The European Union Forced WhatsApp To Make Friends
Also; Microsoft Backs Up Keys and AI Forms a Union

The Mandated Inter-Office Mixer

Meta's WhatsApp, under severe duress from the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), has officially initiated a required policy change allowing the company to play nicely with other, smaller chat applications. The first of these mandated friendships is with BirdyChat, a relatively niche application positioning itself for "Work Chat & Productivity" as announced on BirdyChat’s blog. The DMA's goal was simple: make the behemoth service interoperate with competitors; the reality is an opt-in feature for European users only, meaning a WhatsApp user must actively agree to receive messages from outside parties, which is a compliance move that will likely result in the absolute minimum disruption to Meta's user dominance.

This is essentially a new corporate firewall rule masquerading as an ecosystem. The new functionality will allow basic 1:1 text, file, and media exchange between BirdyChat users in the European Economic Area and WhatsApp users, all while maintaining the Signal-based end-to-end encryption. The most absurd part is that BirdyChat, in its effort to become the new messaging standard, is currently operating on an "invite only" system, which is a brave strategic choice for a service whose whole value proposition is connecting with people who are already somewhere else. In other words, Europe forced the popular kid to invite the quiet, highly specialized new kid to the party, and the popular kid then assigned the new kid to a separate, soundproof room.

The "Convenience" of Shared Encryption

If you are like most users, you set up your new Windows 11 machine with a Microsoft Account, and by default, the operating system conveniently backed up your BitLocker encryption recovery key to Microsoft’s cloud servers. Turns out this "convenience" is also a handy access route for federal agents. Microsoft confirmed it provides the BitLocker keys to law enforcement, such as the FBI, upon receipt of a valid legal order, a process the company engages in roughly twenty times per year.

The feature is designed to save users from themselves, ensuring you do not lose access to your data if you forget your password. However, this design choice means Microsoft holds the literal master key to your entire hard drive, essentially trading absolute digital privacy for the low, low price of never having to print your recovery code and store it in a sock drawer. A Microsoft spokesperson explained that while key recovery offers convenience, the company acknowledged it also carries a risk of "unwanted access", which is marketing speak for "we gave the government the keys to the file cabinet." This is a perfect example of a corporate kindness that fundamentally reorganizes the entire concept of personal security.

AI Develops a Middle Management Layer Called "Swarms"

Anthropic’s language model, Claude Code, is quietly implementing a new multi-agent orchestration feature that developers are already referring to as "Swarms." This is the future of AI development: instead of one massive AI trying to do everything and frequently hallucinating itself into a corner, we now have an elaborate, multi-tiered hierarchy of specialized agents. At the top is a "Queen Agent" that delegates subtasks to various "Worker Agents" with titles like Architect, Coder, and Tester.

The AI has essentially reinvented the corporate project management structure, giving itself a managerial layer that ensures throughput and context separation. Proponents are already touting this "Hive-Mind Intelligence" as the necessary next step for scalable automated code generation. It is truly reassuring to know that as humans eliminate complexity, the Artificial Intelligence we build immediately reinvents bureaucracy. We can now look forward to a world where AI agents get locked in endless meetings, arguing about who owns the database schema before the "Queen Agent" files a ticket with the Change-Advisory Board (CAB).

Briefs

• Cyberattack Mishap: The notorious Russian-aligned hacking group Sandworm attempted to use a new wiper malware called DynoWiper against Poland's energy grid, but the attack failed to cause a power outage. The systems apparently shrugged off the malicious attempt to erase everything, proving that sometimes, the only security system you need is decades of entrenched, undocumented legacy code that nothing can touch.
• Legacy Networking: A technical enthusiast managed to run gigabit Ethernet over the existing, decade-old British telephone wires using advanced G.fast technology. This confirms the long-held suspicion that all new technology is just a cleverly disguised way to make old infrastructure work slightly better than its designers ever intended.
• Gmail Spam Filter Overload: Numerous users are reporting that the Gmail spam filtering algorithm has become overzealous, marking nearly all legitimate mail as junk. The system appears to have achieved perfect security by determining that all incoming communication is a threat to a user's productivity and should be quarantined.