Government drops key to office filing cabinet.
Also AI does math and a battery got spicy.

The Custodian Key Conflict Resolution

The UK Home Office, our equivalent of the IT Department’s most enthusiastic but ultimately misguided manager, has decided to stand down on its demand that Apple create a master key to its most secure cloud storage system. The order, which mandated a ‘backdoor’ to access encrypted customer data, has been dropped following what sources describe as intense pressure from the US, specifically from high-ranking officials like Vice President J.D. Vance. Apple had previously responded to the demand by disabling its Advanced Data Protection feature for UK users, a classic move that resembles the IT team unplugging the server to avoid the problem entirely.

The entire debacle was less a national security crisis and more a petty transatlantic inter-departmental feud over the filing cabinet keys. The US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, announced the reversal, framing it as a win to "ensure Americans' private data remains private." This leaves us with the bizarre bureaucratic outcome where the concession only specifically excludes US citizens, meaning British Apple users still cannot use the highest-level privacy feature that is available elsewhere. The Home Office, having handled the issue “very badly,” is now simply working on a way around the problem of their own making. We are all rooting for them to find a workaround, perhaps an all-hands meeting that everyone can ignore.

AI Achieves Peak Book Smarts; Still Cannot Refill the Toner

Google’s large language model, Gemini with Deep Think, has officially reached gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). This is a monumental achievement that confirms AI is now better at abstract, high-stakes, purely academic problems than the vast majority of human beings. The internal component, aptly named "Deep Think," apparently gives the system the ability to use complex, long-horizon reasoning, which is a big win for humanity's future calculus homework.

The underlying absurdity, as always, is the gulf between genius and utility. We now have software that can conquer the most difficult mathematical proofs on the planet, but it still cannot be trusted to file the correct quarterly tax returns without "hallucinating" an extra zero or recommending the use of a fork in a microwave. The model is a brilliant mathematician, which means it is about to experience the soul-crushing reality of applying its skill to a data scientist role that mostly involves cleaning spreadsheets.

Manufacturing Oopsie Causes Desk Fire Hazard

Anker Innovations is initiating a massive voluntary recall for its PowerCore 10000 power banks. The company determined that a single-vendor batch of lithium-ion battery cells has a potential manufacturing issue that can cause the power bank to overheat. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, this oversight can lead to the melting of plastic components, smoke, and, in several reported cases, actual fires and explosions.

This is an excellent reminder that even the most advanced supply chain logistics ultimately depend on tiny components not being placed incorrectly in a box. Anker, to its credit, is offering a free replacement or a gift card. However, the real tragedy here is the required disposal process: customers are explicitly warned not to throw their tiny fire-hazards in the trash or regular recycling bins, necessitating a trip to a certified hazardous waste facility. Congratulations to everyone who now has a mandatory, highly inconvenient errand to complete thanks to a tiny manufacturing mistake from 2016.

Briefs

• TrackWeight: Someone built a script to turn a MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale. This is the perfect example of using a thousand-dollar piece of precision engineering to solve a problem that a five-dollar kitchen scale handles better.
• FCC Bureaucracy: The Federal Communications Commission is eliminating its gigabit speed goal and scrapping its analysis of broadband prices. This effectively means the government decided that instead of fixing the performance issues in the network, it would simply downgrade the performance target. Excellent management by shifting the goalpost closer to the kicker.
• Paywall Bypass: The popular paywall bypass site, 12ft.io, has finally been taken down. This is a profound institutional tragedy, as we now have to go back to manually right-clicking and opening articles in a private browser window like an actual animal.