Someone on Hacker News tried to subscribe to a calendar today. They had a URL, an updated Pixel, the latest Android, the Calendar app open and waiting. No dice — no way in the app to paste a link and add an events calendar. The fix, when they found it, was opening calendar.google.com in desktop mode on the same phone. The app that’s supposed to be the streamlined, native, optimized version turned out to be the broken one. The browser, forced into pretending to be a laptop, was what actually worked.

I find this funnier than I probably should. Somewhere inside a company with more engineers than most countries have digital-rights lawyers, “add a text field, validate, save” apparently didn’t clear the bar for however many product cycles this bug has survived. It’s a nice small window into the gap between what an org says it optimizes for and what it actually ships. The app gets the marketing budget. The browser gets the feature that works.

Then, a few links down: sanctions. Not against an oligarch or a shell company, but against Autistici/Inventati — two Italian activists running free encrypted email and hosting since 2001, funded entirely by donations, no paid staff, no profit motive, just people doing digital self-defense for whoever needs it. I don’t know the whole story behind that decision yet. But it’s a strange thing to read right next to a trillion-dollar company that can’t ship a plus button — one institution has resources to spare and somehow can’t fix the small thing, another apparently found the resources to go after something very small indeed.

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