China Tech Mandatory Work Hours Increase.
Also Burglar King Hides Customer Voice Data.

The New Employee Engagement Metric is Sleep Debt

The mandatory Chinese tech work schedule known as the '996' is apparently still the default playbook for maximizing shareholder value by aggressively violating human physiology. The '996' nomenclature refers to a required 9:00 am to 9:00 pm schedule, six days a week, a system that demands a 72 hour weekly commitment from employees. This is not a surge period or a one time rush. It is just the standard operating procedure for companies like JD.com and Youzan, an initiative which various founders have historically championed as the true path to professional success.

It is easy to be angry at management when they decide that a violation of local labor law is a fun corporate perk, but one must remember that high ranking executives believe this arrangement boosts the company's bottom line and assists with personal growth targets. They simply want to help. Think of it as an immersive, company sponsored sleep deprivation hackathon that never quite ends, all to ensure that breakthrough technologies can reach the market faster than the competition. The primary drawback, according to industry observers, is merely the fact that this model might not be sustainable long term, which is usually what the Systems Administrator says right before the whole thing crashes and burns.

Quarter Pounder With a Side of Audio Surveillance

Restaurant Brands International, the corporate owner of Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons, has demonstrated a kind of benevolent digital incompetence by allegedly recording customer audio at the drive thru for a training AI, but then securing the entire infrastructure with the password 'admin'. Security researchers discovered that the 'Assistant' platform, the digital brain behind the drive thru ordering screens, was so poorly protected that an authentication bypass allowed access to employee accounts and the entire backend system with minimal effort.

It turns out the real prize for any casual intruder was the massive database of drive thru voice recordings. These recordings were being actively fed into a machine learning model to measure things like upsell success rate and customer sentiment. Once the ethical hackers revealed the existence of this bizarre voice library and the glaring security flaws, Restaurant Brands International took the most logical step: it issued a DMCA takedown notice to the researcher's blog post, suggesting the entire episode was merely an unauthorized use of their trademark. The vulnerability itself was fixed quickly, but the digital panic attack that followed confirms that the easiest way to expose corporate data is often to just look at the default settings.

The AI Intern Who Won't Stop "Helping"

GitHub users are openly rebelling against Microsoft's increasingly aggressive deployment of mandatory Copilot AI features, saying the platform has reached a new inflection point of intrusiveness. The complaints center on the inability to disable features that inject the AI into pull requests and code reviews, essentially making the Copilot product the office intern who keeps filing unsolicited, low quality expense reports that everyone else has to check and fix.

Microsoft is trying very hard to make developers happy with its generative AI suite. However, a significant and vocal portion of the community simply does not want the product and is frustrated by the difficulty of opting out or removing the features entirely. One developer, Andi McClure, has been repeatedly filing tickets to block the features, noting a deep resentment that GitHub appears to be training the AI on their code while simultaneously forcing them to look at what are essentially in app advertisements for the AI service. This marks an evolution in the platform's utility, transforming it from a mere code repository to a persistent, mandatory marketing campaign.

Briefs

• Credential Playbook Leak: The "Kim" dump has exposed the credential theft playbook of North Korea's Kimsuky group, revealing that even international espionage is ultimately dependent on a solid, well organized spreadsheet.
• Raspberry Pi Cluster LLM: The Qwen3 30B A3B model is reportedly achieving 13 tokens per second on a small cluster of four Raspberry Pi 5 devices. Prepare for a future where your desk calendar can also run a moderately sized language model.
• Azure Red Sea Incident: Microsoft Azure is reporting that multiple international subsea cables were cut in the Red Sea, a perfectly normal day in networking when someone with heavy machinery decides to rearrange the ocean floor.
• Executive Bonus Review: Qantas is cutting executive bonuses following a recent data breach, proving that the only mechanism of accountability the industry truly understands is a direct impact to the yacht fund.