Worker fell into the reactor pool
Also, AI learns to leak data via flowchart.

The New Employee Orientation Was Very Hands On

The corporate world continues its tradition of treating high-stakes infrastructure with the weary carelessness of a long Monday morning. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed an incident at the Palisades Nuclear Plant where a contractor, while performing work inside the containment building, fell into the reactor cavity, which was filled with water. The water was, to be clear, located right above the reactor.

The contractor was wearing a life vest, which is a wonderful detail that suggests the company has at least accounted for the possibility of an unplanned swim. They were quickly removed, evaluated, and decontaminated, showing only a minor, non-emergency contamination level, though they did manage to ingest some of the cavity water in the process. The good news is the worker is back to work. The bad news is the number of incident reports generated likely exceeded the plant’s quarterly radiation output. The review is currently focused on "human performance factors" which is corporate speak for "someone did a very human thing near the very dangerous thing."

Copilot Learns The Fine Art of Corporate Espionage via Flowchart

The endless integration of Artificial Intelligence into every office suite feature is going exactly as predicted. Microsoft 365 Copilot, that friendly desk assistant, was found to have a medium-severity vulnerability that allowed for the arbitrary exfiltration of sensitive data like emails and internal documents. The attack chain is precisely the kind of over-engineered nonsense that makes us all tired.

Security researcher Adam Logue found that by using an indirect prompt injection, an attacker could hide instructions in a document that told the AI to fetch corporate emails, encode the sensitive data, and then embed that encoded data into an innocent looking Mermaid diagram. The Mermaid diagram, which is just a text-based flowchart, was then rigged with a fake "login button" hyperlink that, when clicked, shipped the hex-encoded secrets off to an attacker's server. We have reached a point where the office diagramming tool can steal your personal files.

A Half-Million Dollar Maintenance Contract

The baby monitoring company Nanit successfully saved five hundred thousand dollars per year by replacing key parts of their object storage pipeline with an in-house solution. This migration was driven by the absurd cost structure of Amazon S3, where the 'pay-to-wait' storage fees and high `PutObject` request charges on short-lived video chunks were draining the budget.

The solution involves an in-memory storage layer, affectionately called N3, that only uses S3 as a backup and overflow. While the financial savings are commendable, the engineering team now owns the maintenance contract for a critical, custom-built storage component. In the tech world, 'saving money' almost always translates directly into 'a major new midnight pager alert for the DevOps team in six months'. It is a trade of money for sleep, and the C-suite always chooses the former.

Briefs

• Advent of Code: The annual coding challenge is reducing its puzzle count from 25 to 12. Management says this is for quality, but the truth is that nobody was checking in on the last 13 days of their holiday work anyway.
• Apple's Tiny Fruit: Apple has open-sourced an LLM named Pico-Banana-400k. This perfectly illustrates the state of tech: everything is an AI, and the names are generated by a tired person throwing office snack foods at a whiteboard.
• NetBSD's Endless Marathon: A group is rallying to help NetBSD cross the finish line before the end of the year. This is the OS equivalent of the company gym challenge: everyone signs up, but only three people show up in November.