This week there have been some interesting bugs. Or interest in bugs. Bugs It was Cloudflare’s turn to break the internet. As per usual, the transparency on display is rather cool. It was rather interesting that for once, the problem wasn’t DNS or BGP, neither was it a cyberattack. Though indirectly, the threat of bots was responsible. As a subtle change in the handling of queries meant that the bot management system suddenly produced config files that were twice as large and that made them larger than the system could handle.

This week’s edition of the weakly link has got some fire in it: First on the menu we’ve got a report that tries to tell us that if there’s an AI bubble, that’s a good thing: The AI Wildfire Is Coming. It’s Going to Be Very Painful and Incredibly Healthy Instead of a bubble, the post tells us of one dinner guest at a CEO dinner in Silicon Valley who argues that instead of a bubble it is more like a wildfire.

This post is a mixture of AppSec, vibe coding and cryptography. SPOILER ALERT: This post describes how to complete the Capture-The-Flag exercise “Encrypted Pastebin” (Hard) on Hacker101. Over the last few days I have had a lot of fun with a padding oracle. But let’s take a step back: I have been looking at Hacker101 CTF exercises. The premise is simple: You’re given a website The website has flags hidden.

Every week I come across some interesting, ridiculous or astounding content related to security and tech around software engineering. And I post it on the company Slack, sometimes on LinkedIn and often on BlueSky or Mastodon. (I deleted my Twitter account a long time ago. No Nazi bar for me.) And yet, I often forget all about the content. And because I closed my browser with 200ish open tabs once too often, I thought, why not write about the things that interested me, then I can look back on them and maybe someone else might find them interesting too.

BSides Newcastle is probably one the most anarchic of the BSides I’ve been to so far. So much so that the fascists organised a protest. Well, not really, but there was a far-right and counter-protest not far from where the conference was. Thankfully, the organisers were on top of it and kept is all up-to-date with advice: “Punch Nazis” (for the benefit of the tape, nobody endorsed violence). Aaanyway, aside from a really early start I was ready to dive in and hope to share some of the experiences with you.

Have you ever wondered how hard it is to make an AI talk to an API? Wouldn’t it be great if I could talk to a machine like Captain Picard does to his computer? “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot!” would have to sent to the replicator subsystem with the correct instructions. But how would that actually work? I suppose, the Starship Enterprise-D made its first appearance on the airwaves in 1987. So at the time I guess we could expect a replicator to be programmed in C.