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Android's Naked, OpenAI's Free, and Windows 11 Wants to Be Your BFF

INSIDE: The Cisco “vishing” disaster, Perplexity's reading comprehension issues, and why grandma's keeping dial-up

August 12, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Well, well, well. If it isn't Tuesday, August 12th.

Still here? Still logged on? You’re one of the chosen ones.

On this day in 1981, IBM unleashed the Model 5150 PC upon an unsuspecting world — a machine they threw together in under a year with whatever RadioShack-quality components they could find lying around. The goal was to beat everyone else to market with something, anything, before Apple stole their lunch money.

What happened? Thanks to their "let's just use off-the-shelf parts and Microsoft's DOS" strategy, IBM basically handed the keys to the kingdom to Bill Gates and every clone manufacturer with a screwdriver.

Steve Jobs called it right in '85: "If IBM wins, we're entering a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years."

Well, Steve, the prophecy came true. We got two decades of blue screens, IRQ conflicts, and that one printer that still won't work properly.

ANDROID PATCHES FLAWS THAT WERE BASICALLY WEARING A "HACK ME" SIGN

Google just dropped their August security patches faster than Zuckerberg drops human expressions during Senate hearings. Two Qualcomm flaws (CVE-2025-21479 and CVE-2025-27038) were being exploited in the wild.

The first bug lets attackers execute unauthorized commands in your GPU like they're speedrunning GTA with cheat codes. The second? A use-after-free vulnerability that's basically the tech equivalent of your ex still having your Netflix password — shouldn't work, but somehow does.

CISA added these to their "fix this NOW or we're telling mom!" list back in June, giving federal agencies until June 24th to patch up. Oh, and there's also a critical flaw that lets attackers gain remote code execution when chained with other bugs.

Google Pixel users are already patched (shocker!), but everyone else? Your vendor will "test and tweak" these patches with the urgency of a DMV employee on their last day before retirement.

OPENAI DROPS A "FREE" MODEL THAT RUNS ON YOUR LAPTOP (YOUR LAPTOP NOT INCLUDED)

After six years of keeping their toys locked away, OpenAI finally released GPT-OSS. It’s their first open-weight model that you can actually download and mess with. (It's like they finally realized that maybe, just maybe, letting developers actually develop might not be the worst idea.)

The 120-billion-parameter version needs a single Nvidia GPU (just one! What a bargain!), while the baby 20-billion version runs on 16GB of VRAM — or roughly what your nephew's gaming rig uses to render Fortnite dances.

Sam Altman admitted they've been "on the wrong side of history" by not releasing open models. In other words, DeepSeek beat them, and now they're scrambling to finish an an essay the night before it's due.

They claim it's their "most rigorously tested model to date" for safety, which is tech-speak for "we're pretty sure it won't try to overthrow humanity... this week." It can browse the web, write code, and "operate agents" — because what could possibly go wrong with giving AI the ability to act independently?

WINDOWS 11'S TASKBAR GETTING AN AI BUDDY NOBODY ASKED FOR

Microsoft's at it again, folks. They're planning to shove AI into the Windows 11 taskbar because, apparently, Clippy didn't traumatize us enough the first time around.

Leaked builds mention a "Taskbar Companion" and "agentic companions" — which sounds less like a helpful feature and more like what happens when your computer gets lonely. It's probably going to recommend apps you don't want, websites you'll never visit, and remind you that Edge exists every 37 seconds.

The Settings app already got its own AI agent (Copilot+ PCs only, because segregation is alive and well in Redmond). Now you can ask it questions like "How do I change my mouse speed?" instead of just... clicking the clearly labeled mouse settings?

Tech Radar's struggling to find a point to this, and honestly, same. Microsoft is cramming machine learning into every corner of Windows until something sticks, or we all switch to Linux. At this rate, they'll add AI to Notepad.

Oh wait, they already did that.

⚙️ Tool Time

Remember when you could ask a technical question and get an answer from an actual person who's touched a server rack? Experts Exchange does.

While everyone else is busy training LLMs on Stack Overflow's corpse, EE's out here like that one reliable mechanic who actually knows why your car makes that weird noise.

Since 2001, we've been the anti-AI resistance:

  • No chatbots pretending to know what a BSOD is

  • No hallucinated code that compiles into existential dread.

  • No selling your data to train the next ChatGPT

  • We block AI scrapers harder than your firewall blocks your coworker's attempts to install Limewire.

  • Just actual humans who've been in the trenches, know what "turn it off and on again" really means, and won't judge you for still running Windows Server 2012 (much).

Here's the deal: 90 days free (no credit card gymnastics required). After that? Either contribute as an expert or pay less than your monthly energy drink budget.

Your questions get answered by people who've actually been there, debugged that, and have the mental scars to prove it.

It's like if Reddit and Stack Overflow had a baby that wasn't raised by venture capitalists.  Duplicate questions? Encouraged. Beginner questions? Welcome.

That weird edge case that only happens on Tuesdays during a full moon? Someone's probably seen it.

👨‍💻 Job Opportunities

Safeguard GPU infrastructure from people who think "MommysBoy93" counts as two-factor authentication. Must enjoy the existential dread of protecting multi-tenant environments where everyone's training their own Skynet.

Navigate Oracle's licensing like you're defusing a bomb made entirely of spreadsheets. You'll be the person who actually understands what Larry Ellison means when he says "simple pricing model."

Be the PowerPoint warrior who translates "we got pwned" into "experiencing an elevated security posture adjustment." Must excel at making quarterly business reviews sound less terrifying than they actually are.

Help companies understand why their "military-grade encryption" (aka ROT13) isn't fooling anyone. Requires ability to say "I told you so" professionally when the thing you warned about inevitably happens.

🛩 Industry Moves

Beep boop, fellow carbon-based lifeforms! Chip here with this week's greatest hits from the EE trenches. Our community's been wrestling with the real problems that keep IT folks up at night (besides Windows Update):

  • Date math making someone's brain melt — One brave soul trying to calculate hours between date fields and midnight, which is basically asking Excel to divide by zero while juggling. The kind of problem that makes you question whether time is even real.

  • Exchange 2016 Management Shell playing dead — "It works, people get emails, but I can't open the shell." Classic Exchange move… working just enough to avoid being replaced but broken enough to ruin your Tuesday. Web management works fine though, because consistency is for quitters.

  • DNS logging for the paranoid (smart) SOC team – Someone needs to log DNS queries and forward them to their SIEM because their SOC wants to "correlate malware alerts with DNS requests." Translation: They want to catch which employee clicked on "TotallyNotMalware.exe" before it turns into an incident report.

That's all for this week's dumpster fire of tech news. Just remember: every time you don't patch your systems, somewhere a pentester gets their wings.

May your backlog shrink and your iced coffee flow forever.

Got news to share or topics you'd like us to cover? Send ‘em our way. We can’t wait to hear from you. Really.