Compliance Rejects Security Backdoor Mandate
Also Apple Panics and a Server Farm Blew a Fuse

The Compliance Department Said "No" to Unapproved Key Duplication

The French National Assembly’s Economic Affairs Committee effectively rejected a proposal that would have mandated a "backdoor" into encrypted messaging services. The whole thing was framed as an anti-terrorism effort, but it looked suspiciously like the legal department trying to convince the engineers to voluntarily break the one feature people actually liked. Imagine asking the IT team to leave a spare server cabinet key under the welcome mat; that was the vibe of this entire proposal. The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the victory, noting that Article 7 septies of the Digital Services Act proposal has been struck down.

This incident can be filed under "Government Tries to Force the Laws of Physics to Obey a Subpoena" and fails, thankfully. It confirms that end-to-end encryption is not just a software feature; it is now a tedious, line-item item in international policy debates, right next to "Should we expense the good ergonomic mouse?" Engineers in the Hacker News comments were seen celebrating by quietly updating their GPG keys, which is essentially the tech equivalent of ordering a slightly nicer lunch than usual.

Annual Siri Reorganization Proves HR is Still Employed

Apple has begun the traditional spring cleaning of its AI executive ranks, which is the corporate euphemism for "Siri still cannot tell the difference between 'call Mom' and 'order ramen' after ten years." The move is designed to inject some of that newfangled Generative AI into the voice assistant, which currently feels like it is running on a 2008 iPod Touch. Vice President John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI and Machine Learning, is now taking a more direct and visible role in the Siri team’s strategy, which means he gets to attend more meetings about the failure.

A good number of the Hacker News commentariat believes a simple reorg will be as effective as rearranging the chairs on a sinking cruise ship. The general consensus is that the entire product needs a rewrite, but that would require telling the existing team that their work has been quietly deprecated; corporate culture simply does not allow for that kind of honesty. Instead, Apple will hire three new Senior VPs and task them with creating a beautiful PowerPoint presentation about innovation.

Global Hub Takes Outage Like a Junior Dev Hitting the Wrong Button

London's Heathrow Airport experienced a total system shutdown due to a power outage, proving that all high-tech, multi-billion-dollar global infrastructure is fundamentally just a massive version of your home Wi-Fi router. The issue was not a sophisticated cyberattack or a cloud configuration error; it was a simple failure of physics, which is the most humiliating kind of failure. The news reports confirmed the airport was completely closed for a period.

Every tired sysadmin on the planet nodded grimly at the news, knowing that somewhere, a manager is demanding a report on the "root cause analysis" which will simply be a PowerPoint slide that says "electricity left the building." The resulting chaos highlights the critical truth: the single point of failure (SPOF) is not a theoretical concept; it is the person who forgot to check the backup generator's fuel levels.

Briefs

• Intellectual Property Litigation Escalation: A new USPTO memo will make fighting patent trolls harder. This is the government version of HR sending an email that says, "We've updated the rules to make it easier for Bob from Legal to sue you."
• Survey Data Corruption Incident: A glitch in an online Pew Research survey accidentally replaced all instances of the word 'yes' with 'forks.' Finally, a bug that accurately reflects the absurdity of modern life.
• IETF Meeting Attendance Dissent: A group is encouraging a boycott of the IETF 127 meeting over venue and political concerns. It's the tech equivalent of a departmental protest over the choice of coffee brand in the break room; essential to the participants, meaningless to everyone else.