A lot of companies seem to misunderstand the role of pay in hiring and retaining smart people. In my first year at Microsoft Research I listened to a (normally sensible) member of the lab’s leadership team explain that the bonus structure was there to incentivise good research. I looked around the room and wondered who had ever thought ‘well, I was going to do some mediocre research, but for 20% more money this year I will do something world leading!’ My guess: no one.

If you want to hire the best people, you are looking for the people who, if money didn’t matter, would do the job for free because they believe it’s important and care about the outcome. You don’t pay them well to persuade them to work. You pay them well so that they can afford to work on the things that they think are important. If smart people don’t think the things you’re doing are important then you should consider why you’re doing them.

This is especially true for executive compensation. The best CEOs are ones that care about the company’s products and want everyone to use them, not the ones that want to make the most money. This is especially true for non profits where your pool should start with people who care a lot about the organisation’s mission. Paying more (above a certain level) won’t find more of those people it will simply dilute the pool with people who are there for the money, not the mission.

EDIT: A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding this and think this is an argument to pay people badly. It absolutely isn't. If you pay people badly, they will spend a lot if time thinking about money. Your job as a manager is to remove problems. Money removes a lot of problems. But a lot of problems cannot be removed by applying money. If someone competent is being told to do nonsense work that they know will cause problems in the long run, no amount of money will make them motivated. The problems that can be solved with money are the easy ones.

[RSS] NTLM reflection is dead, long live NTLM reflection! - An in-depth analysis of CVE-2025-33073

https://www.synacktiv.com/en/publications/ntlm-reflection-is-dead-long-live-ntlm-reflection-an-in-depth-analysis-of-cve-2025

[RSS] Exploring Kernel Address Leakage via WARN()

https://u1f383.github.io/linux/2025/06/14/exploring-kernel-address-leakage-via-WARN.html

[RSS] exploits.club Weekly Newsletter 75 - Speaker Hacking, Old Video Game Bugs, SecureBoot Bypasses, And More

https://blog.exploits.club/exploits-club-weekly-newsletter-75-speaker-hacking-old-video-game-bugs-secureboot-bypasses-and-more/

Meta AI posts your personal chats to a public feed

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/14/meta-ai-posts-your-personal-chats-to-a-public-feed/ - text
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj_Hu2Pmwzo&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

Looks like the Google Cloud incident report is out: https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1SsW

Summary:

- On May 29, 2025, a new Service Control feature was added for quota policy checks.
- This feature did not have appropriate error handling, nor was it feature flag protected.
- On June 12, 2025, a policy with unintended blank fields was inserted and replicated globally within seconds.
- The blank fields caused a null pointer which caused the binaries to go into a crash loop.

"If this had been flag protected, the issue would have been caught in staging."

^ Kinda reminds me of the CrowdStrike incident. 🫠

Check out our first blog post about V8 CVE-2024-12695: https://bugscale.ch/blog/dissecting-cve-2024-12695-exploiting-object-assign-in-v8/

By 1986, the U.S. began attempting computer network exploitation. That same year, the U.S. discovered the Soviets were paying hackers to target U.S. networks using similar methods. https://www.army.mil/article/286292/army_cyber_corps_a_prehistory

🚨Binarly is documenting the discovery of CVE-2025-3052, a memory-corruption flaw in a Microsoft-signed UEFI module that lets attackers bypass Secure Boot and run unsigned code before the OS starts.

🔗 Full details: https://www.binarly.io/blog/another-crack-in-the-chain-of-trust
🛡️ Advisory: https://www.binarly.io/advisories/brly-dva-2025-001

#cybersecurity

Submitted my first bug via GitHub's advisory reporting mechanism for hosted projects (I know, right!?!?). Much less painful than the traditional hunt the email address/chase the vendor so far.

#bug

REcover is a tool for approximately recovering the compile-unit layout from stripped binary executables.

https://github.com/huku-/recover

Back up your 2fa keys, or add a second method.

Do it now, before your phone dies/breaks/is stolen.

That's it that's the post.

This is the 100 year anniversary of humans having an idea of what the heck the sun and all the stars actually are. If you had asked a leading astronomer in 1925 what the sun was, they would say that it's basically the same as Earth, but very hot.

In Cecilia Payne's doctoral thesis she was the first to say, from spectral data, that the sun was overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium.

It was later described as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin

Have you ever spent precious time converting something like "0xde, 0xad,\r\n0xbe, 0xef" to "\xde\xad\xbe\xef"?

If so, then xer is for you:

https://github.com/v-p-b/xer

This is also my first somewhat useful #Rust project, so be gentle <3

Outlook must die, again
Gemini might have the best solution for Outlook (new) to prevent it regularly appearing back on my system. I do not want this code!!

Remove Provisioned App Packages (More Aggressive - Use with Caution):
This is a more permanent solution that attempts to remove the app not just for your user profile, but for all future user profiles on the system, and prevents it from being provisioned again automatically by the OS.

Open PowerShell as Administrator.

Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Where-Object {$_.Name -like "Microsoft.OutlookForWindows*"}

Look for the PackageFullName (e.g., Microsoft.OutlookForWindows_1.2024.515.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe).

Remove for Current User:

Get-AppxPackage *Microsoft.OutlookForWindows* | Remove-AppxPackage

Remove Provisioned Package (Crucial for preventing reinstallation):
PowerShell

Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Where-Object {$_.PackageName -like "Microsoft.OutlookForWindows*"} | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online

Note: If you run the Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage command and it doesn't find the package, it means it's not provisioned for new users, but might still be re-added through other mechanisms like Windows Feature Experience Pack updates.

Me: (Selects option to create a new empty folder on my Win11 i5 laptop)

Laptop: OH DEAR GOD NO WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? I MUST CRANK ON THE FANS AND DISPLAY THE EXPLORER NOT RESPONDING BANNER TO DEAL WITH THIS UNPRECEDENTED DEMAND ON MY PROCESSORS! YOU VICIOUS, HEARTLESS BASTARD! *sob*

Me: (Smiles and quietly fantasizes again about shooting this laptop.)

“jemalloc Postmortem” https://jasone.github.io/2025/06/12/jemalloc-postmortem/

ominous voids per byte

Today we published two blog posts about an HTML specification change that makes mutation XSS harder to exploit! Long story short: `<` and `>` are now escaped in attributes.

* Blog post about security rationale behind this change: https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5038742869770240/escaping-and-in-attributes-how-it-helps-protect-against-mutation-xss
* Blog post about how it affects web developers: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/escape-attributes?hl=en