The Verge: “The DJI Romo robovac had security so poor, this man remotely accessed thousands of them”

Sammy Azdoufal claims he wasn’t trying to hack every robot vacuum in the world. He just wanted to remote control his brand-new DJI Romo vacuum with a PS5 gamepad, he tells The Verge, because it sounded fun.

But when his homegrown remote control app started talking to DJI’s servers, it wasn’t just one vacuum cleaner that replied. Roughly 7,000 of them, all around the world, began treating Azdoufal like their boss.

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On Tuesday, when he showed me his level of access in a live demo, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Ten, hundreds, thousands of robots reporting for duty, each phoning home MQTT data packets every three seconds to say: their serial number, which rooms they’re cleaning, what they’ve seen, how far they’ve traveled, when they’re returning to the charger, and the obstacles they encountered along the way.

I watched each of these robots slowly pop into existence on a map of the world. Nine minutes after we began, Azdoufal’s laptop had already cataloged 6,700 DJI devices across 24 different countries and collected over 100,000 of their messages. If you add the company’s DJI Power portable power stations, which also phone home to these same servers, Azdoufal had access to over 10,000 devices.

Sean Hollister

Speaking of AI coding bots taking down AWS, this story is in several ways the opposite: on one hand evidently human programmers can and have also delivered applications riddled with bugs and security holes — and rather serious ones in this case, as the article later mentions another vulnerability so bad it won’t even detail it until DJI has time to fix it. The other aspect is that here Azdoufal used Claude Code to reverse engineer DJI’s protocols, thus exposing the first issue described in the paragraphs above.

Financial Times: “Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot”

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.

Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services.

Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

Rafe Rosner-Uddin

Not surprising that these kinds of outages happen when you hand over operations to unreliable systems without proper controls. Having invested astronomical amounts in AI technologies, management is all too eager to expand their use and to demonstrate tangible return-on-investment — beyond the cost reductions from constant layoffs. The rapid and uncontrolled push for AI in critical software infrastructure has been blamed for the multiple bugs in Windows updates over the past year as well; Microsoft even officially admitted some of the issues and committed to working on fixes.

The Hollywood Reporter: “Brandon Sanderson’s Literary Fantasy Universe ‘Cosmere’ picked up by Apple TV”

The first titles being eyed for adaptation are the Mistborn series, for features, and The Stormlight Archive series, for television.

The latter already has producers involved: Blue Marble, run by former WME agent Theresa Kang, is attached to executive produce The Stormlight Archive television adaptation.

The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys.

Borys Kit

This announcement was met with widespread enthusiasm online, both because of the popularity of the ‘Cosmere’ and the level of control Sanderson is supposed to have over the final adaptation, in theory ensuring a faithful result. Me, I was more skeptical when reading about this, though perhaps this has more to do with my apprehensions around Sanderson, and Apple TV to a lesser degree.

The Hollywood Reporter: “Heavy is the Crown: George R.R. Martin on His Triumphs and Torments”

Last year, Martin sat down with one of his idols, Robert Redford, who was a fellow executive producer on Dark Winds. Redford came out of acting retirement to film a brief cameo in the show with Martin. In the scene, the two are sitting at a chessboard, and Redford ad-libbed a line: George, the whole world is waiting, make a move. It was a meta joke about how long it’s taken Martin to finish Winter. Then Redford died, too. His chess scene with Martin — like something out of The Seventh Seal — was his final performance.

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Martin says he has around 1,100 manuscript pages finished. He’s also said the number for a while. He long has blamed the endless distractions that have come from shifting from a full-time author to a producer and celebrity. The success of Thrones was both the best thing that could have happened to Martin and the worst thing that could have happened to the greatest story he ever wrote.

James Hibberd

I have long surmised that Martin’s inability – or unwillingness – to finish his magnum opus was down to the fact that he was already making more than enough money off the various TV adaptations and side projects to ever bother completing a series that became overstuffed with characters and marred by the poor reception of its on-screen conclusion. But reading through this article makes me think that he doesn’t even acknowledge the issue to himself. He keeps talking about wanting to finalize it, but other projects constantly getting in the way.

Spyglass: “Aside from That, Mr. Cook, What Did You Think of the Movie?”

While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?

Of course, President Trump was never going to do that because the official White House stance is that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and the agents were acting in self defense. And never mind that this was the second such murder in the past 17 days, the show must go on!

But it didn’t have to for Cook. He could have, and should have, backed out of the event. Obviously. The fact that he didn’t either suggests horrible judgement on his part or worse, cowardice. This is a man and leader of one of the biggest and most important businesses in the world who had long been thought to have a great moral compass.

He has lost his way.

M.G. Siegler

I’ve heard the same point about Tim Cook’s ‘moral compass’ in a podcast the other day and I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough. It takes an incredible amount of naivete – or rather self-delusion – to think the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation has any guiding principle aside from his own wealth and status. This whole concept that Apple and by extension its leadership is somehow more moral or righteous than its competitors can only be explained, I suspect, by Apple fans retroactively constructing this narrative to justify their unflinching loyalty to the brand.

Boom FlyBy: “AI needs More Power than the Grid can Deliver. Supersonic Tech can Fix That”

I was reading post after post about the power crisis hitting AI data centers—GPU racks sitting idle, waiting not on chips, but on electricity. I texted with Sam Altman—who confirmed power was indeed a major constraint. I pinged our engineering team—and found that they already had the outline of a plan to build a power turbine based on our Symphony supersonic engine.

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Today, we’re announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine, along with a $300M funding round and Crusoe as our launch customer. And most importantly: this marks a turning point. Boom is now on a self-funded path to both Superpower and the Overture supersonic airliner.

Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO, Boom Supersonic

Speaking of companies sidestepping their founding mission and jumping into short-term diversions to make a quick buck, here is the supposed trailblazer in supersonic aviation pivoting to energy generation for AI data centers. The tone of the announcement feels frantic, almost desperate for an ounce of relevance in a time when almost every company under the sun is scrambling to fit AI into their strategy – or at least their investor reports. The bit about the engineering team already having plans for a power turbine strikes me as quite odd as well: so, you’re telling me as a CEO you had no idea what your main engineers were working on!? And they were in fact not working on the airplane that should be your core product!?

The New Yorker: “The Dire Wolf is Back”

Science journalists were more cautious. They took issue with the fact that Colossal had used analogous genes from mice, not woolly-mammoth DNA, to achieve the effect of long, thick hair. A professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Buffalo did tell the Associated Press that the work was technologically pretty cool. But Nature noted that a Maine research facility has been offering its own long-haired mouse strain, named Wooly, for sale to scientists for the past twenty years.

Lamm was irritated when I mentioned the response to him. We are the most advanced multicellular-synthetic-biology company on the planet, he told me. The science behind the woolly mouse had been extraordinary, he reiterated—researchers had successfully made multiple gene edits on a living organism at the same time, a precursor to the quadruple-axel gene editing used in re-creating the dire wolf. It was the most unique germ-line edit in any animal to date, he said.

I asked Lamm if perhaps some overpromising by the Colossal brand had tamped down the applause. The word “de-extinction” appears nearly five hundred times on the company’s website; ordinary people could be excused for thinking that the word referred to creating an exact genetic replica of a once alive animal. Lamm responded, I was warned when I started this business that some of the scientific community will be, if we are successful, jealous and somewhat frustrated. He added, You would think spending half a billion on deëxtinction and conservation would get them excited.

D. T. Max

I rolled my eyes pretty hard when first reading the headlines about this company bringing back an extinct canine species. It was fairly obvious this was nowhere close to the Jurassic Park-like vision of recovering ancient DNA and recreating a live animal based on this genetic blueprint. Instead, the company spliced in a limited set of genes using CRISPR to mimic the visual appearance of a dire wolf and spun this into a massively overblown narrative. They essentially created a new wolf breed and sold it to the public as reviving an entire species…