The government website forgot its password.
Also Texas wants a stock exchange.

The Intern Who Left the Janitor Key in the Lock

It turns out that a government website subdomain, doge.gov, used for a pilot program, was set up with permissions so loose you could land a helicopter on them. The investigation by 404 Media discovered that anyone with a basic understanding of Git could push updates to the site. This is less "sophisticated cyber-attack" and more "Gary from Marketing set up a public Dropbox link for the budget meeting and forgot to password protect it".

The core issue was traced back to an exposed version control repository; basically, the source code was actively checking out from the public internet without requiring any real authentication. One commentator on the Hacker News thread noted that the deployment script was likely using a public key for automated updates, but the key itself was effectively optional. It is the digital equivalent of labeling the master server's power button "Do Not Touch" and then taping the emergency bypass key right next to it. They mean well, those government IT folks, they just need to stop trusting the internet so much.

Seniority is Measured in How Much Technical Debt You Inherit

A new internal memo from the engineering department confirms what most of us knew: you are not a real grown-up engineer until you have suffered. The theory, detailed in a developer blog post, is that the true measure of a senior engineer is not how many new, shiny things they build but how many times they have been paged at 3 AM to fix a system that was built by someone who quit in 2012 and whose documentation is only available on a floppy disk.

This shift in thinking away from "move fast and break things" and towards "please, for the love of god, stop this thing from breaking" coincides perfectly with the realization that the entire GPU gold rush was perhaps based on a faulty premise. The report from Fly.io notes that, maybe, we were all wrong about the utility of massive, always-on GPU clusters for things that are not giant language models. The consensus seems to be that after burning a quarter's budget on specialized hardware, we should all probably go back to maintaining the old database that still runs on Java 6. It is a humble, necessary return to the baseline state of enterprise computing.

The NYSE is Relocating its Coffee Machine to Texas

In a move that feels both wildly important and utterly pointless, the New York Stock Exchange announced plans to launch NYSE Texas. The official press release cites "increasing demand for choice" and "access to diverse capital pools" which, when translated from corporate-speak, means they want cheaper real estate and fewer city permits. The New York Stock Exchange, the name of which is quite explicit about its physical location, is now a distributed ledger.

This new venue in Dallas is aiming to cater to the very large, very late-stage private companies that are apparently tired of the New York vibe. It is essentially an executive decision to open a secondary branch office because the rent was cheaper and the CEO prefers BBQ. Expect the first few weeks of trading to be plagued by slow internet and confusion over which stock ticker belongs to which time zone.

Briefs

• Zed AI Editing: The editor Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, their new open model. This model will not write the code for you, it will just anticipate the character you are about to type, which is just as annoying as your cubicle neighbor constantly finishing your sentences.
• Apple's Tracking Exemption: A privacy watchdog is now pondering why Apple does not apply its own strict app tracking rules to itself. This is the corporate equivalent of the CEO creating a "No Casual Fridays" policy but still wearing a Hawaiian shirt to the board meeting. Rules are for the little people.
• LinkedIn's Existential Dread: A thread on the front page declared LinkedIn to be the worst social media platform. It remains unclear if this is a revelation or a universal sigh of recognition that the site is now just a series of thinly veiled humblebrags and motivational posters that should have stayed on the server.