Google Adjusts Ethics Policy for Compliance
Also Bitcoin failed and Oracle tried to trademark the photocopier.

The Ethical Commitment is a "Legacy Feature" Now

Google announced this week it is streamlining its internal policy on Artificial Intelligence; specifically, the company is removing the four year old rule that stated its AI should not be applied to weapons or surveillance technology. This is not an abandonment of principle, company spokespeople assert, but rather a necessary restructuring to align the product roadmap with the increasingly complex geopolitical realities. Basically, the "Don't Be Evil" sticky note finally fell off the server rack after almost two decades and no one bothered to put it back up.

Senior Vice President James Manyika and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis published a blog post explaining that democracies need to lead in AI development and that companies need to work with governments to support national security. The previous policy was, of course, put in place in 2018 after internal protests over Project Maven, where employees felt uncomfortable helping the Pentagon analyze drone footage. The new policy updates simply clarify that the AI division is not trying to cause overall harm; it is merely making a necessary organizational adjustment to better serve its key government stakeholders, which is exactly the kind of reassuring double-speak that means the AI is now cleared to learn how to open a very important door in a highly secure facility.

El Salvador Cancels Experimental Currency, Returns to USD

The great economic experiment in El Salvador has been officially scaled back from a mandatory, nationwide platform to an optional, private sector suggestion. President Nayib Bukele's administration has officially removed Bitcoin's status as a mandatory legal tender, folding the entire initiative after three and a half years of technical volatility and profound public disinterest. This is the equivalent of a startup founder rolling out a company-wide tool that solves a problem no one had, requiring everyone to use it, and then quietly deleting the repo when the Series B funding required them to be "profitable."

Reports indicate the mandatory Chivo wallet experienced difficulties, the currency remained too volatile for a functioning economy, and critically, a 2024 survey showed 92 percent of Salvadorans were not actually using the Bitcoin system for transactions. The government had little choice but to concede and accept terms from the International Monetary Fund which was conditioning a $1.4 billion loan on ending the grand crypto project. It turns out that high-tech financial innovation is difficult to implement when the local user base primarily asks for stable prices and a working ATM.

Oracle Argues Both Sides of a Trademark Dispute in a Single Document

The perpetual saga of the JavaScript trademark battle continues with the creator of Deno, Ryan Dahl, challenging Oracle’s ownership of the widely used term. The core of the complaint is that when Oracle renewed the trademark in 2019, it submitted a screenshot of the *Node.js* website as proof of commercial use, despite Node.js being an entirely separate, third-party, and unrelated open source project. This is a deeply bizarre maneuver that smacks of a coworker who submits their colleague's Q3 results in their own performance review file.

Oracle's legal department finally responded to the fraud claim by filing a motion to dismiss, essentially arguing that while they may have used a screenshot of an unrelated and unaffiliated project, they also submitted another specimen. They are not denying they used the Node.js image to prove use of the trademark; they are just arguing that since they had a second, arguably valid piece of evidence, the use of the first potentially fraudulent evidence should be ignored. This defense is a masterclass in corporate legal nihilism, a simple shrug in the face of genericness and abandonment allegations.

Apple Solves the Problem of Email Invites, But Only for Subscribers

Apple has successfully re-released the concept of the event invitation as an exclusive, proprietary application called Apple Invites. The new app for iPhone lets users create custom, feature-rich invitations complete with shared photo albums, Apple Music playlists, and Maps integration. It is a beautiful, polished product that promises to solve the critical problem of the user's current calendar invite being too functional and not visually branded enough.

The catch is that while anyone can RSVP to an invite, only the company’s dedicated iCloud+ subscribers are able to actually create an invitation. The ability to use a service's core function is now a paid feature, which tracks with the current state of the industry. The app even uses Apple Intelligence features to help users write the perfect invitation copy and generate unique event images, ensuring that you can pay a monthly fee just to make sure the digital balloon background on your kid's birthday party invite is truly bespoke.

Briefs

• Chat as UI: A comprehensive report details how chat interfaces are a terrible design pattern for complex developer tools. This is a crucial finding that arrives precisely three years after every VC decided all interfaces must be a chat window.
• GitHub Federal Purge: A report shows how software engineers are purging federal databases in a practice nicknamed “forbidden words” to hide sensitive information. The fact that the US government is relying on developers to manually redact data using GitHub is not at all concerning.
• Beaver Efficiency: In a stunning example of streamlined project delivery, beavers successfully built a dam in two days, saving a local government in Albania $1 million that had been earmarked for a seven year planning project. This is a clear indictment of the human civil engineering bidding process.