State Actor Stole Text Editor Key
Also Elon Closes Another Department Door

The Janitor’s Keycard Incident

A simple, beloved text editor, Notepad++, has confirmed a catastrophic security mishap. The company reports that a state-sponsored actor, the digital equivalent of a three letter agency in a cheap suit, managed to compromise their main download server. It turns out the attacker got a hold of the OVH account and used the official domain to distribute trojanized installers for a full nine days, a quiet digital crime spree. The blog post detailing the event reads like an exhausted IT ticket, noting that the problem was not a sophisticated zero-day, but rather a compromise of the actual download server credentials.

The absurdity is classic; a nation state with infinite resources decided the best use of their time was to sneak a nasty surprise into the one piece of software developers use to edit their grocery lists and passive aggressive commit messages. The Notepad++ team, led by founder Don Ho, managed to regain control after the actor simply left the door unlocked on the back end. We treat every breach like a Hollywood thriller, but in reality, the digital equivalent of a master thief just got into the vault because the night guard wrote the password on a sticky note.

The Merger Nobody Asked For

In a move that surprised approximately zero employees at either location, xAI is joining SpaceX. The official announcement, buried on the SpaceX updates page, confirms that the AI entity is now part of the rocket company. This is essentially the CEO taking the R&D department from the East wing and forcing them to sit with the Space team in the West wing, all while maintaining that the synergy is going to be "fantastic."

The rationale is, naturally, that rockets need smarter robots, and the company has too many separate office parties to attend. The reality is two high-profile, high-capital projects are now going to share a single budget spreadsheet, which is the true definition of a corporate merger. We now get to watch as the people writing abstract AI algorithms try to figure out which side of the building has the better snacks and if they have to start wearing flame retardant coveralls to the weekly status meeting. The integration will certainly be as smooth as the Starship landing attempts. The press release itself is short, declarative, and lacks any details about whose Jira board will be used.

One Hero in a Sea of Kubernetes

Todd C. Miller, the principal author and maintainer of Sudo, is finally getting the equivalent of a gold watch for thirty years of service. He has singlehandedly kept one of the most fundamental security utilities in Unix running for three decades, a feat of stability that is now almost impossible to comprehend in the modern world of weekly framework updates. The man has been letting us all run privileged commands without having to re-authenticate our passwords since before Netscape Navigator was a thing.

The rest of the internet may be a shifting landscape of half-baked machine learning tools and microservices that fail at 3 AM, but Miller’s work simply works. His blog post is a quiet, unassuming meditation on maintenance, which is exactly the opposite of every VC-funded press release you read today. The lesson here is that the most critical piece of infrastructure in the world is probably being maintained by one guy who is not on your company's stock option plan.

The CTO Bought Outside Coffee Filters Again

Microsoft, which has spent billions developing its own internal AI called Copilot, is suddenly integrating competitor Anthropic's Claude code into a wide array of internal tools. The integration appears to be spreading like a virus through the internal network, even appearing in the code bases of projects like Notepad. The reports suggest this is happening fast, leading to a palpable sense of internal confusion.

This is the classic corporate move where the CEO or CTO suddenly decides the internal product, which the whole team has been working on for two years, is not "fast enough" and mandates using the competitor's product for a pilot project. The internal Copilot team must be thrilled to see a rival's logic all over their work, like seeing a memo from your boss praising a temporary contractor. The end result is a dozen different, incompatible AI models all fighting for control over the same three lines of code in your favorite text editor.

Briefs

• TSA Fine Print: Regulatory expert says the new $45 fee the TSA is charging for travelers without ID is likely illegal. This is the government version of charging you for the printer toner you did not use.
• Anki Hand-off: The open source flashcard app Anki has transferred ownership to a new entity, AnkiHub. This is a subtle reminder that all the digital infrastructure you rely on for personal success is one transfer of a domain name away from total chaos. The developer notes the growth, a sign that we all just need to study harder.
• Moltbook API Leak: A database belonging to an entity named Moltbook was exposed, spilling millions of API keys. This is the data equivalent of the communal office fridge finally being opened after six months and ruining everything within a twenty foot radius.