Day: July 21, 2025

When you imagine personal data stolen on the internet, like your address, phone number, internet history, or even passwords, you probably think of hackers passing it to identity thieves. Maybe you think of cops getting their hands on it in less-than-legal ways, or maybe an insurance company spying on its customers. But apparently anyone can buy this data, from a U.S. company, for as little as $50.

That company is Farnsworth Intelligence, an “open-source intel” startup from 23-year-old founder Aidan Raney. And it’s not being coy about what it’s doing. The company’s primary consumer-level product is called “Infostealers,” and it’s hosted at Infostealers.info. (Yup, what a URL.) According to an exposé from 404 Media, a simple purchase starting at fifty bucks can get you access to a searchable database of personal data from people all over the United States and the world.

And this isn’t just the usual stuff you could find on the various “people pages” sites, the somewhat scummy descendants of the Yellow Pages. No, this is information apparently sourced directly from data breaches, stolen from companies and services in ways that just about every country considers a crime. There’s a full suite of data available for perusing, up to and including the auto-fill addresses you stick into your browser so you don’t have to type them into every new store.

Farnsworth Intelligence

But it goes even deeper. Farnsworth Intelligence’s more powerful Infostealer Data Platform product will serve up private data that includes usernames and passwords. Yes, again, the actual product is called “Infostealer.” This feature isn’t available to just anyone…but it is available to anyone who can provide a compelling reason. The list of apparently legitimate use cases Farnsworth accepts includes “private investigations, intelligence, journalism, law enforcement, cyber security, compliance, IP/brand protection.”

There’s no mention of a warrant necessary to access this stolen information.

Farnsworth’s public-facing sight seems almost gleefully eager to declare its ability to collect information via less-than-legitimate means. “We are renown [sic] for our human intelligence capabilities, having successfully infiltrated a North Korean laptop farm through social engineering techniques and succesfully [sic] extracting intelligence that saved companies millions of dollars,” declares a promo blurb. Farnsworth says this information can be used for “corporate due diligence,” “enhanced background checks,” and “advanced asset searches.” Exactly how Farnsworth procures its trillions of data points is not disclosed.

It’s easy enough to find stolen personal info, since hardly a week goes by without a database of millions of users making its way onto the dark web. And there are legitimate reasons for people to find and catalog those databases, like security companies alerting their customers when their passwords have been leaked. But brazenly selling stolen information on the open market, especially when there are so many companies, governments, and other state-level actors that can use it to do harm, seems incredibly callous.

And it’s worth pointing out that evidence obtained illegally is generally inadmissible in a criminal prosecution. But that wouldn’t stop, say, an abusive ex from tracking down their victim’s most recent address. There are plenty of other ways for illegally obtained information to be used to hurt people. I’m sure I don’t have to draw you a picture of why groups of vulnerable people who are already targeted wouldn’t want it to be searchable by private investigators or government agents, with nothing more than a credit card.

I’m a technology journalist. I don’t have the authority to declare behavior like this legal or illegal, and my employer’s lawyers would probably tackle me if I tried. But as a human being, I can point out that collecting private, stolen information, then selling it to anyone without a thought for what further damage it might cause, is the epitome of sociopathic greed. “It would be illegal and unethical to sell stolen cell phones even if you didn’t steal them yourself, and I don’t see how this is any different,” said Cooper Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

404 Media requested comment from both Farnsworth Intelligence and its founder, and received no response. I highly recommend reading 404 Media’s original report for the full scope of the situation.

Geeks love to get a little more power out of their hardware by digging deep in its guts, either literally or with software. A little gentle overclocking is usually safe, and in fact it’s expected to a certain degree by manufacturers. But an unorthodox method for laptops with discrete Nvidia RTX graphics cards is extremely powerful…and notably dangerous.

It’s called a “shunt mod,” and it’s essentially a way to get a graphics card to run at power input way beyond what it’s rated to run at. Shunt modding is a complex, physical process that needs active soldering on the GPU itself, but if done correctly, it can boost the power going into the card by a huge margin. For some of the most powerful RTX laptop cards, this can boost the power input from a spec maximum of 150-175 watts to up to 250 watts, with a similar delta in terms of performance.

How and why is this possible? It’s complicated. Some of the laptops with RTX 4090, 5080, and 5080 discrete GPUs are running the same physical graphics chips as seen on the desktop cards, which are rated for much higher wattage inputs. Because of the “binning” process for when these chips are manufactured, the most perfectly produced chips go into the most powerful desktop cards, while the ones that didn’t quite win the “silicon lottery” might be used for laptops. In short, the chips should — should — be able to handle much more watt input than they typically get from a more restrictive, battery-saving laptop configuration.

GizmoSlipTech, an expert in the minutia of desktop and laptop GPUs, has aggregated some data from both professional and enthusiast users who’ve attempted this complex process to boost the energy going into RTX 5080 and 5090-equipped laptops (via VideoCardz.com). The results are impressive. One test of an RTX 5090 laptop showed a whopping 41 percent increase in the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark when the card was modified to run at 250 watts. In-game results are less dramatic, but more than 20 percent improvement in Cyberpunk 2077 is nothing to sneeze at.

But before you reach for a screwdriver, you might want to take a second to think it through. We’re talking about some pretty deep hardware modifications here, the kind of thing that shouldn’t be attempted by anyone without some pretty impressive, base-level electronics projects under their belt. This goes way beyond the basic desktop assembly or even laptop repair skills. Cracking open your laptop to access the discrete graphics card might void the warranty on its own, but the full process requires taking a soldering iron to capacitors and then modifying the firmware to make it run hotter.

In short, doing this might melt your gaming laptop. And if it does, you can kiss any kind of warranty support goodbye. In fact even if something completely unrelated to your GPU should fail, I imagine that any technician who spots this modification will instantly declare the laptop out of warranty due to user modification.

And these are some of the most powerful, and most expensive, gaming laptops available right now. Performing a shunt mod is essentially gambling with thousands of dollars of hardware for a performance boost. A nice boost, but in my opinion, one that’s not worth the risk even if you have the technical skills to achieve it.

Still, the fact that this modification is possible — and apparently gaining popularity among the bravest users — indicates that these discrete laptop cards might have a lot more power available than they’re currently utilizing. In fact, some laptop manufacturers have quietly performed similar mods to their gaming models without telling anyone (and then had to issue a patch to undo it). GizmoSlipTech recommends that Nvidia increase the power limits to some laptops, utilizing the latest thermal management tech, to deliver more performance.

It’s possible to eject a graphics card while you’re using your computer, if it’s an external model or some other non-standard setup. But if you’re using a desktop with a GPU installed on the motherboard, or a laptop with discrete graphics within the case, it’s generally a bad idea. Which is why some Windows 11 users were alarmed when their computers asked if they wanted to eject their graphics cards.

This appears to be a Windows bug that adds graphics cards to a list of devices that can be ejected in the “Safely remove hardware and media” tool in the notification center. It’s that thing you’re supposed to use every time you unplug a flash drive, which I’ve never seen anyone use in the real world, ever. Some Reddit users, seeing the option to “eject” the very powerful, very expensive graphics card soldered into the guts of their laptop, were understandably confused.

This bug has been showing up for years, apparently as an unintended UI expression of the option to disable some discrete laptop graphics and switch to integrated graphics to save power. (Note that “disabling” and “ejecting” are very different terms, and probably shouldn’t be conflated for regular PC users.) Windows Central notes that there are registry hacks available to turn off this alarming and apparently unintentional message.

While hardly the worst user-facing bug for Windows, I can see how this would be concerning even if you’re fairly tech-savvy. “I’m afraid I might accidentally eject it one day and god knows what’s gonna happen to my laptop,” says one Reddit user on the Windows 11 sub. If you’re seeing something similar, and you don’t want to dive into a registry hack (which I think is very admirable caution), maybe just leave it alone.

Further reading: I finally decided to reset my Windows PC. Here are 6 signs you should, too