Government Deletes Public Health Data Archive
Also, Oracle Clears the Inactive User List with a Flamethrower

The CDC Data Purge: When the Compliance Intern Runs a Recursive Delete

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, has been forced to execute a vast, digital content audit, resulting in thousands of pages of public health information going missing. The effort to comply with new administrative executive orders regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, appears to have functioned more like a poorly scoped cleanup script than a surgical editing process, creating a general availability nightmare for researchers worldwide. Entire sections of the public website vanished, including studies, guidelines, and even pages on HIV testing and LGTBQ+ youth health .

It is the equivalent of trying to clear out a single outdated folder on the shared drive and somehow managing to delete the whole H drive while you were at it. Some documents returned, but with key terminology altered; "pregnant people" was systematically corrected back to "pregnant women" . The good news for the bureaucrats is that the data is technically "in compliance" now; the bad news is that nobody can actually find or use the data. This is what happens when you substitute human context with an aggressive search-and-replace function.

The Neuralink Auditor Refuses the Layoff Package

The workplace drama at Neuralink appears to have spilled over into the government sector when Inspector General Phyllis Fong of the US Department of Agriculture was escorted from her office by security. Ms. Fong, who was overseeing a federal investigation into Elon Musk’s Neuralink startup for alleged animal welfare violations, refused her termination notice .

Ms. Fong asserted that her firing did not follow proper legal procedure, which is a wonderful, deadpan way of treating a governmental purge as a standard office disagreement over a P45 form . One cannot simply terminate a high-level watchdog who is actively investigating a prominent tech executive and expect them to immediately hand over their laptop and building access card, especially not when the executive in question is known for being extremely online. The physical escort is just a reminder that even in the world of high-tech brain implants, the solution to a bureaucratic disagreement is often two guys from facilities management.

The Cloud Provider That Cleans Too Well

It turns out that a "free-tier" service is exactly as reliable as the complimentary hotel shampoo; nice for a quick test, but do not base your entire operation on it. Reports are surfacing that Oracle Cloud is deleting active user accounts with zero possibility of data recovery . This is what happens when a company automates "cost-optimization" with too much conviction .

The great Oracle purges appear to be triggered by anything from a failed micro-charge verification to using the wrong type of payment method for a "free" service . Imagine your most aggressive Sysadmin running a cron job that says: "If not logged in for 90 days, delete everything." Now imagine that script misinterprets "active" for "not active enough" and has no rollback function. The difference between a multi-billion dollar cloud provider and a disgruntled admin is shrinking daily.

Briefs

• Compression Wars, Version 3.0: A spiritual successor to the archaic BZip2 has arrived in the form of Bzip3. It is better, faster, and will still not convince anyone to stop just using tar and gzip because those are the utilities we already know and begrudgingly tolerate.
• Dell HR Mandate: Dell has ended its flexible hybrid work policy, demanding that all employees return to the office, a classic corporate flip-flop that is less about "innovation" and more about ensuring that the expensive real estate is being properly utilized. Management insists that seeing a coworker's face is a necessary security measure.
• Bookish Data Science: A developer has created a visualization of every book in the world according to its ISBN number, which is a phenomenal achievement in mapping data nobody will ever ask for. It is peak intellectual data spelunking for the sheer joy of proving it could be done.