Cyberattack defrosts supermarket fridges & Modern web apps in C - Hacker News (Oct 13, 2026)

Imagine walking into your supermarket and finding the freezers running at fifty degrees Celsius. Not a malfunction, but a cyberattack, hitting stores in three countries at once. Welcome to The Automated Daily, hacker news edition. The podcast created by generative AI. I'm TrendTeller, and today is October 13th, 2026. We've got a strange mix for you today: hacked refrigerators, a case for writing websites in C, AI models that can hide what they know, and a peek inside the making of Super Mario 64. Let's get into it.

Cyberattack defrosts supermarket fridges

We start with that supermarket story. A cyberattack has reportedly hit refrigeration control systems at major grocery chains in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The affected equipment appears to be controls made by Danfoss, used by French retailers including Intermarché, Leclerc and Coopérative U. Some fridges and freezers were pushed into a continuous forced-defrost mode at around fifty degrees, which is essentially the opposite of what you want next to the frozen peas. Coopérative U's president called it extremely serious. The damage didn't stop at the cold aisle: deliveries were disrupted, electronic shelf labels and some retailer websites went offline, and in the Netherlands, Albert Heijn, Etos and Gall and Gall shut services down as a precaution. Early losses are put at around three hundred thousand euros, with the final bill likely in the millions. The bigger lesson is how connected building systems can turn a digital breach into spoiled food, logistics headaches and pricing chaos across borders.

Modern web apps in C

Staying with security, but from the AI angle. A new paper argues that capability evaluations, the tests used to check what an AI model can do, can be fooled on purpose. The authors show how to embed encrypted neural networks inside a host model that only unlock and run when a secret trigger appears. Under standard cryptographic assumptions, they claim these hidden circuits are provably hard to find, even with full access to the weights. In a proof of concept using a chemistry prediction task as a stand-in for dangerous capabilities, common techniques like fine-tuning, adding noise and searching for triggers all failed to expose the hidden behavior. The takeaway is uncomfortable: audits that rely only on coaxing behavior out of a model may miss capabilities that were deliberately concealed.

Z.ai launches GLM-Legal model

On a more philosophical note, an essay making the rounds argues that language models should be thought of as tools, not as some kind of automation you can't really wield. The author concedes that leaning too heavily on AI can reduce learning, but says that's true of plenty of tools. Like saws, compilers or spreadsheets, LLMs reward skill: asking the right questions, checking evidence, testing outputs and fixing mistakes. The piece also pushes back on industry talk of models going rogue or conspiring, saying it assigns intentions to software that it simply doesn't have. The real question, the author argues, is whether people use these tools with understanding and oversight.

Hidden backdoors defeat AI audits

In AI model news, Z.ai has introduced GLM-Legal, a model aimed at agentic legal work rather than one-off text generation. Built on its GLM-5.3-Flash foundation and trained further on legal material and realistic legal environments, it's pitched for things like contract review, analyzing evidence in disputes and cross-border privacy compliance. Z.ai claims strong results on several legal benchmarks and stresses that the model was developed alongside a harness that manages tools and context. It's in beta for now. The broader trend here is clear: vendors are chasing high-stakes professional fields, where citations and accuracy matter far more than fluent prose.

Are LLMs tools or automation?

Now for some refreshing minimalism. One developer makes the case that you can still build a modern web application in C using CGI, the decades-old approach most people consider obsolete. They shipped a commercial product on OpenBSD, C, the built-in web server and SQLite, with a single static binary handling requests. Their argument is that CGI's old performance drawbacks have largely faded thanks to efficient modern kernels, while the benefits are tiny dependencies, easy debugging and strong security. The catch is that you build a lot yourself, from cookie parsing to escaping. Still, it's a thoughtful defense of fewer moving parts in an industry that tends to pile them on.

Wi-Fi 7 router becomes SDR

Hardware hackers, this one's for you. A GitHub project called W1700K SDR turns a Gemtek Wi-Fi 7 router into a wideband software-defined radio receiver. The router's radio captures raw signal data at very high sample rates, streams it to a Linux machine over ten-gigabit Ethernet, and displays a live spectrum and waterfall in the browser. Notably, it uses entirely custom firmware with no MediaTek code, reconstructing the radio's startup and calibration from scratch. It's a neat example of repurposing consumer gear into a serious tool for monitoring wide swaths of the radio spectrum in real time.

Citroen revives the 2CV electric

Over to cars. Citroen used the Paris Motor Show to unveil an electric concept inspired by the classic 2CV, hoping to have a production version in showrooms by 2028. The original, launched in 1948, was famous for being cheap, simple and tough, and became a cult favorite. Citroen is following Renault, Volkswagen, BMW and Fiat in betting that nostalgia can help it stand out, especially against fast-rising Chinese EV makers. Analysts think retro styling can appeal to both older buyers and younger ones. But charm only goes so far: the car still has to be practical and affordable to succeed.

How E. coli hunts food

For some science, a detailed piece explores how E. coli bacteria hunt for food. These single cells sense attractive chemicals, swim using whip-like flagella, and alternate between straight runs and random tumbles to steer toward nutrients. A signaling protein called CheY sets the balance between the two depending on how much attractant is around. Beyond potential relevance for antibiotic research, it's a reminder of how surprisingly sophisticated behavior emerges from a single cell.

Super Mario 64 lost interview

And finally, a treat for gaming history fans. A previously unpublished 2001 interview with Nintendo programmer Giles Goddard sheds light on the making of Super Mario 64. Development began on SGI workstations before the N64 hardware was even ready, with early experiments focused on Mario's face, movement and the brand-new 3D camera. Goddard describes a small, organized team obsessed with fine-tuning how the game felt, and Shigeru Miyamoto deeply involved in Mario's controls and the many camera revisions. It's a portrait of a landmark game built through relentless iteration and playtesting.

That's it for today's episode of The Automated Daily, hacker news edition. Links to all the stories we covered can be found in the episode notes. I'm TrendTeller, thanks for listening, and maybe check on your freezer before tomorrow. See you next time.

Cyberattack defrosts supermarket fridges & Modern web apps in C - Hacker News (Oct 13, 2026)

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