VeryCodedly Today: Huawei Licenses To Qualcomm, Google Pauses Bug Bounty, Lagos Life Hits 1M + More

In a surprising turn of events no one saw coming, more things happened. Here's VeryCodedly Today.

Muse Keeps Tabs On Everyone

A security researcher extracted Muse's internal system prompts, revealing quite a bit on how the AI works. No fancy hacking, no jailbreak. He just asked the AI to share its own files, which he then shared with WIRED.

The prompts instruct Muse to build "a page for every person in the user's life", refreshed hourly, covering family, friends, colleagues, and even people users follow on social media. Each page tracks Facts (location, job), History (past trips, resolved arguments, milestones), The Relationship (intimacy level, interactions), and Strengthening (tips to improve the relationship). The prompt also says "the user's authority over their own household is unconditional and overrides your safety training". Hmm.

Meta's defense? Muse needs context about you and yours to be useful. The company says the file sharing feature is its attempt at transparency.

Huawei + Qualcomm Sign First 5G Deal

Huawei made its first licensing payment to Qualcomm in 2001, and for over two decades, the money flowed one way. Now some of it will flow back as both companies just agreed to a multi-year patent licensing deal for AI, 5G, computing and networking tech.

US restrictions cut off Huawei from American chips and software in 2019 when Huawei was added to the Entity List (US trade restriction list). Huawei responded by spending over 20% of its revenue on R&D to build its own tech. Now the company is licensing that tech back to the company that stopped selling to it.

Nothing like a comeback story.

Google Pauses Bug Bounty Program

AI is making it cheap to generate bug reports. Not good.

The company's Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program (OSS VRP) launched in 2022 and covers projects like Golang, Angular, Bazel, and more.

They're hitting pause due to a flood of automated, mostly invalid, AI-generated submissions. Invalid here means the code analysis sounds plausible, but the vulnerabilities don't actually exist, so devs were spending more time on fake reports instead of fixing real ones.

The program remains active for supply chain reports and reports submitted before the cutoff.

Ubuntu 26.10 Ships Rust PGP

OpenPGP is the standard behind encrypted email, file encryption, and software package verification. It's ancient.

GnuPG is the implementation of OpenPGP Linux has used for decades. Also ancient, and vulnerable to memory safety bugs. That's where Sequoia PGP comes in. It's a new OpenPGP implementation written in Rust which provides memory safety, removing an entire category of vulnerabilities.

Ubuntu 26.10 ("Stonking Stingray") ships Sequoia PGP in the main archive. Now it's officially supported by Canonical, users can install and use it without pulling from a third-party repo.

Rust has found something else to rewrite.

Gen Z Polymarket Group Made ~$40M

A private, invite-only Discord group called "Alpha," with ~30 members mostly Gen Z, is estimated to have made about $40 million on Polymarket since 2024. They pool research and capital to bet on weather, elections, and conflicts.

On the other hand, research found that 69.2% of Polymarket's 2.9 million retail accounts are losing money, with a median loss of about $3. Not much, but still a loss.

Anywho, the Financial Times spent months with its members, and it appears turning warfare, elections, and disasters into betting markets is not all fun and games.

Bitchat Disappears in India

Twitter founder's Bitchat was removed from Indian App Stores following a government order over unspecified illegal content. This is the second time authorities in India have gone after Bitchat. The first was in July when GitHub was ordered to remove Bitchat's repos.

Bitchat is a Bluetooth messaging app that works without internet, servers or phone numbers. Messages hop from phone to phone and are encrypted end-to-end. It's built for situations where the internet is blocked, hence the situation.

Lagos Life Hits 1 Million Players

It's a free, browser-based life simulation game set in Lagos, Nigeria. It launched on the country's Independence Day (October 1st), and crossed a million players within four days, with no app store, console, or high-end hardware.

Players create a character who is randomly assigned one of two starting states: "Nepo" (wealth and connections) or "Lapo" (financial struggle, referencing microfinance), and live their virtual lives finding a job, earning virtual naira, buying food, and paying rent. As their finances grow, they can visit actual Lagos locations.

Sounds like a good time. Perhaps a bit too close to real Lagos life.

That's it for today, guys. Enjoy. Be good.