Tourist Refused Entry Over Political Meme.
Also, Corporate AI Feud and Retail Therapy Now Affects Your Mortgage.

Asset Noncompliance Causes Travel Delay; Report Deleted

A Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, found out the hard way that one should always sanitize their personal computing environment before attempting to traverse international boundaries. The 21 year old claims that US Customs and Border Protection detained him at Newark Airport and demanded his phone password, which he alleges they threatened with a five thousand dollar fine or five years in prison if he refused. Upon inspecting the device, the border personnel allegedly discovered an unflattering, bald, Photoshopped meme of Vice President JD Vance.

The Department of Homeland Security, through a spokesperson, denied the meme was the cause for the refusal of entry, instead pointing to Mr. Mikkelsen's admitted drug use in places where it is locally legal. However, the plot thickens into typical government-grade goo. The tourist's attorney later filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the records of his 18 hour detention, only for both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP to claim they had "no records" of the interaction. It seems the system detected an unapproved asset, escalated it, and then promptly deleted the incident report. We have all been there; the only difference is this was for a picture of a politician with an egg head, not a printer driver from 2008.

The Internal Struggle: Departmental Rivalry for Generative AI Seat Warms Up

The long-running internal power struggle between OpenAI and its primary backer, Microsoft, is heating up and has officially hit the corporate email chains. The core problem, as ever, is that the employees prefer the consumer product over the corporate solution. Drugmaker Amgen Inc., a high-profile customer that previously deployed Microsoft's Copilot to twenty thousand employees, is now expanding its use of the platform-agnostic ChatGPT instead.

Senior Vice President Sean Bruich from Amgen Inc. stated that OpenAI has done a tremendous job making their product "fun to use," a quote that must have landed like a lead balloon in Microsoft's internal Teams chat. Microsoft's sales force is reportedly struggling to differentiate Copilot from the better-known, more viral ChatGPT, given that both tools often run on the same underlying OpenAI models. Corporate integration can only carry you so far when the rival product is simply more "fun" to use in the enterprise.

The Algorithm Now Knows About Your Impulse Buys

FICO, the venerable gatekeeper of your financial worth, has finally gotten around to patching its credit score algorithm to account for the existence of buy now, pay later plans. The analytics company is launching two new models, FICO Score 10 BNPL and FICO Score 10 T BNPL, which will incorporate BNPL data from providers like Affirm and Klarna directly into your credit history.

Previously, the small, frequent installment loans used for everything from new kitchen gear to groceries were largely invisible to the traditional credit reporting infrastructure. Now, FICO has created a unique scoring approach that aggregates multiple BNPL loans taken out in a short period of time, essentially adding a new metric to track financial behavior that might look like "churning" to a risk model. While responsible use can ostensibly build positive credit history, late payments or simply too many simultaneous micro-loans can now officially trigger the bureaucratic red flags, turning your five dollar coffee installment plan into a tiny, looming threat to your future mortgage.

Briefs

• Image Specification Update: There is apparently a new PNG specification. This is the kind of quiet, dependable work that keeps the world spinning; thank you, people who worry about image formatting, for sparing us the drama.
• Security Theater: Excalidraw+, a diagramming tool, is now SoC 2 Certified. Your digital whiteboard sketches of how the new microservice architecture will work are officially safe, in compliance with whatever auditors demand this quarter.
• Geopolitical Reorg: The open source platform SourceHut is moving its business operations from the US to Europe. The official announcement cites concerns over US policy and surveillance risk, proving that sometimes the best way to handle IT compliance is to simply change continents.