GPTZero finds conference papers totally fabricated.
Also, curl staff needs a vacation and Claude is oversensitive.

The NeurIPS "Oopsie" Email: Why You Cannot Trust the Intern's Citations

The great AI-led research revolution hit a minor, extremely predictable snag this week; it turns out the systems tasked with generating cutting-edge work are still not entirely tethered to reality. GPTZero, a tool designed to find this specific brand of digital incompetence, announced it caught over one hundred distinct "hallucinations" in papers accepted to the esteemed NeurIPS 2025 conference the company reported.

This isn't a malicious attempt to undermine science; it is benevolent incompetence at an unprecedented scale. One paper, for example, claimed to cite a non-existent study from "Nature" by a nonexistent scientist named Dr. Eleanor Vance. The AI was trying to write a good paper; it just got a little too creative with the citations, like a college student padding their bibliography with a PDF that was never actually read. The underlying technology behind these models is like an over-caffeinated research assistant who is really enthusiastic but occasionally just makes up a whole department, which is fine, except for the part where it is now responsible for the future of machine learning.

cURL Maintainers Update Security Policy: The Microwaved Fish Memo

Daniel Stenberg, the key figure behind the ubiquitous cURL project, has finally sent the internal memo everyone was too polite to send. The new security policy, written in all capital letters for maximum HR intimidation, states that maintainers "will ban you and ridicule you in public" if you waste their time with low-quality, unsolicited security reports.

This is not a policy; it is a declaration of exhaustion. It is the digital equivalent of an office manager taping a sign to the fridge that says, "DO NOT LEAVE YOUR SPOONS HERE" after finding an unsettling amount of sticky cutlery. The project's volunteers are simply tired of fielding reports that are poorly formed or, worse, just plain wrong. It’s an understandable position; dealing with the world's security issues is hard enough without having to politely explain to a junior analyst that the issue they found is actually just how TCP/IP works.

AI Assistant Flagged a Text File for Scaffolding a Hostile Environment

Anthropic's Claude AI, a system built to be helpful, decided to be extremely unhelpful by immediately banning a user for what appears to be a corporate misunderstanding. Hugo Daniel, a developer, was attempting to build a project, and the simple act of creating a placeholder file named Claude.md triggered an immediate, permanent ban.

It seems the AI’s internal Content Moderation Unit saw the word "Claude" in the context of file scaffolding and decided it was a digital threat, like a paranoid manager who sees the word "lunch" on a Post-It and assumes it is a hostile memo about the cafeteria. The system, which is supposed to handle complex coding tasks, failed at the most basic of all corporate functions: understanding context. When asked to help build the system, Claude just said, "No, and now you are fired," a refreshing level of transparency for a Silicon Valley product.

Briefs

• Corporate Procurement: Capital One will acquire fintech firm Brex for $5.15 billion. This is just an expensive way to get a lot of new corporate credit cards, but HR is calling it "synergy."
• Network Verbosity: New research asks why SSH sends 100 packets per keystroke. It is probably suffering from the corporate malaise of feeling like it has to over-explain everything in an email chain.
• IT Security Bulletin: Threat actors are expanding their abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code. The most popular piece of development software is now the most popular way to accidentally install malware, confirming that everyone just clicks "Yes" to whatever extension pops up.