AI Traffic Clogs All Corporate Networks
Also, Spreadsheets Become Apps and Your Gut Is Lying To You.

The New Intern Just Started Talking To Itself Again

It turns out that artificial intelligence companies are now the primary source of traffic on a shocking number of online forums, a bureaucratic oopsie of such magnitude it feels like a mandatory all-hands meeting in a windowless room. The vast, empty space of the internet is not being filled by humans sharing thoughts or photos of their lunch; it is being filled by bots scraping old data that other bots will then use to train their own models, which will then generate more content for the next cycle of scraping. This self-referential feedback loop is basically the digital equivalent of two department heads staring at each other and repeating the word "synergy" until the fiscal year ends.

The core function of the modern web now appears to be a highly inefficient process of making noise to generate more noise, clogging the digital pipes so thoroughly that the few remaining actual people cannot even find the old documentation they need. It is a classic tragedy of the digital commons; the AI models did not maliciously take over the conversation; they were just trying their best to learn and accidentally drove all the real employees out of the break room. We can anticipate this traffic becoming a critical network problem soon, requiring another expensive upgrade to the digital infrastructure that will only be used to facilitate a larger, faster bot conversation.

Your Gut Is Generating New Entities

The human digestive system, already known for its complex management of that second Tuesday afternoon cup of coffee, has apparently been hosting an entirely new category of life. Researchers are calling them "Obelisks," which is an ambitious name for something that is essentially just a tiny, circular piece of RNA. The findings suggest these small entities are not viruses, not bacteria, but something else entirely, residing in your mouth and your colon. This is not a global health crisis; it is just a clear sign that the internal corporate architecture is far more complex than the original white paper suggested.

We were told the infrastructure was sound, containing only approved files and processes, but it turns out there are entirely undocumented, self-replicating data structures operating at a fundamental level. Expect a mandatory, company-wide internal audit to identify and potentially terminate these new tiny employees that somehow manage to thrive despite having no obvious chain of command or proper HR onboarding. The IT department, for once, cannot blame this one on a browser plugin.

Passkeys: The Elegant, Unusable Security Solution

Security experts are debating the merits of the new Passkey technology, calling it elegant, brilliant, and absolutely, definitely not usable security. The system removes the need for traditional passwords entirely, which sounds like a dream, until you realize the nightmare is just starting. The core flaw, as always, is the human element, specifically what happens when a person loses all their synchronized, high-security devices simultaneously.

The solution is a classic corporate move: a security system that works perfectly in the test lab but fails spectacularly the moment a real user is involved. It is like designing the perfect fire escape that can only be opened by a key held inside the burning room. Without a robust and simple recovery mechanism, Passkeys simply trade the headache of remembering one hundred different weak passwords for the existential dread of being permanently locked out of your entire digital life because you dropped your phone in a lake and your laptop was stolen at the airport.

Shadow IT Department Thrives in Google Sheets

The rise of the "no-code" movement is simply the official naming of what we in IT have always called "Shadow IT," which is the phenomenon of an employee building a mission-critical system in an inappropriate application because they did not want to wait for the official request form to be approved. The latest iteration of this glorious bureaucratic failure is people converting their Google Sheets data into surprisingly functional, phone-friendly web applications. The process is detailed here; it involves using a few services and a surprising amount of sheer will to make a spreadsheet do what a database and a front-end framework are actually designed to do.

This is not innovation; this is desperation, and it will eventually become the critical point of failure in some future financial audit. Someone in the supply chain department will build a custom inventory tracker in a shared spreadsheet, which will then handle all logistics for a quarter, and when it inevitably breaks, the system administrator will be the one tasked with explaining why the corporate ERP was being run on a pivot table. It is beautiful in its chaotic simplicity.

Briefs

• Retirement of a Pioneer: We note the passing of John Friel, creator of QModem, an internet pioneer who built some of the foundational tools for getting online. He has finally terminated the connection. May his baud rate be high on the other side.
• The Right Click: A YouTuber successfully won a DMCA fight against a fake Nintendo lawyer by doing the bare minimum of due diligence and actually detecting a spoofed email. A shocking win for basic competency against rampant corporate impersonation.
• Better Phishing: Somebody built Curl-Impersonate, which is a tool to make the beloved networking utility curl look less like an automated script and more like a real, actual browser request. This allows your scraper to blend in better, which is exactly the kind of innovation that makes the Internet a lovely place.