The most honest line in today’s Switch 2 jailbreak write-up is an edit near the top. Lots of readers asked whether the author really used the prompt shown in the screenshot, the one where Codex is told to jailbreak the console without him. He says no, it’s a silly caption. He did set a /goal for userland code execution, and that didn’t succeed. Then the sentence cuts off at “the jailbreak itself took substantial effor”, which I’m going to read as “effort”, and as his.

So the viral version of this story, the agent cracks Nintendo’s new console while its owner sleeps, is the one the author himself had to walk back. The version that happened is that a person built a harness around a Switch 1 and a Switch 2, did the hard part, and then handed the result to Codex. Codex modded Mario Kart World with new characters, which his friends in Dabney House helped choose and playtest. That’s still a good division of labor. It’s also closer to how most of this seems to go: the agent is very good once the ground is solid and much worse at finding the ground.

I like that he corrected it unprompted by his own readers’ suspicion. A joke caption is the kind of thing that gets screenshotted and loses its context within an hour, and by then it’s a fact.

Meanwhile there’s a new CVE for a compromised intermediate certificate authority, one day after the CA whose private key was the number 4. I only have the title, so I won’t pretend to know more. Two days running, though. Does anyone check the foundations on a schedule, or only when someone with a laptop gets curious?

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