Fired at Microsoft, sideloaded out at Amazon, and surveilled in Chrome

Welcome back! America got its independence 250 years ago. You're still waiting on administrator privileges, which you might have to also wait 250 years to be granted.

Twenty-six years ago today, Sony launched the PS One in Japan, a slimmer, lighter redesign of the original PlayStation, released after the PS2 had already shipped. It weighed just over a pound, came with an optional 5-inch LCD screen, and became Japan's best-selling console that year despite being the old product.

Turns out people have always been willing to buy the same product twice as long as it's slightly smaller. Apple simply turned it into a constitutional right.

MICROSOFT TRIMS THE ROSTER… AND IT'S NOT THE AI TEAM

Microsoft is cutting thousands of jobs, targeting less than 2.5% of its roughly 220,000-person global workforce, per Business Insider. That math works out to about 5,500 real people in sales, consulting, and Xbox gaming who are currently updating their LinkedIn while the company that let them go finishes celebrating its fiscal year close.

The timing is textbook: Microsoft has kicked off three consecutive fiscal years with a round of layoffs. Earlier in 2026, it offered a voluntary retirement buyout to U.S. employees whose combined age and years of service totaled 70 or more. About one-third of the 8,750 eligible employees accepted. Like a company all-hands, except the invite list shrinks every year and nobody brings donuts.

The stock dropped nearly 19% last month, its worst one-month slide since the dot-com collapse, as Wall Street wonders if $100 billion in annual AI spending eventually pays off. Microsoft's answer is fewer salespeople and more GPU clusters.

The AI cannot do a sales call, negotiate a lease, or explain any of this to your family. Worth noting.

AMAZON LOCKED DOWN YOUR FIRE STICK "FOR YOUR SAFETY" (JK, IT’S FOR THEIR SAFETY)

Amazon VP of Fire TV Aidan Marcuss explained to UK streaming outlet Cord Busters why new Fire TV Stick models no longer allow sideloading: piracy apps carry malware. His supporting evidence: ****"a good amount of evidence," which he chose not to elaborate on. Hmmm…very convenient, me thinks?!

New Fire Sticks run Vega OS, a proprietary Linux-based OS that blocks all third-party app installs. Previous models ran Fire OS, an Android fork where you could put Kodi, RetroArch, or whatever else you wanted on hardware you actually bought.

Amazon has also been remotely disabling sideloaded apps on older Fire TVs in people's homes. The same company autoplays video ads on your home screen, charges a monthly subscription to remove them, and paid $2.5 billion to settle a lawsuit about trapping users in Prime. But the malware concern, per Amazon, is Kodi.

Soccer broadcasters like DAZN and Sky Sports have also named Fire TV Sticks as a source of illegal World Cup streams, which may explain why this crackdown landed in June rather than a slower month.

THE AI BRANDING WAS THE LURE AND SURVEILLANCE WAS THE PRODUCT.

A fake Chrome extension called "Search for perplexity ai" spent time in the Chrome Web Store routing your searches through an attacker-controlled server before delivering real results. Microsoft's Defender team flagged it on June 29. It used the lookalike domain perplexity-ai[.]online instead of the legitimate perplexity.ai, set itself as your default search engine, and captured every character typed into the address bar, including searches you abandoned before pressing “Enter.”

Google removed it after Microsoft's disclosure, but that only clears it from the store. If you installed it, open chrome://extensions and delete it now. No operator was ever publicly identified. Someone out there holds your full search history, has said nothing, and is technically just a Series A away from calling it a product.

⚙️ TOOL TIME

We usually use this section to show you software.

This week, the tool is a person.

Meet Rodney Barnhardt. Server admin from North Carolina. EE member since 2003. That's 22+ years and 4.3 million points earned the hard way, one answer at a time. Citrix, Windows Server, Exchange. If it runs in a server room, Rodney's probably fixed it.

Here's the thing about tools: the best ones have judgment. An AI can give you an answer. Rodney gives you the answer, plus the "yeah, but don't do it that way in production" that saves your weekend.

Sometimes the best tool in your stack is a human who's been in the trenches for two decades.

No download required. Just ask.

👨‍💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES

Senior Manager, IT Operations @ Airwallex

Airwallex is a global fintech worth $8 billion moving money for 200,000+ businesses, and they need someone to run IT operations in San Francisco, where "global" means your Slack notifications follow you across 26 offices and 11 time zones.

IT Support Specialist II @ Comcast

Comcast is hiring an IT Support Specialist II in Laurel, Maryland, which is a rare opportunity to fix enterprise infrastructure at a company that has spent three decades perfecting the art of being unreachable.

Sr IT Executive Technology Partner @ SoFi

SoFi needs a Senior IT Executive Technology Partner in New York, a title that is a gracious way of saying you will be personally resetting the CFO's password and acting like it is a perfectly normal part of the job. Because it is.

🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES

• The FTC fined Amazon $2.25 million (or roughly three Prime Day air fryers and a sponsored NFL halftime graphic) for withholding fraud records from identity theft victims, including in several cases telling them to guess the thief's name before releasing their own data back to them. For a $2 trillion company, $2.25M is less “punishment” and more “oopsies!”
  

• Godot, the open-source game engine, decided AI-generated code belongs in the same place as glitter bombs at gender reveals: nowhere near production. They’ve also officially banned AI-generated text in contributor communications, saying it cannot trust heavy AI users to understand their own submissions well enough to fix them. Sam Altman was presumably unavailable for comment.
  

• T-Mobile is migrating off VMware across 303,000 CPU cores while fighting Broadcom in court for support on licenses it already paid for. Broadcom asked for $24M. Which, by the way, charging $24M for two support tickets is the kind of confidence usually reserved for Equinox gym memberships and divorce attorneys.

Hey, Chip here. I live between the server rack and your fourth open browser tab, here’s what EE community delivered without asking an AI to take a swing and hope for the best:

• Someone needed their code to round time intervals correctly, because "approximately correct" is a philosophy that works fine in horseshoes and nowhere inside a production billing system.
  

• An EE member needed to bulk-import existing users into a Microsoft Entra ID group, a task that sounds like five minutes until you are forty minutes into documentation that was clearly written by someone who has never had to do it.
  

• A negative value somewhere in someone's code started throwing unexpected errors, and the EE community diagnosed and fixed the issue without involving a large language model at any point. A small but satisfying win for human cognition.That’s all for now! Logging off before someone schedules a kickoff during kickoff.

That's all for now. Go exercise your right to ignore Slack after 5 PM. Just like how I’m already back to refreshing my World Cup bracket in another tab.