AI intern finds server security leak
Also unicorn collapses and cameras attack processors

The New Hire Found The Bug The Seniors Missed

A security researcher named Sean Heelan used OpenAI's new o3 model to locate a remote zero-day vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s Server Message Block implementation, officially filed as CVE-2025-37899. The vulnerability is a use-after-free issue, which is basically what happens when Steve from Accounting checks out a library book, returns it, and then somehow manages to keep reading it while someone else has checked it out, creating temporal paradoxes and memory corruption in the process. Mr. Heelan only intended to benchmark the model’s capabilities, but the LLM spotted the complex concurrency bug in the logoff command handler of the ksmbd module.

The general consensus among developers is not that the AI has achieved sentience, but rather that a powerful tool, when given highly specific and methodical instructions, can occasionally save the rest of the engineering team a tremendous amount of paperwork. The successful bug-finding exercise underscores the idea that even AI-assisted vulnerability research relies on "good engineering thinking," which is the polite way of saying the humans still have to meticulously format the prompt or the machine just hallucinates a cat picture instead. This is the new normal.

Chief Wizard's Magic Failed To Materialize Revenue

Builder.ai, a UK-based "AI unicorn" startup once valued highly and backed by Microsoft, has collapsed into insolvency. The company, which promised no-code app building using AI, was apparently unable to recover from "historic challenges and past decisions," which is the corporate euphemism for a spreadsheet that says "out of money." The downfall followed the departure of co-founder Sachin Dev Duggal, who held the title of "chief wizard," a designation which, in retrospect, may have been a red flag.

The new CEO, Manpreet Ratia, informed employees that the company’s main unit would enter insolvency proceedings and appoint an administrator. This whole exercise serves as a helpful reminder that having hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like the Qatar Investment Authority does not exempt a technology company from basic financial obligations. The firm also had to restate its 2023 revenue downward, proving that you can dress up your balance sheet with buzzwords, but the numbers themselves still have to balance.

The Departmental Offsite Is Now In Vancouver

Scientific conferences are increasingly leaving the United States, a trend driven by the collective anxiety of international researchers over border security and visa processing. The problem is not one of scientific rigor but of administrative rigor mortis; getting a non-resident Ph.D. into the country now requires the bureaucratic equivalent of solving the Riemann hypothesis.

This mass relocation treats the US like the office where the coffee machine is always broken, so everyone decides to meet at the Starbucks across the street. Conference organizers are simply seeking easier venues where delegates will not be detained for questioning about their particle physics research. This exodus is fueling an intellectual brain drain, which the new host countries, like Canada and European nations, are happily treating as an unexpected talent acquisition opportunity.

Briefs

• Legacy Input Devices: A new Linux kernel driver allows the use of a rotary telephone dial as an input device. It is now possible to dial the number '9' at the exact same speed one could have in 1965, finally solving the problem of input being too fast.
• Photosensitive Processors: The bizarre case of the Raspberry Pi 2 crashing from a xenon camera flash is being documented. The high-intensity light hits the bare die of the power regulator chip, which is apparently shy and reboots the entire system out of embarrassment.
• Reinventing Software: A developer has published a piece on the inevitable cycle of "reinventing the wheel" in software. The analysis confirms that a programmer's primary directive is to ignore all existing solutions and build a new, slightly worse version from scratch using a language invented last Tuesday.