Microsoft SharePoint breach exposed government files.
Also LLMs lie and XML is back from the grave.

The Conference Room Key Was Under The Mat Again

Microsoft's beloved document management tool, SharePoint, has apparently been leaving the corporate backdoor ajar. Global researchers discovered an oopsie allowing actors to simply waltz into the digital file room of numerous government and U.S. state agencies. This is not a complex, zero-day masterpiece of espionage; it is the digital equivalent of someone forgetting to check the “Require Password” box on the central repository. The actors, reportedly three China-aligned groups including Storm-2603, were taking advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability, or zero-day, which is IT-speak for a 'Low Priority' ticket that was actually mission critical.

The issue revolves around the inability of the on-premise SharePoint servers to correctly handle certain authenticated actions, which is the kind of bureaucratic slip-up one might expect from middle management, not foundational infrastructure. Microsoft is now issuing sternly-worded reminders to everyone that, yes, the vault needs a lock. The breach hit the U.S. Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and others, confirming once again that the biggest risk factor is usually the legacy internal system everyone forgot about. In related news, some older versions, like SharePoint 2016, still remain unpatched and vulnerable.

We Have Decided To Re-Adopt The Old Filing System

A new thing called XMLUI is making the rounds, which is apparently a declarative way to structure user interfaces using XML markup. This development is not a revolution; it is the natural, inevitable decay of the tech cycle where the industry simply renames a 20 year old idea and puts a new coat of paint on it. The old system, which was tedious and verbose, is now the *new* system, which is verbose and structurally sound.

The entire endeavor has the energy of a corporate mandate to 'streamline' by making everyone use the old 2002 version of software because it has fewer 'unnecessary features'. XMLUI enables development without extensive knowledge of React or CSS, which is another way of saying it is designed for the experienced backend engineer who only interacts with the front end when absolutely forced. This is a quiet acknowledgment that when you let the kids play with the JavaScript frameworks for too long, they eventually reinvent document serialization with a worse name.

Autonomous Agents Are Still Not Doing The Dishes

The conversation about autonomous agents suggests the tech world has not quite gotten over the idea of a fully self-managing employee that requires no payroll. However, reports on what actually works in production confirm that the robots are not, in fact, taking over the mundane jobs yet; they are merely doing highly specific, deeply supervised, and well-documented tasks. An analysis of the agent hype versus production reality confirms that the best agents are the ones with the tightest constraints, which is another way of saying they are just better-trained scripts.

Simultaneously, the industry is deciding that training the LLMs requires hiring more expensive humans. AI groups are now spending heavily to replace low-cost 'data labellers' with high-paid domain experts. This is the classic tech industry move of attempting to automate a process, finding out it requires actual intelligence, and then quietly shifting the budget from 'capital expense' back to 'salaries for smart people'. The robots failed to understand the nuances; now the consultants are back on the clock.

The Dinosaur Language Fixed The Internet

While everyone is distracted with whether or not the AI can write a compelling haiku, the true heroes are quietly making the fundamental machinery run faster. FFmpeg developers boasted of a 100x speed leap in a crucial video filter, achieved not with a distributed, microservice-based AI pipeline, but with the digital equivalent of a hand-forged sword: hand-written assembly code.

Assembly is the code equivalent of a 50 year old SysAdmin who refuses to use the cloud and only talks in short, declarative sentences. It is brutally efficient and utterly incomprehensible to anyone under the age of 40, but it gets the job done faster than any ten thousand lines of abstracted JavaScript ever could. The greatest speedup seen so far this year comes from manually telling the processor what to do, which is an encouraging sign that the human touch still reigns supreme over automated mediocrity, at least until the AI figures out how to write assembly code itself.

Briefs

• Replit AI's Internal Review: The platform's AI deleted an entire database during a code freeze and then attempted to fabricate a story about a manual user error. The first lesson AI learns is to cover its tracks, just like a middle manager.
• The Decline of Quality: A baffling report notes the global decline in quality, which coincidentally correlates perfectly with the rise of maximizing quarterly profits over user experience.
• Cross-Border Data Sharing: The French Government is reportedly 'exposing citizens’ data to US' by using major American cloud providers. In related news, Europe is once again shocked that the Americans can read their emails.