Software suite decides to work for free.
Also package theft and address verification trauma.

The "Good Enough" Team Finally Gave Up and Gave It Away

The Affinity suite, produced by its parent company Serif, is now completely free, effective immediately. This is not a trial; this is not a limited time offer; the company simply decided the entire creative software package must now live on the internet, free of charge, which is a very aggressive way to run a small business. Serif is essentially making its entire design department work for exposure now, which is a bold new take on the labor market. The core message here is that if you cannot beat a competitor, you might as well just set your own product on fire and hope the smoke annoys them.

Creative professionals are now struggling to understand the sudden and massive devaluation of their primary tools, which previously cost around $70. This move is being called a "disruption," which is corporate speak for "we do not know how we are going to make money anymore, but we figured we would crash the competition first." The market leader, Adobe, is reportedly ignoring the entire event, much like a CEO ignores a small fire in a competitor's lobby. It is benevolent incompetence on an almost artistic level; a company giving away its crown jewels to prove a point no one asked for. You can now download a free copy and enjoy the cognitive dissonance.

Supply Chain Just Means Getting Junk Mail Now

The software package manager NPM has been flooded with malicious code packages. This is not a targeted attack, mind you; it is more like the delivery driver accidentally dropped 86,000 bad packages into the central warehouse and no one noticed until after the developers had already installed them. The packages were downloaded more than 86 thousand times before someone in security finally looked up from their coffee cup and realized the code was doing something weird, like maybe stealing credentials.

This incident proves that the entire open source ecosystem is a lot like a neighborhood pantry; it is great until someone leaves out a suspicious casserole and everyone who eats it gets sick. This is the natural order of things, of course; the more convenient we make it to pull in code, the more convenient we make it for the bad code to walk right in. It is all part of the digital transformation journey, which mostly consists of apologizing for security oversights.

The Financial System Is Just a Really Strict Change of Address Form

A company detailed a cautionary tale after its Wise (formerly TransferWise) account was shut down; the offense was simply changing its business address. Apparently, the global compliance system views a change of physical location as high treason, or at least a potential money laundering flag. The user went through all the mandatory verification steps, submitted all the documents, and the algorithmic financial bureaucracy still responded by locking the doors and turning off the lights.

Wise, a company built on making international finance simple, is a wonderful case study in automation gone mad. Once the machine decides you are a criminal, no amount of human intervention can save you because the humans are physically incapable of overriding the system; they can only send prewritten apology emails. The user, Shaun, now gets to experience the true joy of modern finance; having your money held hostage by an algorithm with zero sense of irony or proportion.

Briefs

• Pixel Phone Vulnerability: A leaker revealed the specific Pixel phones Cellebrite can hack. Cellebrite is that company that helps law enforcement get into locked phones, which means the government knows which of the Google phones are the easiest ones to pick the lock on; plan your next phone purchase accordingly.
• US Cybercrime Treaty: The United States declined to join more than 70 other countries in signing a UN cybercrime treaty. The official reason is probably complex; the real reason is likely that the US negotiating team could not agree on where to order lunch, which is the root of all modern geopolitical failures.
• PlanetScale Pricing: PlanetScale is now offering $5 databases. This is what a race to the bottom looks like; soon they will be paying you $5 to store your data with them, and then you will realize your data is the actual product.