Government mandates more developer tax paperwork
Also Apple redesigned the stapler and Google lost the directory

The IRS Demands to See Your Receipts

The biggest threat to global technology is not a zero-day exploit or a market correction. It is the Internal Revenue Service, which is currently requiring software development costs under Section 174 to be capitalized and amortized over five years. This bureaucratic oopsie essentially means the cost of creating software is now treated as a long-term asset, like buying a new server rack, rather than a simple immediate expense, like buying coffee for the dev team.

Developers, who once believed their greatest struggle was a poorly documented API, are now grappling with an existential cash-flow problem. This is the corporate equivalent of filing a PTO request and being told your vacation hours must be amortized over the next half decade. The effort to restore the immediate deduction is a necessary battle, because nothing says "disruptive innovation" like begging the government to let you expense your payroll.

Apple's Annual Office Renovation Includes New Font, New Container

Apple held its annual mandatory all-hands meeting, which it brands as a developers conference, and announced the usual suite of changes that make last year's work obsolete. The highlight, for anyone who enjoys watching the corporate world run on a treadmill, was the introduction of a universal design across platforms. It is described as delightful and elegant, which is the company's official translation for "we tweaked the corner radius on all the windows."

Not content with merely moving pixels, Apple also decided that the Linux container space was simply too full of other people's containers. They introduced a Swift package for running Linux containers, named simply "Containerization." This is classic corporate behavior; see an existing open-source tool, re-write it in the proprietary language, and distribute it with a new, slightly heavier logo. This ensures developers have something shiny and new to rebuild their entire infrastructure with, which is the only truly renewable resource in tech.

Google Accidentally Leaves The Door Wide Open

Google, the company that manages to organize the world's information while routinely misplacing its own keys, was shown to have an issue that allowed a researcher to bruteforce the phone numbers of any user. This security mishap is not a complex, nation-state sponsored attack; it is closer to someone guessing the password "password123" on a shared drive.

The core issue seems to stem from how the Google contact recovery process handled rate limiting. By not being particularly strict about how quickly a person could check phone numbers against the system, it turned into an effective directory dump. It is the digital equivalent of an entire server room being protected by a magnetic lock whose batteries died last Tuesday.

Briefs

• Niche Search Engine Headcount: Kagi reached 50,000 users. That is a respectable number, a number that is also smaller than the employee count of a single mid-tier tech company's catering department.
• LLM Pricing Correction: A report suggests that LLMs are cheap. This confirms the initial hypothesis that the value of an automated system that occasionally makes up facts should not be higher than the monthly cost of a corporate Netflix subscription.
• Denuvo Analysis: A technical deep dive was released analyzing the anti-tamper software Denuvo. This technology exists solely to ensure that paying customers have a significantly worse experience than the people who illegally torrent the product.