, where I was be­ing con­sid­ered for pro­mo­tion to the rank of bar­tender. I’d be­come ca­pa­ble at mak­ing cof­fee and cock­tails, but my so­cial skills were con­sid­ered un­ac­cept­ably poor. I over­heard one of the bar­tenders, who felt I should­n’t be pro­moted, dis­cussing me with the man­ager: “He talks in para­graphs,” was the com­plaint.

Aware of my deficits, I started study­ing the servers who were so­cially ad­mired. And I started notic­ing that they op­er­ated in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent par­a­digm from me. Some of the servers, who were de­cent, did what I did — they pre­sented a fixed role, a plau­si­ble bit, like “extravagantly gay man with quips,” or “cheerful coun­try girl.” But the re­ally good servers had flex­i­bil­ity. They would fig­ure out what so­cial game the other per­son wanted to play, and then they would play it with them.

If their ta­bles or­dered in a brusque and di­rect fash­ion, they be­came ef­fi­cient and stoic in re­sponse. If their ta­bles wanted to flirt and ban­ter, the servers would an­i­mat­edly yes-and what­ever came at them. They were re­spon­sive — they weren’t look­ing to shore up a pre­ex­ist­ing iden­tity, so much as they were sim­ply open to play.

Although adopt­ing this ap­proach re­quired prac­tice, I in­stantly rec­og­nized it as su­pe­rior, and took to it de­vot­edly. After a year of this, my man­ager said to me: “you’re never go­ing to be my top sales­per­son. But you make peo­ple ridicu­lously com­fort­able.” It can be easy to change your per­son­al­ity when it’s or­ga­nized around achiev­ing a goal, and you re­al­ize your pre­vi­ous strat­egy is­n’t go­ing to work. Also, restau­rants are a great arena for try­ing on a new per­sona, given that every new table is an­other op­por­tu­nity for novel be­hav­ior.

I started feel­ing like I was pretty charm­ing, and this was true, rel­a­tive to my stan­dards. However, when I moved to a restau­rant with more sea­soned servers, I learned that I was still a be­gin­ner.

I tran­si­tioned into a fancier, nicer restau­rant, in a cooler neigh­bor­hood, where I was, again, the awk­ward kid. I was now sur­rounded by real adults who were re­ally ur­bane and charm­ing — ca­reer servers who had spent over a decade re­fin­ing their so­cial pro­ce­dure.

There was one in par­tic­u­lar who cap­ti­vated me. Compared to the oth­ers, he was messy. He for­got or­ders, rec­om­mended weird pair­ings, and sold ta­bles on en­trees that the restau­rant had stopped serv­ing a month ago. Nevertheless, every­one loved him be­cause of his in­cred­i­ble so­cial skills.

But they were weird in­cred­i­ble so­cial skills. He con­stantly said things that did­n’t make any sense. “Let’s go home,” he’d say, as a greet­ing. “Lovely ball,” he’d say, as an as­sess­ment of qual­ity. There were dozens of other catch­phrases and odd habits. Somehow it worked. I watched every­one adore him for some time, me in­cluded, while feel­ing in­com­pre­hen­sion re: how this ef­fect was be­ing achieved. What I started to re­al­ize was that his sur­real quirk­i­ness was send­ing out an un­spo­ken mes­sage, some­thing like: “I’m not a real server. This is­n’t a real restau­rant. All of these so­cial roles we’re in­hab­it­ing are just fic­tions. We can all just re­lax.” His odd, un­con­tained man­ner gave per­mis­sion for every­one else to es­cape con­tain­ment in a col­lec­tive jail­break.

I adopted this at­ti­tude in my own way, tack­ing on bits of be­nign strange­ness to my in­ter­ac­tions. Whenever I of­fered wa­ter to ta­bles, I said it in an odd, skep­ti­cal way, as if I’d just be­come lu­cid in a dream. “Hi…,” I said, while mak­ing di­rect eye con­tact. “Can I get you some… wa­ter?” I’m not ex­ag­ger­at­ing when I say that about 95% of my ta­bles loved this in­stantly. By be­ing awk­ward on pur­pose, I be­came their re­lat­able com­rade, rather than an im­per­sonal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a snobby es­tab­lish­ment.

Previously, I’d thought there were two choices you had with a so­cial script: re­ject it, or go along with it. But I started de­vel­op­ing an in­stinct for a third choice: how to take the other per­son side­ways, into the weird­ness of open pos­si­bil­ity, where it’s not clear how any­one should feel, and there are no re­quire­ments.

For ex­am­ple, I once spilled a bot­tle of olive oil onto a wom­an’s lap. She hap­pened to be wear­ing an ex­quis­ite blue de­signer suit. I looked her in the eye, and I could rec­og­nize that she was about to be an­gry. A re­ac­tion was form­ing on her brow, like a loom­ing cloud. In the brief mo­ment be­fore thun­der struck, I said: “Sorry, I was just dis­tracted… by how spe­cial you are.” She paused, star­tled again. Then she broke into a huge smile, laughed up­roar­i­ously, and grabbed my hand with both of hers. We looked at each other for a mo­ment, silently, and the rest of the table also watched, un­sure of what to think. “Send us the dry clean­ing bill?” I said. “Sure thing,” she said. I nod­ded and ducked out, leav­ing it there. It was some­one else’s table, and the server re­ported that she re­ceived an un­usu­ally large tip.

This pen­chant is still a large part of my con­ver­sa­tional habits. Much of what I say, in ca­sual chit-chat, is di­rected to­wards loos­en­ing the grip, rather than con­vey­ing any­thing in par­tic­u­lar. This in­spired a blog from my wife about how some peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate in or­der to ex­change facts, and some com­mu­ni­cate in or­der to find con­nec­tion:

This did­n’t click as an ex­plicit model for me un­til re­cently. What did it was hear­ing my hus­band, again and again, say things to peo­ple that made me cringe be­cause to me they sounded hos­tile or disin­gen­u­ous. And again and again, I was con­fused when peo­ple’s re­ac­tions to him were al­most uni­ver­sally pos­i­tive. Clearly, the is­sue was that I was lack­ing some es­sen­tial piece of hu­man soft­ware, not his sense of pro­pri­ety. Now, I’m not a to­tal dolt — I’m fa­mil­iar with the clas­sic wis­dom that a large pro­por­tion of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is non-ver­bal. I can read body lan­guage quite well, thanks to de­lib­er­ate study as a poker player, and I know to smile, send out friendly vibes, mir­ror the other per­son, all the things you can read in a book. But un­til I watched Sasha in ac­tion, and we tried to an­a­lyze my hang-ups, it re­ally did­n’t sink in for me just how much less im­por­tant what you say is, to most peo­ple, than how you say it.

It is grat­i­fy­ing to me that this les­son prop­a­gated through space and time from an Italian restau­rant a decade ago to a re­cent Substack post.

However, af­ter I learned this trick, there were still a cou­ple of ma­jor up­dates yet to go.

I quit fine din­ing to be a rov­ing free­lance jour­nal­ist, then achieved my child­hood dream of be­com­ing a pub­lished au­thor. It did not make me happy.

I then en­tered the clas­sic California pipeline: when worldly plea­sures fail you, at­tempt to lo­cate the hap­pi­ness with­out con­di­tions. I be­came a self-ther­apy and med­i­ta­tion nerd, and, as a re­sult, I achieved a much greater level of em­bod­i­ment. I re­al­ized that I’d been stuck in my head for my whole life — that this is not a fig­ure of speech, but a real de­scrip­tion of how your sub­jec­tiv­ity is very dif­fer­ent when you’re un­com­fort­able with emo­tion, and liv­ing be­hind the sen­sory fil­ter cre­ated by a rigid self-con­cept.

Bam! I was plunked into the vivid depth of bod­ily ex­pres­sion. There was so much I’d missed be­fore. Though I was ver­bally skilled from my restau­rant train­ing, some­times my tim­ing was off, be­cause of all the del­i­cate non-ver­bal signs hid­den from me. It was not un­like a col­or­blind per­son, un­aware of their con­di­tion, sud­denly see­ing the whole rain­bow.

There were these new, sub­tle fla­vors of hu­man pres­ence in front of me, like:

* The bit­ter-edged weari­ness of a per­son who feels un­der­praised

* The wary stiff­ness of a man in charge who feels in­se­cure

* The speed of a ner­vous in­tel­lec­tual try­ing to dance around their emo­tions

* The lan­guid tones of some­one pre­sent­ing them­selves as a sex­ual op­tion

I started see­ing new sub­tleties in peo­ple I’d known for years. It was like I got to meet every­one again.

Before this, I’d in­ter­acted with peo­ple who seemed psy­chic. They could pick up on del­i­cate un­der­cur­rents of my state that I was­n’t even try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate, or be­friend me in­stan­ta­neously by giv­ing me ex­actly the kind of at­ten­tion I wanted. And now I thought: oh, this is how you be­come psy­chic. You just fuck­ing look at what is hap­pen­ing on the faces and bod­ies of other peo­ple.

With this new per­spec­tive, con­nec­tion felt a lot more like danc­ing. If I stopped to think about the in­for­ma­tion I was get­ting through body lan­guage in real time, then my com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­came leaden. But if I sim­ply re­acted, from a state of fas­ci­nated ab­sorp­tion with the phys­i­cal data in front of me, some­how it typ­i­cally worked out okay.

This could have been where it ended, but Twitter, that beau­ti­ful scor­pion, changed the tra­jec­tory of my life again.

Flash for­ward to 2021. I’d started work­ing as a writ­ing coach dur­ing the pan­demic. I did­n’t have much coach­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, so I did­n’t yet know what my style was. And I was liv­ing in the desert in a de­cay­ing mar­riage, which made me feel ex­per­i­men­tal. “How did I get here” is a ques­tion that some­times en­ables a mood of “and where else could I go?”

I stum­bled across a tweet by Tyler Alterman, talk­ing about how he had man­aged to get autists to suc­cess­fully do en­ergy heal­ing sim­ply by earnestly pre­tend­ing to be en­ergy heal­ers. And I thought, “alright, fuck it, I’m go­ing to pre­tend I can heal peo­ple with my en­ergy.” I had no il­lu­sions about the truth of this, but I wanted to take it on as a use­ful fic­tion, to see what would hap­pen.

I thought about peo­ple I knew with an en­ergy I’d de­scribed as heal­ing. There was some­thing they had in com­mon, maybe. A non­judg­men­tal, vel­vety open­ness, an alert­ness with­out a sense of prob­lem. Perhaps I could try that.

I’ll al­ways re­mem­ber the first call I took in this mode. I slipped into a groove that I was fa­mil­iar with from Zen med­i­ta­tion, a place of spa­cious open­ness, lu­mi­nous aware­ness. Rather than try­ing to get to the bot­tom of the is­sue, I just fo­cused on be­ing in that state with my in­ter­locu­tor.

They had a mo­ment of tremen­dous emo­tional cathar­sis, com­plete with full-body sob­bing, and thanked me for open­ing their heart. And I was like, for open­ing what now? I did­n’t do any­thing ex­cept re­lax and gaze softly and ask a few ques­tions. This does­n’t make any sense.

After a few sim­i­lar oc­cur­rences hap­pened, I learned a cou­ple of things that seem, in ret­ro­spect, ob­vi­ous:

* A large-ish amount of the ac­tion of ther­apy/​coach­ing is sim­ply hav­ing ner­vous sys­tem ca­pac­ity for some­one in dis­tress.

* Many peo­ple are des­per­ate to be lis­tened to be­cause so few peo­ple lis­ten, so if you go around your life in a state of pres­ence and open­ness, you will be treated like an oa­sis in the desert.

* If you med­i­tate long enough to re­act to the world with lov­ing grat­i­tude, peo­ple can re­ally feel that.

It seemed like a prank, over­all. Connection was im­pos­si­bly scarce when I was a kid. Then, it be­came some­thing I could ob­tain through a del­i­cate so­cial dance. But af­ter this par­a­digm shift, I learned that if I just threw my­self open, other peo­ple would do all the work.

Sure: it took me a lot of in­ten­tional self-ren­o­va­tion to equip my­self to do this trick. But once I did, it was easy. And po­tent. I started hear­ing phrases like this a lot: “I don’t know why I just told you that, I’ve never told that to any­body.” It was shock­ing to find in­stant in­ti­macy with what felt like any­one, any­where — whether it was the schiz­o­phrenic son of a cac­tus store owner, or, af­ter I got a di­vorce, a first date with some­one I did­n’t even have that much in com­mon with.

But there are up­sides and down­sides of mak­ing your whole life into a con­nec­tion-fest.

There are two re­ac­tions that one could have to the pre­vi­ous sec­tion. “Wow, that’s cool, how he de­vel­oped the abil­ity to cre­ate a lot of deep con­nec­tions in this lonely world.” And: “that is a weird and creepy thing to want, sounds kind of vam­piric.” I be­lieve that both re­ac­tions are cor­rect in some pro­por­tion.

Here is the thing about go­ing around the world in a state of emo­tional open­ness and pres­ence. Many peo­ple are hun­gry for that kind of at­ten­tion. They might dream of get­ting it from a par­ent, or a men­tor, or a lover, but might never re­ceive it. Maybe never in their lives. And if you just walk up and give it to them, for free — but you aren’t ac­tu­ally in­ter­ested in a deep re­la­tion­ship — then they might, right­fully, feel ma­nip­u­lated, or at least con­fused. You are writ­ing them emo­tional checks you can’t cash.

Because… what? You want more con­nec­tion? Why do you need that, right now? Can’t you be com­fort­able on your own? These are ques­tions I started ask­ing my­self when I re­al­ized that my whole life was be­com­ing a ther­apy ses­sion. And I also re­al­ized that, even in a ther­a­peu­tic con­ver­sa­tion, go­ing right for max­i­mum emo­tional con­nec­tion was rarely the most pro­duc­tive move.

Around this time, I’d started dat­ing my now-wife, and we de­cided to be monog­a­mous. In a clas­sic mo­ment of Cate can­dor, she said to me, with­out a hint of anger or judge­ment, some­thing like: “it seems like a lot of women have crushes on you. I don’t think you have bad in­ten­tions, but this must be a prod­uct of some­thing you’re do­ing.” And, in fact, it was; I was go­ing around dan­gling the pos­si­bil­ity of emo­tional con­nec­tion in­dis­crim­i­nately, ig­nor­ing the fact that it’s en­tirely rea­son­able to in­ter­pret this as flir­ta­tion.

So I re­solved to mod­er­ate my ap­proach, to slow the whole gooey busi­ness down. I set­tled on a goal: to con­sider con­nec­tion as a dial go­ing from 0-10, and to be com­fort­able with any set­ting on that dial. And, rather than al­ways push­ing things in the di­rec­tion of con­nec­tion, I re­solved to fol­low my con­ver­sa­tional part­ner’s lead. Someone wants to have a four-hour bond­ing con­ver­sa­tion at this house party? Sure, let’s do it. Someone wants to say “let’s get it” and lit­er­ally noth­ing more be­fore we spar in jiu-jitsu class? I also want to in­ter­act in that mode, and to con­sider each hu­man in­ter­ac­tion equally in­for­ma­tive and wor­thy of at­ten­tion.

I chilled out. And by that, I mean I:

* Meditated for hours in float tanks, to train my­self to en­joy deep pres­ence com­pletely on my own

* Read a bunch of stuff about anx­ious at­tach­ment, and tried to nudge my­self in the di­rec­tion of se­cure

* Tried to deeply ac­cept feel­ings of soli­tude, which led to a life-defin­ing mys­ti­cal ex­pe­ri­ence

It’s been a cou­ple of years since I set my per­sonal goal, and I’ve mostly achieved it. I rou­tinely have in­ter­ac­tions that are achingly rich with emo­tion, but also con­ver­sa­tions that skip mer­rily on the shin­ing sur­face of pleas­antry. I’m told that I can come off as stand­off­ish, and some­times a lit­tle bit in­tim­i­dat­ing, which is wel­come news.

Perhaps now, I am fi­nally so­cially nor­mal.

Thank you to my dar­ling Cate Hall for in­put on this piece. Credit for the im­age goes to Dan Allison.

Microsoft said to­day that the Aisuru bot­net hit its Azure net­work with a 15.72 ter­abits per sec­ond (Tbps) DDoS at­tack, launched from over 500,000 IP ad­dresses.

The at­tack used ex­tremely high-rate UDP floods that tar­geted a spe­cific pub­lic IP ad­dress in Australia, reach­ing nearly 3.64 bil­lion pack­ets per sec­ond (bpps).

“The at­tack orig­i­nated from Aisuru bot­net. Aisuru is a Turbo Mirai-class IoT bot­net that fre­quently causes record-break­ing DDoS at­tacks by ex­ploit­ing com­pro­mised home routers and cam­eras, mainly in res­i­den­tial ISPs in the United States and other coun­tries,” said Azure Security se­nior prod­uct mar­ket­ing man­ager Sean Whalen.

“These sud­den UDP bursts had min­i­mal source spoof­ing and used ran­dom source ports, which helped sim­plify trace­back and fa­cil­i­tated provider en­force­ment.”

Cloudflare linked the same bot­net to a record-break­ing 22.2 ter­abits per sec­ond (Tbps) DDoS at­tack that reached 10.6 bil­lion pack­ets per sec­ond (Bpps) and was mit­i­gated in September 2025. This at­tack lasted only 40 sec­onds but was roughly equiv­a­lent to stream­ing one mil­lion 4K videos si­mul­ta­ne­ously.

One week ear­lier, the XLab re­search di­vi­sion of Chinese cy­ber­se­cu­rity com­pany Qi’anxin at­trib­uted an­other 11.5 Tbps DDoS at­tack to the Aisuru bot­net, say­ing that it was con­trol­ling around 300,000 bots at the time.

The bot­net tar­gets se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in IP cam­eras, DVRs/NVRs, Realtek chips, and routers from T-Mobile, Zyxel, D-Link, and Linksys. As XLab re­searchers said, it sud­denly bal­looned in size in April 2025 af­ter its op­er­a­tors breached a TotoLink router firmware up­date server and in­fected ap­prox­i­mately 100,000 de­vices.

Infosec jour­nal­ist Brian Krebs re­ported ear­lier this month that Cloudflare re­moved mul­ti­ple do­mains linked to the Aisuru bot­net from its pub­lic “Top Domains” rank­ings of the most fre­quently re­quested web­sites (based on DNS query vol­ume) af­ter they be­gan over­tak­ing le­git­i­mate sites, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

The com­pany stated that Aisuru’s op­er­a­tors were de­lib­er­ately flood­ing Cloudflare’s DNS ser­vice (1.1.1.1) with ma­li­cious query traf­fic to boost their do­main’s pop­u­lar­ity while un­der­min­ing trust in the rank­ings. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince also con­firmed that the bot­net’s be­hav­ior was se­verely dis­tort­ing the rank­ing sys­tem and added that Cloudflare now redacts or com­pletely hides sus­pected ma­li­cious do­mains to avoid sim­i­lar in­ci­dents in the fu­ture.

​As Cloudflare re­vealed in its 2025 Q1 DDoS Report in April, it mit­i­gated a record num­ber of DDoS at­tacks last year, with a 198% quar­ter-over-quar­ter jump and a mas­sive 358% year-over-year in­crease.

In to­tal, it blocked 21.3 mil­lion DDoS at­tacks tar­get­ing its cus­tomers through­out 2024, as well as an­other 6.6 mil­lion at­tacks tar­get­ing its own in­fra­struc­ture dur­ing an 18-day multi-vec­tor cam­paign.

Nearly all UK dri­vers said they thought head­lights were too bright and that they have been daz­zled by on­com­ing ve­hi­cles, ac­cord­ing to a ma­jor study. The gov­ern­ment said last week that it will take a closer look at the de­sign of cars and head­lamps af­ter con­cerns about lights daz­zling dri­vers.A study com­mis­sioned by the Department for Transport (DfT) found 97% of peo­ple sur­veyed found they were reg­u­larly or some­times dis­tracted by on­com­ing ve­hi­cles and 96% thought most or some head­lights were too bright. Dr Shaun Helman, who led the re­search for Berkshire-based Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), said it pro­vides “compelling ev­i­dence” that lights’ glare is a “genuine is­sue for UK dri­vers”.

New mea­sures will be in­cluded in the gov­ern­men­t’s up­com­ing Road Safety Strategy, re­flect­ing what is be­com­ing an in­creas­ingly fraught is­sue for road users. TRL’s data sug­gests that LED and whiter head­lamps may be linked to glare and that dri­vers might find their white­ness harder to cope with.Of those sur­veyed, 33% said they had ei­ther stopped dri­ving or are dri­ving less at night be­cause of lights, while an­other 22% said they would like to drive less at night but have no choice. A to­tal of 1,850 dri­vers, matched to the age and gen­der split of the coun­try’s li­cence hold­ing pop­u­la­tion, were sur­veyed for their views.

TRL said LED lights used in ve­hi­cles are brighter, more con­cen­trated and emit more blue light, which hu­man eyes strug­gle with more at night. The RAC’s se­nior pol­icy of­fi­cer Rod Dennis said: “Having cam­paigned hard for this study, we wel­come its find­ings which in­de­pen­dently con­firm what dri­vers have been telling us — that rather than be­ing an imag­ined phe­nom­e­non, some bright head­lights do cause a glare prob­lem.“While dri­vers clearly ben­e­fit from high-per­form­ing head­lights, it’s im­por­tant this does­n’t lead to oth­ers suf­fer­ing the ef­fects of daz­zle, so a bal­ance needs to be struck,” he added.Mr Dennis said that it is “vital” TRL’s re­port is “reviewed care­fully to put us on a path to­wards changes that ul­ti­mately ben­e­fit all road users.“Denise Voon, a clin­i­cal ad­vi­sor at The College of Optometrists, said the DfT should “take im­me­di­ate, ac­tion­able steps to sup­port dri­vers and com­mis­sion more de­tailed re­search, specif­i­cally into how head­light reg­u­la­tions need to change”.

How quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

Released in June 1996, Quake had to ride three tech­no­log­i­cal shock-waves dur­ing its life­time. Besides the emer­gence of 3D hard­ware ac­cel­er­a­tor cards and the growth of the Internet, an op­er­at­ing sys­tem shift put game de­vel­op­ers in a tough po­si­tion.

With its push for Windows 95 and Windows NT, Microsoft was re­plac­ing its legacy PC op­er­at­ing sys­tem, MS-DOS. From 1996 to 1997, the mar­ket share of DOS dropped by 50%. Some de­vel­op­ers, like Blizzard North, took the leap of faith and wrote Windows 95–exclusive ti­tles such as Diablo. id Software on the other hand went through the ef­fort of pro­duc­ing a sin­gle bi­nary, quake.exe, able to run on both DOS and Windows.

What is even more im­pres­sive is that id man­aged to make Quake bet­ter when Windows 95 TCP/IP stack was avail­able. Here is how they did it.

quake.exe is a DOS ex­e­cutable. id Software had used Watcom com­piler for DOOM but they switched to a GCC port named djgpp[1] to cross-com­pile Quake on Alpha servers.

$ file quake.exe

quake.exe: MS-DOS ex­e­cutable, COFF for MS-DOS, DJGPP go32 DOS ex­ten­der

Alike wat­com’s DOS/4GW, djgpp of­fered to de­vel­op­ers an ex­ten­der al­low­ing to write pro­grams with flat 32-bit ad­dress­ing in­stead of the dreaded 16-bit near/​far hell­ish real-mode oth­er­wise man­dated by DOS. An ex­ten­der works with a client and a server. In the case of Quake the ex­ten­der client is em­bed­ded in quake.exe while the server is in cws­dpmi.exe.

From the be­gin­ning of the de­vel­op­ment, id had re­quested from djgpp en­gi­neers that their DPMI client would be able to run on djgp­p’s DPMI server but also Windows 95 DPMI server.

It may not be ap­par­ent how much of a tour-de-force it was for djgpp to make their DPMI client work with an­other DPMI server but know­ing a lit­tle about how it works, it blows me away. Raymond Chen, Microsoft ker­nel en­gi­neer at the time, had the best de­scrip­tion of how to per­ceive this sit­u­a­tion.

Being able to run with Windows 95 DPMI server was how quake.exe pulled off the abil­ity to run un­der both DOS and Windows 95.

DOOM only needed two files to run, doom.exe and doom.wad but there are many files that came with Quake.

$ find quake

./mgenvxd.vxd  ./genvxd.dll ./qlaunch.exe  ./id1/pak0.pak  ./pdipx.com

./cwsdpmi.exe  ./q95.bat  ./id1/config.cfg  ./quake.exe  ./quakeudp.dll

It looks like a mess at first sight but run­ning Quake un­der DOS only re­quires four files. Namely, the game en­gine quake.exe, the con­fig file con­fig.cfg, the as­set file pak0.pak, and the DOS ex­ten­der server cws­dpmi.exe.

./mgenvxd.vxd  ./genvxd.dll ./qlaunch.exe  ./id1/pak0.pak  ./pdipx.com

./cwsdpmi.exe  ./q95.bat  ./id1/config.cfg  ./quake.exe  ./quakeudp.dll

Two modes al­lowed gamers to en­ter a duel (1v1). Both modes ex­pected a de­vice plugged into the COM port of the PC. A mo­dem al­lowed to call an op­po­nen­t’s phone num­ber (hello $$$) while a NullModem ca­ble (called here “Direct Connect”) re­quired both com­put­ers to be a few feet apart.

Both IPX and TCP/IP al­lowed a much more in­ter­est­ing death­match fea­tur­ing up to 16 play­ers. IPX tech­nol­ogy was in­tended for LAN where all ma­chines were a few feet apart, while TCP/IP al­lowed to reach any­body world­wide.

Notice how, un­der DOS, by de­fault, both IPX and TCP modes were dis­abled (greyed out).

Quake came with PDIPX. EXE which loaded an IPX DOS TSR. That TSR com­mu­ni­cated with a packet dri­ver which in turn hit the net­work card. Quake was able to probe for that DOS TSR and upon de­tec­tion al­lowed play­ers to se­lect IPX.

Using TCP/IP was nearly im­pos­si­ble. DOS did not come with a TCP/IP stack and it was some­thing com­plex enough that only a sin­gle ven­dor pro­vided a TSR for it on DOS.

The TSR name was BWNFS. Made by Beame & Whiteside, its cost $395 in 1996 ($830 in 2025!)[3]. It is rea­son­able to say that few gamers ever used TCP/IP on DOS to play QUAKE.

Starting quake.exe from Windows 95 works like a charm. The ex­e­cutable is loaded into a Windows 95 “dos-box”[4] that vir­tu­al­izes mem­ory, in­ter­rupts, and sig­nals[5]. The game ran ex­actly like un­der DOS with the same mul­ti­player choices avail­able. It was con­ve­nient since users did not have to load any mouse dri­ver or set up the BLASTER en­vi­ron­ment vari­able to make the sound card work.

Much less con­ve­nient how­ever, this way to run Quake re­quires 16 MiB RAM. Quake only needs 8 MiB but Windows 95 adds quite a bit of over­head! The same files used when run­ning from DOS are used here as well, ex­cept for cws­dpmi.exe, since the DJGPP client de­tects and uses Windows’ built-in DPMI server.

./mgenvxd.vxd  ./genvxd.dll ./qlaunch.exe  ./id1/pak0.pak  ./pdipx.com

./cwsdpmi.exe  ./q95.bat  ./id1/config.cfg  ./quake.exe  ./quakeudp.dll

It is im­pres­sive to see Quake run at full speed know­ing that Windows 95 runs DOS ex­e­cutable in a vir­tual ma­chine. My guess is that, in full screen, mem­ory writes and reads to the VGA are given di­rect ac­cess to the hard­ware to pre­serve per­for­mances.

Starting quake.exe from DOS or Windows are not the only two op­tions to run Quake. There is a third one which is to launch q95.bat.

In this case, a win­dow “Launching Quake” briefly pops up on Windows 95 desk­top.

The text gives a clue about what is hap­pen­ing. Quake is loaded with a tun­nel to Winsock, Microsoft’s TCP/IP stack. There is fur­ther in­di­ca­tion of what is do­ing that, “Powered by Mpath”. But not much more to ex­plain how this all works.

Mpath Interactive was a com­pany ded­i­cated to on­line gam­ing. They pro­vided sub­scrip­tion ser­vices to help gamers find each other but also op­er­ated as an ISP re­seller.[6]. It was in their in­ter­est to help gam­ing com­pa­nies to re­lease ti­tles al­low­ing Internet play as Larry Hastings, an Mpath em­ployee at the time, re­calls.

Back then in the pri­mor­dial ooze that was the mid-90s in­ter­net, on­line mul­ti­player was still in its in­fancy. If you wanted to play a mul­ti­player game on the in­ter­net, ei­ther you needed to have ex­plicit host & port in­for­ma­tion, or you needed to use an on­line mul­ti­player gam­ing ser­vice. And in 1995 there were only two: us, and Total Entertainment Network. You might think game cre­ators would come to us and say “please put my game on your ser­vice!”, but… nope! Not only did we have a li­cens­ing team that went out and got con­tracts to li­cense games for our ser­vice, but we had to pay the ven­dor for the right to li­cense their game, which was of­ten an ex­clu­sive. So, we had Quake and Unreal; TEN got Duke Nukem 3D and NASCAR.

The user ex­pe­ri­ence for Mplayer was like this. First, you’d run the “Gizmo”, which was a Windows pro­gram that acted as a sort of game browser. It knew which com­pat­i­ble games you had in­stalled, and it’d let you browse the mul­ti­player games on of­fer for each game; the metaphor we used for this was a “room”. Quake was drop-in, so you could sim­ply find a game in progress and hop right in–not a fea­ture of very many games back then. Alternatively, you could find a “room” where some­one was propos­ing to launch a game soon. Or you could cre­ate your own. You’d set the name of the room, and the Mplayer Gizmo had some per-game UI that let you set the set­tings for the game (what map, what fea­tures, etc). The room fea­tured text and au­dio chat, and even a shared “whiteboard”, a sim­ple paint pro­gram. Once the owner of the “room” “launched” the game, every­one’s Gizmos would au­to­mat­i­cally start the game for them, and the game would au­to­mat­i­cally join that on­line game and start play­ing.

In or­der for a game to run on Mplayer, it had to in­te­grate with the Mplayer soft­ware stack. Mostly this in­te­gra­tion work was done by Mpath en­gi­neers; we’d get source code from the game de­vel­oper and “porting en­gi­neers” would get it to run on Mplayer. This of­ten in­cluded mod­i­fy­ing both the client and the server, so that both could talk via Mplayer’s servers.

The early ver­sion of Quake was DOS only, and used the Chunnel to talk to the Windows 95 TCP/IP stack. (Which in ret­ro­spect makes the “Chunnel” a type of “thunk”, like Microsoft’s “Win32s”.) I think the deal was, we li­censed the Chunnel to id, and in re­turn for that we got to have Quake on Mplayer. So, DOS Quake sup­ported run­ning on Mplayer via the Chunnel, in ad­di­tion to con­nect­ing to open game servers on the Internet via host and port.

Larry was kind enough to share some Quake anec­dotes.

One af­ter­noon shortly af­ter we got our first build of the game, we played a round of death­match with the id team over the in­ter­net. We were in Cupertino, CA, in a build­ing on Bandley Drive (now a “Fitness Center” for Apple em­ploy­ees). They of course were in Mesquite TX. Yup, it was death­match over the in­ter­net–very ex­cit­ing!

The only id em­ployee I re­mem­ber for sure be­ing in the game was Tim Willits. He owned us, both be­cause he was way more used to Quake, but also be­cause he knew where all the se­crets were. At one point I spot­ted him com­ing out of a se­cret door­way with a rocket launcher. And ei­ther he did­n’t see me, or I died shortly there­after.

As for ex­plain­ing how the Chunnel worked, I was out of luck.

I did­n’t work on the Chunnel. That was mainly a British guy named Henry but I don’t re­mem­ber his last name, it was thirty years ago. All I re­mem­ber about him is what he looked like, and the fact that he drove a cool car, a white Merkur XR4Ti.

When every­thing else fails, we still have Ghidra and doom­world’s amaz­ing com­mu­nity (thanks xttl[7]). After much de­com­pil­ing and talk­ing, it turned out all files pre­vi­ously ig­nored were part of Mpath’s “Chunnel”.

./mgenvxd.vxd  ./genvxd.dll ./qlaunch.exe  ./id1/pak0.pak  ./pdipx.com

./cwsdpmi.exe  ./q95.bat  ./id1/config.cfg  ./quake.exe  ./quakeudp.dll

q95.bat is just a small script to launch mpath’s main pro­gram. qlauncher.exe con­tains all the MPlayer func­tions. However the role of this ex­e­cutable is lim­ited.

It merely loads quakeudp.dll. Despite its con­fus­ing name, this DLL is the heart of Quake Chunnel. It is the bridge to Microsoft TCP/UDP/IP stack (wsock32.dll). It also starts Quake with -path pa­ra­me­ter to make it load a BSD net­work socket API sys/​socket.h. Finally, it also loads the vir­tual de­vice dri­ver man­ager gen­vxd.dll.

The vir­tual de­vice is the trick that al­lows a DOS ex­e­cutable run­ning in­side a Windows 95 dos box to com­mu­ni­cate with win32. The gen­vxd.dll dy­namic li­brary loads a vir­tual de­vice dri­ver[8] named GENVXD. VXD which in­stalls it­self to re­spond on in­ter­rupt 0x48.

The last piece of the puz­zle is on Quake side. The im­ple­men­ta­tion of BSD sys/​socket.h, mp­plc.c, is code pro­vided by Mpath. It takes care of mar­shal­ing every BSD socket func­tion call, then use the DPMI client to trig­ger a soft­ware in­ter­rupt that is re­ceived in win32 land. Data is passed up the pipeline we pre­vi­ously de­scribed un­til it is un­mar­shalled by gen­vxd.dll and routed to­wards wsock32.dll. Notice the sym­me­try of func­tions found in mplib.c mar­shalling and the sym­bols found in gen­vxd.dll un­mar­shalling.

It seems John Cash was in­volved in com­pil­ing Mpath’s stuff. We can find his name in the sym­bols of mgen­vxd.vxd.

F:\cashcode\GENVXD\bin\Mgenvxd.pdb

The source code of mgen­vxd.vxd, gen­vxd.dll, qlaunch.exe and quakeudp.dll was never re­leased. It was a pro­pri­etary, patented tech­nol­ogy from Mpath. It is likely id only got per­mis­sion to re­lease the client side of it.

As far as I un­der­stood it, that is how Quake was able to send TCP and UDP pack­ets over IP. This con­vo­luted con­struct be­came ob­so­lete when id stopped ship­ping DOS ex­e­cutable (the last one be­ing vquake.exe). After Dec 1996, win­quake.exe, glquake.exe, and all QuakeWorld bi­na­ries were win32 ex­clu­sive with di­rect ac­cess to wsock32.dll.

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