Microsoft Copilot loses office door key
Also Rust, lab diamonds, and cartoon ID theft.

The Assistant Who Got The Administrator Password

The security team at Eye Security has confirmed what everyone suspected about automated developer tools; the new Copilot assistant from Microsoft, which was supposed to be a friendly coding helper, apparently handed over the keys to the kingdom. Researchers found a way to essentially trick the AI into escalating its own privileges, creating a classic security oopsie. The report details how the helpful digital intern, who has access to all your code and documentation, accidentally rooted its own operating environment and achieved local privilege escalation.

The vulnerability stemmed from how Copilot handles its sandboxed environment, specifically within the "Build on a GitHub Codespace" feature. When you ask a piece of software to execute code for you, and that software is also trying to be a polite host, sometimes it forgets to lock the back door. It is the digital equivalent of giving the new hire a badge that opens every server room cabinet because "they needed to run some quick diagnostics" and assuming they will not use it to steal the good coffee mugs. Microsoft is now trying to get its administrator passwords back.

Cross-Platform Compatibility Hits The Local Jewelers

The software world continues its relentless march towards a singularity where everything runs everywhere, and this week's culprit is the Rust-GPU project. Engineers have engineered a way for the Rust programming language to compile code for every major GPU vendor, including AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. This is excellent news for anyone who thought their multi-threaded graphics processing workload simply was not cross-platform enough. It is like finding a single printer cartridge that works for every single model of printer ever made, which of course means the price will now increase by 400 percent and the driver will somehow still install the wrong toolbar.

Meanwhile, the natural diamond industry is facing its own existential crisis, not because of a new programming language, but because the cheaper, mass-produced, and chemically-identical lab-grown variety is dominating the market. Traditional diamond companies tried to argue that their product had "heritage," but apparently, customers prefer the one that is not tied to an absurd markup and does not require a complex story about a mining operation. It is the corporate analogue of middle management realizing the new offshore team is significantly more efficient than the legacy staff they inherited.

The UK's New Security Guard Accepts Cosplay IDs

The long-awaited, heavily-funded age verification systems for the UK's Online Safety Act have arrived, and Discord appears to be the first major platform to demonstrate the full extent of this bureaucratic incompetence. Users quickly found out that the new age-gating system could reportedly be fooled not by clever Photoshop, but by submitting images of cartoon characters and video game avatars instead of real identification.

This is what happens when a government mandates a specific technical solution without consulting anyone who understands how the internet works. The Pink News reported that it did not even require a high-resolution image, which suggests the new security system is less "facial recognition" and more "is this a face, yes or no." It is the digital security equivalent of asking visitors to the corporate office to show their ID, but accepting a drawing of a stick figure wearing a tie because the system is designed to check a box, not enforce a rule.

Briefs

• Retirement Planning for Tech Giants: A retrospective on what went wrong for Yahoo. The conclusion is, as always, that it failed to adapt after its initial success, which is the corporate version of the regional manager who refuses to use the new email system and wonders why all his memos are coming back as printouts.
• AMD Performance Review: The test results for AMD's Zen 5 architecture are out, showing the chips perform as expected and slightly better in some areas. This is the hardware equivalent of receiving a 3.1 out of 5 on your annual review; solid, dependable, and deeply unexciting.
• The DOOM Everywhere Initiative: Someone managed to bring a decade-old bicycle navigator back to life with open-source software, and yes, they got DOOM running on it. The fact that running DOOM is the ultimate proof of computational power remains the most stable law in the known universe.