Google teaches AI to finally hold coffee
Also, the decades-long paperwork on surveillance finally closed.

The New Hire Can Now Lift Boxes, But Not Your Boxes

Google DeepMind announced its Gemini Robotics initiative today, which is essentially the corporate mandate to make the Large Language Model finally get off its backend and perform physical labor. The goal is to let the AI see, interpret, and then manipulate objects in the real world; a process that currently requires a small, dedicated team of PhDs to instruct the robot to pick up a stapler. This is not the end of work as we know it, it is the start of very expensive maintenance contracts because the machine learned to file documents by shredding them first. The company is trying so very hard to make its abstract ideas tangible; it is like when the new Vice President of Synergy decides the office needs an elaborate, rotating snack carousel.

Meanwhile, the new Gemma 3 Technical Report also dropped. Gemma is the little open-source AI that could, or at least, the one that fits nicely on a single GPU. Management is proud that the new model, which is a tiny fraction of the size of the biggest ones, is the current strongest model in the Small But Mighty category. It is a classic tale of the company realizing the big server farm is too costly, so they quietly start moving all the important files onto a very powerful, but very lonely, Dell desktop tower in the corner of the office. Efficiency is key when the stock price is watching.

Inter-Office Memo: Is It Time to Break Up with the Vendor?

A new community campaign titled Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google is circulating, which is the public-facing equivalent of an HR department finally reviewing a 15-year-old vendor contract. Mozilla has historically received the majority of its revenue from its search agreement with Google; a relationship that is now causing philosophical arguments about privacy and corporate mission. People really want Mozilla to stop using the company that pays most of the bills, which is a perfectly normal request in Silicon Valley.

The core problem is that switching search providers after this long is not just a small database change; it is like trying to move the company from an Excel-based accounting system to a modern SAP deployment. Everyone agrees it should happen, nobody wants to touch the migration, and the spreadsheet is still technically working. The petition is a lovely sign of hope; but history suggests that the inertia of money is a powerful, difficult-to-fire entity.

The Decades-Long Internal Audit Is Finally Closed

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported today that Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician who blew the whistle on the NSA's massive, warrantless surveillance program, has passed away. Klein revealed the existence of Room 641A, a secure room in an AT&T office building in San Francisco that was designed to tap into internet traffic. The information was a monumental revelation that led to years of legal battles and public discourse about the government's access to private data.

This incident is a reminder that the biggest security breaches do not always come from a sophisticated zero-day exploit, but from a dedicated network employee noticing an unlabeled door and wondering why the utility closet has better cooling than the server racks. Now the EFF is sending out the memo, and all the relevant parties are filing the closure paperwork for the incident report, which is almost certainly stored on a shared network drive from 2007.

Briefs

• DuckDB User Interface: The analytical database team has released a Local UI. This is what happens when you tell engineers you cannot write reports in pure SQL anymore.
• In-Browser File Transfers: The FilePizza project is back, offering peer-to-peer file transfers in the browser via WebTorrent. It is the company's unauthorized Dropbox alternative that nobody in IT wants to admit is faster than the official SharePoint server.
• Scammer Girlfriend: A security consultant posted a deep dive on baiting a romance fraudster. It is a mandatory security training scenario in which the IT department attempts to negotiate with the phishing email to save the company 10 percent on the wire transfer fee.