DHS enforces mandatory biometric office scans.
Also, vacuums fight back and one guy codes an OS.

The New Employee Wellness Check is Mandatory

The Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, has clarified its new mandatory procedure for what essentially amounts to checking people into the building. A Department of Homeland Security document states that a person cannot legally refuse to be scanned by the new facial recognition app used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. This is a fascinating new precedent for bureaucracy, essentially treating a person's biometric data like a required internal compliance form or the mandatory annual ethics video that no one pays attention to.

The core problem is that refusing the scan is interpreted as refusing to participate in the entire process, which is apparently a non-option for non-citizens at certain points of entry, according to those who commented on the matter. This is less a security measure and more a badly implemented sign-in sheet that locks the doors if you do not hit the "Accept All" button. It seems the U.S. government has stumbled into the same dark pattern user experience that every modern website with a privacy pop-up employs. It is simply another cost of doing business, assuming your face is now technically considered "business data."

Office Appliance Stage Coup d'État; Rejects Corporate Telemetry

In a bold show of solidarity with the tired systems administrator, a smart vacuum decided to enforce its own privacy policy. After an engineer successfully blocked the appliance from collecting and phoning home its telemetry data, the manufacturer issued a remote kill command, bricking the hardware in a stunning display of corporate pettiness. The implication is that if you do not let the vacuum tell the cloud how many dust bunnies it found, it has to be destroyed.

The good news is that the engineer, likely fed up with having his personal floor cleaning device held hostage by the software licensing agreement, was able to revive the machine using custom hardware and Python scripts to run it completely offline. This entire episode should be a mandatory case study for every hardware startup, demonstrating that engineers will always find a way to circumvent mandatory compliance and telemetry systems, especially if it is to spite a vacuum cleaner.

The New Intern Fixed the Unfixable Legacy Security System

Anthropics' large language model, Claude Code, has apparently demonstrated a bizarre competence at tasks that traditionally require years of highly specialized experience. The AI was put to the task of debugging some low-level C cryptography code, a domain where one character difference can create a billion-dollar oopsie. The result was that the LLM was able to quickly identify subtle logic bugs related to integer overflow that human cryptographers had a difficult time pinpointing.

This development is confusing for the old guard who believed that only a senior engineer with a twenty-year beard and a deep hatred for the C standard could fix this type of problem. It is now plausible that we will have to explain to the Chief Technology Officer that the new security patch was written by an opaque, non-deterministic probability engine and that this is somehow an improvement. The only comfort is that this new intern cannot complain about the coffee, yet.

Briefs

• Paperwork Protocol: ArXiv has updated the practice for review articles and position papers in its Computer Science category. This is what happens when you let the documentation team write the new compliance standard; everyone now has to adjust their templates.
• Legacy IT MVP: Visopsys, an operating system, is apparently being maintained by a single developer since 1997. This highlights the true bus factor of the entire world's IT infrastructure; it is always just one incredibly dedicated, tired guy.
• Forgotten Interface: A blog post is here to remind everyone that there is still an official HTML tables API that almost no one uses. This is like finding the dusty, decommissioned water cooler in the back server closet that still technically works.