EU Mandates Monitoring Office Instant Messages
Also AOL retired the backup fax machine.

The Compliance Team Requires An End-to-End Encryption Backdoor Key

The European Union has decided that privacy is simply too efficient, moving forward with an initiative that activist groups are calling Chat Control. The proposal effectively mandates that every messaging service install a mandatory compliance officer who will read all the messages; in technical terms, this means requiring services to scan and report on private communications for certain illegal content. It is the digital equivalent of that one IT guy, Gary, who insists on monitoring everyone’s web history to make sure nobody is torrenting Linux ISOs on company time. The sheer scale of the system, which must detect new "terrorist content" daily, suggests this will be the most comprehensive and least-used set of bureaucratic red tape ever assembled, likely resulting in a torrent of false positives and a decade of legal challenges.

As the comment section points out, this is the textbook definition of the Benevolent Incompetence Razor, applied at the continental level. The intent is good, but the mechanism is so flawed it essentially mandates a fundamental insecurity in every piece of communication software. It's like installing a safety latch on the elevator that randomly drops it three floors—safer, perhaps, but not in any way anyone prefers. The biggest security flaw will probably be a forgotten, hardcoded password taped under the compliance server, which is how these things always go.

The Final 9600 Baud Goodbye

After 34 years, AOL is officially ending its dial-up internet service. This news is less of a technology story and more of a facilities management report. The only real surprise is that it was still running. A small, dedicated team of engineers who had perfected the art of tuning a bank of modems, presumably powered by a dusty 486 running FreeDOS, can finally be assigned to a new project—perhaps updating the office’s internal phone book, or maybe just taking a two-decade-long nap.

For those still clinging to the past, the sound of the modem handshaking, a ritualistic scream into the void, is now just a memory. The comments reminisce about the days when a single connection could take down the entire family's ability to use the phone, the original bandwidth throttling. The decommissioning process will probably involve one guy unplugging a beige box and throwing it into a dumpster labeled "Miscellaneous E-Waste," and the whole world will move on, slightly quieter, slightly less connected to the past.

GPT-5 Is Late, Overhyped, And Still Doesn't Understand The Difference Between 'Your' And 'You're'

The cycle continues: a new AI is announced, the stock market holds its breath, and then it turns out the new model is just marginally better at writing passive-aggressive emails. Gary Marcus, the AI critic, points out that GPT-5 is shaping up to be overdue, overhyped, and underwhelming, which is exactly the performance review you would give to the company's new $100-million server cluster. The issue remains that large language models are not "world models," they are extremely sophisticated statistical parrots who have ingested the entire internet, which is to say, they are very good at saying a lot while conveying zero actual information.

Another post drives this home, arguing LLMs are not, in fact, creating internal simulations of reality; they are just really good at predicting the next word, like a highly paid corporate communications specialist. The entire industry is trapped in a loop where they promise Skynet but deliver an auto-complete feature that costs ten million dollars a day to run. The fact that Diffusion Language Models are also being heralded as "super data learners" just means we have three different types of expensive parrots now.

Briefs

• Security Patching: Adult sites are stashing exploit code inside SVG files. This is a five-dimensional chess move in the constant battle between people trying to sell things and people who only use the internet to look at pictures of melons.
• Productivity Tool: A developer created a Show HN project called wlgblock which locks your Wayland session until you complete a Pokémon battle. This is the most honest anti-procrastination tool ever invented; it replaces one time sink with another, but at least the first one is an actual video game.
• Niche Language Debate: The internet is buzzing over Zig’s Lovely Syntax. This is the programming equivalent of arguing about which office chair has the best lumbar support; everyone is a passionate expert, and nobody outside the discussion cares.