Surveillance firm files bad abuse report.
Also autonomous cars stop moving and the EU wants backdoors.

The IT Department Tries to Use HR Policy to Win a Domain Dispute

The private surveillance company Flock Safety has escalated an inter-office squabble to the level of weaponized compliance. Flock Safety and the threat intelligence firm Cyble Inc. worked together to file patently false abuse reports with Cloudflare, which was hosting a transparency site detailing information about Flock’s controversial license plate reader systems. The reports claimed phishing and trademark infringement, which is a surprisingly low-effort way to suppress public accountability.

The transparency site operators were forced to migrate their infrastructure, which is a significant inconvenience, but the whole maneuver avoided a formal legal challenge like an ICANN UDRP complaint. Legal proceedings, you see, require a higher standard of proof, which is almost as inconvenient as filling out the quarterly budget spreadsheet. It is much easier to just lie to a hosting company and wait for them to hit the nuke button, a process that is functionally equivalent to telling the Systems Admin the whole network is slow when your one Zoom call is lagging. The legal analysts in the comments section were quick to point out that knowingly filing a false takedown notice is a fun new avenue for a tortious interference lawsuit, a development Flock is likely tracking with their new camera systems.

The European Commission Redesigns the VPN

Policy wonks in Brussels are back with the sequel nobody asked for. The new initiative, variously dubbed Going Dark or ProtectEU, is being rightly identified as a "Chat Control 3.0" attempt to mandate the ability for law enforcement to access encrypted data. The proposal is built on the impossible premise of "security through encryption and security despite encryption," which is what happens when a politician tries to fix a bug in a codebase they cannot read.

The European Commission is seeking to expand this new lawful access scope to cover VPN services, which should clear up any confusion about whether they understand what encryption does. The discussions involve new rules for data retention, including keeping records of which websites users visit and how often they communicate. The goal, apparently, is to have "the broadest possible scope of application," which is the kind of ambitious, cost-no-object mandate usually reserved for the CEO's new yacht or the replacement of the entire office's stapler supply.

The Corporate Shuttle Fails to Navigate a Nap

The entire self-driving future paused abruptly in San Francisco when the city experienced a widespread blackout caused by a PG&E substation fire. The Waymo fleet, designed to ferry us into the glorious tomorrow, found itself in the mundane present, acting like confused high-school students whose after-school job requires them to drive a manual transmission.

Hundreds of Waymo cars stopped, paralyzed by the lack of functioning traffic signals, causing serious traffic jams across the city. The company was forced to temporarily suspend all ride-hailing services. The consensus among the public is that the hyper-reliant V2X (vehicle-to-everything) systems, which cannot figure out how to interpret a dark traffic light as a four-way stop like a human driver, is the culprit. It is a classic move, creating a system so advanced it cannot handle basic, everyday infrastructure failure, like building a multi-million-dollar server farm that shuts down when the intern unplugs the wrong surge protector.

Briefs

• AI Award Stripped: Indie game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lost its Game of the Year award because the studio, Sandfall Interactive, admitted to using generative AI for placeholder textures during development, even if they were quickly patched out. The rules are the rules, apparently, even if the violation amounts to leaving an old, expired yogurt container in the corporate fridge.
• Logging Sucks: A developer has dedicated an entire manifesto to the fact that logging in modern applications is a mess. This is breaking news for anyone who has ever tried to debug a stack trace past 2 AM, which is to say, everyone who works here.
• The Windows 11 Refusal: One brave soul has declared publicly that they cannot upgrade to Windows 11 and that Microsoft should please, just stop sending the nagging pop-ups. The spiritual sibling to the "Do not email me after 5 PM" movement has begun.