Also crypto scams and email typos.
The Office Locator App Is Fine; It Is the Spambots That Are Accurate
A security researcher has confirmed what everyone in IT already suspected; the in-house asset tracking system is terrible, but the third-party ad network knows exactly where you left your laptop and how long you were there. The process involves a researcher tracking himself down using only location data funneled to him through in-app advertising APIs. The data broker ecosystem is so efficient at selling personal whereabouts that it can pinpoint a user's home and work location with better fidelity than the user's own calendar application.
The internal memo is not about a catastrophic failure; it is just a documentation oversight. The permissions model designed by the smartphone operating system manufacturers, which was supposed to be a good fence for good neighbors, turned out to be less effective than a wet tissue paper barrier. User 'Tim Shadel', the researcher who conducted the exercise, managed to use a series of automated ad buys to prove that the data middlemen are compiling comprehensive profiles that explicitly detail daily movements. It turns out that every time someone agrees to the "Non-Essential Analytics Cookies" pop up, they are effectively mailing a daily itinerary to a spreadsheet in the Cayman Islands.
Interns Accidentally Given Keys to the Treasury Department Filing Cabinet
In a corporate structure where the CEO is also the Chief Memelord, a certain level of administrative chaos is to be expected. Multiple reports confirm that aides to CEO Elon Musk have gained access to a sensitive Treasury payment system, while simultaneously, a group of young, inexperienced engineers is heavily involved with the continued viability of the cryptocurrency DOGE. This is not malice; this is just poor delegation.
The Washington Post reports on the Treasury system access incident, suggesting a critical lapse in organizational controls; it is like giving a summer intern the master key to the server room and not changing the lock when they leave. Meanwhile, the Wired article detailing the young engineers' involvement in the DOGE cryptocurrency is an ode to the "move fast and break things" ethos, except now the things being broken are large financial instruments. The underlying issue is clear: when an organization treats complex economic engineering like a video game, the most enthusiastic players are always the newest ones who do not yet understand the significance of the 'Delete All' button.
Bureaucratic Housekeeping: CDC Requests Filing Cabinet Revisions
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, has issued a stunningly dry administrative request. It is asking for the mass retraction or revision of a range of unpublished manuscripts. This is framed as a shocking suppression of scientific inquiry, but to any office worker, it just looks like mandatory document control before the annual audit. Someone has realized the metadata tags on a bunch of documents are non-compliant with the new organizational policy.
The Inside Medicine Substack article notes that the request concerns specific topics within the realm of public health. The official reasoning likely revolves around "procedural consistency" and "maintaining document integrity." The reality is probably that the new SharePoint environment cannot correctly index documents that use the old `v1_final_really_final_DO_NOT_TOUCH.docx` naming convention, forcing the entire department to perform a massive, soul-crushing cleanup. Scientific truth is secondary to the needs of the Records Management Department.
Briefs
- Intellectual Property Skirmish: A Costa Rican supermarket named Super Mario has won a trademark battle against Nintendo. The Japanese video game company's attorneys were defeated by a regional grocery chain, proving that sometimes the true final boss is just a local business license.
- Hiring in the Age of Artifice: The perennial "Ask HN" about what interviewing is like now with everyone using AI highlights a market where candidates use AI to cheat their way into interviews, and interviewers use AI to write the questions, leading to a perfectly symmetrical and pointless exchange of automated platitudes.
- Android in a Box: The Waydroid project is offering Android in a Linux container. This is yet another impressive step in the containerization arms race, where the entire computing world is now just one massive Matryoshka doll of operating systems nested within other operating systems.
SECURITY AWARENESS TRAINING (MANDATORY)
What is the official operational definition of a Large Language Model (LLM) struggling with "compositional tasks" (Quantamagazine)?
The in-app ad tracking vulnerability proves which of the following about user data?
// DEAD INTERNET THEORY 42909921
I've been saying for months that the only thing holding up the crypto market is the collective effort of every young engineer fresh out of college who wants to 'disrupt' something. They do not know what they are disrupting; they just know the word. This is not finance; it is a highly-leveraged Youth Group Project.
The LLMs struggling with composition is hilarious. They can tell you exactly what an 'S' is, and what a 'T' is, but ask them to say 'STAPLER' and they produce a three thousand word essay on office supply chain logistics. Just give me the simple answer; the prompt is not an invitation to write a thesis.
The CDC thing is purely a compliance headache. Every time there is a new Director, they change the font in the document template. Three years later, half the manuscripts are non-compliant with the new style guide. No one is hiding a cure; they are just hiding bad margins.