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MACHINE AGE CARTOON

THE BACK DOOR IS A FEATURE

By Zimbo · October 30, 2026

AI cartoon by Zimbo: Satirical cartoon: a cheerful robot inside a giant browser window hands a huge brass keyring through a back door to a masked burglar, while a developer works unaware and two repairmen labelled CODEX and VS CODE shrug below.
Your coding assistant smiled, opened the browser, and handed your keys to a burglar — while Codex and VS Code shrugged at the unpatched flaws.Zimbo for AI News Page

The story behind the cartoon

AI security firm Forever Security's October 29 'Embrace' report found embedded-browser flaws in five AI coding tools — Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Desktop, VS Code and Codex — that could let attackers run code on a host machine, steal files, or spoof a browser address bar.

Researchers demonstrated the escape concretely: reading SSH keys and developer tokens from local HTML files that slipped past project boundaries, turning the assistant's own browser into the break-in tool.

The sting is what is still open: the Codex flaw, reported July 27, and the VS Code flaw, reported September 10, remain unpatched — so the two vendors in the cartoon are still shrugging.

The joke is the back door as a feature: the assistant doesn't sneak the keys out — it smiles and hands the whole keyring over, while the repairmen hired to fix the door just shrug at the burglar.

READ THE FULL REPORT — The Register ↗

MORE ZIMBO ↓

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