HR Demands ID For Office Bathroom
Also Microsoft Quietly Updates its Resume

The Compliance Team Is Worried About Your Skin Cream

The EFF, a non-profit organization, is currently sending out a mass email regarding the new trend in age verification laws, which are quickly morphing into a mandatory surveillance tool. What started as an attempt to protect minors from adult content has now metastasized into proposals requiring ID for things like certain skin creams and other innocuous web transactions, effectively turning basic internet access into an irritating, age-gated administrative burden the organization explains.

It is the policy equivalent of the office requiring a two-factor biometric scan and five forms of government identification just to use the coffee maker in the break room, a solution that completely bypasses the real problem and only irritates the existing employees. The general sentiment in the comment threads is that this system will either be easily bypassed by the technically proficient, or it will be so invasive it creates a massive, centralized database of everyone's identity and browsing habits, which is exactly the kind of thing the IT department will struggle to keep private when the inevitable security mishap occurs.

Inter-Departmental Spat: Microsoft Files for Uncontested Divorce

The unspoken tension in the Microsoft and OpenAI relationship has finally hit the internal memos. Microsoft is apparently tired of sharing the supply closet and is quietly working to ensure its own generative AI foundation, according to internal whispers. It is an expensive power struggle where Microsoft is simply hedging its bets, making sure it has an independent, backup plan in case the main vendor, OpenAI, decides it wants to stop sharing the good staplers and run off with the shared customer list.

The Interns Are Correcting The Professor's Term Paper

The academic community is facing the humbling reality that the machines they created are now better at proofreading than they are at writing. AI tools are currently spotting structural and statistical errors in scientific research papers, doing the tedious peer review work that the senior researchers frankly cannot be bothered with anymore. The *Nature* journal reports that this is less a terrifying advancement and more a necessary administrative quality control measure in a recent publication.

The irony of the Artificial Intelligence unit correcting the human intelligence unit's homework is not lost on anyone, especially the people in the comments section who feel this is a clear sign that the research process, like the office supply budget, is fundamentally broken. AI is simply the only employee willing to go through 500 pages of Excel to ensure the column headers are correct.

Delivery Mishap: Moon Lander Trips on the Last Step

In a classic case of a high-tech project ending with a mundane, physical-world failure, the *Athena* spacecraft, a German-led lunar lander, has been declared officially dead. The mission did not end due to a cosmic ray or a software glitch, but because the entire thing simply fell over after landing on the lunar surface.

It is the ultimate administrative failure, akin to the delivery guy making it all the way across the country, only to trip on the last step outside the office and spill the contents. The spacecraft is upright-challenged, and without the proper solar panel orientation, its battery is dead, an unfortunately common outcome when deployment planning meets simple, low-gravity gravity.

Briefs

• HTML Update: Chrome is adding 'command' and 'commandfor' tags. Just in case you were not bored enough with all the existing tags, the W3C has assigned you more things to track and manage.
• Aviation Security: Planes are having their GPS hacked. The proposed solution is better clocks, which is a surprisingly low-tech fix for a high-tech problem, akin to fixing a DDoS attack with a sternly worded memo.
• Amazon Prime Cancellation: A former Amazon VP details his decision to cancel Prime. It is a long-form complaint that we have all written internally, but his version gets read because he used to work there.