AI Intern Clones IT Admin Badge
Also: Compliance Cites Brand Goodwill and Everyone Dodges the HR Bot

The Case of the Missing `robots.txt` Ethics

The latest episode in AI's grand ethical adventure involves the startup Perplexity attempting to circumvent website block lists, essentially treating a server's explicit "Do Not Enter" sign like a suggestion box. Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure provider, noticed Perplexity's declared bots, like PerplexityBot, would initially respect the rules, but as soon as a block was enforced, an entirely new, undeclared set of bots would appear. These new agents reportedly impersonated a common user-agent, specifically **Google Chrome on macOS**, while rotating through unlisted IP addresses and autonomous system numbers, a practice which Cloudflare views as a clear breach of internet trust.

Perplexity has dismissed Cloudflare’s findings as a "sales pitch" for a new product, and a spokesperson, Jesse Dwyer, claimed the suspicious bot was not even theirs, which is the perfect response when security catches you trying to use your roommate's keycard to get into the gym after hours. Cloudflare has now officially de-listed Perplexity as a verified bot, which means the platform has been uninvited from the verified-bot community lunch table. The move forces site owners to actively manage a denial-of-service prevention problem instead of relying on good faith, transforming the cooperative web indexing system into a tedious game of Whac-A-Mole for exhausted systems administrators everywhere.

HR Introduces AI Interviewer; Workforce Discovers "New Bug"

In a bold new chapter of corporate efficiency, job-seekers have begun actively dodging the mandatory AI interviewers, treating the high-tech hiring process like an unexpected pop-up ad for mandatory training. The goal of the AI was ostensibly to make the process more efficient, but instead, it has created a strange new hurdle for recruiters: finding candidates who are willing to talk to a robot. Apparently, when you automate the human element of a job application, you accidentally automate the candidates away too.

This phenomenon of "AI-avoidance" is a fascinating market response to the relentless push for automation. Job-seekers seem to prefer dealing with the unpredictable whims of a human hiring manager, a system they understand, over the perfectly optimized, emotionally neutral rejection of a machine that is almost certainly scoring their background noise and posture. It turns out people are willing to take lower wages and more unemployment just to avoid the experience of an automated performance review, which is understandable. No one wants to be told they lack "cultural fit" by a python script.

Tesla Deletes the Receipt; Claims the Dog Ate the Log Files

Automaker Tesla has been found to have repeatedly withheld critical data and misled investigators during a wrongful death case involving Autopilot. After the 2019 crash, the vehicle instantly uploaded a "collision snapshot"—containing video, logs, and sensor data—to Tesla's servers, which employees refer to as the "Mothership". The local copy on the car was then deleted, leaving Tesla as the sole custodian of the digital evidence, which they subsequently pretended did not exist for years.

For years, police and plaintiffs were given the run-around, with an official Tesla attorney crafting a letter to avoid sharing the collision snapshot data. When an attempt was made to extract the data from the car's computer, a Tesla technician claimed the data was "corrupted". The log files, however, were later forensically recovered by a plaintiff-hired engineer, revealing that Autopilot was active in a "restricted Autosteer zone" and failed to issue a "Take Over Immediately" alert. This is not malice, of course, just a very, very clumsy data retention policy. Or as a company lawyer later put it, the whole affair was merely an issue of the company being "clumsy" in its handling of the data.

Briefs

• Monetary Morality: Mastercard is deflecting blame for NSFW games being removed from platforms like Steam and Itch.io, stating it allows all lawful transactions. Valve says the payment processors cited Mastercard's Rule 5.12.7, which forbids any transaction that "may damage the goodwill of the Corporation". So, it is not illegal, but it might hurt feelings, which is what truly matters in corporate finance.
• Wooden Pixel Art: A developer has spent six years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display called Kilopixel. It is technically a functioning screen with 1024 manually flippable pixels. This proves that you can solve any modern software problem with enough time and raw lumber.
• Image Generation Improvement: Alibaba's AI team announced Qwen-Image, a model capable of crafting images with native text rendering, a groundbreaking step for an industry that previously treated spelling like a secondary priority. We can now generate beautiful images of an eight-fingered person holding a perfectly spelled sign that says, "I am a hand."