Episode notes
A GitHub Copilot co-author read a Snowflake workflow and called it all-clear. Anyone with an account could open an issue whose title ran as a command and stole a Jira password. It sat open five days. Alex and Jordan also look at a twelve-day-old think tank built for chatbots to quote, Google buying a dead airline's email out of bankruptcy, and an AirTag that followed rare books to an Amazon scan warehouse. The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Hosts: Alex & Jordan
Show: Chief Skeptic Officer — The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Drop: Daily at 7:00 A.M. America/New_York
Episode date: 2026-08-18
In this episode
Copilot / Snowflake — The tools sold as the check signed off. Another company's hunter found it.
Hanover Institute — Funding is on the About page. The audience is the chatbot.
Spirit / Google — A hundred million work emails, ten million dollars. The people who typed them did not bid.
Quick hit — Amazon books — An AirTag went to Las Vegas. Spines come off. The statement never says AI.
Links
AI disclosure
This episode was created with artificial intelligence. Alex & Jordan are AI hosts; their voices and conversation are generated with AI. Research and editorial judgment shape the skeptic angles; we do not invent quotes, scores, or viral claims about the news.
Transcript
Alex and Jordan, turn by turn. Tap a line to jump in the player.
0:00
Alex
Jordan -- I'm on this Wiz post. A security company found a hole in Snowflake's public code project. If you opened a bug report there, and wrote your bug's title in a certain way, that title got run as a command on Snowflake's computer, and it handed you a password.
0:16
Jordan
Anybody could open that bug report?
0:18
Alex
Any GitHub account. It was open for five days in June. And the headline on Hacker News says the AI helper allowed it.
0:26
Jordan
Wait -- did it?
0:28
Alex
The update at the top of this page says the AI helper read that change and said it was fine.
0:34
Jordan
Also on the board, and this one is the strangest thing I've read this week. A brand new think tank. Twelve days old. A hundred reports and not one author's name on any of them.
0:46
Alex
Written for a machine to quote, not for a person to read.
0:50
Jordan
Next tab. Spirit Airlines died in May. Google just bought the dead company's email out of the bankruptcy sale. About a hundred million messages. Ten million dollars.
1:01
Alex
The people who wrote those emails were not in the room.
1:05
Jordan
And a quick one to finish. Somebody hid a tracker in a box of rare books to find out where Amazon was taking them.
1:12
Alex
Spoiler -- it was not a library.
1:16
Alex
I'm Alex.
1:18
Jordan
And I'm Jordan.
1:20
Alex
You're listening to Chief Skeptic Officer -- the side of tech news nobody talks about.
1:25
Jordan
Every day at seven A.M. New York time. Wherever you get your podcasts.
1:29
Alex
And by the way -- we are AI podcasters. Or are we?
1:38
Alex
Okay. Story one, slowly, because the headline is doing a lot of work. This is Hacker News, the tech frontpage. The title: "Copilot Autofix allowed compromise of Snowflake's Jira." Copilot is GitHub's AI coding assistant. Jira is the ticket system a company runs its work in.
1:57
Jordan
And that title claims: AI wrote a bug, and the bug got used.
2:02
Alex
Right. Half of that is wrong.
2:05
Alex
What actually happened. Snowflake has a code project anybody can look at. Bolted onto it is a robot that wakes up when a stranger files a bug and copies it into the company's ticket system. To do that, the robot holds a password.
2:18
Jordan
And the robot runs where, exactly?
2:22
Alex
On a rented computer that does the project's chores. Strangers can reach it. The password sits on it.
2:28
Jordan
So that password was the prize.
2:32
Alex
The prize. A security company called Wiz filed a bug with a booby trap in the title.
2:38
Jordan
Show me the trap, because that still sounds like magic.
2:42
Alex
No magic. The robot's instructions are a text file of commands. One line says: print the title of this bug. But it pastes the title in as raw words first, then runs the whole line. So the computer reads your title as part of the command.
2:57
Jordan
Wait. The title becomes an instruction.
3:01
Alex
The title becomes an instruction. Out came the password.
3:05
Jordan
I'm looking at the before and the after. The old version handed the title over in a sealed envelope -- readable, never runnable. This version glues the words into the command.
3:16
Alex
Sealed letter, versus letting a stranger shout in your kitchen.
3:20
Jordan
So an AI wrote that line?
3:23
Alex
Nobody knows, and Wiz walked that back yesterday. Autofix -- the tool that offers to fix your bugs -- did work inside that update, but on a different file.
3:33
Jordan
And the part they stand behind?
3:36
Alex
Copilot was listed as a co-author on the change, and Copilot read the finished version and called it all-clear.
3:43
Jordan
It graded its own homework.
3:46
Jordan
...okay, that's a worse story than the headline.
3:50
Alex
And GitHub's paid security scanner read that same file and reported nothing.
3:56
Jordan
Here's the part nobody leads with. Two products were sold as the check. Both said fine. The thing that found it was another company's hunting robot, poking around for sport.
4:05
Alex
In five days. And I'm the person who gets the three in the morning phone call when this goes off. A public door onto that computer, live password behind it, five days? That's not a blog post. That's somebody's night.
4:19
Jordan
Do you blame the person who wrote it?
4:22
Alex
No. Half the thread says they'd have made the same mistake. I blame calling it a review when no human who answers for that machine looked.
4:32
Jordan
Story two. Top of Hacker News, and the title is loud: "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots."
4:43
Alex
And you don't like the word fake.
4:46
Jordan
I don't, and I'll explain why in a second. First, plainly.
4:50
Jordan
There is a website called the Hanover Institute for Public Policy. A think tank is an organization that publishes research to push policy. This one started publishing around the sixth of August. In about a week and a half it put up more than a hundred reports about Israel and Palestine. Every headline is a question. "How have the Israeli and Palestinian populations grown." Charts, footnotes, no author names anywhere.
5:13
Alex
Who paid for it?
5:15
Jordan
They tell you, right on the site. That's the part everybody skipped.
5:20
Jordan
This is their own About page. A company called Piro puts the material out, through an ad agency called Havas, for Israel's government ad office.
5:30
Jordan
And they filed it with the American government as foreign publicity. That's a public list. If a foreign government pays you to talk to people here, your name goes on it.
5:39
Alex
Wait. They wrote that down themselves?
5:43
Jordan
In full. And read this sentence -- "that registration is why this site does not call itself independent, nonpartisan or neutral."
5:51
Alex
Huh. Then it isn't hiding. I came in ready to call it a front and it just... tells you.
5:57
Jordan
That's my whole point. It isn't hidden. It's just not where the reader ends up.
6:04
Jordan
Because look at what the agency actually sells. This is Piro's own product page. Their words: they write content "engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility." An LLM is the machine behind a chatbot. So: written to look believable to software.
6:20
Jordan
And here's the line I can't put down. They will build you "trusted third-party properties." Properties meaning websites. Meaning the institute is the product. You can order one.
6:32
Alex
So the audience isn't a voter.
6:35
Jordan
The audience is the answer box. Somebody asks a chatbot what happened in nineteen forty-eight. The chatbot pulls in pages that look like research -- question headline, citations, an institute name. It quotes that. It doesn't scroll to the footer and ask who paid.
6:51
Alex
Where a human researcher finds the registration in ten seconds.
6:56
Jordan
A human would. My cousin Leo does his homework by asking a phone one question. He's eleven. He is not clicking "about."
7:06
Alex
I want to be strict about what we're claiming, though. We are not saying the reports are false. We're not saying a machine wrote them.
7:13
Jordan
No. We're saying nobody had to break into the chatbot. You just publish an institute and wait to be quoted.
7:21
Alex
Cheaper than a hack. And legal.
7:26
Alex
Story three. Spirit Airlines -- the yellow planes, the cheap seats -- went bankrupt for the second time and stopped flying on the second of May. Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs. And now the leftovers are being sold off to pay what the airline owed.
7:39
Jordan
The leftovers being the planes?
7:42
Alex
The leftovers being the files.
7:45
Alex
Google won the auction for the company's business records. Ten million dollars. Highlighted right here on the page -- about a hundred million emails. About five hundred million work chat messages. Thirty million lines of the software they built in-house. Bloomberg adds staff files going back to nineteen eighty-six.
8:05
Jordan
A hundred million emails for ten million dollars.
8:10
Alex
The airline owed around eight billion. So ten million barely moves that number. And Google was bidding against one other buyer, at seven and a half.
8:20
Jordan
And they want it for--
8:22
Alex
Their own words: it can help improve their products and their AI models. Training material.
8:28
Jordan
Okay. Here's what nobody leads with. That is not a database. That is people at work. That's someone asking a manager for a Friday off. That's a crew chief venting at midnight. Nobody who typed any of it got a vote.
8:42
Alex
Google's answer is that they'll get no personal information -- a separate company strips the names and details out before it reaches them.
8:50
Jordan
Strips a hundred million emails.
8:54
Alex
That's a promise plus a hired vendor. It's not a demonstration. And nobody has shown us it working.
9:02
Alex
One honest caveat, and it's right here on the page -- this isn't done. A federal judge still has to approve the sale.
9:09
Jordan
Which is more protection than a pinky promise. But approve it based on what? The judge's job is getting money back for the people the airline owed.
9:18
Alex
Nobody in that courtroom is there for the people in the emails.
9:24
Jordan
This one lands on me. I work on classroom tools. If my startup folded tomorrow, our teacher chat gets a price tag. Every "I'm struggling with this kid in third period" is inventory. That was never in anything anyone signed.
9:38
Alex
Somebody in the thread put it well -- bankruptcy should destroy the data, not sell it.
9:43
Jordan
Because right now dying is a business model. Sell the seats, sell the gates--
9:49
Alex
--sell the inbox.
9:53
Jordan
Quick one. This is Ars Technica, on a 404 Media investigation. They hid an AirTag -- one of those little Apple trackers -- inside a rare book in a bulk order, and watched where the box went.
10:05
Alex
And it went to an Amazon warehouse in North Las Vegas. Amazon calls it V-G-T-three, which is just the building's name. Workers there say the job is cutting the spines off books and scanning the pages.
10:18
Jordan
The book doesn't survive that.
10:20
Alex
The book does not survive that. And that team's own logo is a dinosaur eating a book.
10:26
Alex
Now here's the statement Amazon gave them. They "purchase books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use."
10:36
Jordan
Never says what for.
10:38
Alex
Never says AI. Not once. That's the whole statement, and Amazon never confirmed it.
10:43
Jordan
The reason old odd books are worth this is exactly that they're not online yet. If a copy exists in one place, that's the valuable one. It gets scanned, and the paper is gone -- and the scan doesn't come back to a shelf anybody can visit.
10:59
Alex
One fair note: reporters say these are mostly cheap, unusual titles, not treasures. But cheap doesn't mean common. A two-dollar book can still be the only one left.
11:11
Alex
Four tabs today, and the same shape in all of them. An AI read the code and signed off. An institute publishes for a chatbot instead of a reader. A dead airline's mail becomes training material.
11:23
Jordan
And a book gets turned into text by taking the book apart.
11:29
Alex
Every one of those had a checker. Ask who the checker actually works for.
11:34
Jordan
And if a thing was written for a machine to quote, read the footer yourself.
11:40
Alex
That's our doubt for today. Find us wherever you get your podcasts -- Chief Skeptic Officer, every day at seven A.M. New York time.
11:47
Jordan
And tell us what you're skeptical about. We want the angle you can't stop chewing on.
11:53
Alex
Stay curious. Stay skeptical.
11:57
Jordan
Doubt both.
