AI companies are trying to take the only cool thing their tech has ever done, making me vaguely interested for the first time ever in the concept of open weight models, local AI, etc. Time to take out a second mortgage on the house I don't have to finance a graphics card. Anyways, let's get into it:

‘Reverse Engineer Anything’: AI Companies Crack Down on the Coolest Thing People Were Doing With AI

It was a fun few weeks while it lasted. People using both Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex to do AI-powered “reverse-engineering” or decompiling are now hitting guardrails or having their accounts limited while trying to do things like unbrick their internet-of-things devices or remove surveillance ads from their smart TVs.

Several people have reported triggering “safety checks” in Claude Code that prevented them from doing AI-powered reverse engineering; a highly upvoted Reddit post in r/ClaudeCode reads “The Dream is dead. Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) is not likely to work with Claude.” A thread in the Reverse Engineer Anything Discord from last week reads, “Claude is refusing to decompile anything,” with multiple users responding saying they have hit similar walls. And X user log4j, who used OpenAI’s Codex to reverse engineer Samsung TVs, reported having their OpenAI account banned for violating its rules on “cyber abuse.” Other users said they asked Codex to reverse engineer hardware or their own code now say they have either been warned by the company or had their accounts restricted. A project called Decomp.wtf that made it easier to reverse engineer software and games has also shut down in recent days.

As we reported last month, Reverse Engineer-Anything has made it easy for people to use AI tools to hack electronics that they own and replace a manufacturer’s software or operating system with an open source or vibecoded one. People have installed new operating systems on their smart TVs, have turned baby monitors into AI assistants, have unbricked internet-of-things devices that were abandoned by their manufacturers, and have installed new software on very old hardware. At the time, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the trend, but as I’ve seen people take ownership and control back over the devices that manufacturers have purposefully bricked, turned into spyware, or have placed artificial limitations on, I have come to see AI-powered reverse engineering of electronic devices as one of the few LLM uses genuinely worth getting excited about. And so big companies have immediately taken steps to restrict this behavior.

The policy tweaks show that big AI corporations will protect other big corporations when their users find ways to use LLMs to circumvent the artificial constraints that hardware manufacturers put on their devices. AI-powered copyright circumvention is OK with big tech when it’s a massive company scraping the entire internet to build their LLMs, but is not OK when people then use those tools to liberate their internet-of-things devices. It’s not the end of AI-powered reverse engineering, but people suddenly getting locked out of their accounts for asking AI to reverse engineer their gadgets suggests that the future of this practice lies in open weight, local, and uncensored models, making it less accessible to the masses and the people who could probably benefit from it most.

Tarun Gogineni, an OpenAI engineer, tweeted that people are not supposed to have their OpenAI accounts restricted for reverse engineering: “these blocks are mostly accidental and a result of difficult decision boundaries; there is no prohibition against reverse engineering with codex. it’s getting fixed,” he tweeted.

But people who are doing AI-powered reverse-engineering suggest that they are moving away from big companies’ models to alternatives where they aren’t going to have their accounts disabled or have to figure out how to work around AI company guardrails.

“My general experience about reverse-engineering getting blocked has been more or less 100% correlated with the ‘cyber’ category blocks I have received. My take is that the lab[s] are probably under pressure to not have their models take part in some kind of criminal hacking activities and their cyber guardrails are erring on the side of being too strict,” Matt Brown, principal consultant at Brown Fine Security and someone who has been using AI to reverse-engineer devices, told 404 Media. “I am investing in hardware and trying to stay up to speed because the frontier labs guardrails will randomly change without warning on the same model. For my security research and pentesting work I really don’t want to invest tooling and energy into an ecosystem that will eventually lock me out. These guardrails on the frontier side have come at the same time as open weight models from (mostly) China are getting better and better.”

Read the full story here

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Around the web

The biggest thing going on in tech right now is Jensen Huang’s apparent affair with an executive at the data center company Megaspeed who is an alleged Chinese spy. This isn’t the type of thing we cover very closely normally, and Sam mentioned it in the newsletter yesterday, but the latest is that the company is now getting sued over this. The AI slop You Can See Everything memes are out in full force. The incel looksmaxxers have weighed in (if you don’t understand this sentence, I won’t corrupt you). So on and so forth. If you’re curious why any of this might matter, The New York Times has a scoop that the U.S. Department of Commerce killed an investigation into a Megaspeed after Nvidia intervened. Cool government we have here. Anyways, moving on.

ICEd out: The Department of Justice said that it no longer has enough attorneys available to respond to every habeas corpus challenge, and will begin letting judges rule on cases with no government opposition. Basically this suggests that ICE has detained so many people illegally that it no longer has enough attorneys to argue in these cases. Alarming, but also means that enough people are challenging their detentions that ICE is beginning to cry uncle. Also, I would normally never suggest you go watch a Bari Weiss x Ross Douthat joint, but parts of the 60 Minutes interview with Trump were SO WILD. Perhaps this guy doesn’t really stand for anything? Hmm.

Help Court Watch: Our friends over at Court Watch are doing a subscriber drive. Court Watch grabs court records off the notoriously expensive PACER document system and makes them available for free and finds extremely interesting and important cases all the time. We partner with them on a bunch of stories so go check/help them out.

Enough: The best Raspberry Pi on the market now costs $385. I remember when the whole point of a Raspberry Pi was that it cost, like, $20. This is, of course, due to the RAM/memory/everything shortage caused by AI data center buildout. If you know what people are doing with these top-end Raspberry Pis, let me know?

SLOPPED: Actors alarmed to learn that they had been replaced by AI in the Return of the Living Dead sequel they were set to star in.

DOGE’d: The government’s IT systems are really fucked up, argues our friend Karl Bode in a piece aptly called “U.S. government IT systems are completely compromised and will require a total rebuild.”

The surveillance state, now for kids: The Atlantic has a deep dive on what constant surveillance is doing to children. I haven’t had time to read the full thing yet, but have been waiting for a piece like this for a long time.

They Rickrolled a printer: … They Rickrolled a printer.

It was a fun few weeks while it lasted. People using both Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex to do AI-powered “reverse-engineering” or decompiling are now hitting guardrails or having their accounts limited while trying to do things like unbrick their internet-of-things devices or remove surveillance ads from their smart TVs. 

Several people have reported triggering “safety checks” in Claude Code that prevented them from doing AI-powered reverse engineering; a highly upvoted Reddit post in r/ClaudeCode reads “The Dream is dead. Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) is not likely to work with Claude.” A thread in the Reverse Engineer Anything Discord from last week reads, “Claude is refusing to decompile anything,” with multiple users responding saying they have hit similar walls. And X  user log4j, who used OpenAI’s Codex to reverse engineer Samsung TVs, reported having their OpenAI account banned for violating its rules on “cyber abuse.” Other users said they asked Codex to reverse engineer hardware or their own code now say they have either been warned by the company or had their accounts restricted. A project called Decomp.wtf that made it easier to reverse engineer software and games has also shut down in recent days.

As we reported last month, Reverse Engineer-Anything has made it easy for people to use AI tools to hack electronics that they own and replace a manufacturer’s software or operating system with an open source or vibecoded one. People have installed new operating systems on their smart TVs, have turned baby monitors into AI assistants, have unbricked internet-of-things devices that were abandoned by their manufacturers, and have installed new software on very old hardware. At the time, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the trend, but as I’ve seen people take ownership and control back over the devices that manufacturers have purposefully bricked, turned into spyware, or have placed artificial limitations on, I have come to see AI-powered reverse engineering of electronic devices as one of the few LLM uses genuinely worth getting excited about. And so big companies have immediately taken steps to restrict this behavior. 

The policy tweaks show that big AI corporations will protect other big corporations when their users find ways to use LLMs to circumvent the artificial constraints that hardware manufacturers put on their devices. AI-powered copyright circumvention is OK with big tech when it’s a massive company scraping the entire internet to build their LLMs, but is not OK when people then use those tools to liberate their internet-of-things devices. It’s not the end of AI-powered reverse engineering, but people suddenly getting locked out of their accounts for asking AI to reverse engineer their gadgets suggests that the future of this practice lies in open weight, local, and uncensored models, making it less accessible to the masses and the people who could probably benefit from it most. 

Tarun Gogineni, an OpenAI engineer, tweeted that people are not supposed to have their OpenAI accounts restricted for reverse engineering: “these blocks are mostly accidental and a result of difficult decision boundaries; there is no prohibition against reverse engineering with codex. it’s getting fixed,” he tweeted. 

But people who are doing AI-powered reverse-engineering suggest that they are moving away from big companies’ models to alternatives where they aren’t going to have their accounts disabled or have to figure out how to work around AI company guardrails. 

“My general experience about reverse-engineering getting blocked has been more or less 100% correlated with the ‘cyber’ category blocks I have received. My take is that the lab[s] are probably under pressure to not have their models take part in some kind of criminal hacking activities and their cyber guardrails are erring on the side of being too strict,” Matt Brown, principal consultant at Brown Fine Security and someone who has been using AI to reverse-engineer devices, told 404 Media. “I am investing in hardware and trying to stay up to speed because the frontier labs guardrails will randomly change without warning on the same model. For my security research and pentesting work I really don’t want to invest tooling and energy into an ecosystem that will eventually lock me out. These guardrails on the frontier side have come at the same time as open weight models from (mostly) China are getting better and better.” 

Brown posted a YouTube video last week explaining how he found hidden Bluetooth commands in an internet-of-things gas monitor attached to his propane tank with the open weight model GLM 5.3. He has explained in various posts that the guardrails big companies are putting on reverse engineering are why local AI and open weight models are important.

AI-powered reverse-engineering isn’t going anywhere, but it does look like it’s going to become much harder to use the most popular frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic for it. It’s unclear how much longer it will be possible for you to open an OpenAI Codex window, ask it to find a smart TV hooked up to your network, and tell it to install a new operating system on it. Moving forward, it looks like this type of work will be best done with open source, open weight, uncensored, and local models. That’s a bummer, because one of the things that was so exciting about the Reverse Engineer-Anything trend was how easily accessible it had become.

Last month, researchers and law professors at Cornell Tech, Columbia University, and New York University published a paper about how cheap, AI-assisted reverse-engineering is challenging big manufacturers’ dominance over the devices their make, and is challenging existing intellectual property law. 

“AI systems can identify hardware components, extract firmware, decompile object code, and clone entire apps. The resulting struggle between technology vendors and reverse engineers will challenge a wide range of laws, including trade secret, copyright, anti-circumvention, computer misuse, and contract,” they write. “The law of reverse engineering was built for a world where opening a device took time, tools, and rare expertise. That friction is vanishing as agents whittle endless, precise picks for the many little locks that fill our digital lives.”

In recent days, people have started modifying older digital cameras with new, vibe-coded operating systems. In a video about hacking old cameras, the YouTuber Breno Loves Cameras explains why it’s such a big deal and why camera companies don’t like it; that same logic can be applied to any device manufacturer.

“Camera companies have this practice of keeping features to release on newer cameras, and having distinctions [in features] in camera lines,” the YouTuber Breno said in one video. “This is breaking that from those big companies, which are going to lose a lot of money if this becomes a big thing.”

 Through that lens, it’s easy to see why big companies are protecting other big companies. People finally found a thing to do with AI tools that gives consumers a bit more control over the devices they bought; it must be immediately stamped out.

“This vibe-code hacking is only called ‘reverse’ when somebody who lacks a trillion dollars is doing it,” the science fiction author Bruce Sterling tweeted. “When you ‘reverse engineer’ the entire Internet Common Crawl, you just built a nice AI model.”

Nederland telt inmiddels meer dan honderd geregistreerde paardencoaches. Die gebruiken de dieren binnen een therapiesessie, bijvoorbeeld om een familielid uit te beelden. „De één denkt als een paard achter hem komt te staan: die steunt me. En de ander denkt: hij geeft me een duw.”

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De rechtbank in Den Haag heeft dinsdag op de derde zittingsdag van het Tarwekampproces naar negentien slachtofferverklaringen van nabestaanden en slachtoffers geluisterd. Bij de verwoestende explosie op 7 december 2024 kwamen zes mensen om het leven en raakten vijf gewond.

Een familie die de explosie overleefde, waarbij hun huis werd verwoest, sloot de reeks van emotionele slachtofferverklaringen af. "De explosie beschadigde mijn huis. Maar de grootste schade zit op een plek die niemand kan zien", zei een van de vier familieleden. "Ik weet inmiddels dat ik waarschijnlijk nooit meer dezelfde zal zijn als vóór die ochtend."

De vader van het gezin, dat bij de explosie een geliefde buurman verloor, ging in zijn verklaring in op de financiële schade. "Ondanks onze verzekeringen kom je er snel achter dat niet alles gedekt is. Sterker nog: zelfs wanneer je goed verzekerd bent, zijn er nog zoveel extra kosten waar je je simpelweg niet tegen kunt verzekeren", aldus de vader. "Ik vraag de rechtbank dan ook om onze traumatische en emotionele ervaringen goed te wegen in deze zaak en in uw veroordeling."

Emotie en pijn

"Er is vandaag veel emotie en pijn uitgesproken, maar wel met waardigheid", sloot de rechtbankvoorzitter de dag af. "Bij velen komt terug dat jullie gevoel van veiligheid en rust is afgenomen."

Woensdag worden de overige vijftien slachtofferverklaringen voorgelezen. Het strafproces gaat dinsdag 24 november verder met het bespreken van de persoonlijke omstandigheden van de vier verdachten. Dan zet het Openbaar Ministerie ook het bewijs uiteen en worden de strafeisen geformuleerd.

We zitten misschien wel in de allerdomste tijdlijn. En zo niet, dan valt er in ieder geval nog te lachen om RTL-presentator Edson da Graça, die door onderzoeksplatform FunX werd geïnterviewd tijdens de Rode Lijn-demonstratie van afgelopen zondag. Na een hoop vaag complotachtig gewauwel over de afwezigheid van Rob Jetten eindigt hij een gesprek bij een protest over de toestand in Gaza (!) met een lofzang op Ibrahim Traoré dictator van Burkina Faso (!). We citeren NRC Handelsblad: 

"De politicoloog wil alleen anoniem spreken (zijn naam is bij de redactie bekend), net als vrijwel alle Burkinezen met wie NRC voor dit verhaal sprak. De risico’s zijn te groot, verontschuldigt hij zich. Wie de afgelopen jaren waagde te tornen aan het imago van Traoré en zijn regime, werd bedreigd, opgepakt of, in meerdere gevallen, naar het front gestuurd waar het Burkinese leger vecht tegen jihadisten.

Het overkwam activisten, journalisten. Zelfs een oud-minister van in de zeventig. Onderwijl zijn politieke partijen geschorst en verschillende internationale media (vooral Franse) geblokkeerd. Lokale journalisten die niet geschorst of opgepakt willen worden, moeten zich aan één gouden regel houden: alleen wat de regering zegt, is waar. Zeker wat betreft de veiligheidssituatie, de raison d’être van Traorés machtsgreep."

En nu vraagt u zich af? Hoe komt Edson da Graça daar nou bij? Het antwoord zal Sander Schimmelpenninck en Pieter Klok behagen. Social media natuurlijk! Hep gestaan in Trouw: "De beelden zijn indrukwekkend. Juichende menigtes in buitenlandse steden betuigen steun aan Ibrahim Traoré, de president van Burkina Faso. De leider zelf houdt vurige Engelstalige toespraken over het pan-Afrikanisme. Foto’s van nieuwe gebouwen in het land, waar arme mensen gratis mogen wonen. Een videotoespraak van de nieuwe paus Leo XIV waarin hij Traoré prijst als ‘zoon van Afrikaanse bodem’.

Ze zijn alleen nep: de juichende menigtes waren eigenlijk demonstranten in Servië, president Traoré beheerst alleen het Frans, de nieuwe gebouwen staan in Algerije en de paus sprak nooit over de president van Burkina Faso."

Ook een leestip voor het RTL-gezicht: Heb je kritiek in Burkina Faso? Dan moet je naar het front. Edson da Graça presenteert het programma Nederlands Domste, maar hij is het dus zelf. Ga maar weer snel over mayonaise posten jongen.

Edson da Graça steunt dit

De Domste

Another banger from neal.fun: Battle Draw. Sort of an open world tower defense “game”?

Ruggedly good-looking and greener than bricks and concrete, Petra Heights are made of three-metre slabs of rough rock. Could they herald a new stone age? Our writer fires up his Flintmobile

There’s been a geological eruption on London’s Finchley Road. Great chunks of pink basalt and igneous larvikite appear to have exploded from the railway cutting, shooting skywards to form teetering towers. Anyone trying to find Finchley Road & Frognal station need wonder no more: just look for the multistorey Stonehenge.

Countless apartment towers have sprouted above London’s stations in recent years, a result of public transport-oriented policies, but none have looked like the Flintstones were in charge.

Finals have hit California desert after stormy few years and pre-tournament kerfuffle has added to the fun

Towards the end of a positive day for Mirra Andreeva, one of the brightest young stars of women’s tennis, the 19-year-old approached the broadcast cameras to dissect her excellent 6-4, 6-0 win over Elina Svitolina in her first match at this year’s WTA Finals. Andreeva took her place alongside Madison Keys, the 2025 Australian Open champion and a guest reporter for Sky Sports at Indian Wells, who greeted her with a mischievous smile: “Hey, diva!” Keys said.

This was an obvious reference to the kerfuffle on the eve of the tournament, when Jessica Pegula, usually known as one of the most congenial players on the tour, had been caught on a hot mic delivering a series of stinging criticisms about Andreeva in a private conversation with her coach. Pegula, who had just finished a practice set with an angsty Andreeva, described her rival as a “diva” who “needs to be humbled”. Her comments instantly spread to all corners of the internet.