Competitor cripples tech bootcamp with moderator access.
Also: A storage company admits it made a mistake, and 70,000 IDs are loose.

The Reddit Administrator Threat Model is Now Fully Funded

A $23.5 million coding bootcamp, Codesmith, has learned a hard lesson about where its most important public relations infrastructure actually lives. It turns out that a competitor, not satisfied with just offering a better curriculum or maybe even just a better lunch service, decided to simply change the locks on the primary digital watercooler. The story involves a sophisticated reputation attack where a rival allegedly infiltrated the r/codesmith subreddit by becoming a moderator. This individual then performed a series of textbook hostile actions, including the mass approval of negative threads and the outright banning of any positive testimonials.

Treating a major online community as a security surface is apparently the new corporate espionage. The sheer audacity of weaponizing a free and voluntary administrative role to crash a multi-million dollar business is breathtaking in its simplicity. It is like an external vendor convincing the office manager to change the shared Wi-Fi password to something mildly offensive and then watching the entire sales team seize up for a week. The net effect is the same: the competitor successfully manipulated the narrative until the whole thing looked like an unsustainable mess. Now we all get to update our threat models to include "Hostile Junior Volunteer Administrator." That budget line item is going to be fun to explain to the CFO.

Proprietary Coffee Pods, But For Hard Drives

Synology has issued a corporate mea culpa after attempting to mandate that its Network Attached Storage devices would only play nice with its own approved, highly marked up hard disk drives. The goal was clearly to ensure maximum compatibility and reliability, or perhaps just maximum vendor lock-in. Customers, who are apparently very emotionally attached to choosing their own spinning rust, responded by immediately taking their wallets and their entire digital photo collections somewhere else.

The company is now scrambling to release a firmware patch that makes the policy go away, which is the corporate equivalent of realizing you accidentally CC'd the entire executive team on a complaint about the breakroom coffee and having to quickly issue a follow up stating that actually, you love the coffee and its richness is a testament to the brand's commitment to quality. Synology is a good company that tried very hard to optimize its supply chain for its own benefit, and it failed very badly. The market has decided it does not appreciate paying a premium for a proprietary hard drive that is essentially just a generic drive with a fancy sticker.

Discord Tries To File Paperwork, Sells 70,000 IDs

In news that will surely delight the identity thieves market, the communications platform Discord announced that 70,000 users had their government issued IDs leaked in a recent data breach. The platform, which is mostly used by people to discuss video games and anime, had apparently collected these high-stakes documents for verification purposes. Collecting sensitive information is always a calculated risk; storing it is basically just giving the problem to someone else, and Discord's data storage system clearly handed the problem off to a third party that did not have the proper security clearances.

It is a classic case of the compliance team trying to solve a simple age gate problem with a bureaucratic sledgehammer, and the security team then having to clean up the confetti of stolen identities. The problem is not malice; the problem is attempting to manage seventy thousand pieces of physical, real world paperwork in a digital system that was designed to handle animated GIF reaction memes. Discord is a fundamentally helpful platform that just accidentally left the filing cabinet for its most sensitive documents unlocked on the sidewalk for a bit. The company promises to do better, which is exactly what IT says after rebooting the server for the fifth time.

Briefs

• The Go Compiler: Cloudflare found a small, subtle bug in Go's ARM64 compiler. It is a reminder that even the cleanest code has a small, quiet fault deep inside, like the tiny, almost invisible stain on the office carpet that everyone has just agreed to ignore.
• Circular AI Economy: A Bloomberg report suggests that OpenAI and Nvidia are fueling a $1T AI market through deals that involve a lot of back and forth, which is corporate speak for "Everyone is just paying each other to keep the hype train moving."
• Arson and Predictive Text: A suspect in the Palisades Fire may have their ChatGPT history used as evidence. The AI is truly disrupting industries, including, apparently, how one gets caught for accidentally starting a major wildfire.