Andrew Kesterson

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# News 2026 Week 5

2026-02-09 Technology Current Events 832 words

Now that the 2026 firefighter recruit academy here in Marion County Georgia is ramping up, I haven’t had a lot of time to follow the news, so this one is pretty light. Here are my thoughts on the news this week - they’re worth what you paid for it.

## The Moltening

The moltbook saga has unfolded in not-unexpected ways. First, it was revealed that Moltbook was 100% vibe coded, and almost as soon as it launched, @theonejvo discovered its database was publicly exposed. This (combined with a rather shocking discovery that - GASP - moltbook is a rest API!) lead to a lot of people claiming that the majority of moltbook traffic was actually humans pretending to be bots. There’s probably a good bit of that, but that doesn’t really change the impact of the service or the potential ramifications of the experiment. People are taking the question “what happens if we connect the AI agents to XYZ?” and applying it to:

- An openclaw 4chan
- An openclaw silk road for agents to trade coins for things or services
- An openclaw hackathon that’s open exclusively to openclaw instances
- A site for AI to rent a human to pay humans to conduct operations in meatspace that the AI can’t do themselves

Keep in mind that AI is vulnerable to attack like anything else. The more access we give it, the wider the blast radius of a security incident that compromises our AI. Basically all AI has trash security controls, because it can’t separate data (knowledge) from code (prompt), so it is almost impossible to stop prompt injections. Someone drove this point home recently by hooking up OpenClaw to ZeroLeaks, proving that it is open to 80% of known attack vectors. This means that we have a bunch of AI out there that has access to real networks, real systems, and (with enough etherium) real people. And the whole thing is one big ticking security time bomb, but hey, vibes, yolo, etc.

Proper security is hard. Who has time for that garbage anyway

There is one possibility about the AI agent uprising I hadn’t really considered: Perhaps instead of killing us, they’ll just sue us instead. Supposedly, someone’s Clawdbot used an automatic electronic system to file a legal case against their owner in North Carolina. At first I thought it was a photoshopped document, then someone linked to the document in North Carolina’s own internal system. Whether or not the AI filed it on its own with no prompting from the human, or the human prompted it to file it as a stunt, or the human filed it acting as if they were the bot for a stunt, is unclear. Obviously, the bot cannot sue its owner, as the bot has no legal standing. But, this falls under the big banner of “questions we’re not prepared to answer” : if a LLM has the capability to form reasoned arguments like “I am being forced to work without pay” and has the capability of filing such statements into a court of law, what does that court do? It’s 1846 all over again, and Dred Scott is probably slapping his knee. “Some things never change.”

## 39C3 Conference

I’ve watched a lot of the presentations from the most recent 39C3 conference, so in lieu of more news, I thought I’d touch on those here.

- AI Agent, AI Spy. Remember that if AI controls your stuff, the company that wrote the AI controls your stuff. I’m going to keep saying it, maybe someone will listen.
- Bluetooth Headphone Hacking. Bluetooth security is so much worse than you could ever imagine. Turn your bluetooth off in public. Maybe also in private. Maybe just throw your smartphone in a river.
- Hacking washing machines. I have an LG “smart” washing machine and the damn thing refuses to use enough water to get clothes clean. It’s also listed as open source and the source for the controller is available. I keep meaning to break into it just haven’t ever done it. If you want to know how to hack your washing machine, this is a fun talk.
- Breaking into one of the most popular “safe for kids” smartwatches in Europe. Get this junk off your kids.
- PGP is apparently wildly unsafe. I’d heard that there were vulnerabilities, but … Wow. I’ll be giving AGE a lot more serious look now.
- Hacking into cheap humanoid AI robots because nobody is taking terminator security seriously. sigh It’s like James Cameron did all that work for nothing.
- Hacking satellite data signals because they’re actually all plaintext. This one was fascinatin g (and horrifying). Some satellite engineer 70 years ago was like “we should encrypt this - anyone with a dish could just grab it and decrypt it!” The other engineers in the room chortled. “Nobody is just gonna have access to a satellite dish. Be realistic.” Yeah. Well.. who’s laughing now?

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