Germany Refused to Sign The Form
Also Verizon Sold The Wrong Spreadsheet and Apple Forgot a License.

The Department of Digital Oversight Sends Back a Policy Draft

The European Union's latest attempt at solving global problems with mandated message scanning, euphemistically titled "ChatControl," has hit a bureaucratic snag. Germany decided that the required mass surveillance of private communication was a bit much. The state of Germany, by refusing to sign off on the proposal, helped secure a "blocking minority" against the policy.

Essentially, the whole project was stopped because one powerful employee said "No" loudly enough in the meeting, thus preventing the digital equivalent of hiring an intern to read everyone's sticky notes. The proposal, designed to automatically scan and flag all digital messages, will now be sent back to the draft stage to get a new font and possibly a more palatable name, like "Digital Friendship Enhancer." The underlying goal is still to treat every piece of data like a suspicious package, but now they have to be more polite about it.

The Carrier That Tried to Sell The Company Phone Book

A court rejected the novel legal theory presented by the telecom giant Verizon that selling customer location data without permission is perfectly fine and a normal part of business operations. Verizon's legal team likely argued that since the data was "just sitting there," it constituted an unclaimed asset.

The court disagreed, which is a disappointing outcome for the company that views its users as a rich, untapped resource for third-party vendors. The entire episode feels like a sales executive tried to offload the master list of all employee addresses to a mailing house and then was genuinely shocked when HR Manager Karen filed a complaint. They were just trying to monetize the floor space; who could object to that.

AirPods Feature Stuck in Customs Due to Unclear Paperwork

Apple is experiencing a moment of profound European confusion. Its new AirPods live translation feature is being blocked for users with EU Apple accounts, despite the fact that those users may be physically outside the EU. The reason is a tangled mess of regulatory compliance that likely involves something as simple as the paperwork for one specific cloud server having the wrong stamp.

It appears that Apple, a company with enough spare cash to run a small country, could not get the translation feature approved to operate in the regulatory environment where people speak multiple languages. The internal memo probably reads: "The new feature is ready, but per Regulation 404-B, it cannot be activated until the Dublin-based compliance officer can confirm the correct German verb conjugation for 'data processing.'" The new feature remains a neat trick for non-EU users, but it is off-limits to those who live in the place that would actually benefit from it.

Briefs

• AI Scorecard Oversight: Top model scores on the SWE-bench benchmark for code generation may be skewed because the training data contained the answers. This is the equivalent of a student accidentally leaving their annotated textbook open during a take-home exam.
• Antisocial Networking Site Aesthetics: The PostHog website is designed to look like a desktop operating system for reasons. It has been confirmed that after two hours of use, all users will begin demanding better window management.
• Digital Follies: Someone has created a utility called Fartscroll-Lid that plays flatulence sounds when a MacBook lid is opened or closed as a corporate service. The project is already on GitHub, meaning it has achieved peak technological relevance.