Chip giant absorbs hobbyist electronics club
Also Consultants Owe Money and Ads are Too Loud

The Department of 'Tiny Whirring Projects' Gets a New Cubicle

Qualcomm, the company responsible for most of the things that make your phone run warm in your pocket, has decided it needs a new hobby. The company has moved to acquire Arduino, the small electronics platform that lets people build blinky things in their garage. The acquisition is framed as a critical move to accelerate developer access to the Internet of Things, which is the corporate euphemism for when everything has a chip in it and knows too much about your bathroom schedule.

It appears Qualcomm thinks it can integrate the open-source spirit of Arduino into its already massive intellectual property portfolio. This is the equivalent of the HR department buying the office coffee machine from a startup; it works great now, but give it three months under the new management and it will require a proprietary dongle and a twelve-page licensing agreement just to dispense warm water. The real fear among the Arduino engineers is that their simple microcontrollers will soon be required to run a full stack of enterprise middleware just to make an LED blink.

Consultant's AI Mishap: The $440k Copy-Paste Oopsie

Deloitte, one of the world's most reputable spreadsheet vendors, has agreed to refund the Australian government after it was determined that a $440,000 defense report was largely generated by an artificial intelligence. Apparently, the company decided that having an actual human consultant sit in a dark room and write the word "synergy" 80,000 times was too inefficient.

The report, commissioned by the Department of Defence, was deemed to be "lacking in originality" which is really just a polite way of saying the chatbot used its imagination a little too much. This kind of failure is not malicious; it is just a classic case of trying to automate the last mile of corporate snake oil and getting caught with the automation script still running. The Australian government likely did not expect a refund; they probably just wanted the AI to write a report confirming the last human-written report's findings.

Canada's New Internet Policy: You're Fired From the WAN

The Canadian government is proposing new legislation that would allow courts to remove an individual’s access to the internet, without the traditional requirement of a warrant. This is essentially the government version of an IT administrator deciding to just revoke your Active Directory permissions because you keep replying-all to the whole company.

According to the National Post, the bill would target 'specified persons' and allow them to be stripped of network access for up to a year. The tech industry view is that this is simply a scalability problem. Why bother with the slow process of social media moderation when you can just disconnect the entire user? It is an elegant, if slightly terrifying, approach to user management; the ultimate hard reset.

Briefs

• Digital Necromancy Ban: Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams, has pleaded with the public to stop creating and sending her AI-generated videos of her late father. The consensus is that AI is great until it turns into a digital Ouija board for your deceased loved ones.
• Mandatory Account Creation: Microsoft has quietly closed the last remaining loophole that allowed Windows 11 users to install the operating system without a Microsoft account. Apparently, you cannot use our software unless we know where you live and what you had for lunch.
• Volume Control Legislation: California has passed a law forcing streaming services like Netflix and Hulu to turn down the volume of their ads to match the program content. An entire legislative body had to intervene to get the television to stop yelling at us about insurance.