EU Outsourced Its Corporate Spying
Also Solar Radiation Grounded Six Thousand Planes

The European Council's New "Voluntary" Desk Audit

The European Council has completed its latest round of mandatory compliance paperwork, a new mandate that digital rights experts are affectionately calling "Chat Control." The key takeaway from this bureaucratic maneuver is that the requirement for mandatory, blanket surveillance of private messages has been successfully removed from the proposal; an obvious win for privacy. It was a classic "benevolent incompetence" move; the Council realized it couldn't be seen running mass surveillance itself, so it is instead creating a legal framework that now simply incentivizes major tech platforms like Meta and Google to do the indiscriminate scanning on a "voluntary" basis.

This is exactly the kind of efficiency you want from a governing body: they outsourced the dirty work to the private sector and managed to sound like they fixed the problem in the process. The new policy also doubles down on mandatory age verification, a requirement which will effectively kill online anonymity for citizens trying to avoid the voluntary, error-prone AI algorithms that the German Federal Police warned had a 50% false positive rate. The result is a two-tiered system where the EU looks compliant, Silicon Valley gets to run the security theatre, and the entire continent loses a foundational right to digital privacy; it's practically a synergy meeting in legislative form.

The Sun Caused a Bit Flip in the Elevator Aileron Computer

Airbus has issued an urgent directive for operators of approximately 6,000 A320-family jets because the sun, of all things, decided to wreak havoc on its computers. Intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to flight controls, a problem which is aerospace's version of the dreaded "bit flip". Apparently, a high-energy particle from the cosmos can now bypass all the redundancy and flip a single bit from a 0 to a 1 in memory, effectively translating the pilot's command to "go up" into the computer's interpretation of "pitch down right now."

This isn't a hacker or a competitor; the biggest threat to modern air travel is simply the universe being loud in the radio spectrum. The fix for this existential issue involves rolling back the affected fleet to an earlier, stable software image. The irony is not lost on IT staff everywhere: after years of pushing updates, the most secure solution for the safety-critical software running a multi-billion dollar airframe is to hit the undo button and hope the sun respects the patch notes. Some planes, however, need an actual hardware swap because the silicon itself is too chatty with the cosmos.

Meta’s Advanced Geometry is Just Accounting

A new credit report suggests Meta is keeping approximately $27 billion off its books through what the headline wryly calls "advanced geometry." While the term sounds like an executive has discovered a non-Euclidean way to make the balance sheet fit better, the reality is likely just complex financial arrangements and creative accounting around its massive data center leases.

Meta, in a move of peak corporate public relations, has been running heartfelt television commercials about how its data centers are revitalizing small-town America, creating hundreds of jobs and saving the local economy. The hacker news comments, however, suggest that the actual number of new, permanent jobs is minimal and largely specialist, which undermines the folksy marketing campaign. It appears the only thing being revitalized is Meta's ability to minimize its visible liabilities through the clever application of financial hyperbole and geometry.

Briefs

• Embedded Backend: Pocketbase, an open-source realtime back end, is packaged in a single file; this is exactly the kind of elegant simplicity that will immediately be wrapped in a five-layer Docker orchestration and a Kubernetes cluster.
• Automotive Advertising: Stellantis is now spamming pop-up ads for new car discounts directly to owners' screens, demonstrating that there is no safe space left in the universe, especially not the $60,000 firewall protecting your commute.
• Paranoid Accessories: A new Show HN project is advertising glasses designed to detect the hidden cameras in other people's smart-glasses, creating an arms race of passive-aggressive eyewear for the surveillance-weary consumer.