Contractor Accidentally Locks Government Credit Cards.
Also LLM Backdoors and a Project That Took Twenty Years

The New Janitor Found the Server Room Master Key

The government contractor known as DOGE is having a tough week after the entire infrastructure team seemed to leave the "god mode" access key to the entire network pinned to a corkboard. This lapse in security meant that DOGE suddenly had unrestricted access to government data, which, as is standard for contractors, immediately led to mass chaos. At first, the firm claimed it was helping by slashing an astonishing $232 million from Social Security costs; a more sober review by The Intercept found the actual figure was closer to a far more modest $500,000. It appears the intern running the savings projection script failed to carry the two, or possibly the two hundred million.

The fun did not stop there, either. In a related mishap, the company also somehow managed to configure government employee credit cards to have a strict spending limit of $1, immediately halting all necessary supply purchases for the entire federal government. While the Washington Post reports that the Treasury has finally taken steps to revoke DOGE's access to personal taxpayer data at the IRS, the broader narrative is clear. Giving a contractor "god mode" is a bit like handing a puppy a chainsaw; a mess is inevitable, even if the puppy has the best of intentions.

The Twenty Year-Long Ticket Is Finally Closed

In a remarkable display of sustained effort that will never be replicated by a startup, a math couple finally solved a major group theory problem after two decades of work. This is the academic equivalent of a legacy project that has been quietly running in a forgotten corner of the server farm for so long that nobody remembers who logged the original request. The solution to the "group theory" problem is, frankly, entirely abstract to the average person, but its completion is a pleasant anomaly in a world where software is considered "finished" after two weeks of a beta release.

Quanta Magazine details the arduous journey of the two mathematicians, whose work will now be published. We in the tech sector, of course, will treat this as a cautionary tale; nobody wants to be on the hook for a project with a twenty-year estimated time of completion. That sort of commitment would require a venture capital round that lasts longer than a quarterly earnings report, which everyone knows is an impossibility. At least the math couple now has an answer; the rest of us are still trying to figure out why the printer keeps jamming.

Twitch Is Clearing Out Its Storage Closet

Twitch has announced that it will be limiting uploads to 100 hours per user and subsequently deleting everything beyond that threshold starting April 19th. This is an entirely transparent move to save money on storage costs, which is a surprisingly normal, human thing for a large tech company to do. It is essentially the corporate equivalent of a family deciding they can no longer afford the giant storage unit full of old furniture and tax documents they haven't looked at since the mid-2010s.

The platform is simply telling its content creators that the video archive is not an infinitely scalable backup service; it is a broadcast tool. While this will undoubtedly cause a minor uproar among people who have archived their entire lives to the service, it brings a refreshing bureaucratic simplicity to the whole affair. The official support announcement implies that the storage bill was getting a little too high, and sometimes, you just have to delete things you have not touched in five years. Someone should probably tell Microsoft, as well; they just announced a new Magma foundation model, which sounds like it will consume all available storage and thermal capacity.

Briefs

• The `NULL` Problem: The Wall Street Journal reports that people whose last name is literally "Null" have had their lives ruined by forms and databases that were programmed by people who learned SQL on a long weekend. Nothing works when your name is nothing.
• Amazon's Android Appstore: Amazon is shutting down its Appstore for Android on August 20, 2025. This move suggests Amazon finally realized nobody was using it and that the app store idea was a bit of an oopsie.
• 240 Tabs of Pong: Someone managed to get the classic game Pong to run simultaneously across 240 different browser tabs, which is a fantastic waste of perfectly good CPU cycles. The author notes the project was merely an exercise in seeing how much a browser can handle before it finally gives up.