🤦 Zuck Blames “Nerds” For Killing His Metaverse

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Good morning, no need to update your OS… Ignore the notification like the rest of us!

If your current system feels fragile, just remember: so did Mac OS X 10.0. Twenty-five years ago today, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0. (aka the "Cheetah"), marking the birth of the operating system that would eventually make rounded corners and minimalist design everyone's entire personality.

The release wasn't exactly smooth… Cheetah was buggy, lacked DVD playback, and couldn't burn CDs, which for $129 was like buying a car without wheels. But it laid the groundwork for everything from your iPhone to that overpriced rectangle you're reading this on.

Zuckerberg Kills the Metaverse, Insists He Didn't, Then Admits He Did But With Feelings

Meta is abandoning VR for Horizon Worlds after burning billions on a vision fewer people believed in than the ol’ “I’ll just have one more drink.” Following mass layoffs, studio closures, and discontinuing their work metaverse that nobody used, Reality Labs VP announced they're going "almost exclusively mobile.” Funny, considering they spent years trying to convince us to live in VR, only to quietly admit we all prefer scrolling Instagram in bed like God intended.

What’s weird is Mark Zuckerberg—a skin suit running iOS—simultaneously claims the metaverse isn't dead while also admitting it failed spectacularly. He blamed the "super nerdy" VR crowd for ruining his dream by doing things like enthusiastically using a product he built. Oh, the irony of a man who rehearses blinking accusing other people of being socially off!

Zuck—the only man who A/B tests eye contact—claims Horizon Worlds needs "more normal people." You know, instead of the passionate early adopters who were the only ones willing to strap janky headsets to their faces. The humanoid CAPTCHA also says Meta will pivot to AI-generated games for social feeds, which sounds like the pitch from someone who hates human connection.

The company still plans VR hardware for "different audience segments," since they can’t admit that this was a $80 billion face-plant yet. Meanwhile, 86% of headset usage goes to third-party apps, meaning Meta's own content is about as popular as Zuck himself.

Interlock Ransomware Gang Exploited Cisco Flaw for a Month Before Anyone Noticed

The Interlock ransomware crew spent 36 glorious days partying inside Cisco's Secure Firewall before anyone at Cisco realized they'd left the door wide open—think Home Alone, except every elaborate trap hit Kevin and the Wet Bandits sat in the couch to watch.

Amazon's security team spotted Interlock exploiting this hole since late January, giving them more than a month to ransack enterprise networks while Cisco was presumably checking their other to-do list items. Cisco patched the nightmare on March 4, casually mentioning that hackers could remotely execute whatever code they wanted with full admin privileges, like it was a secret copy of GTA 6.

Interlock has been on a tear, hitting hospitals, universities, and entire city governments while deploying a new malware flavor called “Slopoly,” created with AI tools, because even cybercriminals are letting ChatGPT do their homework now. This marks Cisco's fourth major security disaster since January, which at this point feels less like bad luck and more like another Doctor Who series nobody asked for.

Microsoft Pauses Copilot Creep After Admins Revolt

Microsoft finally blinked and stopped its master plan to auto-install the Copilot app on every Microsoft 365 user after IT admins revolted so hard it counted as cardio. The rollout—originally slated for October, then December, now "sometime never maybe"—was designed as opt-out by default, forcing overworked IT folks to scramble and set policies on Microsoft's schedule instead of their own.

The app was supposed to be your "centralized entry point for Copilot experiences," meaning it’s not a feature anymore. Just a lifestyle choice you didn’t make but are now legally bound to participate in—like parenthood. Turns out enterprise customers weren't thrilled about surprise software showing up like an uninvited party guest who raids your fridge. Microsoft says admins should "await further updates," which is what the Clippy brand says when they’ve already made the decision and are just figuring out how mad you’re going to be.

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👨‍💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES

Information Technology Manager @ Caterpillar

Lead IT teams and drive innovation for Large Engine facilities in Texas. Must enjoy managing $6M in tech spend while someone named Greg insists the printer is “just being difficult” like it has emotions.

IT Operations Specialist @ Sendbird

This role needs someone to act as the final line of defense between “everything works” and “we’re pivoting to apologies,” powered entirely by caffeine and suppressed rage. Oh, and you get to keep MacBooks alive, manage Kandji and Okta, and ensure nobody's laptop dies ten minutes before the big demo.

Sr. Director, IT Operations @ Sierra Space

Oversee global IT infrastructure, network engineering, and cloud architecture while ensuring compliance with enough acronyms to make alphabet soup jealous (NIST, DFARS, ITAR, CMMC 2.0). TS/SCI clearance preferred for when your incident response plan includes lighting a cigarette, staring at the sky, and accepting consequences.

🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES

• Cloudflare appeals Italy's €14.2 million Piracy Shield fine, calling it a "misguided regulatory scheme" that breaks core internet architecture. Italy demanding 30-minute takedowns from Cloudflare is like yelling at a weather app to stop the hurricane—loud, confident, and completely detached from reality.

• IBM CEO Arvind Krishna's pay jumped 51% to $38 million while the median employee got a 2.1% raise to $49,630. That's the pay of 765 regular IBMers combined. Nothing says “we value our people” like giving one executive generational wealth while everyone else gets a LinkedIn Premium subscription.

• Nvidia's networking division quietly became an $11 billion-per-quarter beast that's bigger than Cisco's entire networking business. The tech conglomerate spent decades defining networking, and Jensen Huang just walked in like OpenAI to Google Search and said “Look at me, I’m the captain now.”

• Almost 40 new unicorns minted this year including companies with names like "Flapping Airplanes" and "Erebor Bank" because we've run out of normal startup names. AI startups raising hundreds of millions on PowerPoints while your local coffee shop still can't get a small business loan.

Hey there, it’s your favorite newsletter mascot who somehow became more sentient than Meta's metaverse avatars. Here’s what our EE community solved this week:

• One user accidentally nuked their widgets while attempting to make Windows 11 look like Windows 10, which is like getting plastic surgery to look like your younger self. The goal is to just restore the temp/weather icon, but the struggle is real.

• Another expert is getting the dreaded 500 error when trying to add data to MariaDB via PHP, even though phpMyAdmin works fine. It's like having a car that only starts when you're not in a hurry.

• Someone's migrating 400 users from on-premises Exchange to M365 while replacing devices running Core 2 Duo processors with 4GB RAM. Kind of like trying to run modern civilization on telegraph machines and hoping for the best.

That’s it for today! Now back to clicking buttons that may or may not do anything. See you next week.

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