DHS forgets to pay the vulnerability tab.
Also a farmer built his own internet and AI renamed its children.

The IT Department Forgot to Renew the Spreadsheet License

The entire industry’s central ledger of digital oopsies, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, has hit a wall because the Department of Homeland Security simply allowed the contract to expire. The funding for the MITRE corporation, which runs the catalog of every single security flaw we all pretend to patch, has run dry. This is the organizational equivalent of the accounting department forgetting to pay the electric bill for the server rack containing the list of all the other things that are broken.

In an astonishing display of bureaucratic improv, an emergency organization, the CVE Foundation, is being assembled on the fly like a startup trying to pivot before the seed round collapses. Security professionals are now facing the grim reality that all the standardized nomenclature for global computer weakness might suddenly enter an administrative limbo, forcing us to go back to describing a severe buffer overflow as "that one messy thing Steve found last week." The market is already pricing in a 30% increase in general anxiety.

Midwesterner Refuses to Pay Exorbitant Networking Quote; Becomes a Utility

In a move that should be taught in every Business 101 class, Stephen Thorpe, a rural Michigan resident, successfully refused to pay an estimated $50,000 to have his property connected to the internet by a major cable provider. Instead of submitting a formal complaint or writing a strongly-worded email, Mr. Thorpe just built his own ISP. The resulting network, Cherry Capital Connection, now serves hundreds of homes, proving that the most effective way to deal with enterprise-level quote absurdity is to just implement the solution yourself and then scale it out.

This is exactly the kind of outside-the-box thinking middle management is always asking for during quarterly reviews, just on a scale that actually matters. It's the ultimate protest against the tyranny of the last mile fee, demonstrating that sometimes all you need to start a multi-million dollar infrastructure project is spite and a general refusal to pay the vendor’s inflated rate.

OpenAI Re-orgs its Models, Releases Another New Command Line

OpenAI has announced a new set of LLM names, the o3 and o4-mini. We assume the "o" stands for "Our models" or maybe "Oversight" but the internal memo was unclear. Regardless, the firm is following the corporate tradition of randomly re-naming successful product lines to confuse long-time customers and make the new models sound 15% faster than the old ones, which are now immediately legacy.

Not to be outdone, they also dropped the Codex CLI, a lightweight terminal agent designed to run in a developer's environment. This means the AI is now moving closer to becoming that annoying coworker who sits behind you, offering suggestions, except this coworker is a command line tool that requires a subscription, and its suggestions sometimes contain security vulnerabilities. Productivity is expected to increase by 4% but only after everyone spends a week configuring it to stop overriding their git pushes.

Microsoft Releases Font Named After a Frog, Because Why Not

While their competitors are busy replacing developers with AI bots, Microsoft decided to release a surprisingly wholesome product: Kermit, a typeface for kids. The font is designed to be accessible and playful, proving that the giant corporation still remembers how to perform low-stakes, non-world-altering tasks.

Kermit is the kind of project that keeps the morale up in the Graphics department when the rest of the building is tasked with integrating LLMs into everything from the coffee machine to the quarterly expense report software. It is a quiet moment of sanity in a world that is otherwise on fire, like finding a perfectly functioning stapler in the supply closet after a week of dealing with a paper jam.

Briefs

• Intellectual Property Damage: Charles Darwin's children drew all over the "Origin of Species" manuscript. The historical documents survived the children’s battle drawings of vegetables, proving that the greatest threats to foundational data are internal and often adorable.
• Another AI Tool: JetBrains announced their IDEs will now integrate a comprehensive AI Coding Agent. All major development environments will now include a sentient, code-generating copilot that is only 90% sure about semicolons.
• The Data Dump: Anonymous leaked 10TB of data exposing Kremlin assets and Russian businesses. 10 terabytes is a lot of data, and now some poor analyst has to write the SQL query to find the interesting bit.