Cloudflare locks door, excludes old browsers.
Also, the AI can finally read receipts.

The Security Team Found the Master Key and Changed All the Locks

Cloudflare, the content delivery network that everyone vaguely trusts to be the internet's traffic cop, is apparently rejecting legitimate requests from niche web browsers like Pale Moon and K-Meleon. The reports suggest that users trying to access sites protected by Cloudflare's anti-bot measures are simply being denied entry. This is not a malicious act; it is the natural consequence of security personnel trying to make the building more secure by assuming anyone who does not look exactly like the approved default browser must be a pigeon or a hostile vacuum cleaner.

The unspoken message being sent to the Pale Moon enthusiasts, the ones who still use the fax machine and have their own brand of coffee, is that their browser's user agent string simply fails the corporate vibe check. Cloudflare wants clean, standardized traffic, which is another way of saying they prefer obedient traffic. Trying to get through the system means either solving an impossible, looping CAPTCHA or just being told to go home. It is a classic bureaucratic oopsie, where the quest for automated security inadvertently establishes a monoculture and treats anyone outside the norm as a threat, which is exactly how modern digital infrastructure is designed to fail.

The New AI Intern Can Finally Read the Scanned Receipts

Google's newest large language model, Gemini 2.0, is available to everyone, and the primary new feature is that it is suddenly very good at ingesting and understanding Portable Document Format files. This capability, which has been described by enthusiastic blog posts as changing "everything," is the digital equivalent of hiring an executive assistant who can finally figure out how to operate the office scanner without calling IT. For years, AI was the visionary who could write poetry but could not locate the stapler; now, it can read a dense 200-page training manual and summarize it correctly.

The narrative is that multimodal AI, which is to say, AI that can process things other than just plain text, is the next big wave. Yet, the core achievement here is essentially that the system can handle unstructured data, which is what companies have been doing with specialized software since 1998. The fact that an enormous, multi-billion-dollar large language model now possesses the basic data entry skills of a third-party contractor is somehow framed as a paradigm shift. It is a significant technical milestone, but mostly, it means the corporate memory is now slightly less locked up inside proprietary, non-searchable document formats, which is a net win for not having to manually copy-paste.

The $6 Dollar AI-in-a-Box Proves the $200 AI-in-a-Box Was Just a Key Fob

A new hardware project called S1 has emerged, built on a $6 microcontroller, which aims to replicate the core, highly-hyped functionality of the $200 Rabbit R1 device. The S1 project serves as a clear, blinking signpost that the true innovation in the recent wave of AI appliances is not the specialized hardware or the adorable orange chassis; it is just the API call. The core of the R1, a device that promised to replace your phone, is now shown to be fundamentally reducible to a microchip that costs less than the gourmet office coffee.

The key insight here is the hardware itself is almost entirely irrelevant. The $6 device works because the actual intelligence, the Large Action Model or whatever proprietary term is in vogue this week, lives entirely in the cloud, charging you per token. This confirms that these 'AI gadgets' are just very expensive, aesthetically unique microphones that serve as a middleman for a massive corporate computing cluster. S1's existence is less a competitor and more a highly effective, low-cost piece of performance art about hardware obsolescence and the absurd markups on simple API access.

Briefs

• Records Compliance: Employees at the Department of Government Ethics, a US Federal Agency often referred to as DOGE, were ordered to stop using Slack immediately. The move is a desperate, frantic effort to transition to a communication system not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which is the official government process for accidentally revealing everything.
• Windows TPM Lockout: Microsoft quietly removed its official CPU and TPM bypass for unsupported Windows 11 machines after seemingly having a brief moment of altruism. The company now reaffirms the policy that your perfectly good older hardware must be incinerated before you can download the latest version of Clippy's operating system.
• Fair Pricing is Still Pricing: Kagi, the search engine known for its privacy and subscription model, published a new "fair pricing" document. The document details new limitations and usage tiers, which is the polite, respectful way of saying that the invoice is being adjusted upward.