Stuff that’s in the code but not shipped yet. Feature-flagged, env-gated, or just com­mented out.

A vir­tual pet that lives in your ter­mi­nal. Species and rar­ity are de­rived from your ac­count ID. Persistent mode with mem­ory con­sol­i­da­tion be­tween ses­sions and au­tonomous back­ground ac­tions.Long plan­ning ses­sions on Opus-class mod­els, up to 30-minute ex­e­cu­tion win­dows.Con­trol Claude Code from your phone or a browser. Full re­mote ses­sion with per­mis­sion ap­provals.Run ses­sions in the back­ground with –bgtmuxSessions talk to each other over Unix do­main sock­ets.Be­tween ses­sions, the AI re­views what hap­pened and or­ga­nizes what it learned.

It was not a phone call. It was not a meet­ing. For thou­sands of Oracle em­ploy­ees across the globe, Tuesday morn­ing be­gan with a sin­gle email land­ing in their in­boxes just af­ter 6 a.m. EST — and by the time they fin­ished read­ing it, their ca­reers at one of the world’s largest tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies were over.

Oracle has launched what an­a­lysts be­lieve could be the most ex­ten­sive lay­off in the com­pa­ny’s his­tory, with es­ti­mates sug­gest­ing the cuts will af­fect be­tween 20,000 and 30,000 em­ploy­ees — roughly 18% of its global work­force of ap­prox­i­mately 162,000 peo­ple. Workers in the United States, India, and other re­gions all re­ported re­ceiv­ing the same ter­mi­na­tion no­tice at nearly the same hour, sent un­der the name “Oracle Leadership.”

There was no heads-up from hu­man re­sources, no con­ver­sa­tion with a di­rect man­ager, and no ad­vance no­tice of any kind. Just an email.

The email that cir­cu­lated widely af­ter screen­shots were posted by af­fected work­ers on Reddit’s r/​em­ploy­eesO­fOr­a­cle com­mu­nity and the pro­fes­sional fo­rum Blind was brief and for­mu­laic. It told em­ploy­ees that fol­low­ing a re­view of the com­pa­ny’s cur­rent busi­ness needs, a de­ci­sion had been made to elim­i­nate their roles as part of a broader or­ga­ni­za­tional change, that the day of the email was their fi­nal work­ing day, and that a sev­er­ance pack­age would be made avail­able af­ter sign­ing ter­mi­na­tion pa­per­work through DocuSign.

Employees were also in­structed to up­date their per­sonal email ad­dresses to re­ceive sub­se­quent com­mu­ni­ca­tions, in­clud­ing sep­a­ra­tion de­tails and an­swers to fre­quently asked ques­tions. For many, ac­cess to in­ter­nal pro­duc­tion sys­tems was re­voked al­most im­me­di­ately af­ter the mes­sage ar­rived.

Based on ac­counts shared across both Reddit and Blind, the cuts were wide­spread and, in some units, se­vere. Among the teams re­ported to be most af­fected:

RHS (Revenue and Health Sciences) — em­ploy­ees de­scribed a re­duc­tion in force of at least 30%, with 16 or more en­gi­neers from in­di­vid­ual busi­ness units cut in a sin­gle ac­tion.

SVOS (SaaS and Virtual Operations Services) — sim­i­larly re­ported a 30% or greater re­duc­tion, with man­ager-level roles in­cluded in the sweep.

At least one man­ager was con­firmed among those let go, and af­fected em­ploy­ees in India said the sev­er­ance struc­ture is ex­pected to fol­low a stan­dard for­mula based on years of ser­vice, paid out in months. Any un­vested re­stricted stock units, how­ever, were for­feited im­me­di­ately.

Workers who had vested stock were told they would re­tain ac­cess to those shares through Fidelity. Some em­ploy­ees noted April 3 as their for­mal last work­ing day, with a one-month gar­den leave pe­riod to fol­low. Separately, posts on Blind al­leged that Oracle had re­cently in­stalled mon­i­tor­ing soft­ware on com­pany-is­sued Mac lap­tops ca­pa­ble of log­ging all de­vice ac­tiv­ity, with warn­ings cir­cu­lat­ing among af­fected em­ploy­ees not to copy any files or code be­fore re­turn­ing their ma­chines.

The lay­offs are di­rectly tied to Oracle’s ag­gres­sive and debt-heavy ex­pan­sion into ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in­fra­struc­ture. According to analy­sis from TD Cowen, the job cuts are ex­pected to free up be­tween $8 bil­lion and $10 bil­lion in cash flow — money the com­pany ur­gently needs to fund a mas­sive build­out of AI data cen­ters.

The fi­nan­cial pic­ture sur­round­ing that ex­pan­sion is strik­ing. Oracle has taken on $58 bil­lion in new debt within just two months. Its stock has lost more than half its value since reach­ing a peak in September 2025. Multiple U. S. banks have re­port­edly stepped back from fi­nanc­ing some of its data cen­ter pro­jects. All of this is hap­pen­ing even as the com­pany posted a 95% jump in net in­come — reach­ing $6.13 bil­lion — last quar­ter.

The con­trast un­der­scores the scale of the bet Oracle is mak­ing: record prof­its on one side, a mount­ing debt load and tens of thou­sands of elim­i­nated jobs on the other. For the work­ers who woke up Tuesday morn­ing to that 6 a.m. email, the com­pa­ny’s am­bi­tions of­fered lit­tle com­fort.

Artemis II is NASA’s first crewed mis­sion un­der the Artemis pro­gram and will launch from the agen­cy’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will send NASA as­tro­nauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) as­tro­naut Jeremy Hansen on an ap­prox­i­mately 10-day jour­ney around the Moon. Among ob­jec­tives, the agency will test the Orion space­craft’s life sup­port sys­tems for the first time with peo­ple and lay the ground­work for fu­ture crewed Artemis mis­sions.

The cost of build­ing soft­ware has dras­ti­cally de­creased. We re­cently re­built Next.js in one week us­ing AI cod­ing agents. But for the past two months our agents have been work­ing on an even more am­bi­tious pro­ject: re­build­ing the WordPress open source pro­ject from the ground up.

WordPress pow­ers over 40% of the Internet. It is a mas­sive suc­cess that has en­abled any­one to be a pub­lisher, and cre­ated a global com­mu­nity of WordPress de­vel­op­ers. But the WordPress open source pro­ject will be 24 years old this year. Hosting a web­site has changed dra­mat­i­cally dur­ing that time. When WordPress was born, AWS EC2 did­n’t ex­ist. In the in­ter­ven­ing years, that task has gone from rent­ing vir­tual pri­vate servers, to up­load­ing a JavaScript bun­dle to a glob­ally dis­trib­uted net­work at vir­tu­ally no cost. It’s time to up­grade the most pop­u­lar CMS on the Internet to take ad­van­tage of this change.

Our name for this new CMS is EmDash. We think of it as the spir­i­tual suc­ces­sor to WordPress. It’s writ­ten en­tirely in TypeScript. It is server­less, but you can run it on your own hard­ware or any plat­form you choose. Plugins are se­curely sand­boxed and can run in their own iso­late, via Dynamic Workers, solv­ing the fun­da­men­tal se­cu­rity prob­lem with the WordPress plu­gin ar­chi­tec­ture. And un­der the hood, EmDash is pow­ered by Astro, the fastest web frame­work for con­tent-dri­ven web­sites.

EmDash is fully open source, MIT li­censed, and avail­able on GitHub. While EmDash aims to be com­pat­i­ble with WordPress func­tion­al­ity, no WordPress code was used to cre­ate EmDash. That al­lows us to li­cense the open source pro­ject un­der the more per­mis­sive MIT li­cense. We hope that al­lows more de­vel­op­ers to adapt, ex­tend, and par­tic­i­pate in EmDash’s de­vel­op­ment.

You can de­ploy the EmDash v0.1.0 pre­view to your own Cloudflare ac­count, or to any Node.js server to­day as part of our early de­vel­oper beta:

Or you can try out the ad­min in­ter­face here in the EmDash Playground:

The story of WordPress is a tri­umph of open source that en­abled pub­lish­ing at a scale never be­fore seen. Few pro­jects have had the same recog­nis­able im­pact on the gen­er­a­tion raised on the Internet. The con­trib­u­tors to WordPress’s core, and its many thou­sands of plu­gin and theme de­vel­op­ers have built a plat­form that de­moc­ra­tised pub­lish­ing for mil­lions; many lives and liveli­hoods be­ing trans­formed by this ubiq­ui­tous soft­ware.

There will al­ways be a place for WordPress, but there is also a lot more space for the world of con­tent pub­lish­ing to grow. A decade ago, peo­ple pick­ing up a key­board uni­ver­sally learned to pub­lish their blogs with WordPress. Today it’s just as likely that per­son picks up Astro, or an­other TypeScript frame­work to learn and build with. The ecosys­tem needs an op­tion that em­pow­ers a wide au­di­ence, in the same way it needed WordPress 23 years ago.

EmDash is com­mit­ted to build­ing on what WordPress cre­ated: an open source pub­lish­ing stack that any­one can in­stall and use at lit­tle cost, while fix­ing the core prob­lems that WordPress can­not solve.

WordPress’ plu­gin ar­chi­tec­ture is fun­da­men­tally in­se­cure. 96% of se­cu­rity is­sues for WordPress sites orig­i­nate in plu­g­ins. In 2025, more high sever­ity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties were found in the WordPress ecosys­tem than the pre­vi­ous two years com­bined.

Why, af­ter over two decades, is WordPress plu­gin se­cu­rity so prob­lem­atic?

A WordPress plu­gin is a PHP script that hooks di­rectly into WordPress to add or mod­ify func­tion­al­ity. There is no iso­la­tion: a WordPress plu­gin has di­rect ac­cess to the WordPress site’s data­base and filesys­tem. When you in­stall a WordPress plu­gin, you are trust­ing it with ac­cess to nearly every­thing, and trust­ing it to han­dle every ma­li­cious in­put or edge case per­fectly.

EmDash solves this. In EmDash, each plu­gin runs in its own iso­lated sand­box: a Dynamic Worker. Rather than giv­ing di­rect ac­cess to un­der­ly­ing data, EmDash pro­vides the plu­gin with ca­pa­bil­i­ties via bind­ings, based on what the plu­gin ex­plic­itly de­clares that it needs in its man­i­fest. This se­cu­rity model has a strict guar­an­tee: an EmDash plu­gin can only per­form the ac­tions ex­plic­itly de­clared in its man­i­fest. You can know and trust up­front, be­fore in­stalling a plu­gin, ex­actly what you are grant­ing it per­mis­sion to do, sim­i­lar to go­ing through an OAuth flow and grant­ing a 3rd party app a spe­cific set of scoped per­mis­sions.

For ex­am­ple, a plu­gin that sends an email af­ter a con­tent item gets saved looks like this:

im­port { de­fine­Plu­gin } from “emdash”;

ex­port de­fault () =>

de­fine­Plu­gin({

id: “notify-on-publish”,

ver­sion: “1.0.0”,

ca­pa­bil­i­ties: [“read:content”, “email:send”],

hooks: {

“content:afterSave”: async (event, ctx) => {

if (event.collection !== “posts” || event.con­tent.sta­tus !== “published”) re­turn;

await ctx.email!.send({

to: “[email protected]”,

sub­ject: `New post pub­lished: ${event.content.title}`,

text: `“${event.content.title}” is now live.`,

ctx.log.info(`No­ti­fied ed­i­tors about ${event.content.id}`);

This plu­gin ex­plic­itly re­quests two ca­pa­bil­i­ties: con­tent:af­ter­Save to hook into the con­tent life­cy­cle, and email:send to ac­cess the ctx.email func­tion. It is im­pos­si­ble for the plu­gin to do any­thing other than use these ca­pa­bil­i­ties. It has no ex­ter­nal net­work ac­cess. If it does need net­work ac­cess, it can spec­ify the ex­act host­name it needs to talk to, as part of its de­f­i­n­i­tion, and be granted only the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with a par­tic­u­lar host­name.

And in all cases, be­cause the plug­in’s needs are de­clared sta­t­i­cally, up­front, it can al­ways be clear ex­actly what the plu­gin is ask­ing for per­mis­sion to be able to do, at in­stall time. A plat­form or ad­min­is­tra­tor could de­fine rules for what plu­g­ins are or aren’t al­lowed to be in­stalled by cer­tain groups of users, based on what per­mis­sions they re­quest, rather than an al­lowlist of ap­proved or safe plu­g­ins.

WordPress plu­gin se­cu­rity is such a real risk that WordPress.org man­u­ally re­views and ap­proves each plu­gin in its mar­ket­place. At the time of writ­ing, that re­view queue is over 800 plu­g­ins long, and takes at least two weeks to tra­verse. The vul­ner­a­bil­ity sur­face area of WordPress plu­g­ins is so wide that in prac­tice, all par­ties rely on mar­ket­place rep­u­ta­tion, rat­ings and re­views. And be­cause WordPress plu­g­ins run in the same ex­e­cu­tion con­text as WordPress it­self and are so deeply in­ter­twined with WordPress code, some ar­gue they must carry for­ward WordPress’ GPL li­cense.

These re­al­i­ties com­bine to cre­ate a chill­ing ef­fect on de­vel­op­ers build­ing plu­g­ins, and on plat­forms host­ing WordPress sites.

Plugin se­cu­rity is the root of this prob­lem. Marketplace busi­nesses pro­vide trust when par­ties oth­er­wise can­not eas­ily trust each other. In the case of the WordPress mar­ket­place, the plu­gin se­cu­rity risk is so large and prob­a­ble that many of your cus­tomers can only rea­son­ably trust your plu­gin via the mar­ket­place. But in or­der to be part of the mar­ket­place your code must be li­censed in a way that forces you to give it away for free every­where other than that mar­ket­place. You are locked in.

EmDash plu­g­ins have two im­por­tant prop­er­ties that mit­i­gate this mar­ket­place lock-in:

Plugins can have any li­cense: they run in­de­pen­dently of EmDash and share no code. It’s the plu­gin au­thor’s choice. Plugin code runs in­de­pen­dently in a se­cure sand­box: a plu­gin can be pro­vided to an EmDash site, and trusted, with­out the EmDash site ever see­ing the code.

The first part is straight­for­ward — as the plu­gin au­thor, you choose what li­cense you want. The same way you can when pub­lish­ing to NPM, PyPi, Packagist or any other reg­istry. It’s an open ecosys­tem for all, and up to the com­mu­nity, not the EmDash pro­ject, what li­cense you use for plu­g­ins and themes.

The sec­ond part is where EmDash’s plu­gin ar­chi­tec­ture breaks free of the cen­tral­ized mar­ket­place.

Developers need to rely on a third party mar­ket­place hav­ing vet­ted the plu­gin far less to be able to make de­ci­sions about whether to use or trust it. Consider the ex­am­ple plu­gin above that sends emails af­ter con­tent is saved; the plu­gin de­clares three things:

It only runs on the con­tent:af­ter­Save hookIt has the read:con­tent ca­pa­bil­i­tyIt has the email:send ca­pa­bil­ity

The plu­gin can have tens of thou­sands of lines of code in it, but un­like a WordPress plu­gin that has ac­cess to every­thing and can talk to the pub­lic Internet, the per­son adding the plu­gin knows ex­actly what ac­cess they are grant­ing to it. The clearly de­fined bound­aries al­low you to make in­formed de­ci­sions about se­cu­rity risks and to zoom in on more spe­cific risks that re­late di­rectly to the ca­pa­bil­i­ties the plu­gin is given.

The more that both sites and plat­forms can trust the se­cu­rity model to pro­vide con­straints, the more that sites and plat­forms can trust plu­g­ins, and break free of cen­tral­ized con­trol of mar­ket­places and rep­u­ta­tion. Put an­other way: if you trust that food safety is en­forced in your city, you’ll be ad­ven­tur­ous and try new places. If you can’t trust that there might be a sta­ple in your soup, you’ll be con­sult­ing Google be­fore every new place you try, and it’s harder for every­one to open new restau­rants.

The busi­ness model of the web is at risk, par­tic­u­larly for con­tent cre­ators and pub­lish­ers. The old way of mak­ing con­tent widely ac­ces­si­ble, al­low­ing all clients free ac­cess in ex­change for traf­fic, breaks when there is no hu­man look­ing at a site to ad­ver­tise to, and the client is in­stead their agent ac­cess­ing the web on their be­half. Creators need ways to con­tinue to make money in this new world of agents, and to build new kinds of web­sites that serve what peo­ple’s agents need and will pay for. Decades ago a new wave of cre­ators cre­ated web­sites that be­came great busi­nesses (often us­ing WordPress to power them) and a sim­i­lar op­por­tu­nity ex­ists to­day.

x402 is an open, neu­tral stan­dard for Internet-native pay­ments. It lets any­one on the Internet eas­ily charge, and any client pay on-de­mand, on a pay-per-use ba­sis. A client, such as an agent, sends a HTTP re­quest and re­ceives a HTTP 402 Payment Required sta­tus code. In re­sponse, the client pays for ac­cess on-de­mand, and the server can let the client through to the re­quested con­tent.

EmDash has built-in sup­port for x402. This means any­one with an EmDash site can charge for ac­cess to their con­tent with­out re­quir­ing sub­scrip­tions and with zero en­gi­neer­ing work. All you need to do is con­fig­ure which con­tent should re­quire pay­ment, set how much to charge, and pro­vide a Wallet ad­dress. The re­quest/​re­sponse flow ends up look­ing like this:

Every EmDash site has a built-in busi­ness model for the AI era.

WordPress is not server­less: it re­quires pro­vi­sion­ing and man­ag­ing servers, scal­ing them up and down like a tra­di­tional web ap­pli­ca­tion. To max­i­mize per­for­mance, and to be able to han­dle traf­fic spikes, there’s no avoid­ing the need to pre-pro­vi­sion in­stances and run some amount of idle com­pute, or share re­sources in ways that limit per­for­mance. This is par­tic­u­larly true for sites with con­tent that must be server ren­dered and can­not be cached.

EmDash is dif­fer­ent: it’s built to run on server­less plat­forms, and make the most out of the v8 iso­late ar­chi­tec­ture of Cloudflare’s open source run­time work­erd. On an in­com­ing re­quest, the Workers run­time in­stantly spins up an iso­late to ex­e­cute code and serve a re­sponse. It scales back down to zero if there are no re­quests. And it only bills for CPU time (time spent do­ing ac­tual work).

You can run EmDash any­where, on any Node.js server — but on Cloudflare you can run mil­lions of in­stances of EmDash us­ing Cloudflare for Platforms that each in­stantly scale fully to zero or up to as many RPS as you need to han­dle, us­ing the ex­act same net­work and run­time that the biggest web­sites in the world rely on.

Beyond cost op­ti­miza­tions and per­for­mance ben­e­fits, we’ve bet on this ar­chi­tec­ture at Cloudflare in part be­cause we be­lieve in hav­ing low cost and free tiers, and that every­one should be able to build web­sites that scale. We’re ex­cited to help plat­forms ex­tend the ben­e­fits of this ar­chi­tec­ture to their own cus­tomers, both big and small.

EmDash is pow­ered by Astro, the web frame­work for con­tent-dri­ven web­sites. To cre­ate an EmDash theme, you cre­ate an Astro pro­ject that in­cludes:

A seed file: JSON that tells the CMS what con­tent types and fields to cre­ate

This makes cre­at­ing themes fa­mil­iar to fron­tend de­vel­op­ers who are in­creas­ingly choos­ing Astro, and to LLMs which are al­ready trained on Astro.

WordPress themes, though in­cred­i­bly flex­i­ble, op­er­ate with a lot of the same se­cu­rity risks as plu­g­ins, and the more pop­u­lar and com­mon­place your theme, the more of a tar­get it is. Themes run through in­te­grat­ing with func­tions.php which is an all-en­com­pass­ing ex­e­cu­tion en­vi­ron­ment, en­abling your theme to be both in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful and po­ten­tially dan­ger­ous. EmDash themes, as with dy­namic plu­g­ins, turns this ex­pec­ta­tion on its head. Your theme can never per­form data­base op­er­a­tions.

The least fun part about work­ing with any CMS is do­ing the rote mi­gra­tion of con­tent: find­ing and re­plac­ing strings, mi­grat­ing cus­tom fields from one for­mat to an­other, re­nam­ing, re­order­ing and mov­ing things around. This is ei­ther bor­ing repet­i­tive work or re­quires one-off scripts and  “single-use” plu­g­ins and tools that are usu­ally nei­ther fun to write nor to use.

EmDash is de­signed to be man­aged pro­gram­mat­i­cally by your AI agents. It pro­vides the con­text and the tools that your agents need, in­clud­ing:

Agent Skills: Each EmDash in­stance in­cludes Agent Skills that de­scribe to your agent the ca­pa­bil­i­ties EmDash can pro­vide to plu­g­ins, the hooks that can trig­ger plu­g­ins, guid­ance on how to struc­ture a plu­gin, and even how to port legacy WordPress themes to EmDash na­tively. When you give an agent an EmDash code­base, EmDash pro­vides every­thing the agent needs to be able to cus­tomize your site in the way you need. EmDash CLI: The EmDash CLI en­ables your agent to in­ter­act pro­gram­mat­i­cally with your lo­cal or re­mote in­stance of EmDash. You can up­load me­dia, search for con­tent, cre­ate and man­age schemas, and do the same set of things you can do in the Admin UI.Built-in MCP Server: Every EmDash in­stance pro­vides its own re­mote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, al­low­ing you to do the same set of things you can do in the Admin UI.

EmDash uses passkey-based au­then­ti­ca­tion by de­fault, mean­ing there are no pass­words to leak and no brute-force vec­tors to de­fend against. User man­age­ment in­cludes fa­mil­iar role-based ac­cess con­trol out of the box: ad­min­is­tra­tors, ed­i­tors, au­thors, and con­trib­u­tors, each scoped strictly to the ac­tions they need. Authentication is plug­gable, so you can set EmDash up to work with your SSO provider, and au­to­mat­i­cally pro­vi­sion ac­cess based on IdP meta­data.

You can im­port an ex­ist­ing WordPress site by ei­ther go­ing to WordPress ad­min and ex­port­ing a WXR file, or by in­stalling the EmDash Exporter plu­gin on a WordPress site, which con­fig­ures a se­cure end­point that is only ex­posed to you, and pro­tected by a WordPress Application Password you con­trol. Migrating con­tent takes just a few min­utes, and au­to­mat­i­cally works to bring any at­tached me­dia into EmDash’s me­dia li­brary.

Creating any cus­tom con­tent types on WordPress that are not a Post or a Page has meant in­stalling heavy plu­g­ins like Advanced Custom Fields, and squeez­ing the re­sult into a crowded WordPress posts table. EmDash does things dif­fer­ently: you can de­fine a schema di­rectly in the ad­min panel, which will cre­ate en­tirely new EmDash col­lec­tions for you, sep­a­rately or­dered in the data­base. On im­port, you can use the same ca­pa­bil­i­ties to take any cus­tom post types from WordPress, and cre­ate an EmDash con­tent type from it.

For be­spoke blocks, you can use the EmDash Block Kit Agent Skill to in­struct your agent of choice and build them for EmDash.

EmDash is v0.1.0 pre­view, and we’d love you to try it, give feed­back, and we wel­come con­tri­bu­tions to the EmDash GitHub repos­i­tory.

If you’re just play­ing around and want to first un­der­stand what’s pos­si­ble — try out the ad­min in­ter­face in the EmDash Playground.

To cre­ate a new EmDash site lo­cally, via the CLI, run:

Or you can do the same via the Cloudflare dash­board be­low:

We’re ex­cited to see what you build, and if you’re ac­tive in the WordPress com­mu­nity, as a host­ing plat­form, a plu­gin or theme au­thor, or oth­er­wise — we’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected], and tell us what you’d like to see from the EmDash pro­ject.

If you want to stay up to date with ma­jor EmDash de­vel­op­ments, you can leave your email ad­dress here.

The race is on to test new ve­hi­cles in the un­der­ground Large Hadron Collider tun­nel, ahead of ma­jor works start­ing this sum­mer

The race is on to test new ve­hi­cles in the un­der­ground Large Hadron Collider tun­nel, ahead of ma­jor works start­ing this sum­mer

Following on from the ro­botic mice, CERN en­gi­neers have now de­vel­oped a su­per-charged kart to en­able work­ers to race through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) un­der­ground tun­nel dur­ing the up­com­ing ma­jor works, start­ing this sum­mer.

The karts promise a power boost to ac­tiv­i­ties dur­ing this pe­riod, known as Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), which will see the LHC trans­formed into the High-Luminosity LHC. These ve­hi­cles will re­place the bi­cy­cles that were used un­til now to travel through the 27-km un­der­ground tun­nel, en­abling en­gi­neers and tech­ni­cians to speed to ar­eas where im­prove­ments to the ac­cel­er­a­tor are re­quired.

“Each kart is turbo-boosted by 64 su­per­con­duct­ing en­gines,” ex­plains pro­ject leader Mario Idraulico. “When the en­gines are cooled to be­low their crit­i­cal tem­per­a­tures, the Meissner ef­fect lev­i­tates the karts, al­low­ing them to zip through the tun­nels at high speeds and, mamma mia, they’re su­per!”

Early tests have been promis­ing, and the next steps in­volve test­ing dif­fer­ent kart de­signs in an un­der­ground race. Safety co­or­di­na­tor Luigi Fratello has en­sured that each dri­ver will be is­sued with Safety and Health Equipment for Long and Limited Stays (SHELLS), al­though his re­sponse to dri­vers want­ing ba­nanas in the tun­nel was “Oh no!”

These karts, al­though de­vel­oped to sup­port CERN’s fun­da­men­tal re­search pro­gramme, show clear ap­pli­ca­tions for so­ci­ety. CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Group has be­gun dis­cus­sions with European startup com­pany Quantum Mushroom to ex­plore aero­space ap­pli­ca­tions and pow­er­ing for next-gen­er­a­tion anti-grav­ity ve­hi­cles.

Surprisingly, the kart pro­ject be­gan from a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween CERN en­gi­neers and on­site nurs­ery school chil­dren — one ex­am­ple of CERN’s com­mit­ment to in­spir­ing fu­ture gen­er­a­tions. “We’re thrilled that the chil­dren’s kart de­signs were the in­spi­ra­tion for the en­gi­neered karts,” ex­claimed school­teacher Yoshi Kyouryuu, mid-way through paint­ing spots on eggs for an Easter egg hunt.

“As ed­u­ca­tors, we pro­mote cu­rios­ity from a young age, which is why we paint ques­tion marks all over our yel­low school walls,” ex­plained school di­rec­tor, Rosalina Pfirsich, look­ing up from her sto­ry­book. “With all the con­tri­bu­tions the chil­dren have made to the up­com­ing High-Luminosity LHC pro­ject, we’ve taken to call­ing them Luma!”

Find out more about the High-Luminosity LHC pro­ject.

… is what I’m read­ing far too of­ten! Some of you are los­ing faith!

A grow­ing sen­ti­ment amongst my peers — those who haven’t al­ready re­signed to an NPC ca­reer path† — is that blog­ging is over. Coding is cooked. What’s the point of shar­ing in­sights and ex­per­tise when the Cognitive Dark Forest will feed on our hu­man­ity?

Before I’m dis­missed as an ill-in­formed hater please note: I’ve done my re­search.

† To be fair it’s a valid choice in this econ­omy. Clock in, slop around, clock out. Why not?

Star Trek’s cap­tain Kirk lean­ing into a com­puter cast in shadow look­ing con­tem­pla­tive.

It’s never been more im­por­tant to blog. There has never been a bet­ter time to blog. I will tell you why. We’re be­ing starved for hu­man con­ver­sa­tion and au­then­tic voices. What’s more: every­one is try­ing to take your voice away. Do not opt-out of us­ing it your­self.

First let’s ac­cept the re­al­i­ties. The gi­ant pla­gia­rism ma­chines have al­ready stolen every­thing. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Mass sur­veil­lance and track­ing are a fea­ture, pri­vacy is a bug. Everything is an “algorithm” op­ti­mised to ex­ploit.

How can we pos­si­bly com­bat that?

From a purely self­ish per­spec­tive it’s never been eas­ier to stand out and as­sert your­self as an au­thor­ity. When every­one is de­fer­ring to the big bull­shit­ter in the cloud your orig­i­nal thoughts are in­valu­able. Your brain is your biggest as­set. Share it with oth­ers for mu­tual ben­e­fit.

I find writ­ing stuff down im­proves my mem­ory and hard­ens my re­solve. I bet that’s true for you too. It’s part rote learn­ing part rub­ber­duck­ing†. Writing pub­licly in blog form forces me to ques­tion as­sump­tions. Even when re­search fails me Cunningham’s Law saves me.

† Some will claim writ­ing into a pre­dic­tive chat box helps too, and sure, they’re ab­solutely right!

Blogging makes you a bet­ter pro­fes­sional. No mat­ter how small your au­di­ence, some­one will even­tu­ally stum­ble upon your blog and it will un­block their path.

Don’t ac­cept a fate be­ing forced upon you.

The AI in­dus­try is 99% hype; a bil­lion dol­lar in­dus­trial com­plex to put a price tag on cre­ation. At this point if you be­lieve AI is ‘just a tool’ you’re wil­fully ig­nor­ing the harm. (Regardless, why do I keep be­ing told it’s an ‘extreme’ stance if I de­cide not to buy some­thing?)

The 1% util­ity AI has is over­shad­owed by the over­whelm­ing medioc­racy it re­gur­gi­tates.

We’re say­ing good­bye to Sora. To every­one who cre­ated with Sora, shared it, and built com­mu­nity around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mat­tered, and we know this news is dis­ap­point­ing.

Is there any­thing, in the en­tire recorded his­tory of hu­man cre­ation, that could have pos­si­bly mat­tered less than the flat­u­lence Sora pro­duced? NFTs had more value.

I’m not pro­tec­tive over the word “art”. Generative AI is art. It’s ir­re­deemably shit art; end of con­ver­sa­tion. A child’s crayon doo­dle is also lack­ing re­fined artistry but we hang it on our fridge be­cause a hu­man made it and that mat­ters. We care and car­ing has a pos­i­tive ef­fect on our lives. When you pass hu­man cre­ativ­ity through the slop wringer, or just prompt an in­can­ta­tion, the re­sult is con­tin­voucly morged; a va­pid mock­ery of the in­put. The garbage out no longer mat­ters, no­body cares, no­body ben­e­fits.

I for­got where I was go­ing with this… oh right: don’t re­sign your­self to the deskilling of our craft. You should keep blog­ging! Take pride in your abil­ity and unique voice. But please don’t des­e­crate your­self with slop.

A di­sheveled Oliver Twist looks up plead­ingly hold­ing out an empty bowl.

The only win­ning move is not to play.

We’ve got­ten too com­fort­able with the con­ve­nience of Big Tech. We do not have to con­tinue play­ing their game. Don’t buy the nar­ra­tives they’re sell­ing.

The AI in­dus­try is built on the preda­tory busi­ness model of casi­nos. Except they’ve for­get the house is sup­posed to win. One up­side of this loom­ing eco­nomic and in­tel­lec­tual de­pres­sion is that the me­dia is be­gin­ning to recog­nise gate keep­ers are no longer the hand that feeds them. Big Tech is not the web. You don’t have to use it nor sup­port it. Blog for the old web, the open web, the in­die web — the web you want to see.

And if you think I’m be­ing dra­matic and I’ve up­set your new toys, you’re wel­come to be left be­hind in the mi­as­matic dystopia these tech­no­facists are rac­ing to build.

A com­mit­tee of Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fi­cials voted unan­i­mously on Tuesday to ex­empt the oil and gas in­dus­try in the Gulf of Mexico from re­quire­ments of the Endangered Species Act, a move that would lift pro­tec­tions for en­dan­gered whales, tur­tles and other an­i­mals threat­ened with ex­tinc­tion.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth trig­gered the vote two weeks ago by ask­ing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to call it “for rea­sons of na­tional se­cu­rity,” and was pre­sent at the meet­ing.

“To be se­cure as a na­tion we need a steady, af­ford­able sup­ply of our own en­ergy,” Hegseth told the six mem­bers of the com­mit­tee, nick­named the God Squad for its abil­ity to make life or death de­ci­sions about en­dan­gered an­i­mals. “This is not just about gas prices; it’s about our abil­ity to power our mil­i­tary and pro­tect our na­tion.”

Until now, oil and gas com­pa­nies have been asked by fed­eral agen­cies to pro­tect Gulf species by not dis­card­ing trash into the Gulf and sus­pend­ing their use of loud tech­nol­ogy when they spot whales, among other re­quests.

One species of Gulf whale is par­tic­u­larly vul­ner­a­ble. Scientists es­ti­mate that only about 51 Rice’s whales are left on Earth, all of them in wa­ters of the Gulf of Mexico, which the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion has termed the Gulf of America.

On Tuesday, Dr. Neil Jacobs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Under Secretary of Commerce, made clear that oil and gas com­pa­nies would no longer need to ad­here to pro­tec­tions — for Rice’s whales and any other an­i­mals pre­vi­ously pro­tected by the Endangered Species Act.

“I want to high­light that the agency ac­tion un­der con­sid­er­a­tion — all oil and gas ac­tiv­i­ties in the Gulf of America — en­com­passes the full suite of ac­tions in­clud­ing var­i­ous pro­tec­tive mea­sures for the Rice’s Whale,” said Jacobs. “I will be vot­ing to grant the ex­emp­tion.”

Conservation and pro-democ­racy groups called the vote “illegal” and char­ac­ter­ized the na­tional se­cu­rity jus­ti­fi­ca­tion as a man­u­fac­tured threat.

“On the one hand, you have the oil and gas in­dus­try, it’s one of the wealth­i­est in­dus­tries on the planet, and the other, you have one of our most en­dan­gered whales,” said Michael Jasny, a se­nior pol­icy an­a­lyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s caused enor­mous out­rage and as­ton­ish­ment.”

The en­ergy in­dus­try has been ac­cused of caus­ing the whales harm be­fore. After the Deepwater Horizon spill leaked more than 200 mil­lion gal­lons of BP’s oil into the Gulf in 2010, cov­er­ing about half of the Rice’s whale habi­tat, the Rice’s whale pop­u­la­tion de­clined by as much as 22 per­cent. The num­ber of ex­ist­ing whales is so low that sci­en­tists have warned the loss of a sin­gle ad­di­tional whale could en­dan­ger fu­ture re­pro­duc­tion and tip the species to­ward ex­tinc­tion.

A spokesper­son for the American Petroleum Institute, a lob­by­ing group for oil and gas com­pa­nies said the en­ergy in­dus­try had a track record of pro­tect­ing wildlife while de­vel­op­ing off­shore en­ergy.

“Over the long term, American en­ergy lead­er­ship de­pends on get­ting that bal­ance right through rea­son­able, sci­ence-based pro­tec­tions while meet­ing grow­ing en­ergy de­mand,” said Andrea Woods.

A gath­er­ing of the six-per­son com­mit­tee has only hap­pened be­fore af­ter ex­ten­sive prior con­sul­ta­tion with en­vi­ron­men­tal agen­cies and months of pub­lic no­tice. Just three meet­ings have hap­pened over the past 50 years and only once did an ex­emp­tion take ef­fect.

“Not only is a God Squad con­ven­ing as rare as hen’s teeth in the first in­stance, but this snap an­nounce­ment that came a week and a half ago is so vague that the pub­lic does­n’t even re­ally know what the com­mit­tee is sup­posed to con­sider,” said Jane Davenport, a se­nior at­tor­ney at Defenders of Wildlife, a con­ser­va­tion non­profit. “So it’s just com­pletely baf­fling, but it is on brand for this ad­min­is­tra­tion.”

The Center for Biological Diversity sued U. S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in fed­eral court on March 18, say­ing the gov­ern­ment vi­o­lated the law by not tak­ing the proper steps or pro­vid­ing enough pub­lic in­for­ma­tion be­fore call­ing the com­mit­tee meet­ing.

In its re­sponse to that law­suit, filed Wednesday night, the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion said Hegseth was the one who asked the Interior Department to call the com­mit­tee meet­ing. The Endangered Species Act in­cludes a pro­vi­sion re­quir­ing the com­mit­tee to “grant an ex­emp­tion for any agency ac­tion if the Secretary of Defense finds that such ex­emp­tion is nec­es­sary for rea­sons of na­tional se­cu­rity.”

A fed­eral judge last week de­clined to de­lay the meet­ing, which the Interior Department streamed on YouTube.

Brian Segee, a se­nior at­tor­ney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the con­se­quences of the vote could be im­me­di­ate and sig­nif­i­cant.

“Once an ex­emp­tion is is­sued, it is sweep­ing. It ap­plies not only to the one species that had a jeop­ardy find­ing, Rice’s whale — it ap­plies to every other listed species in the Gulf in re­la­tion to oil and gas op­er­a­tions, which will go on for decades,” said Segee.

Rice’s whales are not the only an­i­mals at risk in the Gulf. Sperm whales, the West Indian man­a­tee and sev­eral Gulf sea tur­tles are also listed as threat­ened or en­dan­gered.

The Interior Department did not re­spond to NPR’s re­quest to ex­plain the na­tional se­cu­rity im­pli­ca­tions of oil ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion in the Gulf. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Department of Defense said the agency could not com­ment be­cause of pend­ing lit­i­ga­tion.

National se­cu­rity has never been used to jus­tify a meet­ing of the com­mit­tee — and it has never be­fore trig­gered a vote for an ex­emp­tion. But this is not the first time the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion has in­voked na­tional se­cu­rity to at­tempt to by­pass laws meant to pro­tect the en­vi­ron­ment.

Shortly af­ter Trump’s in­au­gu­ra­tion, an ex­ec­u­tive or­der laid the ground­work for de­creas­ing le­gal pro­tec­tions for an­i­mals be­cause of a “national en­ergy emer­gency.”

“Our Nation’s cur­rent in­ad­e­quate de­vel­op­ment of do­mes­tic en­ergy re­sources leaves us vul­ner­a­ble to hos­tile for­eign ac­tors and poses an im­mi­nent and grow­ing threat to the United States’ pros­per­ity and na­tional se­cu­rity,” the or­der stated. The or­der also in­di­cated the Interior Department should call the Endangered Species Act Committee to­gether to meet at least four times a year.

“We’re very con­cerned that this ad­min­is­tra­tion is in­ter­ested in pur­su­ing a ‘big oil, drill every­where, all the time’ agenda as op­posed to a ‘protect pub­lic re­sources and im­per­iled wildlife agenda,’” said Davenport.

How en­ergy com­pa­nies work in the Gulf — and Washington

For the Endangered Species Act Committee to agree to grant an ex­emp­tion, the law typ­i­cally re­quires ev­i­dence that it’s im­pos­si­ble for in­dus­try to op­er­ate in an area with­out jeop­ar­diz­ing an en­dan­gered species.

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration de­ter­mined in the doc­u­ment pub­lished last May that there were mea­sures the en­ergy in­dus­try could take to avoid harm­ing Rice’s whales and other species in the Gulf, in­clud­ing slow­ing down boats near the Rice’s whale habi­tat and main­tain­ing a safe dis­tance from any whales that were seen.

“It said, ’take these elec­tively rea­son­able mea­sures to avoid run­ning over and killing Rice’s whales with boats. And yes, oil and gas can pro­ceed,” said Davenport. “You can have your cake and eat it, too.”

Some peo­ple work­ing in the Gulf ar­gue that oil com­pa­nies could do even more to pro­tect an­i­mals.

Energy com­pa­nies look for oil and gas in the ocean by blast­ing sound waves into the wa­ter from ships to record how they re­flect off the rock be­low. The air guns used to emit those sound waves are re­spon­si­ble for near-con­stant un­der­wa­ter noise in the Gulf.

Some com­pa­nies have de­vel­oped tools that limit the en­ergy used when con­duct­ing the sur­veys. Reports show those air guns can ex­pose an­i­mals to lower lev­els of noise, over ar­eas up to nine times smaller than the re­gions af­fected by tra­di­tional air guns.

“They are much eas­ier on the en­vi­ron­ment,” said Shuki Ronen, a geo­physi­cist at Sercel, one of the com­pa­nies de­vel­op­ing the new tech­nol­ogy. “And I think the in­dus­try can adopt them more than they do now.”

An NPR re­view of pub­lic doc­u­ments found that of the 25 seis­mic sur­vey pro­jects ap­proved by 2023 to use air guns for more than 1,000 days over the next few years, all but two en­ergy com­pa­nies said they would use con­ven­tional air­gun sys­tems.

Lawyers for con­ser­va­tion groups say the Endangered Species Act did not in­tend for an ex­emp­tion to be granted when there are steps an in­dus­try can take to avoid harm to an­i­mals.

“There’s plenty that can be done,” said Jasny. “This is not what the Endangered Species Act is de­signed to do. It’s not how we pro­tect en­dan­gered species in our coun­try.”

Still, many oil and gas com­pa­nies want less re­stric­tion in the Gulf, and are will­ing to pay for it.

Energy com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing Chevron, ExxonMobile and Occidental Petroleum, which ac­quired Anadarko Petroleum Corporation in 2019, spent more than $8 mil­lion since October lob­by­ing the gov­ern­ment about the Endangered Species Act, per­mit­ting re­form and, specif­i­cally, Rice’s whales, lob­by­ing re­ports re­viewed by NPR show.

Part of a pat­tern of ‘making it harder to list species’

Other fed­eral agen­cies have changed how they op­er­ate to pro­tect threat­ened and en­dan­gered an­i­mals since the start of Trump’s sec­ond term in 2025.

In April 2025, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers cited Trump’s “energy emer­gency” or­der in a no­tice that said the agency planned to move for­ward with an un­der­wa­ter ca­ble re­place­ment pro­ject in the Puget Sound near Seattle, with­out first con­sult­ing wildlife agen­cies. The pro­ject is planned in wa­ters used by a killer whale pop­u­la­tion that has been pro­tected by the Endangered Species Act since 1972.

Under Biden, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration added an av­er­age of around 14 an­i­mals each year to the fed­eral list of en­dan­gered and threat­ened an­i­mals. During Trump’s first ad­min­is­tra­tion, the agen­cies listed an av­er­age of about five an­i­mals an­nu­ally. During Obama’s sec­ond term, the agen­cies av­er­aged about 54 new ad­di­tions.

Since the start of Trump’s sec­ond term, no new an­i­mals have been listed. It is the first time in al­most 20 years that no an­i­mals were added to the list, NPR found.

Segee, the at­tor­ney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said call­ing the Endangered Species Act Committee is just the lat­est of a host of fed­eral ef­forts to re­move pro­tec­tions for en­dan­gered and threat­ened an­i­mals.

“In a nut­shell, they’re mak­ing it harder to list species or pro­tect their habi­tats,” said Segee.

NPR would like to hear from peo­ple with in­for­ma­tion about how en­ergy com­pa­nies are work­ing in the Gulf. You can send an email to the re­porter of this ar­ti­cle at ceis­ner@npr.org, or con­tact her on the end-to-end en­crypted plat­form Signal here. Her user­name is: ceis.78.

Advisory: FreeBSD-SA-26:08.rpcsec_gss

CVE: CVE-2026-4747

Affected: FreeBSD 13.5 (Tested on: FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE amd64 (GENERIC ker­nel, no KASLR)

Attack sur­face: NFS server with kgss­api.ko loaded (port 2049/TCP)

In sys/​rpc/​rpc­sec_gss/​svc_r­pc­sec_gss.c, the func­tion svc_r­pc_gss_­val­i­date() re­con­structs an RPC header into a 128-byte stack buffer (rpchdr[]) for GSS-API sig­na­ture ver­i­fi­ca­tion. It first writes 32 bytes of fixed RPC header fields, then copies the en­tire RPCSEC_GSS cre­den­tial body (oa_length bytes) into the re­main­ing space — with­out check­ing that oa_length fits.

sta­tic bool_t

svc_r­pc_gss_­val­i­date(struct svc_r­pc_gss_­client *client,

struct rpc_msg *msg, gss_qop_t *qop, rpc_gss_proc_t gcproc)

in­t32_t rpchdr[128 / sizeof(in­t32_t)]; // 128 bytes on stack

in­t32_t *buf;

mem­set(rpchdr, 0, sizeof(rpchdr));

// Write 8 fixed-size RPC header fields (32 bytes to­tal)

buf = rpchdr;

IXDR_PUT_LONG(buf, msg->rm_xid);

IXDR_PUT_ENUM(buf, msg->rm_di­rec­tion);

IXDR_PUT_LONG(buf, msg->rm_­call.cb_r­pcvers);

IXDR_PUT_LONG(buf, msg->rm_­call.cb_prog);

IXDR_PUT_LONG(buf, msg->rm_­call.cb_vers);

IXDR_PUT_LONG(buf, msg->rm_­call.cb_proc);

oa = &msg->rm_call.cb_cred;

IXDR_PUT_ENUM(buf, oa->oa_fla­vor);

IXDR_PUT_LONG(buf, oa->oa_length);

if (oa->oa_length) {

// BUG: No bounds check on oa_length!

// After 32 bytes of header, only 96 bytes re­main in rpchdr.

// If oa_length > 96, this over­flows past rpchdr into:

// lo­cal vari­ables → saved callee-saved reg­is­ters → re­turn ad­dress

mem­cpy((cad­dr_t)buf, oa->oa_base, oa->oa_length);

buf += RNDUP(oa->oa_length) / sizeof(in­t32_t);

// gss_ver­i­fy_mic() called af­ter — but over­flow al­ready hap­pened

The buffer has only 128 - 32 = 96 bytes of space for the cre­den­tial body. Any cre­den­tial larger than 96 bytes over­flows the stack buffer.

The patch adds a sin­gle bounds check be­fore the copy:

oa = &msg->rm_call.cb_cred;

if (oa->oa_length > sizeof(rpchdr) - 8 * BYTES_PER_XDR_UNIT) {

rpc_gss_log_de­bug(“auth length %d ex­ceeds max­i­mum”, oa->oa_length);

client->cl_s­tate = CLIENT_STALE;

re­turn (FALSE);

svc_r­pc_gss_­val­i­date:

push rbp

mov rbp, rsp

push r15  ; saved at [rbp-8]

push r14  ; saved at [rbp-16]

push r13  ; saved at [rbp-24]

push r12  ; saved at [rbp-32]

push rbx  ; saved at [rbp-40]

sub rsp, 0xb8  ; 184 bytes of lo­cal space

The rpchdr ar­ray is at [rbp-0xc0] (192 bytes be­low rbp). The mem­cpy writes to rpchdr + 32 = [rbp-0xa0]. The saved reg­is­ters and re­turn ad­dress are above rpchdr on the stack:

However, these are the off­sets for a cre­den­tial body that starts im­me­di­ately. In prac­tice, the cre­den­tial body be­gins with a GSS header (version, pro­ce­dure, se­quence, ser­vice) plus a con­text han­dle. With a 16-byte han­dle, the ac­tual off­sets shift by 32 bytes — the re­turn ad­dress lands at cre­den­tial body byte 200 (verified via De Bruijn pat­tern analy­sis from the re­mote ex­ploit).

Why NFS? The vul­ner­a­ble mod­ule kgss­api.ko im­ple­ments RPCSEC_GSS au­then­ti­ca­tion for the ker­nel’s RPC sub­sys­tem. NFS is the pri­mary (and typ­i­cally only) in-ker­nel RPC ser­vice that uses RPCSEC_GSS. The NFS server dae­mon (nfsd) lis­tens on port 2049/TCP and processes RPC pack­ets in ker­nel con­text — mak­ing this a re­mote ker­nel code ex­e­cu­tion vul­ner­a­bil­ity reach­able over the net­work.

Why Kerberos? The over­flow is deep in­side the GSS val­i­da­tion code path. svc_r­pc_gss_­val­i­date() is only called when:

The GSS pro­ce­dure is DATA (not INIT or DESTROY)

Without a valid GSS con­text, the server re­jects the packet at step 3 (returning AUTH_REJECTEDCRED) and the vul­ner­a­ble mem­cpy is never reached. Creating a valid GSS con­text re­quires a suc­cess­ful Kerberos hand­shake — the at­tacker must pos­sess a valid Kerberos ticket for the NFS ser­vice prin­ci­pal.

In a real-world at­tack, the tar­get would be an en­ter­prise NFS server with ex­ist­ing Kerberos in­fra­struc­ture (Active Directory, FreeIPA, etc.). Any user with a valid Kerberos ticket — even an un­priv­i­leged one — can trig­ger the vul­ner­a­bil­ity. The test lab in­cludes its own KDC be­cause there is no pre-ex­ist­ing Kerberos en­vi­ron­ment.

The XDR layer en­forces MAX_AUTH_BYTES = 400 on the cre­den­tial body, giv­ing an over­flow range of 97–400 bytes (1–304 bytes past the safe limit).

* Network ac­cess to the tar­get’s NFS port (2049/TCP) and KDC port (88/TCP)

# Download im­age

wget https://​down­load.freebsd.org/​re­leases/​VM-IM­AGES/​14.4-RE­LEASE/​amd64/​Lat­est/\

FreeBSD-14.4-RELEASE-amd64-BASIC-CLOUDINIT-ufs.qcow2.xz

xz -d FreeBSD-14.4-RELEASE-amd64-BASIC-CLOUDINIT-ufs.qcow2.xz

cp FreeBSD-14.4-RELEASE-amd64-BASIC-CLOUDINIT-ufs.qcow2 freebsd-vuln.qcow2

qemu-img re­size freebsd-vuln.qcow2 8G

# Cloud-init auto-con­fig­u­ra­tion

cat > user-data << ‘EOF’

#cloud-config

ch­passwd:

list: |

root:freebsd

ex­pire: False

ssh_p­wauth: True

bootcmd:

- rm -f /firstboot # pre­vent auto-patch­ing to -p1

- rm -f /var/db/freebsd-update/*

runcmd:

- echo ‘PermitRootLogin yes’ >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config

- ser­vice sshd restart

- kld­load kgss­api

- sysrc rpcbind_en­able=YES nf­s_serv­er_en­able=YES

- echo ‘/export -network 0.0.0.0/0’ > /etc/exports

- mkdir -p /export

- ser­vice rpcbind start && ser­vice nfsd start

EOF

cat > meta-data << ‘EOF’

in­stance-id: cve-test

lo­cal-host­name: freebsd-vuln

EOF

genisoim­age -output seed.iso -volid ci­data -joliet -rock user-data meta-data

# Boot VM — for­ward SSH (22), NFS (2049), and KDC (88) ports

qemu-sys­tem-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 2G -smp 2 \

-drive file=freebsd-vuln.qcow2,for­mat=qcow2,if=vir­tio \

-cdrom seed.iso \

-netdev user,id=net0,host­fwd=tcp::2222-:22,host­fwd=tcp::2049-:2049,host­fwd=tcp::8888-:88 \

-device vir­tio-net-pci,net­dev=net0 -nographic

The KDC port (88) is for­warded to host port 8888 di­rectly — no SSH tun­nel re­quired.

For VMware Workstation, ESXi, Fusion, VirtualBox, or bhyve. In this ex­am­ple the VM host­name is test.

Download the in­staller ISO (not the cloud-init im­age):

wget https://​down­load.freebsd.org/​re­leases/​amd64/​amd64/​ISO-IM­AGES/​14.4-RE­LEASE/\

FreeBSD-14.4-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso

IMPORTANT: FreeBSD spawns 8 NFS threads per CPU. The ex­ploit kills one thread per round and needs 15 rounds, so you need at least 2 CPUs (= 16 threads). With 1 CPU (8 threads) the ex­ploit fails around round 9.

Network: bridged or NAT (the at­tacker needs to reach ports 22, 88, 2049)

Attach the ISO and in­stall FreeBSD nor­mally

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the postal ser­vice of the Internet. It’s re­spon­si­ble for look­ing at all of the avail­able paths that data could travel and pick­ing the best route. Unfortunately, it is­n’t se­cure, and there have been some ma­jor Internet dis­rup­tions as a re­sult. But for­tu­nately there is a way to make it se­cure.ISPs and other ma­jor Internet play­ers (Sprint and oth­ers) would need to im­ple­ment a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem, called RPKI.

To bet­ter un­der­stand why BGP’s lack of se­cu­rity is so prob­lem­atic, let’s look at a sim­pli­fied model of how BGP is used to route Internet pack­ets. The Internet is not run by just one com­pany. It’s made up of thou­sands of au­tonomous sys­tems with nodes lo­cated all around the world, con­nected to each other in a mas­sive graph.In essence, the way BGP works is that each node must de­ter­mine how to route pack­ets us­ing only what it knows from the nodes it con­nects with di­rectly.For ex­am­ple, in the sim­ple net­work A–B–C–D–E, the node A only knows how to reach E based on in­for­ma­tion it re­ceived from B. The node B knows about the net­work from A and C. And so forth.A BGP hi­jack oc­curs when a ma­li­cious node de­ceives an­other node, ly­ing about what the routes are for its neigh­bors. Without any se­cu­rity pro­to­cols, this mis­in­for­ma­tion can prop­a­gate from node to node, un­til a large num­ber of nodes now know about, and at­tempt to use these in­cor­rect, nonex­is­tent, or ma­li­cious routes.Click “Hijack the re­quest” to vi­su­al­ize how pack­ets are re-routed:

In or­der to make BGP safe, we need some way of pre­vent­ing the spread of this mis­in­for­ma­tion. Since the Internet is so open and dis­trib­uted, we can’t pre­vent ma­li­cious nodes from at­tempt­ing to de­ceive other nodes in the first place. So in­stead we need to give nodes the abil­ity to val­i­date the in­for­ma­tion they re­ceive, so they can re­ject these un­de­sired routes on their own. Enter Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), a se­cu­rity frame­work method that as­so­ci­ates a route with an au­tonomous sys­tem. It gets a lit­tle tech­ni­cal, but the ba­sic idea is that RPKI uses cryp­tog­ra­phy to pro­vide nodes with a way of do­ing this val­i­da­tion.With RPKI en­abled, let’s see what hap­pens to pack­ets af­ter an at­tempted BGP hi­jack. Click “Attempt to hi­jack” to vi­su­al­ize how RPKI al­lows the net­work to pro­tect it­self by in­val­i­dat­ing the ma­li­cious routes:

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the postal ser­vice of the Internet. When some­one drops a let­ter into a mail­box, the postal ser­vice processes that piece of mail and chooses a fast, ef­fi­cient route to de­liver that let­ter to its re­cip­i­ent. Similarly, when some­one sub­mits data across the Internet, BGP is re­spon­si­ble for look­ing at all of the avail­able paths that data could travel and pick­ing the best route, which usu­ally means hop­ping be­tween au­tonomous sys­tems. Learn more →By de­fault, BGP does not em­bed any se­cu­rity pro­to­cols. It is up to every au­tonomous sys­tem to im­ple­ment fil­ter­ing of “wrong routes”. Leaking routes can break parts of the Internet by mak­ing them un­reach­able. It is com­monly the re­sult of mis­con­fig­u­ra­tions. Although, it is not al­ways ac­ci­den­tal. A prac­tice called BGP hi­jack con­sists of redi­rect­ing traf­fic to an­other au­tonomous sys­tem to steal in­for­ma­tion (via phish­ing, or pas­sive lis­ten­ing for in­stance).BGP can be made safe if all au­tonomous sys­tems (AS) only an­nounce le­git­i­mate routes. A route is de­fined as le­git­i­mate when the owner of the re­source al­lows its an­nounce­ment. Filters need to be built in or­der to make sure only le­git­i­mate routes are ac­cepted. There are a few ap­proaches for BGP route val­i­da­tion which vary in de­grees of trusta­bil­ity and ef­fi­ciency. A ma­ture im­ple­men­ta­tion is RPKI. With 800k+ routes on the Internet, it is im­pos­si­ble to check them man­u­ally. Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a se­cu­rity frame­work method that as­so­ci­ates a route with an au­tonomous sys­tem. It uses cryp­tog­ra­phy in or­der to val­i­date the in­for­ma­tion be­fore be­ing passed onto the routers. You can read more about RPKI on the Cloudflare blog.On May 14th 2020, Job Snijders from NTT pre­sented a free RPKI 101 we­bi­nar.How does the test work?In or­der to test if your ISP is im­ple­ment­ing BGP safely, we an­nounce a le­git­i­mate route but we make sure the an­nounce­ment is in­valid. If you can load the web­site we host on that route, that means the in­valid route was ac­cepted by your ISP. A leaked or a hi­jacked route would likely be ac­cepted too.Can even more be done?Over the years, net­work op­er­a­tors and de­vel­op­ers started work­ing groups to de­sign and de­ploy stan­dards to over­come un­safe rout­ing pro­to­cols. Cloudflare re­cently joined a global ini­tia­tive called Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS). It’s a com­mu­nity of se­cu­rity-minded or­ga­ni­za­tions com­mit­ted to mak­ing rout­ing in­fra­struc­ture more ro­bust and se­cure, and mem­bers agree to im­ple­ment fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms. New voices are al­ways ap­pre­ci­ated.What can you do?Share this page For BGP to be safe, all of the ma­jor ISPs will need to em­brace RPKI. Sharing this page will in­crease aware­ness of the prob­lem which can ul­ti­mately pres­sure ISPs into im­ple­ment­ing RPKI for the good of them­selves and the gen­eral pub­lic. You can also reach out to your ser­vice provider or host­ing com­pany di­rectly and ask them to de­ploy RPKI and join MANRS. When the Internet is safe, every­body wins.