France switches conference provider for new homegrown solution.
Also, space is a terrible server closet.

The Great Vendor Swap of 2027

Europe has decided the IT department needs to have a talk with procurement; France, specifically, has announced a hard deadline of 2027 for its civil servants to finally ditch Zoom and Microsoft Teams for a new, in-house conferencing system named Visio. This is all part of a larger push for "digital autonomy," which is corporate speak for "we do not trust the guys in Redmond not to share our TPS reports with Langley." The French government aims to replace all U.S. provider videoconferencing to guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications.

The goal is noble; stop spending millions on commercial licensing fees and stop relying on foreign companies who are legally obligated to obey U.S. sanctions and surveillance laws. The transition will affect 2.5 million civil servants and the French government is building its own software, releasing it under the MIT license, and hosting it on sovereign infrastructure. This is what happens when you let the legal team talk to the engineering team; they end up building a brand-new internal collaboration tool that everyone will only use for compliance, while continuing to use the old, familiar tools on their personal devices to actually get work done. We wish the helpdesk staff the best of luck with the inevitable interagency compatibility issues when someone has to join a Visio call from a system still running legacy Teams.

When "Move to the Cloud" Gets Too Literal

Every exhausted Systems Administrator instinctively knows that space is a terrible environment for a server rack, yet somehow we still need a 658-point blog post to confirm that data centers in space make no sense. The main issue is not the cold, which is what the pitch deck probably promises, but the total lack of air; this makes it impossible to cool the millions of GPUs with a fan, forcing the use of gargantuan, delicate radiator panels. We are talking about structures that would require kilometers of surface area to dissipate the heat from the server components, far bigger than the International Space Station's arrays.

Not only do you have a massive heating problem, but space is also trying to kill your electronics with cosmic radiation that causes bit flips and data corruption, requiring specialized, slower, and exponentially more expensive "rad-hardened" chips. This whole endeavor feels like the latest venture-capital-fueled trend, where an AI company needs a convenient excuse for shuffling money from a profitable space company into an unprofitable large language model operation. In short: it is extremely expensive, logistically complex, and the first time a maintenance window is required, the whole thing will be scrapped.

Mandatory Compliance Sticker for the Innovation Machine

New York State has officially entered the chat with a legislative proposal that would require "blocking technology" on all 3D printers sold or delivered in the state. This blocking technology, which is defined as hardware, software, or firmware, must use a "firearms blueprint detection algorithm" to scan every print job and prevent the printing of illegal firearm parts.

This is what happens when people who still print to PDF try to regulate additive manufacturing; they believe that software which can be disabled by simply flashing custom firmware to the printer will somehow stop an individual determined to bypass the restriction. The bill casts a wide net, defining a 3D printer as any machine capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital file using additive or subtractive manufacturing, which technically includes CNC mills and a lot of standard industrial equipment. The underlying technology is clearly meant to be a software DRM layer for physical objects, a concept which has historically worked out very well for absolutely no one.

Briefs

• Alibaba’s AI Assistant: Alibaba has released Qwen3-Coder-Next, another large language model specifically for code generation. We must now prepare for a future where 90 percent of GitHub is filled with boilerplate written by three different AIs arguing with each other over optimal memory allocation.
• Notepad++ Surprise: The beloved open-source text editor Notepad++ suffered a supply chain attack. Nothing is sacred, not even the simplest tool we use for editing configuration files at 3 AM.
• X Legal Team Has a New Firewall: Authorities raided X offices in France while the UK opened a separate investigation into the Grok AI model. This is simply the European regulatory compliance team requesting a mandatory in-person audit, by force.