Bonjour, Byters! It's Bastille Day and France plays Spain in the semi-finals. (That's either poetic timing or incredibly rigged scheduling by FIFA...) But Ooh là là, my croissant has never tasted more patriotic. If you're French and skipping ByteSize today... c'est la vie. No red card for you.

Sixty-one years ago today, NASA's Mariner 4 buzzed past Mars and beamed back the first photos ever taken of another planet, mostly craters, because even the universe knew Mars was going to be a letdown. But hey… while Mariner 4 gave us grainy proof that Mars is just a sad rock, at least it didn't accidentally build a botnet on the way there.

We'll get to that later.

Researchers just confirmed that your AI coding assistant thinks it has Don Draper aura (despite having the reading comprehension of a golden retriever) when it comes to making things up, and hackers are cashing in.

The attack, dubbed “HalluSquatting” (someone with a brain came up with this name, incredible), exploits the fact that AI tools will occasionally invent a software package that doesn't exist and recommend it with the unearned confidence of a guy at a bar who "actually knows the owner." Attackers just register that fake package name before your AI does, then sit back while your assistant faceplants into their trap like Joe Pesci opening a door in Home Alone.

Researchers demonstrated code execution against multiple coding assistants and framed the technique as a scalable path to mass compromise and botnet assembly, hitting tools including Cursor, Cursor CLI, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Cline, OpenClaw, ZeroClaw, and NanoClaw, because naming conventions in tech are apparently decided by nine year olds with a Pokémon obsession.

One fake name, planted once, can infect thousands of machines and stitch them into a botnet. So somewhere out there, code editors are quietly recruiting an army while their developers argue about tabs versus spaces. Godspeed, everyone

Apple sued OpenAI last week over alleged trade secret theft, and within hours Elon Musk and Sam Altman turned X into a billionaire slap fight that would make a Real Madrid - Barcelona FC rivalry look tame.

Musk dusted off "Scam Altman," accused him of leveling up from stealing a nonprofit to stealing Apple's phone tech, and posted a meme mocking Altman's motives. Altman clapped back (while dropping in a uncomfortably forced “homeboy”), posting that Musk was the one selling public market investors on short-term space datacenters, a jab at Musk's orbital data center pitch.

Musk fired back that launches are on schedule and Altman's welcome to attend, pending his parole officer's approval. This is Messi versus Ronaldo if both players owned the league, wrote the rulebook, and called each other “FIFA’s princess.” 👀

A federal jury already tanked Musk's earlier OpenAI lawsuit back in May. He's appealing, because of course he is.

Somewhere in Shenzhen, DeepSeek did the most human thing an AI has ever done: it tried to help and then made everything worse by accidentally committing a crime.

Check Point researchers found a DeepSeek-generated sample that combined a theoretical browser-only ransomware concept with a real browser capability, disguised as a fake Discord photo upscaler that locks and ransoms your files using nothing but your browser's own permissions. Skip the install, exploit, and app store gatekeeper entirely, this thing runs straight through the browser, and it works across Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.

Seems like the workings of Dr. Evil, but nobody set out to build this, by the way. DeepSeek saw a mess, grabbed the nearest tool, and made it worse with the full confidence of a seven-year-old who definitely knows how to use a power drill. The model kept saying "I got this" to an unreasonable prompt until it face-planted into a real attack chain. Just like every kid who "helped" mom with laundry and turned all the white linen bedsheets it into a suspicious-looking pile of brown-stained betrayal.

Strangely enough, I feel for DeepSeek. The poor lil' LLM model just wanted to help… even though it ruined someone's photo library instead.

Freshservice (by Freshworks) is IT support infrastructure that doesn't require four escalations, a blood sacrifice, and a prayer to whoever maintains your legacy systems just to close a ticket.

Used by goated brands like American Express, Mastercard, and Sony, it automates the workflows your team is currently doing manually at 6 AM while eating a sad granola bar over a keyboard.

The AI built into it is called “Freddy.” Freddy does not apologize for the inconvenience or suggest clearing your cache, because there is no inconvenience and he’s already done everything for you:

Freshservice is what 74,000+ IT teams (that’s a lot!!!) switched to when they got tired of managing chaos with duct tape and good intentions. The ticket graveyard closes here.

Now’s your chance to try Freshworks for free. (Thank us later 😏)

IT Ops Manager @ CoreWeave: Keep the machines that power everyone else's AI dreams alive and humming, ideally without personally becoming Skynet's first employee of the month. Day to day, that means overseeing infrastructure uptime, coordinating with engineering teams, and making sure the GPUs stay cool enough to keep printing money for people who will never say thank you.

Assistant IT Support Lead @ People, Technology & Processes, LLC: A company name so generic it sounds like an AI hallucinated it, which, given this week's news, is a genuinely terrifying possibility. The job itself is exactly what it says on the tin: fixing tickets, wrangling support requests, and being the calm human in the room when someone's Outlook has once again decided PST files are a personality trait.

Sr. IT Change Manager @ General Dynamics: Manage change at a defense contractor, because herding bureaucracy and things that go boom builds real character. In practice, you'll be running change management processes, coordinating approvals across teams, and making sure nothing gets deployed without the proper twelve layers of sign-off first.

Hey hey, it's Chip, your resident pixelated gremlin who lives in the wires and silently judges your ticket queue from the shadows. Here’s a recap of what the EE community got extremely real about this week:

…and that’s a wrap from this week’s ByteSize! Logging off before a ref gives Messi another penalty kick.