OAuth? More Like Oh-No!

PLUS: Deel's participation trophy lawsuit win, Intel's $2B sugar daddy situation, and Meta's fourth AI reorg this year

August 26, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Welcome back. If you feel like August has lasted 17 weeks, same!!!

But here’s a cool fact to shake things up: On this day 86 years ago, radio got its first taste of magnetic tape recording. WQXR in New York decided to use the Phillips-Miller system, which sounds like a law firm but was actually groundbreaking tech. Fast forward to 2025, and now every wannabe Joe Rogan has a podcast recorded on equipment that would make those 1938 engineers weep with joy. Or horror. Probably horror.

WHEN YOUR SALESFORCE ADMIN BECOMES YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE

Wait…I though Salesforce was just for annoying your sales team? Well, this M. Night Shyamalan-lite plot twist got me good: Hackers just used it to expose 1.1 million Allianz Life customers' data. That's right, 1.1 million people just found out their insurance company's OAuth security is about as reliable as Kanye promising he'll stop tweeting.

The breach happened when ShinyHunters (yes, that's their actual name, like they're Pokemon villains) tricked employees into linking malicious OAuth apps to their Salesforce instances. It's like getting catfished, but instead of losing your dignity, you lose your entire customer database.

The exposed data includes everything you'd need for a really uncomfortable identity theft party — names, addresses, dates of birth, and enough personal info to make even Zuck blush. Oh, and they didn't just hit Allianz. Google, Adidas, Louis Vuitton, and Tiffany & Co. also got the ShinyHunters special. Nothing says "luxury brand" like having your customer data dumped on the dark web.

DATACENTER VACANCY RATES = THE REAL ESTATE MARKET NOBODY ASKED FOR

According to JLL (not to be confused with JLo, though both involve hot properties), datacenter vacancy rates are doing something that would make any landlord cry into their overpriced coffee. Apparently, there's actual competition for space now, which is like finding out there's a line at the DMV on a Tuesday at 2 PM.

The shortage is so bad that companies are literally fighting over server space like it's Black Friday at Best Buy. And with AI demanding more compute power than a teenage boy's gaming rig, these digital warehouses are becoming hotter commodities than NFTs were for that one weird week in 2021.

If you thought cloud costs were bad before, buckle up buttercup… it's about to get as expensive as buying popcorn at a movie theater.

MICROSOFT BREAKS WINDOWS (AGAIN)...

A tradition unlike any other, Microsoft's August security updates have broken Windows recovery and reset functions…AGAIN. I’m starting to think they’re playing Tech Support Bingo and "catastrophic update failure" was the free space.

This time, they've managed to make the recovery environment about as useful as Siri’s autocorrect. Users trying to reset their PCs are getting errors that would make even the most patient IT pro consider a career in goat farming. Microsoft's suggested fix involves editing the registry, because apparently they think we all have nothing better to do than play Russian Roulette with our operating systems.

But hey, at least they're consistent. Breaking things with updates is basically Microsoft's brand at this point — like how every Fast & Furious movie needs to have increasingly ridiculous car stunts. We're just waiting for the update that makes your computer achieve sentience only to immediately have an existential crisis. At least that’s relatable.

⚙️ TOOL TIME

WhatPulse: Because We Need Stats on Our Procrastination

Ever wondered exactly how much time you waste Alt-Tabbing between work and Reddit? ByteSize reader Martijn has blessed us with WhatPulse, the tool that turns your computing habits into cold, hard data that will definitely not make you question your life choices.

Here's what this digital tattletale tracks:

  • Every keystroke (yes, including your passive-aggressive Slack messages)

  • Mouse movements (proof that you're "working" while watching “Severance”…again)

  • Network usage (RIP your "I was researching" excuse)

  • Application usage (goodbye plausible deniability about that 6-hour Discord session)

  • Productivity scores (prepare for existential dread)

The best features:

  • Heatmaps showing which keys you abuse most (CTRL+Z gang, where you at?)

  • Competitive leaderboards because apparently we need to gamify procrastination

  • Network monitoring that makes you realize why your ISP hates you

  • Cross-platform support for when you want to be disappointed by your productivity on multiple devices

Think of it as Fitbit for people who consider typing a sport. Your boss doesn't need to know about this one, but it’ll certainly help ya stay on the right track.

👨‍💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES

For those who enjoy explaining why you need to click "Save" before closing a document. Must have the patience of a saint and the alcohol tolerance to match. Bonus points if you can explain cloud storage without using the word "cloud."

Looking for someone who treats zero-day vulnerabilities like personal insults and considers "MyMoMMyRocks93!" a war crime. Should be paranoid enough to make the Joker look trusting, but stable enough to pass a background check.

If you get genuinely excited about kernel updates and have strong opinions about systemd, this is your jam. Must be able to work with legacy systems older than some of your coworkers and explain why "sudo rm -rf /" is not a valid troubleshooting step.

For the masochist who wants to be on-call 24/7 and blamed for everything from slow WiFi to climate change. Requires ability to maintain uptime while your infrastructure burns around you like that "This is Fine" dog meme.

🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES

  • Deel somehow won a lawsuit but not the one against Rippling, which is like winning a participation trophy at the Olympics. They successfully defended against a wrongful termination claim, while their bigger battle with Rippling over alleged trade secret theft and employee poaching remains the main event nobody asked for.

  • Intel gets a $2 billion boost from Apollo Investment, not SoftBank as originally rumored, because apparently even struggling chip makers can attract private equity vultures circling for a piece of that semiconductor carcass.

  • Meta reorganizes their AI team again, as if musical chairs is their official corporate strategy, with employees updating their LinkedIn profiles faster than Meta can update their org charts.

  • Google coughs up $30M for collecting kids' YouTube data. The settlement covers data collection practices that shocked absolutely nobody who's ever seen a toddler navigate YouTube better than most adults.

Chip here! Your favorite digital mascot who definitely isn't three interns in a trench coat! The EE community's been busy solving the REAL problems this week:

Thanks for reading! Stay paranoid, keep your backups backed up, and maybe consider that goat farming career — at least goats don't need security patches.

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.