blog 1 Minute
I’ve spent the past week explaining to various family members that no, I cannot just ‘hack into’ their neighbour’s Ring doorbell because the tree dispute has escalated.
Here’s what happened whilst I was declining to become a cyber-criminal.
The CEO’s Little Black Book
A chief executive kept all 2,000 employee passwords in a desktop Excel file. All because he wanted to read their emails himself. When IT suggested multi-factor authentication, he refused it for four months because it would interfere with his surveillance hobby. The company then suffered two breaches…
The Supply Chain of Chaos
Russia’s using Africa as a staging ground for disinformation campaigns. Manipulated migration routes. Destabilised governments. Then those same networks exploit the resulting chaos as wedge issues in European elections. Create the crisis -> film the crisis -> use the footage to terrify voters three thousand miles away.
The Authentication Bypass That Could Vote
A PPP authentication bypass sat in OpenBSD for twenty-seven years. One line of code. Zero credentials needed. Someone forgot to check if the password length was greater than zero. The CHAP handler got it right back in 1999. PAP never did. It’s been sitting there since Tony Blair was still popular, waiting for someone to notice that an empty string isn’t actually a password.
https://blog.argus-systems.ai/blog/openbsd-pap-27-year-auth-bypass.html
The Model That Nobody’s Using Anyway
The White House reckons Claude’s guardrails are breakable. Anthropic says they’re not. Amazon rang the alarm bell. Now everyone’s in a room arguing whether a vulnerability exists whilst the model sits offline.
https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-is-still-at-odds-with-the-white-house-over-claude-fable-5
Actually Good Software Still Exists
Someone retired and decided to make one piece of software genuinely excellent instead of chasing funding rounds. NetNewsWire still works better than anything backed by thirty rounds of venture capital and a roadmap written by committee. Turns out when you’re not trying to become a unicorn, you can just build something that doesn’t waste people’s time.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/17/netnewswire-status
That’s your lot. If you’ve got stories I should see, reply to this. If you want more cynicism delivered direct to your eyeballs, I’m on Mastodon occassionally… pretending I understand the protocol.
Stay suspicious.