Google restricted user app installation permissions
Also, the certificate for the open-source site expired again.

The IT Department Locked Down the Company Phones Again

Google, the giant who manages the employee hardware program, has decided that workers require less control over the corporate phones. In a move that surprised nobody, Google is making it increasingly clear that the thousand-dollar piece of plastic and glass in a user's pocket is not, in fact, owned by the user, but is instead merely licensed to them as a temporary hardware repository for Google services.

The argument, predictably, involves "security," which is corporate speak for "we want to make sure you only install approved productivity software." Tech policy blogger Hugo Tunius offered a nuanced perspective on the subject. The basic consensus around the water cooler remains that if an employee purchased the device with their own funds, they should be able to run any code they want. Google, however, believes its job is to keep users safe, even if it means preventing them from hanging their own approved art on their own cubicle wall, which is, of course, a critical security vulnerability.

Senior Developers Are Now Just Approving AI’s Pull Requests

A new survey indicates that the "senior" title might soon just mean "person who delegates to a transformer model." About a third of senior developers admitted that over half of the code they ship is now generated by an AI assistant. This finding suggests the industry has reached an inflection point where half the keyboard clacking noises heard throughout the office are merely senior staff typing "fix that bug, please," into a chat window.

The upside is that developers are apparently shipping more code, the same way a middle manager "ships" a PowerPoint presentation that was composed entirely by an overseas contractor. The downside is that when the whole system inevitably melts down, the on-call engineer will be staring at the generated garbage and asking, "Which part of the machine wrote this oopsie."

Microsoft Finally Admits Other Operating Systems Exist

The Windows team has finally, begrudgingly, acknowledged the existence of the Linux division. Microsoft surprised precisely no one by announcing a Linux version of their venerated Sysinternals Process Monitor, also known as Procmon. This is an admission that the rival operating system has achieved sufficient market share that it can no longer be ignored, much like the company cafeteria is now serving kale.

The move is being framed as an open-source olive branch, but it is really just Microsoft wanting to sell their cloud services to people who refuse to use Windows. Regardless of the political maneuvering, the Linux users can now officially use a Microsoft tool to monitor which processes are eating all the CPU time, which is probably a Microsoft cloud agent attempting to auto-update itself under a non-descript filename.

Briefs

• Certificate Expiration: The popular F-Droid website certificate was allowed to expire. Open source infrastructure is just like proprietary infrastructure, nobody ever checks the calendar.
• Quantum Computing: Engineers are still having trouble factoring the number 21 with quantum computers. It is comforting to know that we are still several decades away from truly complicated math.
• Historical Payload Tracking: It turns out Lewis and Clark marked their trail with little bottles of mercury and laxatives. This is the original, and quite literal, version of logging debug information as you go.