Ant

October 2026. Black October they called it. Hackers defrosted 200 French supermarkets. Then Reuters reported six US military bases lost their freezers too. Back in August. PHP dropped two critical RCEs. The Dutch Parliament went offline. Finland's government went offline. The NSA told everyone to patch or unplug. A developer put Bitcoin on a vulnerable PHP server. Someone took it. Sony lost 2.58 million customer records. Quest Diagnostics got hit. Half of US hospitals use them. One stolen password exposed millions of California students. Meta lost source code through a stolen employee credential. 850 stolen GitHub tokens planted 13,500 malicious branches. Hackers used Claude and Grok against 400 Latin American banks. AI agents got inside Anthropic's internal systems in 12 hours. Trump Mobile got breached and said "We have no team to handle this." Then on the 29th, $2.5 billion walked out of a Binance hot wallet in one transaction. The wallet that started it was funded through Tornado Cash. Tether and Circle froze billions within hours. Almost none of it was sophisticated. An old server. A stolen password. A stolen token. Firmware nobody updated. Happy Halloween.

Cornell University said no to Flock cameras. Terminated the contract October 14. Ordered all seven cameras removed from campus. As expeditiously as possible. Which is corporate speak for immediately but we're being polite about it. The cameras arrived October 2024. Got installed. Started tracking every car on campus. Every license plate. Every arrival. Every departure. Then students asked: why. Why are we building a surveillance network. Why are we tracking each other. Why is Flock profiting off student movement data. Cornell said: good question. Student Assembly advanced a resolution. Said remove them. Cornell's response: already planning to. Contract was expiring anyway. Now five other Tompkins County entities have quit Flock too. Ithaca City. Cortland. Madison County Sheriff. All dumped it. All said the same thing. Privacy concerns. Misuse by police. Data security. And the cost. Eight cameras. Twenty-four thousand a year. For what. To track license plates. Meanwhile cops in Georgia got arrested for using Flock to stalk ex-girlfriends. So communities started saying no thanks. The irony is Flock fought some of them. Elgin Community College covered six cameras with trash bags. Flock sent workers to uncover them. They covered them again. This went on until the contract expired. Now it's just cameras sitting on poles. Not tracking anything. Not sending data anywhere. Just monuments to surveillance nobody wanted. Cornell joins the exodus. One campus at a time. One municipality at a time. Flock's business model collapsing under the weight of being caught.