Google Loses New Ad-Blocker Arms Race
Also court policy, satellite budget, and delayed interns.

The Eternal War for the Office Printer Paper

It appears the multi-billion dollar arms race between Google and a couple of tired developers in their basements has reached another predictable equilibrium. The corporation, which believes it has a fundamental right to deliver advertisements to your eyeballs at any cost, rolled out its latest, greatest detection system only for the defense to immediately be circumvented. The headline, Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update, is less a breakthrough and more an acknowledgement that the cat-and-mouse game never actually stops.

The technical bypasses rely on clever filter list updates and the continued resilience of extensions like uBlock Origin, essentially confirming that for every hundred million dollars Google spends on Manifest V3 and proprietary ad-serving technology, a few dozen lines of open-source code are sufficient to render the entire effort an expensive oopsie. It is truly inspiring to watch one of the world's most powerful companies dedicate its best and brightest to becoming the world's least effective hallway monitor. You are simply reminded that no matter how much you automate, someone will always figure out a JavaScript snippet that lets them skip the queue.

HR Unveils Mandatory "Mood Verification" Policy

The U.S. Supreme Court has introduced a new complication into the internet's already confusing content guidelines. In a ruling on the Texas age-verification law, the court effectively said that while adults still technically have free speech rights for certain material, the government can now make exercising those rights so bureaucratically expensive that it is no longer practically possible. The case, Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, upheld Texas House Bill 1181, which mandates that websites with a certain threshold of content deemed "obscene for minors" must implement a "reasonable age verification method."

This is being treated like a content moderation nightmare, forcing platforms to either deploy invasive, privacy-violating age-gating tools or, more likely, simply wipe a large amount of protected adult speech from their servers to avoid the legal risk. The court's use of a lower standard, known as intermediate scrutiny, signals a willingness to treat online content like a public utility that can be inconveniently regulated, rather than a place of foundational free expression. Essentially, the First Amendment is still available, but you need to go wait in line at the DMV to pick it up.

Somebody Forgot to Pay the Space-LAN Bill

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has decided that managing the rapidly increasing number of satellites in low Earth orbit is not a core competency. The administration’s proposed budget for 2026 includes the elimination of the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). This $55 million program, launched less than a year ago in 2024, was supposed to take over the very important and un-military job of telling civil and commercial satellite operators when they were about to crash into one another, a task previously performed by the overworked Department of Defense (DOD).

The irony here is truly high-altitude. The program's annual cost is roughly the price of three SpaceX rocket launches, meaning the solution to avoiding orbital space debris is being eliminated to save a rounding error in a federal budget, a decision one aerospace engineer, Dr. Moriba Jah, called "stupid." The message is clear: the United States government will happily let private companies launch ten thousand satellites, but the half-percent effort to stop those satellites from creating a catastrophic pile-up is apparently too much of a fiscal burden.

The Open-Source Project Manager is "Feeling Unwell"

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the predictable delay of the company's highly anticipated open-weight language model. The launch, which was initially expected in June, then pushed to next week, is now indefinitely postponed. The official reason is a need to "run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas" because, as Mr. Altman correctly points out, the release of an open-weight model is "irreversible."

This is the modern tech equivalent of a high school student telling their teacher the dog ate their homework, except the homework is a multi-trillion-parameter reasoning engine and the dog is a vague, all-encompassing concept of high-risk scenario evaluation. The cycle continues: promise revolutionary, open technology, immediately retreat into the private cloud citing world-ending safety concerns, and then quietly watch your rivals like DeepSeek and Meta release things in the interim.

Briefs

• Nostalgia-as-a-Service: Researchers recovered and digitized MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s. You are now free to remember the good old days when an image only took 50 kilobytes and nobody was yelling at you to use blockchain technology to store your clip art.
• Supply Chain Malpractice: Malware was found in the official Gravityforms plugin, indicating a supply chain breach. It is a mandatory requirement that your mission-critical website infrastructure relies on a PHP plugin maintained by three people who may or may not be looking at an unsolicited attachment right now.
• Workplace Fitness: A 2015 article detailing The Fish Kick as the Fastest Subsurface Swim Stroke surfaced today. This is very relevant to your professional development, as you will need an efficient way to get away from the next all-hands meeting.