Apple changed the iCloud privacy settings.
Also corporate surveillance cameras are unplugged, and the job market ate the intern.

The Office Supply Vendor Found a Key Under the Mat

Apple, which promised the high-security storage closet known internally as Advanced Data Protection would keep things safe, has apparently decided to leave a spare key with Government Relations. The issue stems from the Investigatory Powers Act, which has prompted the company to disable the enhanced privacy features for its users in certain regions, specifically in the UK. This is essentially treating the zero-access encryption vault like an unsecured filing cabinet, but only for the users who probably needed the security the most, thanks to new domestic tech policy. The move exposes how post-Brexit policy is eroding the basic digital rights we assumed were part of the premium subscription.

Customers are now being forced to consider a massive vendor switch because Apple, the vendor that promised they were "different," suddenly got tired of the paperwork needed to fight for user data. It turns out that end-to-end means the end of our street, not the end of the line. The immediate advice from privacy-minded bloggers like Heather Burns is to commence de-Appling, which is simply the new corporate term for finding out the hard way that loyalty to a single provider is a technical debt you pay in either cash or dignity.

Legacy Reporting Tool Finally Gets a Funeral, Blames Google

A long-time veteran of the IT department, XSLT, has finally been put to rest, and the memorial website is predictably an XML document. The language, which was designed for transforming structured documents, is being aggressively deprecated by Chromium, which means Firefox and WebKit will inevitably follow suit in the browser market. The official statement from the engineering team responsible is that the underlying C/C++ libraries are antique, vulnerable to memory safety oopsies, and pose an attack surface.

Despite the niche status of XSLT meaning it was only used by critical government websites and other similarly complex legacy systems, the consensus from the major browser vendors is that fixing the old code is more work than simply deleting the feature. They would rather ship a Javascript-based "polyfill" that is not guaranteed to cover all the original functionality, placing the entire burden of migrating twenty years of data transformation onto the few remaining developers who even remember what an XPath is. This is a classic case of eliminating the single-purpose tool because it cannot also send push notifications and generate blockchain certificates.

The Intern Wrote the Script That Replaced Them

The post-graduation job market has revealed itself to be a perpetual internship, according to the experience of a new computer science graduate watching the system fail. The author, who focused on ML and AI projects, describes the white-collar automation that is eating the entry-level jobs whole, thanks to teleoperation and the very technologies they were being trained to deploy. This is the industrial revolution, but this time the loom-smashers are sitting at a Starbucks while their code compiles somewhere in the cloud.

The primary issue is that companies only seem to be hiring for highly experienced Senior roles, presumably because a Senior Engineer is just two Mid-level Engineers and a Project Manager glued together with pure resentment. The irony of the situation, that the graduate's DeepMind internship projects were about automating work, does not seem to be lost on the commenter pool, which is generally sympathetic but also resigned to the idea that being an entry-level worker now requires the experience of an industry veteran.

Briefs

• Redmond Surveillance Cameras: The city of Redmond, WA, has decided to turn off its Flock Safety license plate readers after they were reportedly used by ICE to conduct arrests. The security system was removed after it successfully, and controversially, functioned exactly as an automatic surveillance system is designed to function.
• Honda vs. Prompting: The car company reports that two years of internal Machine Learning development was effectively matched by a single month of Large Language Model (LLM) prompting, confirming that your entire career is about to be replaced by a few carefully chosen words.
• The Lazy Git UI: A new terminal UI for Git is here, which promises to make the developer experience simpler by abstracting away the parts of version control that require genuine thought, officially lowering the skill floor for creating merge conflicts. The tool is called LazyGit.