Top Secret #12: Beta Launches, Insider Threats, and Wolverine Frogs

This week, we talk about our launch next week, the Open AI personality crisis, menu-hacking Disney villains, and broken job boards.

Apr 29, 2025

Well, we’ve been previewing this for a while, but it’s finally happening. Next week, we’re making our latest project available in beta. Keep an eye out for the news!

We’re also hosting a casual launch event in San Francisco next Thursday. Email me if you’d like to come; use ned.oleary@ssoready.com for now!

What We’re Reading

Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report: lots of good stuff in here! Verizon provides a bunch of data on everything from phishing simulation campaigns to breaches that result from misdelivery (e.g., of emails, paper mailers). I am not sure there’s anything totally revelatory in here, but it’s worth a skim at least.
Ex-Disney Worker Who Hacked Menus Gets 3 Years in Prison: although there’s admittedly something amusing about this crime – e.g., replacing all of the menu fonts with wingdings – this is actually quite serious. The convicted man in this case visited ex-colleagues’ homes! This is a classic example of a boring insider threat; from the indictment: “the credentials were … available for use by multiple employees … Scheuer knew these credentials as a result of his job responsibilities.” These are solved problems, Disney! Come on now.
Sam Altman says OpenAI will fix ChatGPT's 'annoying' new personality – but this viral prompt is a good workaround for now: I gave ChatGPT a direct system prompt to challenge me, but it’s still a PITA – glad this is changing.
4chan is back online, says it’s been ‘starved of money’: I guess 4chan went down? I’d be lying if I said that I’d noticed. But this is pretty interesting. Per 4chan’s blog, “hacker using a UK IP address exploited an out-of-date software package on one of 4chan’s servers, via a bogus PDF upload.” Interesting. Thankfully, someone on Hacker News described the actual vulnerability in some detail here. It’s an old, old PHP exploit.
Looking for a Job in Tech Is More Confusing Than Ever: listen, I believe that classifying job titles is hard, but I know with certainty that whatever LinkedIn has been using for the last few years is terrible. You’ll jump on LinkedIn Sales Insights and see software engineer bucketed in a different category than Software Engineer II. Let’s sunset that clunky ML garbo before we declare that job titles are too complicated.

Nerd Corner^TM

There’s a frog in Central Africa called Trichobatrachus robustus. People know surprisingly little about it. As late as 1971, biologists were just writing, “little information has been published on the biology” of robustus.

But we do know that the thing is weird.

robustus seems to defend itself with an odd claw-like mechanism. It doesn’t exactly have claws in the way you’d think – sharp, permanent keratin. Instead, robustus breaks its own bones, thrusts a bone fragment through its own skin, and uses it like a claw. Yeah, like Wolverine from X-Men. It’s insane. No other animal seems to do things this way.

robustus goes by the common names “horror frog” or “Wolverine frog.” It’s also called the “hairy frog.” Why? It’s also covered in a ton of weird hair filled with blood vessels, for some reason.

I can’t believe that people aren’t studying this thing.

Other Cool Stuff

Open source, Open hearts: if you guys want to send me a fun open source card, let me know. I’d love to receive one. But it’s cool if you don’t want to. No pressure. It’d just be nice. But again, no pressure.
GitDiagram: this is a super cool use of LLMs. You can give this any public git repo and get a diagram out. It does take a little while, though. Here’s what it looks like if you make a diagram for SSOReady.
FilmFinder: kind of useful. Just give the thing a few ideas on what you’re looking for, and you get movie recommendations. I prompted it with “boring fever dream” and got Eraserhead back. Not a movie I’ve ever seen before, but it seems like a decent answer.

From The Archives

Thanks,

Ned