Guru's Tech Bytes — Episode 28

Good morning, it's Friday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 28. And look, I don't know what happened to episodes one through twenty-seven, but I'm told they exist, and I choose to believe that, kind of like I choose to believe my Wi-Fi is "almost fixed." First up, apparently Claude — that's the AI from Anthropic — will refuse your requests or maybe even charge you extra if your code commits contain the word "OpenClaw," which is what some people are calling OpenAI in their repos as like a little joke. And you know what, that reminds me of when I tried to return a Keurig to Walmart and the lady at the counter gave me a look like I had personally insulted her family. That's what this is. You type one little word and suddenly the robot has feelings about it. Second, someone asked whether you can actually disable all data collection from your car, and the short answer is: buddy, no. You know what this reminds me of — that time I thought I was opting out of email newsletters and I was actually signing up for four more. Modern vehicles are basically smartphones on wheels that also somehow know when you're eating a sandwich, and the idea that you can just turn that off is, I gotta say, adorable. Third, there's a book excerpt going around about Mark Klein, the AT&T technician who walked into the EFF's offices and basically said, hey, there's a secret room at our facility in San Francisco where the NSA is copying literally all the internet traffic, and it's called Room 641A. And I gotta be honest, that sounds like something I'd say after four beers, except this guy had documents. Real ones. The kind that make you want to put tape over your laptop camera, which I already do, because of an unrelated incident. And finally, when Linux kernel developers find security vulnerabilities, they just... patch them and ship them, without giving the major Linux distributions a heads-up first. So the distributions are basically finding out about critical security holes the same way I find out Lois rearranged the garage — by running directly into it at full speed. That's your daily byte. Have a great day. Until next time.