Google Hoards Ad Money, Releases Fast Memo.
Also Zoom Unplugged Its Own Domain.

The Office Supply Audit Found Major Discrepancies

A federal judge has ruled that Google illegally maintained monopolies in the digital advertising technology market, a finding that management is spinning as a minor clerical error with high-level implications. Specifically, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power, essentially tying its publisher ad server, DFP, and its ad exchange, AdX, together to freeze out competitors. Google effectively had a sign on the door of the Ad Exchange that read "Employees Only," and those employees were exclusively Google's other products.

To distract from the whole "illegal monopoly" thing, Google is simultaneously launching Gemini 2.5 Flash, a new AI model that is supposedly faster and more efficient, featuring a 1-million token input context window. It is being pitched as the "workhorse" model, which we all know is code for "it is the one we will put on the cheap hardware until it quits in six months." The speed of this release perfectly matches the corporate timing of needing something shiny to place on the corner of the CFO's desk right before the Department of Justice walks in with a subpoena.

The Intern Unplugged the Internet (The .us One)

Users everywhere were released from the tyranny of mandatory video calls when Zoom suffered an outage that was later revealed to be an accidental 'shutting down' of the primary zoom.us domain. The incident report reads like a comedy of errors, involving a communication error between Zoom's domain registrar, Markmonitor, and the GoDaddy Registry, which oversees the entire .us namespace. GoDaddy Registry mistakenly placed a server block on the domain, essentially telling the entire internet that Zoom was not home, and could not be reached.

Zoom wants everyone to know the outage was absolutely not a hack or a network failure at their end, but rather a "communication error," which is the kind of passive-aggressive phrase you use when IT and the domain department are no longer speaking to each other. For two hours, the only thing the platform successfully communicated was that its entire existence is tethered to three third-party vendors having a very normal Tuesday. It is a stark reminder that all of our multi-billion dollar 'digital transformation' initiatives are still protected by a registrar that can be convinced by a misconfigured email to just turn the lights off.

Your Face is Now Your Server Key

Discord is rolling out its new "robust" age verification system, which requires some users to either submit a government ID or perform a face-scanning procedure. This process is mandatory for users attempting to view sensitive content or change certain filter settings, an experiment being run initially in the UK and Australia. Discord assures everyone that the face scan is an "on-device" process and that no biometric information is stored by the company or its vendor, which should reassure absolutely no one.

The requirement is a direct result of regulatory pressure, of course, as the UK's Online Safety Act now demands platforms capable of hosting certain content have proper age gates. Discord did not set out to collect high-resolution selfies; it was simply pushed into this bizarre mandate by a government-mandated security audit. This is the classic tale of a social platform trying to manage a digital community and instead becoming a mandatory biometric collection agency for a regional firewall.

Briefs

• Potatoes: The US Postal Service confirmed that, yes, you can mail a raw potato provided you pay the proper postage and address it clearly. We are still shipping tubers across state lines while arguing about LLM hallucinations, and frankly, the potato seems more reliable.
• The Deep Fake Activist: Law enforcement is now using AI-powered undercover bots, or "AI personas," to infiltrate activist groups and monitor suspects online. It turns out the angry college protester posting about surveillance is not a college protester at all, but rather a bot named Massive Blue Overwatch, and that irony is truly exhausting.
• Extraterrestrial Plumbing: Researchers found promising signs of alien life on exoplanet K2-18b through the detection of dimethyl sulfide. This gas is only produced by life on Earth, suggesting that the universe is not waiting for our tech industry to figure things out, but is rather conducting its own, quieter, biotech experiment.