TikTok server hiccup deletes protest videos.
Also, Amazon closes the digital break room.

The Server Room Ate My Homework, Says TikTok

Users attempting to upload videos critical of ICE operations noticed a bizarre new technical issue on the platform this week; the uploads simply failed or slowed to a crawl. TikTok, the social media company, was quick to attribute this issue to an unfortunate power outage at a US data center, stating the upload problems were "unrelated to last week's news" concerning political content. This is a remarkably specific form of electrical failure, one that seems to target only dissenting opinion.

It is comforting to know that even the most advanced global media platforms are still vulnerable to the most mundane of SysAdmin problems: the flickering lights and the unreliable UPS. Celebrities like Megan Stalter and Finneas are also reporting similar technical difficulties, proving that the digital gremlins of a data center do not discriminate based on follower count. The issue, they claim, is now resolved, but for a brief period, the world saw what happens when a server racks its memory and decides that specific political discourse is too much effort.

Cloudflare's Matrix: The Post-Quantum "Proof of Concept"

Cloudflare released a blog post loudly proclaiming they had implemented a Matrix homeserver on Cloudflare Workers. The tech community, which tends to review such claims with the generosity of a border patrol agent, quickly pointed out the implementation was a highly limited prototype, not a full Matrix solution.

The recurring pattern of infrastructure companies publishing a "we did X" blog post when they really just managed a "we did an ambitious demo of part of X with several known limitations" is growing tiresome. It’s the equivalent of a Product Manager saying, "We finished the project," when an engineer has only committed a rough wireframe and a 'Hello World' function. Some are now even wondering if the whole thing was simply written by AI and not a very good AI at that.

OpenAI Names New Project After Infamous Surveillance Program, Sees No Problem

OpenAI, the organization dedicated to saving humanity or at least optimizing its data stream, introduced its new model, Prism. The name, which shares a syllable count and every single letter with the NSA's controversial mass surveillance program, Project PRISM, immediately caused a stir among the privacy-conscious, or at least the historically literate.

Naming your AI project after a national security monitoring tool is certainly a choice; it suggests either the person in charge of branding has a dead-on sense of irony or has not read a newspaper since 2012. Commenters observed the move aligns with the perception that OpenAI’s models are essentially a platform for "farming scientists for insight" on a "huge mass surveillance platform," lending credence to the idea that the name choice was, perhaps, intentional.

Briefs

• Amazon Retail Strategy: The e-commerce behemoth is closing all of its Amazon Go and Fresh stores, citing an inability to find the "right economic model" for large-scale expansion. This proves that even a multi-trillion dollar company struggles with the simple problem of selling overpriced avocados to people in a physical location.
• Crypto Security: The thief of $90 million in seized U.S.-controlled cryptocurrency has been identified as the son of a government contractor. Turns out the real danger to financial systems is not rogue nation-states, but the disgruntled offspring of the people we pay to protect things.
• New Linux Company: High-profile Linux developers Lennart Poettering and Christian Brauner founded a new company. This is a big moment for the Linux community, or at least for those who enjoy fresh drama in their operating system development.