Google misplaces office keycard again.
Also printers are self-destructing and YouTube is being petulant.

The Case of the Missing Stapler: Chrome Web Store Edition

For a brief, terrifying moment, the internet thought the office manager, Google, had finally committed the ultimate petty power-play: removing the one tool that lets you block unsolicited digital memos. The widely used content blocker, uBlock Origin, appeared to vanish from the Chrome Web Store, triggering a full-scale panic reminiscent of the day the communal coffee machine broke.

It turned out to be less a hostile takeover and more an internal bureaucratic oopsie. The real extension, maintained by developer Raymond Hill, was still there, but a URL redirection mishap following a Google store reorganization made it look like the listing was gone. It was merely a digital filing error, a high-stakes mistake in the corporate library system. The tech giant eventually filed the correct paperwork and restored the link, confirming that most catastrophes are not deliberate acts of malice, but just a result of a major organization trying very hard and failing very badly to organize its own desk.

YouTube Adds Combination Locks to the Staff Lounge Fridge

YouTube is escalating its war against sound historians and archivers by treating every single video on its platform like a proprietary document. The video service pushed new DRM and obfuscation to all videos accessed via its TVHTML5 clients, which is the code responsible for displaying content on smart TVs and other connected boxes.

This move is the digital equivalent of adding a secret compartment to a filing cabinet that already has a lock on it, specifically to thwart tools like yt-dlp which aim to download and preserve the content. YouTube is not angry at users; it is simply sympathetic to its own flailing business model. The platform must be constantly seen as doing something performative to protect the media, even if that means spending engineering time on security theater to complicate a process that a college intern could circumvent by lunch.

The Vending Machine Now Rejects Cash: HP's New Revenue Policy

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has once again demonstrated that when it gives you a printer, it is merely lending you the access port for its ink subscription service. A new firmware update for several printer models reportedly bricked devices or actively prevented them from using third-party ink cartridges.

HP is trying very hard to manage the cost center of the office, which in this case means making sure you cannot use the discount paperclips from the store across the street. This is not a mistake; it is a feature designed by a middle manager who has to hit a quarterly ink-sales quota. The consumer is just the unwilling participant in a corporate-mandated, self-sabotaging lifecycle designed to force a purchase from the approved vendor list.

Briefs

• Moral High Ground Locked In: Ecosia, the search engine, announced it is giving up its right to ever be sold. The company is now a permanent benefit corporation, meaning they chose to forego the billion-dollar exit, thereby confusing every venture capitalist who thought "social good" was just a clever pre-Series A pitch deck bullet point.
• Python's Speed: The development of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter showed performance improvements, confirming the language is now only slightly slower than a corporate desktop running sixteen browser tabs.
• The Unspoken Contract: A Washington Post editor resigned after accusing the CEO of killing a column, proving that even in journalism, the inter-office politics are just as petty and self-serving as any other IT department's budgeting process.