US Copyright Office Manager Fired
Also Dating App Scrambles and FTC Delays Cancellation

Inter-Office Memo Causes Executive Turnover

The US Copyright Office has completed the process of replacing its Register of Copyrights, Ms. Shira Perlmutter, less than a day after her department filed a comprehensive report suggesting that the tech industry’s favorite new toy, Generative AI, might be committing massive, fundamental copyright infringement. Ms. Perlmutter was reportedly dismissed over the weekend, shortly after her office’s draft report questioned whether using vast amounts of copyrighted material to train AI models could actually be considered fair use.

It appears that the leadership in Washington, having just promoted a high-profile initiative to champion AI companies like xAI, discovered that a mid-level manager’s bureaucratic homework threatened to shut down the entire operation. Representative Joe Morelle, a Democrat, suggested that the timing was surely no coincidence, linking the dismissal to the administration’s proximity to billionaires who have publicly endorsed the complete abolition of intellectual property law. The whole incident reads like an exhausted SysAdmin finally filing the ticket that says "The entire core network is actually a dumpster fire" right before the CEO announces he’s giving the dumpster a $500 billion promotional budget.

The Dating App That Failed Security Awareness Training

A college dating platform named Cerca has demonstrated the true essence of 'benevolent incompetence' after a Yale student and security researcher, Alex Schapiro, found an unbelievable, critical vulnerability in their system. Mr. Schapiro discovered that the app’s exposed development endpoint allowed anyone to log into another user’s account using only their phone number, bypassing all verification and granting access to personal data like private chat logs, sexual preferences, and even scanned passports or driver’s licenses.

The most absurd part of this security mishap is the response. The Cerca development team was reportedly very nice to Mr. Schapiro on an initial video call and promised to fix the 'insane leak' immediately, yet they failed to follow up or notify the 6,000+ affected users for months. It is the classic startup move: treating catastrophic data loss like a minor UI bug, promising a patch, and then quietly burying the required compliance paperwork because, well, the users are probably busy dating anyway.

The Federal Government Postpones Common Sense

The Federal Trade Commission has announced a 60-day delay in the enforcement of its new 'click-to-cancel' rule. This rule mandates that companies make it as easy for customers to cancel a subscription as it was to sign up, a concept that seems self-evidently fair to everyone except the businesses that profit from 'cancel purgatory.'

The FTC is justifying the two-month extension because the original deadline "insufficiently accounted for the complexity of compliance." One must assume that the engineering task of changing a hidden, ten-step, call-center-only cancellation workflow into a single button marked "Cancel" is a project of such staggering technical complexity that it rivals the fusion energy problem the University of Texas apparently just solved. The delay essentially gives every company in the US a two-month administrative vacation to try and find the lost internal memo that explains how to actually write a simple HTML button element.

Briefs

• Open Source Maps Fork: A community-led team has forked Organic Maps to create Comaps. The best part of decentralized tech is needing a map to find the five different versions of the map.
• Python Autogen: A new Python library generates its code on-the-fly based on usage. This is what we call "Production Code" in the rest of the industry, but now it has a fancy name and a GitHub star count.
• Crypto Founder Resurrection: A crypto founder who previously faked his death was found alive at his father's house. Faking a death is the only exit scam a Web3 project hasn't yet put on the blockchain.