I’ve walked around SF and NYC with prototypes for years without issue. I genuinely failed to code-switch for the environment. I expected a bag search; I didn't expect a 13-hour detention and a forensic code audit.
It felt like 'pantomime' at first, but once the forensic team arrived, it became very real. They weren't performing theater; they were genuinely verifying the interrupt handlers in the code.
I want to clarify the 'walking away' part: I was standing about 10 feet away at the reception desk, so I hadn't abandoned it—but I wasn't holding it.
That said, your point is the correct one. In a normal setting, leaving a bag near your table while you check in is fine. In a high-security zone during WEF, placing a black box with wires on a bench is a massive red flag. I treated it like a backpack; they treated it like a potential threat. It was a hard lesson in situational awareness.
They were incredibly professional. Once we moved past the initial 'threat assessment' phase, the officers and the forensic expert were fair, logical, and treated me well. The system worked exactly as it should for a suspicious package in a high-security zone.
You are absolutely right about the optics (and the blinkin' lights). The forensic expert made the same point—unintended drama is still drama. I definitely didn't aim for this (just wanted to demo the hardware), but once the process started, I had to respect the thoroughness. Their protocols are no joke.
I travelled globally a lot for work, many borders and often laden with many trunks of equipment - getting stopped for inspections, often driven by curiousity, was par for the course.
The grilling by US security types was a "feature" of crossing any US controlled border space for a number of years after this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597539 in 1998.
You spend one month at ground zero for 11 nuclear tests that caught most of the five eyes by suprise and that's all they ever seem to ask about forever.
11 nuclear tests? I officially surrender the title. My 13 hours over a breadboard feels very quaint by comparison.
It is fascinating to see the evolution of the 'threat signature,' though. You were flagged for proximity to literal nuclear physics in 1998; I was flagged for a vibe-coded prototype that just looked like physics in 2026.
I have a sinking feeling that, like you, I've just unlocked the 'secondary screening' achievement for the next decade. I’ll take the permanent Swiss police record over the Five Eyes watchlist any day. You win.
The world's an interesting place, bang in the middle of the period of getting routinely stopped crossing US spaces I was seperately contracted to them (US DoD) to do similar work in other parts of the world.
Seperately again some nice people in Finland gave us some really nice SAKO TRG's and spotting scopes in return for being the fastest to find some drums of waste they hid in a forest.
My father (still alive) is a few years older than M.J., they grew up together, being from the same part of the same state .. so it was handy having them going to bat for us when faecal matter contacted propellers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jeffery ).
Fair point on the optics. In hindsight, clear casing would have been the smart play for 2026.
That said, the scrutiny shifted quickly from the 'black box' visual to the actual tech. It wasn't just a physical inspection; they brought in a forensic expert to audit the Rust borrow checker logs and interrupt handlers to verify the triggers were benign. It turned into a very technical interview, just with higher stakes.
OP here. I literally just got released from 13 hours in a Swiss holding cell because this prototype looked like a bomb to the WEF police.
To get released, I had to walk a forensic expert ('Chris') through this codebase line-by-line. He didn't care about the pitch; he audited the Rust borrow checker logs, the specific hardware interrupts, and the encryption implementation to prove it wasn't a trigger mechanism.
It was the most aggressive code audit of my life. Happy to answer questions about the stack, the 'vibe coding' workflow I used to build it, or the Swiss prison lasagna."
Hi Steve- honored to see you here! (I’m practically using your book to reverse-engineer what the AI wrote ).
To be precise with my terminology: I showed the forensic expert the terminal history and compiler output in my VS Code/Cursor logs.
Because I was 'vibe coding' with LLMs, I had a long scrollback of cargo build failing repeatedly with ownership/borrow errors. 'Chris' (the forensic expert) reviewed that timestamped history to verify that I was genuinely struggling to compile a harmless display driver in a hotel room that morning, rather than deploying a pre-compiled malicious payload.
His logic was essentially: 'A terrorist brings a clean binary. A developer brings a terminal full of red text.' The broken build state was my alibi.
Ah, that makes sense, I was just confused because I don't think of the borrow checker as producing logs, but the terminal output is a great thing to show someone, yeah.
This note is to inform you that the GPT checker on Hugging Face has confirmed that this article is fake with a 99.99% chance that it was written by ChatGPT. Do not be fooled by any fake or deceptive information, and use the GPT checker to verify the authenticity of any message you receive. Together, we can combat the spread of misinformation and stand united in the fight for truth.
Looking at the submitter's submissions, this user has submitted 4 pages from progressandpurpose.com. All four show up as fake/generated by gpt-2 with a high degree of confidence (99%+) using the openai-detector linked by the parent.
nbrempel is the only user who has submitted from the domain progressandpurpose.com.
It's pretty minimal, at the moment only connect.facebook.net, connect.facebook.com, pixel.facebook.com, and apparently facebookinc.122.2o7.net. If I had to rely solely on it I'd add a lot of hosts and in particular known ones under fbcdn.{net,com}. In contrast, DNS and IP blocking is extensive.
It's important to note that institutions respond to outside forces, not the will of the people in those institutions. I'm sure plenty of the top bankers donate to the Sierra Club, but they still invest in fuel pipelines and oil projects.
No one can blame the drug companies for operating as an institution and it's hard to pin that blame on the individuals operating in it, too. You're right that the incentives that form these companies haven't been around forever and we should seek to find ways towards a better solution.
I’ve walked around SF and NYC with prototypes for years without issue. I genuinely failed to code-switch for the environment. I expected a bag search; I didn't expect a 13-hour detention and a forensic code audit.
It felt like 'pantomime' at first, but once the forensic team arrived, it became very real. They weren't performing theater; they were genuinely verifying the interrupt handlers in the code.
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