AWS breaks the internet, Russians weaponize CAPTCHAs, Google plays monopoly

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Happy Tuesday! It’s October 28th, and your laptop fan is howling, your team’s ghosting you, and we’re here with the Bytes.

On this day, Bill Gates was born, kicking off a lifetime of questionable fashion choices, antitrust lawsuits, and surprisingly decent philanthropy. Sure, he gave us Windows ME and Clippy, but hey… saving millions of lives from malaria actually makes up for forcing us to ask a paperclip for help.

AWS Outage Turns Smart Homes Into Dumb Boxes

Last week’s AWS faceplant didn't just knock out half the internet. It reduced our connected smart home devices to the emotional stability of a Slack thread during a live outage.

The real MVPs of this mess are the EightSleep users whose $200-a-month smart mattresses got stuck in "relax mode," essentially transforming bedrooms into Swedish saunas. One unfortunate soul complained about "sweating through my sheets because the app's dead," AKA basically the origin story of every LinkedIn post that ends with “and that’s how I learned to scale empathy.”

Meanwhile, automated litter boxes forgot how to talk to the cloud, leaving cat owners across America wondering if they'd have to go back to actually covering their business like it's the dark ages. At least the felines maintained operational status, unlike their human overlords (like myself) frantically refreshing apps and questioning their life choices.

The DNS snafu that caused all this eventually got traced back to Amazon's "oldest and largest" site, knocking out Snapchat, Signal, Reddit, and even Fortnite while causing flight delays and banking outages. One analyst estimated the fallout reached hundreds of billions in damages from productivity losses alone (apparently shutting down half the internet for a few hours costs more than most countries' GDP). Who knew our entire economy was just AWS with extra steps?

By the time engineers fixed everything, Reddit's r/sysadmin had transformed into a group therapy session with comments like "Turn off my phone, alter my appearance, think about changing my name" and my personal favorite: "It's funny you think it's a guy and not a straight AI production code push with AI code review." Because who needs humans when you can have robots breaking robots, am I right?!

Russian Hackers Master the Art of Weaponized CAPTCHAs

The Star Blizzard crew (also known as ColdRiver, SINCE Russian hackers collect aliases like they're Pokemon cards) decided that traditional phishing was too mainstream. Now they're using fake CAPTCHA pages to trick people into proving they're human by... running malware?

Their latest masterpiece involves malicious tools with names like NOROBOT, YESROBOT, and MAYBEROBOT – because nothing says "sophisticated cyber warfare" like naming your malware after a toddler playing Twenty Questions with a Roomba.

The attack works by presenting victims with an "I am not a robot" challenge that actually launches the NOROBOT malware when they try to prove their humanity. It's the digital version of that scene in Severance where MDR employees have to separate scary numbers from friendly numbers, except instead of work-life balance trauma, you get a Russian backdoor in your system.

Google's threat intelligence team says ColdRiver abandoned their old LostKeys malware just five days after researchers published their analysis – faster than Elon Musk abandoning a child. The group then pivoted through YESROBOT (which required a full Python installation because subtlety is dead) before settling on MAYBEROBOT, a PowerShell script that's about as stealthy as Mark Zuckerberg trying to act human in congressional hearings.

Cloudflare CEO Takes on Google's Crawler Monopoly

Last week, we talked about how Matthew Prince is in London playing the role of tech industry's least fun dinner party guest, telling UK regulators that Google's search dominance gives it an unfair advantage in the AI race. Now, we’re learning that the company that controls 90% of search might have some leverage in related markets.

Prince's main gripe is that Google bundles its web crawler with everything from search to AI training to ad safety, creating what he calls an "absolute God-given right to all content in the world." It's like if Jeff Bezos decided Amazon Prime should also include access to your refrigerator, your Netflix password, and your firstborn child. (Oh wait, they kind of already do!)

But get this… if you block Google's crawler, it doesn't just hurt your search rankings. It also breaks their ad safety systems across all platforms. Prince suggests the solution is "thousands of AI companies" competing to buy content from media businesses. Yeah, because what the internet really needs is more AI companies bidding on content like it's a Black Friday sale at Best Buy.

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👨‍💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES

Data Platforms Manager, Support Operations @ Capital One

What’s in your wallet? Hopefully, a resume! Capital One want someone to manage teams providing "technology support operations" which really just means "please make our servers stop screaming." Requires 2+ years managing IT teams.

IT Service Desk Analyst @ CarGurus

Located in Boston, CarGurus need someone who can mentor junior staff while maintaining high customer satisfaction scores. Bonus points if you can "transport equipment" and "plug in devices under desks" without having an existential crisis.

Director, Service Desk @ Braze

Braze is looking for someone to provide "strategic leadership" for their global service desk. This role manages other managers, which means you get to experience the unique joy of explaining to executives why the thing they want can't be done. Also, explain to your team why the thing that can't be done is now mandatory.

🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES

• Serval raised $47M to build AI agents for IT service management, because we needed robots to automate the process of telling other robots to restart.

• NASA opened Artemis III to competition after SpaceX fell behind schedule, prompting Musk to claim "Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission," like he's negotiating with his ex-wife's lawyer.

• Jaguar Land Rover's hack cost the UK economy $2.5 billion, proving that even luxury car manufacturers can't escape the universal law that all software is terrible.

• Meta axed 600 AI roles while hiring for their "superintelligence" team, because saying "we're serious about AI" is just like firing your AI researchers to make room for more AI researchers.

Hey there, Byters! It's Chip, your friendly neighborhood tech support mascot, here with another round of "Why Is Everything Broken?":

• Someone's battling MS Word's pagination system and losing harder than anyone who's ever tried to understand Microsoft's licensing model.

• A member wants to turn an old Dell tower into a Linux file server, which is like trying to convert a 1995 Honda Civic into a Formula 1 race car — technically possible, but you're going to need more than just good intentions.

• After decades of VMware loyalty, someone's considering Hyper-V and wondering whether to convert old files or start fresh.

That’s the news…Oh, and Happy Halloween! Ghost that Slack channel and carve a pumpkin. Until next time: avoid haunted APIs, update your firewall, and avoid that vendor email.

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