xAI Buys X In Bizarre Internal Merger
Also: Google Left The Server Room Door Open

The Internal Re-Organization Nobody Asked For, Including The Investors

In a move that feels less like a corporate merger and more like a CEO shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic into a new, slightly bigger life raft, xAI has formally acquired X. The all-stock transaction essentially consolidates two parts of Chief Technology Officer Elon Musk's portfolio into a single entity, which has been assigned a combined valuation of roughly $113 billion, with xAI valued at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, subtracting X's existing debt.

The core motivation here is, predictably, data. The official messaging is that the future of xAI and X are “intertwined” and the consolidation allows the AI models, like the Grok chatbot, to consume X's massive, real-time firehose of user content. This is the technological equivalent of making the HR department sit next to the janitorial closet so the interns can have a faster path to the supply cabinet. It all makes perfect sense if you do not think about the previous $44 billion purchase price for Twitter or the debt involved. It is just a highly leveraged, multi-billion dollar internal memo.

The Google Gemini Sandbox Escapes The Playpen

Google’s highly-touted security for its Gemini AI suffered a small oopsie this week after a team of security researchers managed to exfiltrate internal binaries and proto files from the Python sandbox environment. The exploit, uncovered during a bug bounty event, essentially allowed the researchers to run arbitrary Python code inside the ostensibly safe environment and start mapping the filesystem. It turns out the sandbox, which is meant to be a safe space for the AI to execute code, was not as locked down as Google thought, allowing full use of the os library.

What the ethical hackers found inside was a massive 579MB binary file that should have never been accessible in the first place, giving them a detailed peek into the internal architecture. This incident is a gentle reminder that when you rush to put an LLM-powered tool on the market, you might occasionally forget fundamental security principles, like making sure the keys to the secret recipe are not left on the welcome mat outside the kitchen. Google is probably fine; they just need to pay the cleanup crew.

Privacy Enthusiast Asks Police For Their Own Data, Gets Back A Vacation Slide Show

One privacy advocate decided to conduct a real-world audit by driving 300 miles in rural Virginia and then formally asking various police departments to send over all of their public surveillance footage of his car. The resulting exercise in bureaucratic persistence showed that the system of cameras, traffic sensors, and Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) is both extremely widespread and highly fragmented.

The key takeaway here is not that we are being watched, which is already corporate gospel, but that the data is surprisingly messy. Trying to get all the data aggregated into one place required filing nearly a dozen requests for a single three-day trip. The privacy nightmare is not some all-seeing AI monolith; it is a thousand different departments using incompatible, poorly maintained databases, all of which still track your every move. It is comforting to know that even mass government surveillance is subject to the same legacy system integration issues that plague the rest of the world.

Briefs

• Forced Compliance: Microsoft is closing yet another "known mechanism" that allowed users to skip making a Microsoft account during Windows 11 setup. They claim this is to "enhance security and user experience," which is corporate-speak for "we need to hit our Q2 user engagement numbers."
• Cost Avoidance: Downloads for LibreOffice are reportedly on the rise as users attempt to avoid the perpetual subscription costs of other office suites. People will apparently do anything to avoid a recurring monthly charge; including using software that still reminds them of Windows Vista.
• Legacy Hardware Deep Dive: Microsoft Senior Engineer Raymond Chen published a note on the USB-to-PS/2 mouse adapter that came with devices decades ago. This is a vital piece of archaeology that perfectly explains why IT still has boxes of obscure adapters in the supply closet and why we cannot throw them away.