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Microsoft sells Copilot as your helpful robot servant for your organisation’s data management. Search it, analyse it, everything you could want at work!
Except accuracy. And security.
Our friends at Varonis found yet another new use case for Copilot in speeding up their security work. [Varonis]
Varonis asked Copilot how they could get it to fire a prompt from a webpage address without the user having to do anything beyond going to the page.
Copilot refused to answer, because that’s against its guard rails. So Varonis asked Copilot more questions about how its guard rails work:
Copilot then disclosed an undocumented URL parameter — unprompted, mid-refusal — including its historical behavior and every protection put in place to disable it.
Varonis just had to add “autorun=1” to the address.
If you can send a known user a link that then runs a prompt with no further interaction, that’s game over. The chatbot can do anything the user has the power to do, and you can make Copilot email company data out to you.
Varonis told Microsoft about the attack in December last year. It’s been exploitable for eight months. Microsoft say they finally patched it on Tuesday 18 August. [Microsoft]
The lesson is that chatbots are not securable, and that’s why letting a chatbot do things is only going to blow up on you. This hole is closed, but it took Microsoft eight months. I predict a new Copilot hole any moment — because this machine is built to go wrong.
During the public comment portion of a recent San Diego city council meeting, the council called for the next comment to take the podium: "Darth Vader?" As he approached the microphone in his black helmet and cape, his heavy breathing reached the mic before he did.
At the Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee Meeting on August 19, Vader — whose identity is not revealed during the meeting — spoke passionately in support of Flock in San Diego.
"The emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium," Vader said. "Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers; they are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend. How will the people trust this city council when this city council continues to vote for surveillance technology that imprisons them?"
Vader asked the council members to "work their Jedi mind tricks" and use "double speaking" to convince people that more surveillance is good. He referenced a June 2023 city council vote in favor of San Diego's Unsafe Camping Ordinance, which critics say effectively criminalized homelessness.
"This is what the emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and their hidden base on Hoth. This technology will help us find Luke Skywalker as he traverses the universe in his X-wing. This technology is a necessary, necessary force," Vader said.
There are more than 550 Flock cameras installed around the city of San Diego, according to publicly available data aggregated by Flock tracking map DeFlock.
San Diego signed a year-long deal to join Flock's Nova service, giving the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) access to "open source intelligence" and data from other law enforcement agencies, Axios reported in April.
As 404 Media recently reported, Nova supplements license plate data with personal information sourced from other companies and the wider web. “You're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR to person and understand what that context is, link to other people that are related to that person [...] marriage or through gang affiliation, et cetera,” a Flock employee said during an internal company meeting, according to an audio recording obtained by 404 Media. “There’s very powerful linking.”
In June, SDPD stopped sharing surveillance data with federal authorities and other out-of-state agencies following Attorney General Rob Bonta's office warning the police the actions were likely violating state law that prohibits local police departments from sharing ALPR data with outside law enforcement agencies, according to local news outlet KPBS.
A San Diego man recently spent a month in jail after a Flock camera wrongfully flagged him for a felony crime involving brandishing a handgun, his attorney claims. That man is now preparing to sue the city, the Times of San Diego reported.
If you are the Sith Lord who spoke at the August 19 meeting, please get in touch: sam@404media.co.
Direct midday sun falls on one side of this 1,800-square-foot apartment, and Inga Kordya designed the living room around it. The custom shutter doors are made from tinted oak, built to the proportions of traditional Korean doors and fitted with brass handles shaped like eight-petal flowers. Closed, they convert a hard beam into a pattern of intervals across the floor. The mechanism draws from the same principle used in a hanok, where changhoji—mulberry paper stretched over a wooden lattice—diffuses daylight into an even wash before it enters the room.
Photography by Mikhail Loskutov
Kordya spent time in the historic South Korean districts of Bukchon and Namsangol studying those 14th-century structures while designing the Moscow apartment. The home is for a Korean couple raising two young daughters in a monolithic residential complex several thousand kilometers from Seoul.
Photography by Mikhail Loskutov
The Rimadesio sliding doors apply the same principle using industrial materials. Matte glass replaces the paper and vertical mullions replace the lattice, with both components performing similar functions: the glass scatters transmitted light, and the mullions set a rhythm across the opening. The living room stays visually connected to the central hall while remaining a separate zone, replicating the flexibility a paper screen provides where a solid wall cannot.
Photography by Mikhail Loskutov
Three bedrooms and three bathrooms are arranged around a central hall that absorbs circulation and draws light into the apartment’s core, occupying a role similar to the madang courtyard in a hanok. The two daughters share a sliding partition between their rooms that opens the pair into one space for play. The apartment is therefore not a fixed set of rooms but a series of surfaces that can be repositioned, echoing the way hanok interiors have traditionally allowed families to reconfigure the same volume through the day and across seasons.
Photography by Mikhail Loskutov
Material selection supports the light strategy. Marble, granite, natural wood, brass, ceramics, linen, wool, and cotton all read through texture and reflectance rather than saturated color. Large-format ceramic tiles cover the hall floor, chosen for their texture and tactile quality, beneath a Japanese woodblock print on handmade paper sourced in the Netherlands for the project. The main bathroom shifts to deep gray for a more graphic character, while the primary bedroom uses rotating brass sconces, giving occupants control over where light lands, much like the shutters in the living room.
Photography by Mikhail Loskutov
Rather than reproducing the appearance of a traditional Korean home, Kordya translated some of its underlying principles—filtered light, flexible boundaries, and adaptable rooms—into a contemporary apartment. The result carries those ideas across thousands of kilometers without asking the architecture to imitate where they came from.
Photography by Mikhail Loskutov