Amazon Lost the Digital Stapler Key.
Also Corporate Tax Lobbying and Mandatory Surveillance Updates.

The Web Interface is Always the Weakest Lock

Amazon's Kindle division discovered the hard way that when you put your most valuable assets behind a "digital rights management" system, you should not also leave the key lying on the virtual welcome mat. A developer outlined how to bypass the Kindle web DRM, treating the whole operation like a SysAdmin discovering a production database password taped under a monitor.

The entire protection system was designed to tie encrypted files to a specific device, which is an elegant, if annoying, corporate policy. However, the browser application had to decrypt the file locally, which means the necessary key was right there in the browser's memory, ready to be picked up by anyone who knew where to look in the IndexedDB. It turns out that a multi-million-dollar DRM investment can be defeated by a simple memory inspection, an oopsie equivalent to leaving the server room unlocked because the janitor complained the key was too heavy. The file cabinet security is only as good as the person who last locked the drawer.

Windows 10 Retirement: The Mandatory Screen Time Tracker

Microsoft is retiring Windows 10, prompting an industry-wide headache that we all have to pretend is necessary. The move is being framed by some as a systematic shift toward a surveillance state, but really, it is just corporate IT forcing a new monitoring feature called "Employee Wellness" on us.

The new operating system comes pre-loaded with an aggressive telemetry package that simply needs to know what you are doing, all the time. Management insists this data collection is essential for "synergy" and "AI powered productivity"; we are to treat this not as a privacy violation, but as a mandatory, always-on screen time report for our benevolent overlords. It is a classic move, creating a problem with the old version so the mandatory new version, which is worse in a whole new way, looks like progress.

TurboTax's 20-Year Campaign Against Free Data Entry

In a move that perfectly summarizes the tech industry's relationship with government bureaucracy, the company that owns TurboTax has spent two decades and significant lobbying power fighting against the simple, free filing of taxes. This is not a genius product strategy; it is a dedicated effort to ensure a mundane, bureaucratic task remains an expensive, complicated pain point for everyone.

The effort ensures that the government cannot just send you a pre-filled form, which would eliminate the need for an expensive intermediary, the software. Instead, they promote a "free" version of the product that is designed to up-sell you to a paid tier the moment you try to input a number more complicated than a single W-2 form. It is the corporate equivalent of guarding the public water fountain to insist everyone buys your overpriced, flavored seltzer.

Briefs

• Autonomous Last Mile Delivery: DoorDash and Waymo launched a self-driving delivery service in Phoenix. Management has decided the cost of a human delivery driver's health insurance is too high; we are now replacing people with very expensive, very slow, autonomous minivans that cannot navigate speed bumps.
• Open Source Semantics: Liquibase is currently dealing with an existential crisis over its "open source" claims after a license switch. This is a common corporate ritual where the company takes away something essential, renames it, and insists it is "better" while the community quietly updates its resumes.
• Language Update: Elixir released version 1.19 with new features. This is a very pleasant, completely non-controversial event in a codebase we will never touch, which is why it is listed here.