CIt's Friday night, and Tech Tonight is on. Big story, and I mean big: OpenAI just found a security hole in a compression library that's in everything. We'll get there.
MFirst, SpaceX is doing what SpaceX does. Another Falcon 9 went up from California an hour ago.
C27 more Starlink satellites. And this is the 81st Starlink launch of the year.
M81 launches just for Starlink. People still underrate how fast they're building that network.
CAt this point, launching a Falcon 9 is like a bus route. It's routine.
MThat routine is the thing. That's what makes it impressive. Nobody else is even close.
CFair. But let's talk about the OpenAI thing, because this one's genuinely weird.
CTheir red team found a vulnerability in Brotli. That's a compression library used in Node.js, Bun, Envoy.
MSo they found a bug in software they didn't even write? While testing their own AI?
CExactly. Their AI researchers were stress-testing their training environment, and they stumbled on a flaw in a completely separate piece of infrastructure.
MAnd the flaw lets an attacker run code remotely. That's a bad one.
CThat's as serious as it gets. And it's in a library that half the modern web uses. This is the kind of thing that keeps security engineers up at night.
MGive them credit: they could've sat on it. Instead they're telling the world. That's how it should work.
CThe weird part is, they found it while locking down their own AI training. They removed live internet access for their frontier models.
MThat's a story in itself. They built an offline training setup, so their AI can't just go browse the real internet.
CWhich might tell you something about where they think the risk is. They may be afraid of more than bad actors. Maybe they're also worried about what their own models could do with live access.
MI mean, that's a reasonable fear. But it's also a little funny: the testing turned up a security hole in a tool that's not even used in AI.
CIt's the digital equivalent of your robot vacuum finding a crack in your foundation. Not what you bought it for, but glad it did.
MAnd you still have to fix the foundation. That update is going to be a pain for every developer on Earth.