Negotiation terminates over gratitude dispute
Also, Mozilla revokes a promise and Microsoft kills a zombie.

Oval Office Budget Meeting Devolves into Public Shouting

A planned partnership review at the White House ended abruptly today after what sources described as a highly contentious public argument over "cost-sharing" and a perceived lack of "professional courtesy." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been attempting to finalize a complex, multi-year resources contract with the United States administration. Instead, the meeting descended into a televised spat where President Donald Trump accused the visiting executive of being insufficiently thankful for past deliverables, saying "You're not acting at all thankful."

The failure to ratify the critical minerals deal, which involved a huge transfer of high-value stock, led to the immediate cancellation of a joint press conference and a pre-planned luncheon. Mr. Zelenskyy was asked to leave the premises before the scheduled catering could be served. It appears the entire multi-billion-dollar strategic partnership has been temporarily frozen because someone failed to write a nice enough thank-you note to the department head; a classic communication breakdown that proves no amount of resources can overcome personal ego in a management structure.

Mozilla Realizes "Never" Was an Ambiguous Term

The Mozilla Foundation has caused a significant commotion in the developer community by officially removing the explicit promise to "never sell user data" from its Firefox FAQ and Privacy Notice. An internal memo suggests the legal team found the word "never" to be too restrictive and subject to "evolving definitions" concerning what exactly constitutes a "sale" of data. To alleviate confusion, the company is now opting for slightly less definitive terms.

This revision arrives alongside new Terms of Use that grant Mozilla a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to "use" information a user inputs through Firefox. In essence, the non-profit organization is attempting to find a legally-sound way to sell the abstract concept of friendship while maintaining its moral high ground. They are now working on another blog post to clarify the clarification, which will presumably lead to more confusion and another set of terms.

One Token Could Have Burned Down the Whole Desktop

A security researcher has published a brilliant, terrifying proof-of-concept demonstrating how a single, leaked access token could have allowed remote code execution on the systems of hundreds of millions of people. The vulnerability existed within the build-and-update pipeline of ToDesktop, a service used by popular applications like Linear and Notion Calendar to bundle their software. The core issue was an overly-permissive Firebase Service Admin Account key that was accessible during the application build process.

The simple oversight of granting a build container too many permissions could have allowed an attacker to push a malicious auto-update to a massive user base. It is the digital equivalent of giving the intern the master key to the entire server room, the CEO's personal Wi-Fi password, and the code to launch the main product line just so they can install a slightly updated version of the screensaver. ToDesktop patched the vulnerability in less than a day, proving once again that the vulnerability disclosure process is the one thing in tech that occasionally works correctly.

Microsoft Declares Skype’s Retirement, Attempts to Kill Ad Blockers

Microsoft is attempting to clean up its product portfolio again, this time by officially shutting down Skype, which it purchased for $8.5 billion in 2011. The service is scheduled to be formally decommissioned in May, with all surviving users gently herded toward Microsoft Teams, the company's preferred meeting solution. It is a predictable end for a software that spent over a decade being redesigned, neglected, redesigned again, and then ultimately left in a dusty corner like a proprietary server rack that nobody wants to touch.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Edge has decided to enforce the long-telegraphed shift to Manifest V3, which is effectively a planned sunsetting of highly-functional extensions like uBlock Origin. While technically following Chromium's lead, the move is being universally praised as a huge step toward ensuring more intrusive advertisements can be properly displayed across the web, protecting the precious ad-monetization revenue stream, which is, of course, the true mission of all modern software.

Briefs

• Cloud Horror Stories: The website 400 reasons to not use Microsoft Azure is compiling a lengthy list of institutional trauma, mostly involving unpredictable billing, opaque debugging interfaces, and Azure Cosmos DB.
• Supply Chain Malpractice: Kaspersky discovered a vast network of hidden malware being distributed via Github through seemingly legitimate "cracks" and "mods," a development that shocked absolutely no one with a basic understanding of who uses free software for cheats.
• The Financial Model: A serious report from The Economist suggests that inheritance is becoming nearly as important as work, a finding that will certainly be fixed by the next generation of generative AI tools.