Lock Manufacturer Sues Product Reviewer.
Also Spreadsheet AI and Mandatory Layoffs.

The $130 Padlock and the Failed Cease and Desist

The week's biggest inter-departmental spat involves a security product maker, Master Lock, and the YouTube content creator known as LockPickingLawyer. Master Lock initiated legal action after the video producer demonstrated that a $130 lock from the company could be opened with a simple piece of metal, often called a shim. This is what we call an "oopsie" in the field of physical security, a kind of internal audit that happens to be watched by ten million people.

The resulting lawsuit, which attempted to control the use of their branding in a negative light, has had the predictable effect of making the video even more popular. It is the digital equivalent of trying to silence the disgruntled employee in the break room by handing them a megaphone and a spotlight. Commenters on the story are already circulating the video in solidarity. Master Lock thought they were filing a legal brief, but they were actually just filing an expensive marketing document for the LockPickingLawyer's channel. The lesson, as always, is that bad products and bad PR are two sides of the same very fragile dime.

Generative AI Arrives to Automate Your Pivot Table Misery

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude large language model, has officially released a new integration called Claude for Excel. This is what the future of work looks like: taking one of the most powerful, expensive, and complex pieces of computing infrastructure ever created and handing it over to Steve from Accounting to fix his nested VLOOKUP formulas. The sales pitch is that Claude can analyze, clean, and even format spreadsheet data; presumably, it will still blame the errors on the previous intern.

Many in the comments are suggesting that this is actually an excellent application for the technology, which makes it far more horrifying. It proves that the entire innovation cycle of AI has been reduced to eliminating the most tedious parts of middle management's quarter end. The true irony, as noted by some, is that the first task the AI will need to perform is sifting through the five hundred thousand rows of proprietary data that Microsoft Excel will inevitably leak into the cloud.

Microsoft Forgets to Tell Australia About the Subscription Trap

In a truly shocking display of corporate adherence to standard operating procedure, Microsoft is now facing legal action from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or ACCC. The charge is that Microsoft allegedly misled millions of Australian customers about the automatic renewal of their Microsoft 365 subscriptions, including the eventual cost increase.

A company the size of Microsoft does not "forget" to tell people about mandatory fee increases. They accidentally file the notification paperwork in the incorrect national subsidiary folder. We must assume a benevolent incompetence here; Microsoft was simply trying to organize its global paper trail and accidentally put the Australian documents in the folder labeled "Definitely Don't Tell Them About This." It is just a routine bureaucratic mishap, one that now requires an international court to untangle the administrative error.

Briefs

• Layoffs as a Service: Amazon targets up to 30,000 corporate job cuts. This is the annual budget reconciliation process; we call it "right-sizing the team" so the spreadsheet numbers look better for the next quarter.
• The Unofficial Corporate Therapist: OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly. The true killer app for Generative AI turns out to be mandatory, 24/7, unbilled employee wellness support.
• The Midnight System Admin Secret: Do not schedule cron jobs for 2:00 or 3:00 am. This is the most important technical guidance of the last decade, and it is entirely due to daylight saving time being invented by an intern who wanted to mess with the entire global timekeeping infrastructure.