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Switzerland's federal government is making a significant move away from Microsoft, replacing software on roughly three thousand computers as part of a pilot program. It's a story about sovereignty as much as software — governments increasingly want control over their own digital infrastructure, and open source is looking like the path forward.
Shifting to a story that cuts closer to home for anyone who records live television — TiVo is planning to put its automatic commercial skipping feature behind a paywall. The company helped define the DVR era partly by letting viewers skip ads in their own recordings. Now it wants to charge for that privilege, which raises a fair question: when you record something yourself, who really owns that experience?
And in a cautionary tale about automated enforcement, a developer says Google Compute shut down their server after flagging a redirected executable as malware. The file was a legitimate open source release compressed with a common tool called UPX, which antivirus systems frequently misidentify. The developer has been waiting a month with no response to their appeals — a reminder that when the algorithm decides you're a threat, getting a human to reconsider can feel nearly impossible.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
