Issue 35

28 August 2026

Hi there,

A researcher bought an expired domain for five euros and gained control of DNS answers for ENUM zones covering three British overseas territories, including Diego Garcia. Six months of call metadata piled up in the logs before anyone in government answered an email about it.

The rest of the week was tidier and mostly about walls going up. Apple opened preorders for a Mac Studio configured for local inference, X Corp sent takedown demands to Nitter operators, and Debian is deciding by ranked ballot whether machines are allowed to contribute at all.

Industry

The macro layer: who bought what, who sued whom, and where the money moved.

1. X Corp sent Nitter operators cease-and-desist letters

X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters on 24 August demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter’s instances and its repository, with a deadline of 5pm Eastern the following day. The letter, seen by TechCrunch, alleges "unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface" and claims evidence that Nitter accessed X accounts and session tokens. The maintainer, Zedeus, archived the GitHub repository the same day; nitter.net is offline and other instance operators reported receiving the same letter. Nitter was how a lot of people read a link someone sent them, and the loss of those instances makes account-free reading of X links harder.

2. Omarchy’s foundation reached $10 million in three days

DHH launched the Omacom Foundation on 22 August with $8 million from eight patrons at a million each, including Michael Dell, Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince, Jason Fried and Brendan Iribe. By 24 August it was at $10 million, with Drew Houston and OpenClaw’s Peter Steinberger joining. The foundation has named itself exclusive sponsor of Hyprland and premier sponsor of Quickshell. Two Wayland projects that have been running on maintainer goodwill now have an endowment behind them, decided by a handful of founders rather than a corporate consortium.

3. The entry-level on-ramp keeps narrowing

Stanford’s Canaries research note uses ADP payroll data to examine changes in employment for younger workers in occupations with higher AI exposure. It reports an observational association, not proof that AI caused particular job losses. The study does not by itself establish how much of the employment change AI caused.

Artificial Intelligence

Model and silicon news, plus what people are doing with the outputs when nobody is watching.

4. OpenAI’s Jalapeño is a real inference chip

At Hot Chips, OpenAI detailed Jalapeño, an inference accelerator designed with Broadcom and fabbed at TSMC on N3P, with an N3E I/O chiplet. The numbers OpenAI gave: 13.4 PFLOPs of MXFP4, HBM4 at 15.4TB/s, 700W per chip, 128 chips to a rack. Design started mid-2024 and taped out in November 2025, which is about sixteen months, and engineering samples exist now with production ramping through 2027. SemiAnalysis is careful that every figure came from OpenAI and that Blackwell is the wrong comparison anyway since Vera Rubin also has HBM4, though they credit the hardware-software codesign and say the CUDA moat is potentially dead.

5. A synthetic think tank built for AI crawlers

404 Media reported that the Hanover Institute for Public Policy published more than 100 pieces and described FARA filings and invoices, including $900,000 in April and another $100,000 in June through HAVAS. The report says the operation aimed to influence AI search answers; the actual effect on chatbot output, and how much of the site was AI-written, are not independently established by that sample.

Anthropic merged the memory behind Claude and Cowork on 25 August, writing memories during a conversation rather than at the end of one, with no setting to keep the two apart: Anthropic’s own guidance is that separate memories require separate accounts. Claude Code is my daily driver and its memory stays outside the shared pool.

Infrastructure

Silicon, hosting, and the slow consolidation of things that used to be plural.

7. Apple announced a Mac Studio for running models locally

Apple announced the new Mac Studio on 25 August, with M5 Max and M5 Ultra configurations. The Ultra has up to 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores and 512GB of unified memory at 1.2TB/s; Apple claims up to 4.3 times the M3 Ultra’s peak AI compute. Half a terabyte addressable by the GPU is aimed at people running large models at their desks. Preorders opened that day; availability was set for 22 September, not this week.

8. Self-hosted email is down to 22.4 percent

Artem Berezin of Live Direct Marketing measured MX, SPF and DMARC records across the Tranco top million using OpenINTEL’s daily DNS snapshots, and found self-hosted mail fell from 44.6 percent in 2016 to 22.4 percent in 2026. Google Workspace now holds 21.8 percent of detectable MX records and Microsoft 365 another 16.8, so 38.6 percent of the sampled detectable MX records of popular domains receive their mail from two companies, and the self-hosted share is still dropping half a percent a month. Berezin’s concern is not competition but blast radius: an outage, a filtering change or a policy decision at either provider now propagates through a third of the web at once. My primary private mail runs on self-hosted Stalwart, which makes the concentration trend especially relevant to me.

Microsoft

A privacy finding in a shipped feature, and a patch that broke printing.

9. Paint’s AI watermark carries a per-user identifier

Xusheng Li, a developer at Vector 35, found that Paint and Photos include a server-issued identifier in C2PA metadata of locally generated AI images, separate from the visible watermark option. The prompt goes to Microsoft for moderation and the returned GUID comes back embedded, and Paint sends the previous promptGenerationId along with each new request, so successive prompts are explicitly chained. Li’s point is not that Microsoft hid the moderation, which is documented, but that nobody said the C2PA manifest contains an identifier tied to the prompts, and Microsoft had not commented at publication. Worth reading next to David Buchanan’s demonstration that Pixel C2PA signing keys can be abused to sign an AI-generated frog as a camera original, published the same day: one story is provenance metadata carrying more than it says, the other is provenance metadata carrying nothing at all.

10. The August .NET update broke WPF printing

The 11 August .NET Framework cumulative update makes some WPF applications throw System.IO.FileFormatException when printing or generating PDF and XPS output with certain fonts, Calibri among them, on Windows 10 and 11 and on Server 2012 through 2025. The only workaround is an app-config switch that turns off the security protection the update shipped to add, so until Microsoft fixes it properly the choice is printing or patching.

Development

Two projects deciding what a contribution is, and a format that took five years to earn a rewrite.

11. Debian is voting on whether machines may contribute

Debian’s general resolution on LLM usage put eight proposals on a ranked ballot, from Proposal A, a Social Contract amendment banning LLM-assisted contributions outright and needing a 3:1 majority, through to Proposal H, which opposes LLM use on the grounds that it accelerates ecological destruction. Ian Jackson is behind Proposal C, reject as far as practical. Each option had between six and seventeen seconders, under 350 ballots were in as of Wednesday, and Sruthi Chandran has already extended the period once. Red Hat’s Daniel Berrangé watched a single account file 132 QEMU bug reports in under ten minutes, all sanitizer output, no analysis, no fixes, and called it what it looks like from the receiving end, "effectively a denial of service attack on the project maintainers". His ask of GitLab is a rate limit on non-member reporters.

12. Firefox will ship JPEG XL, in Rust

Mozilla posted its intent to ship JPEG XL on 24 August, five years after putting it behind a flag and then declining to go further. The original objection was 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++, more attack surface than an image decoder is worth. Mozilla’s answer was to ask for a Rust implementation, Google Research built jxl-rs, and that is what ships. Chrome is shipping too and Safari has a partial implementation, so a format that spent half a decade stuck on the wrong side of a security argument gets broad support before the end of the year, and the language turned out to be the blocker rather than the codec.

13. Writing down the style guide instead of repeating it

Fabien Sanglard went from unusable LLM output in mid-2025 to production code by March 2026, and the change that did it was noticing he typed the same corrections every session, no magic numbers, prefer an enum to a boolean, respect the layering, and writing them into a file instead. He is clear that it does nothing about hallucination and that verification stays yours, which moves the argument from style to architecture and is where you wanted to spend the time anyway.

Information Security

A DNS delegation nobody was watching, and an Oracle flaw with a three-day clock.

14. €5 bought the phone routing for Diego Garcia

Three ENUM zones under e164.arpa, covering Saint Helena, Diego Garcia and Ascension Island, were delegated to nameservers whose domain had expired. The author says he bought ns.enum.org.uk for five euros and could control DNS answers for those zones, potentially influencing where ENUM-aware systems route calls; he did not show that calls were redirected. Hundreds of thousands of queries landed in the logs, full phone numbers with timestamps and resolver IPs, including traffic to numbers associated with military bases on Diego Garcia; a hostile operator would have had the option to answer with their own SIP server instead. UK government channels did not reply and RIPE pointed at the ITU-T committee structure, and it was the NCSC that eventually acted and took the domain over. ENUM is decentralised by design, every country delegating for itself, and nothing in that design says who renews the domain. It is not the only place that gap exists.

15. CISA’s tightest deadline yet, on a 10.0

CVE-2026-21962 is a CVSS 10.0 in Oracle HTTP Server and the WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in, and CISA gave federal agencies three days to patch it after adding it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue on 24 August, complete access to stored data being what is on the table. Vikas Kundu’s honeypot logged high-volume automated scanning between 22 January and 3 February, days after Oracle’s 20 January disclosure, which shows scanning then, not continuous successful exploitation for seven months.

Coming up

31 August–3 September · VMware Explore, Las Vegas. Broadcom’s event focuses on private-cloud operations, hands-on labs and technical sessions. Official event page.

Reply if you want to dig into any of it. I read everything that comes back.

Until next week,
Julian

How this is made

Throughout the week I stumble across a mildly unreasonable number of interesting things, and I forward them instantly to the friend or colleague I think might care – sometimes to their delight, sometimes to their annoyance, and often with no context at all. Heartbeat is the attempt to do that a little better.

Every Friday a small agent I built, Honoka, looks through the places where those links tend to leak out: my private email, work email, Matrix, Mastodon, WhatsApp, Apple Messages, Signal, and the faint imprints on the platen of my Olympia typewriter (still not an API, tragically). It sorts, filters, groups and summarises the week, then hands me a draft.

Honoka is guided by a private corpus of things I have written over the last fifteen years, so it can get closer to how I sound in more-or-less official emails and public notes. I still take a pass by hand: remove things, change sentences, check links, argue with the judgement. Whether that is enough is, frankly, the experiment. Every issue has one item written entirely by hand. If you can reliably spot it, hit reply and judge.