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🧑‍💻 What happened in your world this week? It's been said that writing can help consolidate technical knowledge, establish credibility, and contribute to emerging community standards. Feeling stuck? We got you covered ⬇️⬇️⬇️ ANSWER THESE GREATEST INTERVIEW QUESTIONS OF ALL TIME
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Hacker Noon - Medium Why SPIFFE Agent Identities Can Still Be Replayed, and How WIMSE Fixes It
SPIFFE has become the default way to give AI agents a workload identity, a short-lived, cryptographically verifiable credential that answers which specific agent process is acting right now. It has real production deployments behind it at companies like Uber, Stripe, and Netflix, and it shows up in nearly every serious piece written about agent security this year. What most of that coverage skips is a specific, fixable gap in how SPIFFE tokens actually work. A SPIFFE token is a bearer token.



Whoever holds it can present it, whether or not they are the workload it was actually issued to. If someone intercepts that token in transit, they can replay it, and nothing in SPIFFE itself stops them. That gap has existed since SPIFFE's earliest design decisions, and this year it finally started closing.

Bootstrapping Was Never the Whole Problem

SPIFFE was built to answer one specific question well: how does a workload get an identity without a person handing it a secret first? Its answer is the SPIFFE Workload API, which identifies a caller out of band, through properties the operating system already provides, rather than requiring a credential to get a credential. That design choice is genuinely good, and it's why the model got adopted as widely as it did for machine identity.



But solving bootstrapping is a different problem from solving replay. Once a SPIFFE token exists, whether it's a JWT-SVID or an X.509-SVID, nothing in the base specification requires the holder to prove they actually own the private key tied to that identity on every request. The token itself is what gets checked. Nothing confirms the presenter is actually the workload it names.



For an internal service mesh where the network boundary already does a lot of the work, that gap is often survivable. For an AI agent making decisions and calling tools across trust boundaries, a stolen token is a stolen identity, full stop, for as long as that token stays valid.

The Project Knew About This Gap for Years

SPIFFE's maintainers weren't unaware of this. Proposals to bind SPIFFE JWTs to proof of possession, the technique that would actually stop a replay, date back to at least 2023. None of them made it into the core specification. The gap sat there, documented and acknowledged, without a shipped fix, for years.

IETF's WIMSE Group Built the Missing Piece

The fix came from a different standards effort entirely. The IETF's WIMSE working group, Workload Identity in Multi-System Environments, is standardizing a Workload Proof Token, a signed JWT that binds a workload's authentication to one specific HTTP request, method, URL, and all. Presenting a Workload Identity Token alone is no longer enough. A workload has to prove it holds the private key behind that token for the exact request being made, the exact property a bearer token can't offer.








A separate WIMSE draft on workload identity practices names the underlying design principle directly. A workload should be able to obtain its identity credentials without a pre-existing secret, the same bootstrapping problem SPIFFE solved for identity issuance, now applied to proving possession on every call instead of just at credential issuance.<[...]

/p>
SPIFFE Just Adopted It as Its Own

That's where the convergence actually happened. SPIFFE's own standards repository now lists a third SVID type alongside its X.509 and JWT formats, the WIT-SVID, built directly on top of WIMSE's Workload Identity Token format. An open SPIRE GitHub issue tracking implementation work states plainly that the underlying IETF document is in its final stages, and that the SPIRE team is actively discussing how to bring support into the reference implementation, likely landing first behind an experimental flag until the IETF draft becomes an RFC.



That's a rare thing to watch happen cleanly: one open standard identifying a gap in another, building the fix, and the original project adopting it rather than shipping a competing one. It's also a quiet admission that SPIFFE spent years as the default answer to machine identity while the actual fix for one of its real weaknesses came from somewhere else.

The Fix Exists on Paper Before It Exists in Practice

None of this is live in most deployments yet. A recent discovery scan of 15 public agent identity issuers found that 10 advertise only shared-secret client authentication, the weakest option available, and zero advertise DPoP-style proof-of-possession binding, the exact protection WIMSE and WIT-SVID are built to provide. The specification work is real, and it's converging quickly. The deployed reality is still mostly bearer tokens and shared secrets, well behind what the standards now recommend.

What This Means for Anyone Building Agent Identity Today

A few things follow if you're deploying SPIFFE for agents right now.



Don't assume a SPIFFE token is safe from replay just because it's short-lived. Short-lived limits the damage window. It doesn't stop a token from being used by whoever holds it during that window.



Watch for WIT-SVID support landing in SPIRE and plan to move to it once it's stable, rather than layering a custom proof-of-possession scheme on top of bearer tokens in the meantime.



If you're evaluating an agent identity vendor or issuer, ask directly whether they support proof-of-possession binding. Based on the discovery scan above, most don't yet, which makes it a real differentiator rather than a checkbox.

Conclusion

SPIFFE solved how a workload proves who it is without a shared secret. It never fully solved how a workload proves that the token it's holding wasn't stolen from someone else. WIMSE built that missing piece, and SPIFFE adopting it directly into WIT-SVID is one of the cleaner examples of standards bodies fixing each other's gaps rather than competing over them. The fix is real. Does your agent identity stack actually use it yet, or is that still an assumption worth checking?

The Hacker News
OpenAI Agents Linked to RubyGems Campaign That Gained RCE on RubyDoc Servers

The "major malicious attack" that targeted RubyGems in May 2026 was the work of a swarm of OpenAI agents, according to a new report published by researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx.

On May 12, Maciej Mensfeld, senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io, disclosed details of a coordinated cyber attack that targeted the package manager for the

The Hacker News
When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Over the past year, we watched a new class of alert appear in enterprise security operations centers and grow faster than anything else in the stream: alerts that were triggered by AI tools and agents. Not attacks against AI, but the ordinary, everyday footprint of an organization using it, from developers running coding agents and non-technical staff signing consumer AI tools into corporate

The Hacker News
CISA Adds 5 Actively Exploited Artifactory, ScreenConnect, and RouterOS Flaws to KEV

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added five security flaws impacting JFrog Artifactory, ConnectWise ScreenConnect, and MikroTik RouterOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild.

Details of the vulnerabilities are as follows -


CVE-2026-42016 (CVSS score: 8.1) - An incorrect authorization

Hacker Noon - Medium A Look Inside My Career As A B2B Product Marketing Manager in IT (Part 1)
Hi! My name is Anya. I run the Product Pulse Telegram channel, work as a PMM in tech (B2B to be precise), and also consult on marketing, product, and career-related topics.



Today, I’m going to tell you all about my career path and share some of my tips — and anti-tips.

How It All Started

Let’s start with this: I have a technical background. I got my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Master’s degree in Product Development Management of IT Services - yeah, I’m a tech girlie. The program was designed to teach us to become technical product managers: it was pretty well-balanced, combining both technical and business disciplines — entrepreneurship, for example. It was fun.



But my education was more of a consequence than a cause. I knew from the very beginning that I wasn’t going to become a software engineer (four years of a Bachelor’s degree made that pretty clear), but I still wanted to stay in tech. So when I discovered the product manager profession during my fourth year, the rest of my career plan was basically decided.



First things first (even before starting my Master’s), I decided to take as many free courses as possible, get as many certificates as possible (it was 2021, when Coursera was still very much alive, and I took several specialization programs there), and build a proper portfolio around a pet project.



Of course, I never really considered it an “educational” project. At the time, I already had a fairly large audience on Instagram, so I was lucky enough to learn how to test hypotheses and work with different frameworks on a real audience.



So, in the summer of 2021, I started conducting my first customer interviews, built a website on Tilda, got my first traffic and my first users. Feeling absolutely thrilled with my success, I simultaneously decided to apply for a Master’s degree — and got in.



At the same time, I put together my portfolio, created a resume following the classic course formula (“task → action → measurable result”), and started applying for internships at big tech companies.

First Wins and Failures

My strategy was as simple as it gets: apply to a million job postings and eventually something will work out. I created a generic cover letter and sent it to every company I saw, trying to apply to approximately a million vacancies every single day.



It’s worth mentioning that at the time I was working as a UX/UI designer in an office, 5 days a week, from opening to closing time. So, obviously, I couldn’t interview during normal human hours, which made an already difficult attempt to break into product management through internships even harder.



Probably more than 95% of my applications ended either in silence or rejection. But thanks to my sheer stubbornness, about 1–2 months after starting the search, I successfully made it through approximately a million interview stages and got an offer for a Product Intern position on a new international initiative at a huge e-commerce company.



I remember that at the time I could practically see my entire glamorous future unfolding in front of my eyes, like in a movie: there I was, working in a beautiful office on one of the highest floors of Moscow City, talking to Important People, going on international business trips, and adding a shiny new line to my CV.



I had beautiful clothes, a huge professional network, I was rich and successful, and everyone wanted to be me.




Basically, I was in a state of blissful ecstasy, imagining how I would escape my working-class life and become&n[...]

bsp;that girl.




Just a dream. You’re 21, and you have absolutely amazing prospects.



So, what did I do?



I turned it down.



From a career perspective, this was a huge failure, a mistake, a waste of time. I understood that logically and rationally back then, and I still understand it now.



However, I’ve always had very strong intuition, and mine was telling me that this simply wasn’t my vibe.



Why am I talking about vibes? Because when a company’s vibe doesn’t match your own, it can lead to burnout and a quiet hatred of the career path you’ve chosen.



Sorry, but nobody is going to convince me otherwise. I’m Gen Z.

A Quiet Period and a Random Coincidence

After turning down the offer, I fell into a state of gloom and apathy. The rational part of me was screaming, “What an idiot you are! This was a one-in-a-million opportunity!”



I understood that myself, so I kept beating myself up over it. My studies were eating up a ton of time, and I no longer had the energy to restart the job search. At the same time, I was making new connections and starting my academic life: regularly attending conferences and writing papers, building my LinkedIn network, participating in product competitions, and occasionally taking additional courses.



Life went on.



Then, in June/July 2022, I unexpectedly received an invitation to apply for a Junior Product Manager position at a small IT company. I went through the process and got the offer.



I grabbed this second chance at life with both hands and legs — and this time I wasn’t letting it go.

First Steps and Growth

Since I was absolutely determined to grow hard, I started performing beyond expectations.



Overall, this strategy turned out to be the right one, and I developed my skills a lot. The team was very small, which meant I had to turn into a many-handed, many-legged creature. That’s how marketing entered my life. And it came quite naturally — luckily, many things in product management turned out to be pretty similar.



In April 2023, I started my Telegram channel 🫡



It became a great way for me to systematize my knowledge, because I started by simply uploading useful materials from my notes, adding my own thoughts and observations. So, if you want to grow professionally, I strongly recommend starting a blog in whatever format works for you.



You don’t even need to build an audience. It’s enough to simply write posts about topics you find interesting and try to look at what you’ve written from different perspectives.



I started thinking about my next growth opportunity in the fall of 2023. I really wanted to grow both my level and my salary by changing jobs.



By that point, I was already following several creators who offered consulting services. So I decided to work with a mentor.



You know, to this day, the whole essence of mentoring for me comes down to three things:

* look at your situation from a different perspective;
* realize that it’s not actually hopeless — and maybe not that shitty;
* put together a list of actions you need to take to get out of the situation.



After my mentoring sessions, I realized two things.



First, I wasn’t actually a useless professional.



Second, my mentor gave me a great idea: I was already doing so much marketing, so why not look for a Product Marketing Manager specialization on the job market?




Here I should clarify something: to me, PMM is NOT a marketer. A PMM is a product person who understands marketing but is still primarily focused on product developmen[...]

t. That’s why I don’t really like being called a marketer. I’m either a PMM, a Product Marketing Manager, or don’t call me anything.




This time, my job search took around 2–3 months because, as I noticed, the market had already started getting worse by then (it was the end of 2023). At some point, I became completely desperate. And then the heavens sent me the perfect match.



Remote work from anywhere in the world.



A promotion to mid-level.

A young team.

A position focused on developing new products within the company.

A startup atmosphere (and I love controlled chaos).



In November 2023, I accepted the offer and finally moved into a Middle Product Marketing Manager position at a B2B SaaS company.



Guys, how are you doing? Did you actually make it to the end? And… are you waiting for part two?

Hacker Noon - Medium Texas’ AI Data Center Boom Is Becoming a Fight Over Water
What's Happening Across Texas

As of August 2026, Texas is currently in a standoff with regulators regarding the development of AI data center projects. Some of the new 248+ planned AI data center projects were placed on hold on August 3, 2026, via a moratorium issued by Governor Greg Abbott. The reason comes down to ERCOT's concern about the impact it would have on the state's power grid. From their latest findings, ERCOT has found 474 gigawatts in connection requests, which is more than 5 times the state's peak demand, which usually occur during the summer and winter seasons.

However, Texans statewide are not seeing the bigger fight within two regions: Cameron County in the Rio Grande Valley, and Hays County just outside of Austin.

The Rio Grande Valley Fight

Deep in South Texas, Cameron County is facing a battle of its own regarding the development of AI data centers. However, it's not about the power grid; it's about the Rio Grande Valley's supply of water, which comes from the Rio Grande itself. Eneus, a Scottish-based digital infrastructure and site development company, holds an option to purchase 1,775 acres of land near Valley International Airport in Harlingen through its subsidiary, RGV Property Group. Their proposed data center campus, if successful, would draw up to 2 gigawatts of capacity. However, they haven't filed a proposal with local authorities. Regardless, actions are being taken by the Brownsville City Commission, who are scheduling public hearings on a 90-day moratorium it is planning to issue to halt the approvals of new data centers until further notice. Their primary concern is the Rio Grande.

To provide a brief history, the Rio Grande has been a staple of the region for more than a century dating back to the early 1900s, as people would often depend on it for survival. However, due to its tendency to swing between long droughts and severe floods, it has become a headache for residents utilizing it, from irrigation to canals, with the 1960s collapse of the citrus industry being a prime example. This has become especially relevant in today's situation with the AI data centers.


Due to the uncertainty of how data centers will affect the Rio Grande, State Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa has stated that the Senate Finance Committee will hold hearings to discuss the issue, aiming to ground the state's response in research rather than, in his own words, "rumors". Simultaneously, the senator was also indirectly referencing a problem that is impacting not just Cameron County, but other counties across Texas as well. In other words, he was poi[...]

nting to a problem with zoning authority in several counties across the state. That meant that if a project like Eneus's data centers were to move forward despite residents and city officials pushing back, who officially has the power to completely shut it down?


The Austin Fight

In Hays County, a similar fight about water like Cameron County's is taking place. Torrie Martin, whose family ranch sits next to a proposed data center site within the San Marcos area, has told commissioners that nearby projects have already affected not just her water supply, but also her livestock. Martin isn't alone in expressing this sentiment, as the San Marcos City Council rejected a proposed $1.5 billion data center in February 2026, following a public hearing that ran until 2 AM. Four months later, in June 2026, the council followed by banning new data center development within city limits. Hays County carried out a similar move, pausing approvals for water-intensive development through the end of 2026, with their reason being that data centers were putting a strain on the Edwards Aquifer during an active drought. Nevertheless, the dispute is ongoing despite these measures being taken. The reason: cities and counties may not have the legal power to enforce similar bans. A state senator has already warned the Texas Attorney General that counties do not have the authority to impose moratoriums focusing on development projects, and one county has already been sued for more than $100 million after doing just that. Hays County, on the other hand, has stalled on making its moratorium permanent, citing the legal threats that have been circling around the issue. It's the same question Cameron County is quietly running into: who actually has the power to say no?

Comparison


When looking at the bigger picture, we realize that both the Rio Grande Valley and the Austin area turn out to be fighting the same issue, but at different stages. Both regions are facing the issue of water scarcity, not grid capacity, despite the narrative stating that the issue is mostly attributed to the Texas power grid. Cameron County depends on a river, the Rio Grande, that unfortunately has a long history of failing to deliver not just for its people, but for the agricultural sector due to the region being prone to drought and the up and down cycle that comes with it. Hays County, on the other hand, had already taken measures, with San Marcos banning the development of data centers at the city level, and the county separately pausing approvals through 2026. Currently, Cameron County hasn't taken the extensive measures that Hays County has already taken, since <a href="https://www.rgvbusinessjournal.com/news/03/08/2026/abbott-data-center-review-brownsville-works[...]

hop/">the City of Brownsville still has to decide when its first hearing on data centers will take place, which is expected to be in September 2026. And even with these measures in place, the same question has been asked: does the power belong to the local government, or the state government? So far, that question has not been answered.


Conclusion

Whether the impact is happening on the Rio Grande in Cameron County or on the Edwards Aquifer in Hays County, the AI data center boom happening in Texas keeps running into the same hurdle: water, not power, and a legal dilemma that multiple jurisdictions are facing on who actually gets to approve, pause, or deny data center development projects. As a Rio Grande Valley resident myself building AI and software, I am watching all of these events play out closer to home than most. The question isn't whether Texas will continue to develop data centers, but rather, whether the places and the individuals that will unfortunately receive the impact on their water bill get any say in it.

Regardless of the answer to the legal dilemma facing the counties experiencing these fights and the state itself, it's something that the Texas Legislature in Austin won't be able to decide alone. The community has an important role to play here, and that in turn, would lead to a better, informed decision on the long-term structure of addressing data center projects within the state.

Hacker Noon - Medium The TechBeat: Zuckerberg's Superintelligence Memo: The Whole Argument Rests on One Premise (9/13/2026)
How are you, hacker?
🪐Want to know what's trending right now?: The Techbeat by HackerNoon has got you covered with fresh content from our trending stories of the day! Set email preference here.
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🧑‍💻 What happened in your world this week? It's been said that writing can help consolidate technical knowledge, establish credibility, and contribute to emerging community standards. Feeling stuck? We got you covered ⬇️⬇️⬇️ ANSWER THESE GREATEST INTERVIEW QUESTIONS OF ALL TIME
We hope you enjoy this worth of free reading material. Feel free to forward this email to a nerdy friend who'll love you for it.
See you on Planet Internet! With love,
The HackerNoon Team ✌️

Hacker Noon - Medium The AI Slop Economy Runs on Unpaid Verification
There is a story going around about artificial intelligence and trust. It goes like this: AI floods the world with cheap, plausible content, so the genuine article becomes scarce, and scarcity means value, so credibility is the new moat. Build trust and win. I believed a version of this but after doing some research, my views have changed. The flood is real, but nobody is paying more for the alternative.

The flood, with actual numbers

Roughly half of new articles published on the web are now primarily AI-generated. That figure comes from Graphite, which sampled 55,400 pages from Common Crawl and averaged three detectors: 49.9 percent in the first quarter of 2026, and roughly flat near half for five straight quarters.




Music is further along. Deezer reported that at its peak in June 2026 it was receiving about 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, more than half of everything uploaded.




Books, the same shape. A team of researchers tracked 14,419 self-published genre titles against daily Amazon sales through June 2026. Selling titles grew 19.2 times. Revenue grew 8.9 times.




Now hold those two Deezer numbers next to each other, because this is where the comfortable story gets its evidence. More than half of daily uploads are fully AI. Those tracks earn between one and three percent of streams.




That is a twenty-to-one decoupling between how much gets made and how much gets heard. You see it in text too. AI writes about half of new articles and holds about 14 percent of Google's ranking set, taking only 7 percent of first positions. In books, titles with substantial AI text are 20 percent of the catalog and 11.3 percent of revenue. Among the top five percent of bestsellers, 73 percent contain no AI text at all.

Volume and attention have come apart. So far, so reassuring.

Where the story falls apart

If scarcity were raising the price of the real thing, you would see it in the price. Go look.




In that same book study, revenue per title fell in seven of eight genre clusters for books with no AI text whatsoever. Not for the slop. For the human-written ones. Flooding did not create a premium for the authentic, it compressed the economics for everybody standing in the aisle.




Then there is the cleanest test case available. Shutterstock's entire business is verified, rights-cleared, provenance-documented, human-made content. If credibility were becoming scarce and valuable, this is the first place it would show up on an income statement. Its second quarter: revenue $221.8 million, down 17 percent. The data and distribution line, which is where AI licensing lives, down 16 percent for the quarter and 28 percent for the half. Net loss of $155.9 million against $29.4 million of net income a year earlier. The merger that was supposed to consolidate the market died on July 7 and the stock fell more than 30 percent.





And the licensing gold rush is thinner than it looks from the headlines. Wiley, sitti[...]