Administration Increases Vendor Sourcing Fees.
Also, a steam train broke the internet.

Procurement Spat Escalates: Office Manager Threatens to Only Buy Local Pens

The US Administration has, effective immediately, announced a mandatory and costly compliance update for all future supply chain acquisitions. The new policy mandates a blanket 34% "sourcing fee" on all goods from China and a slightly less onerous 20% surcharge on inventory flowing from the EU (The Official Memo). This move, which experts are treating as a serious matter of global trade policy, we should treat as the moment when Janet from Accounting finally got fed up with the cheap toner cartridges from the usual vendor and decided to only buy from the tiny, artisanal shop down the street.

The internal memo states this is an attempt to "rebalance the ledger" which is corporate-speak for "we think our competitors are getting too many of the good parking spots and we are going to start charging them for air." The immediate fallout is a new and exciting layer of complexity for the entire international shipping and logistics team; ensuring every imported widget now costs a non-trivial percentage more just because a manager felt like they were getting a bad deal. Look, someone has to pay for the new executive parking garage; it is just a surprise that the money is coming from the supply chain’s mandatory digital wallet.

Legacy Asset Disruption: Cloudflare Blames Antique Transport for Fiber Cut

In a rare moment of transparent absurdity, Cloudflare detailed a network outage caused not by a DDoS attack or an intern spilling coffee on a rack, but by a steam locomotive (The Postmortem). Apparently, one of their test deployments was physically located too close to a railway museum where a working 1993-vintage steam train decided to operate. The locomotive, which is functionally a massive rolling copper coil, generated enough electromagnetic interference to cause a fiber-optic cable connection to fail, which subsequently derailed a long-running testing process.

It is always the legacy hardware. The world's most sophisticated content delivery network was temporarily defeated by a machine whose primary mode of operation is boiling water. This is the digital equivalent of your entire data center going offline because someone plugged a toaster oven into the same surge protector. We spend billions on quantum-proof encryption and distributed fault tolerance, only for a literal choo-choo train to successfully execute a highly localized, analog-era denial-of-service attack.

Thundermail: Mozilla Relaunches the Default Email Client as a Billion Dollar Startup

Mozilla is at it again, proving that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like an opportunity to re-package an existing open-source utility. They are launching "Thundermail," a new, encrypted, and frankly, very late email service intended to compete with the likes of Gmail and the Microsoft 365 monolith (The Announcement). It is an attempt to enter the lucrative business email market; a field that stopped being lucrative roughly seventeen years ago.

It is admirable, in a very sympathetic way, that Mozilla continues to try very hard to save the open web while somehow always ending up releasing a paid product that looks suspiciously like a free one they already built. The company's strategy seems to be hoping that if you squint hard enough, the trusty, slightly clunky, desktop application you have been ignoring for a decade suddenly looks like a disruptive SaaS platform. We wish them the best of luck convincing corporate clients that their email service is the one that will finally, definitely, save the day.

Briefs

• Personnel Update: Y Combinator's resident social forum, Hacker News, announced tomhow as a new public moderator. It is a testament to the community's engagement that this internal HR matter of staffing the janitorial crew made the front page.
• Automotive Mishap: Tesla's quarterly vehicle deliveries suffered their worst stumble since the far-off days of 2022. It turns out that delivering a car is more complicated than designing a self-driving system that can identify a stop sign 70% of the time.
• A Required Moment of Pause: Val Kilmer, star of the underrated 1985 classic Real Genius, has passed away (The Obituary). The film, not the tragedy, is now being hailed as the geek solidarity film that our culture deserved.