Hi friends,

Greetings from the hive!

I saw a tweet by Sw33tLie on Hacker Experience discussing how major bug bounty platforms lack certain experience improvements that would encourage hackers to participate more frequently and for longer durations.

It got me thinking about my own recent experience at Sam's Club over the weekend.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Sam's Club, it's basically a massive "grocery" membership store here in the US where you can buy things in bulk for a discount. As you can probably imagine, it's usually pretty busy, somewhat annoying, and always feels like an ordeal.

But this time, things were different. I've noticed that they've been making some really great customer experience improvements over time, like their mobile check-out feature (which is a total game-changer, by the way). You just scan your items as you shop, and when you're done, you don't have to wait in the checkout line at all. You just show your app with the QR code and walk right out. How cool is that?

But what really stood out to me this time was how exceptionally friendly and helpful all the employees were. They were going out of their way to assist customers and make sure everyone had a great experience.

I was curious about what might have changed, so I did a little digging and found out that they actually hired a dedicated Chief Experience Officer (CXO) back in February of this year. It's clear that they're really making customer experience a top priority, and it shows.

All of this just goes to show that customer experience really does make a difference. Whether you're running a bug bounty platform or a massive grocery store, investing in your customers' experience has a huge impact on their satisfaction and loyalty.

Let's take this week by swarm!

🐝 The Bee's Knees

  • Practical lessons from two years of hands-on experience with AI coding tools, from early autocomplete to today's autonomous agents: Evolution of AI assistants, mental models for working with AI teammates, cognitive biases to avoid, and real impact on team productivity and code quality. MORE

  • Novel SSRF Technique Involving HTTP Redirect Loops. It's difficult to show impact for Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerabilities when you cannot see the full HTTP response. Assetnote's research team details a novel technique that allowed for us to leak the full HTTP response, even though the SSRF seemed like it was blind. MORE

  • How to win a Nobel prize. What subjects have past winners studied? What age were they when they won? Where do they live? Nature crunched the data on every science prizewinner to find out. MORE

  • Forging Passkeys: Exploring the FIDO2 / WebAuthn Attack Surface. Passwords are dying and passkeys are taking over. Celeste tears apart WebAuthn and build our own software FIDO2 authenticator from scratch. MORE

  • Armin explores agentic coding, a transformative software development approach where AI agents actively collaborate with humans. Drawing from his experience with Flask and Sentry, he describes this process as a real-time, dynamic interaction beyond traditional autocomplete tools, driven by advanced AI models trained in tool usage. MORE

STANDARD EDITION

Brought to you by β†’

Hive Five membership

Unlock exclusive benefits… and transform your skills, network, and results. Join our premium community for unparalleled access to resources, support, and exclusive content designed to help you achieve your goals faster.

What you’re missing:

  • Private Discord Community: Connect with like-minded individuals, share your journey, and receive support in our exclusive Discord server.

  • Complete Hive Archive: Access a vast library of resources, tools, videos, and audio – everything you need to succeed.

  • Bonus Content & Deep Discounts: Gain access to exclusive content designed to boost your effectiveness, plus significant discounts on paid resources.

  • Less Time, More Results: Spend less time searching and more time achieving your goals.

Join members that are already experiencing the difference.

Interested in sponsoring the Hive Five? Secure your spot.

Upgrade Yourself β†’

You're getting the free version. Members get more β€” including exclusive & bonus content, access to an online community of smart and driven people, the complete Hive Archive, deep discounts, and so much more. See what you're missing.

πŸ“° Updates

πŸ“… Events

  • HackTheBox is hosting a Bug Bounty themed CTF, HackTheSystem, from June 27 to 29, 2025. These challenges are based on actual bug bounty reports. Two teaser challenges are currently available! IppSec showcases one of them, CriticalOps. MORE

βœ… Changelog

  • Anthropic now lets you build and share AI-powered apps directly in Claude without deployment hassles or API costs. Users authenticate with their own Claude accounts, so their usage counts against their subscription while you pay nothing for hosting interactive games, learning tools, and data analysis apps. MORE

  • Google launched Gemini CLI, a free open-source AI agent that brings Gemini 2.5 Pro directly into your terminal for coding, debugging, and task automation. Developers get massive usage limits (60 requests/minute, 1,000/day) at no cost with just a personal Google account. MORE

  • Astro 5.10 introduces experimental live content collections that fetch data at runtime instead of build time, enabling real-time content like inventory updates, news feeds, and live metrics. This new feature maintains Astro's familiar API while opening up dynamic possibilities for e-commerce sites, dashboards, and personalized content experiences. MORE

❝

When a page using live content collections is requested:

1. The page calls getLiveCollection() or getLiveEntry() to fetch data.

2. Data is fetched from the external source (API, database, etc.).

3. Results are processed and validated against your schema.

4. Data is returned to your page component.

  • The term "context engineering" is gaining traction as a better alternative to "prompt engineering" for working with AI models. Tech leaders like Shopify's CEO and Andrej Karpathy argue it better captures the complex art of providing LLMs with all the right information to solve tasks effectively. MORE

πŸ’Ό Work

πŸ’° Career

  • Hakluke and HackerContent is hiring a Social Media Manager with cybersecurity experience and social media management skills. The application requires details on your infosec background, social handles, and content creation abilities.

  • Alethe Denis, a cybersecurity trailblazer, rose to prominence after winning the DEF CON Social Engineering Capture the Flag competition in 2019. As a Senior Security Consultant at Bishop Fox, she leverages her expertise in human psychology and social engineering to enhance organizational security. MORE

  • How to Get Your First GovTech Role (Help Desk/IT Support/Cybersecurity). MORE

  • Apple is hiring a Red Team Platform and Hardware Security Researcher in Cupertino to find vulnerabilities in iOS, macOS, and Apple Silicon chips. MORE

  • Graham shares his practical guidelines for succeeding in new tech roles, covering everything from mastering internal tools to building relationships with colleagues. His advice includes reading all product documentation thoroughly, taking detailed meeting notes, tracking wins for performance reviews, and maintaining work-life balance through proper breaks and PTO. MORE

πŸš€ Productivity

  • Showcase of an effective Zettelkasten workflow in Obsidian. It illustrates how to create atomic notes and establish meaningful connections between concepts. MORE

  • Todoist just launched an experimental feature "Ramble," that lets you speak naturally and instantly converts your words into organized action lists. This builds on their pioneering natural language parsing technology, currently available for paid users with experimental features enabled. MORE

  • Omarchy is ready. Hyprland + Arch have never been so easy. Everything comes preconfigured, preinstalled, and with six beautiful themes in the box. This is the smoothest, most pleasant operating system DHH ever had under his fingers. MORE

  • Wes Bos released an OBS Source Record UI that lets you control your local OBS setup directly from your browser using websockets. MORE

🌎 Community

πŸŽ‰ Celebrate

  • Patrik Fehrenbach announced he's joining Assetnote as a Security Researcher, calling the opportunity "surreal." Congrats! MORE

  • XINTRA Enterprise Live launches after 8 months of development, offering SOC/IR teams real-world threat simulation with live infrastructure instead of locked-down VMs. MORE

⚑️ Timeline

  • Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, announced he's ready to openly share his experiences and opinions about working with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon after enough time has passed. MORE

πŸ„ Level up

πŸ“° Read

  • Doug discovered a 27-year-old hidden easter egg in Apple's Power Mac G3 ROM by reverse engineering the SCSI Manager code. The secret reveals a team photo that can only be accessed by formatting the RAM disk with the exact phrase "secret ROM image". MORE

  • Researchers discovered a pre-authentication remote code execution chain in Sitecore Experience Platform, exploiting hardcoded credentials where the ServicesAPI user password is literally just "b". MORE

  • Rapid7's zero-day research uncovered 8 vulnerabilities affecting 742 printer models from Brother, FUJIFILM Business Innovation, Ricoh, and Toshiba Tec Corporation. MORE

  • The first-ever State of Devs 2025 survey breaks new ground by focusing on workplace issues, health, and hobbies rather than just coding skills. With 8,717 responses and notably higher female participation, it reveals developers want to discuss the personal side of tech careers beyond programming. MORE

  • Breaking the Shield: How XBOW, autonomous AI pentesting system, Discovered Multiple XSS Vulnerabilities in Palo Alto’s GlobalProtect VPN. MORE

πŸ’‘ Tips

  • George discovered a clever hack to cut OpenAI transcription costs by 33%: simply speed up your audio files 2-3x before uploading them. The technique works because AI models handle accelerated speech surprisingly well, reducing both processing time and token usage while maintaining transcription accuracy. MORE

  • Andrew shares expert advice on writing better AI prompts: avoid humanistic language and use clear, repetitive commands like "Always use X. Never use Y." He provides a comprehensive example prompt for web development that demonstrates how explicit, structured rules prevent AI from generating outdated code. MORE

  • Large language models with massive context windows aren't immune to "garbage in, garbage out", they can get confused, distracted, or poisoned by irrelevant information. This guide covers six proven tactics like RAG, context pruning, and offloading to keep your AI agents focused and performing at their best. MORE

🧠 Wisdom

  • "Working on mediocre things is a disrespect to life. [...]" MORE

  • Ashley explores how feedback in tech isn't criticism but care, requiring emotional labor to give well and reflection to receive properly. She breaks down the myths around "direct feedback," the weight of power dynamics, and why creating psychological safety makes feedback transformational rather than transactional. MORE

πŸ“š Resources

  • A security researcher earned $10,000 from Uber after discovering a critical flaw in their WordPress SAML SSO plugin that allowed attackers to bypass authentication entirely. The vulnerability let hackers forge login responses and gain admin access to Uber's sites without needing any passwords. MORE

  • Nuclei templates for source code analysis. Detects hardcoded secrets, config leaks, debug endpoints. Also helps identify OWASP Top 10 issues in code. Ideal for SAST and CI/CD integration. MORE

  • Julia Evans released "The Secret Rules of the Terminal," a $12 zine that demystifies why terminal behavior seems inconsistent and unpredictable. After 20 years of daily terminal use, she breaks down the four key components (shell, terminal emulator, programs, and TTY driver) and explains practical debugging techniques for common terminal frustrations. MORE

❝

Seems like a timely release judging by the fact that all major AI players are building AI in the Terminal.

  • Security Advisory: Anthropic's Slack MCP Server Vulnerable to Data Exfiltration. MORE

  • iOS Research Docker Environment. It solves common pain points like USB device access, SSH authentication, and symbol resolution. The containerized setup automatically handles port forwarding, process attachment, and script loading, making iOS security testing seamless across different machines. MORE

PREMIUM EDITION

The Member Edition

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition. Subscribers to the MEMBER Edition to get additional content and more.

Upgrade

A membership gets you:

  • WEEKLY PREMIUM EDITION: Delve into the EXPLORE section full of the best content I've consumed, including TOOLS, WATCH, LISTEN, TECH, INTERESTING, and QUOTE.
  • Access to COMPLETE HIVE ARCHIVE: Unlock a treasure trove of tools, resources, videos, and audio, catering to all your needs.
  • MEMBER-ONLY GitHub Repository filled with scripts, templates, and resources for Obsidian, Raycast, CLI, and more
  • Join a private Discord COMMUNITY: Engage in chat, uplift one another, grow together, and explore shared interests.
  • MEMBER-ONLY events: Take part in digital meetups, focus sessions, and more.
  • Deep DISCOUNTS on paid content.

Keep Reading

No posts found