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Skim the atmosphere and air-breathing VLEO sats can theoretically maintain orbit

DARPA is on the verge of reaching a new low - an orbital one - as the Defense Department's research arm moves its Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) Otter satellite program into the production phase. …

Britain said on Wednesday it would ban the resale of tickets to concerts, sport and other live events for profit, disrupting ticket touts and the platforms that benefit from their activities. From a report: Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said touts were ripping off fans by using bots to snap up batches of tickets for coveted shows and reselling them at sky-high prices. "Our new proposals will shut down the touts' racket and make world-class music, comedy, theatre and sport affordable for everyone," she said, after the government had promised action.

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Massive jump in spending shows the Great White North isn’t betting everything on NASA

Canada will boost its investment in European Space Agency (ESA) programs by CA$528.5 million ($376 million USD), a tenfold increase, according to the Canadian Space Agency.…

Chinese economist Gao Shanwen told a Washington panel in December that China's real GDP growth might be around 2% rather than the official figure near 5%. By January, Gao was no longer chief economist at SDIC Securities and went silent for almost a year. As FT points out in a long piece, China does not publish quarterly GDP breakdowns showing consumption, investment and net exports. Every other major economy produces these figures. The IMF in 2024 gave China a C grade for national accounts. The rating puts China on par with India and below Vietnam. Fixed asset investment data showed negative growth in 2025 for only the second time in decades. Property investment has fallen consistently since 2022. But official GDP investment data shows no signs of declining. The National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing sectoral breakdowns of fixed asset investment in 2018. It discontinued a price series in 2021 and a land sales series in 2023. Beijing has restricted researcher access rather than addressing longstanding questions about data quality. China says it disagrees with the IMF's C rating. The government argued its production-side GDP approach is appropriate. Why does it matter? China is too large and too interconnected with the global economy for unreliable data to be a purely domestic issue. The lack of transparency creates problems for everyone trying to make decisions based on understanding China's economic trajectory. As Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University and former IMF official, told FT: China is one of the two biggest economies in the world. "It would be nice to know what is really going on."

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Version 4.21 also brings advances in the datacenter, on ARM, and RISC-V

The Xen Project today delivered a major release of its hypervisor and associated tools, including contributions from automaker Ford, which quietly joined the project in June.…

Boston Dynamics' Spot robot is now deployed by more than 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams across the US and Canada. The 75-pound four-legged machine starts at around $100,000 and has been used in armed standoffs, hostage rescues and hazardous materials incidents since its commercial debut five years ago. The Massachusetts State Police operates two Spot units purchased in 2020 and 2022. Each cost about $250,000 including add-ons funded through state grants. Last year one of the robots helped corner a suspect who had taken his mother hostage at knifepoint in Hyannis. Houston operates three units and Las Vegas has one. ICE recently spent around $78,000 on a similar robot from Canadian manufacturer Icor Technology that can also deploy smoke bombs. Civil liberties groups have raised concerns about normalizing militarized policing. The NYPD suspended its limited Spot program in 2021 after public backlash over cost and surveillance concerns before later reinstating it and purchasing two units. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says there should be state and federal laws providing guidance on appropriate use of such technology. About 2,000 Spot units now operate globally.

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A reactor at the site suffered a partial meltdown in 1979

The Trump administration is so eager to get extra power into the grid that it is offering a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy to help it restart the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear facility.…

Digital rights groups argue cameras used to unconstitutionally surveil locals

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) are suing the City of San Jose and its police department over alleged abuses of automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Federal health officials have linked two massive US measles outbreaks, confirming that the country is about two months away from losing its measles elimination status, according to a report by The New York Times. The Times obtained a recording of a call during which officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to state health departments that the ongoing measles outbreak at the border of Arizona and Utah is a continuation of the explosive outbreak in West Texas that began in mid- to late-January. That is, the two massive outbreaks are being caused by the same subtype of measles virus. This is a significant link that hasn't previously been reported despite persistent questions from journalists and concerns from health experts, particularly in light of Canada losing its elimination status last week. The loss of an elimination status means that measles will once again be considered endemic to the US, an embarrassing public health backslide for a vaccine-preventable disease.

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Tsinghua University collected 4,986 AI and machine learning patents between 2005 and the end of 2024. The Beijing institution has received more than 900 patents last year alone. The total exceeds the combined patent count from MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard during the same period. China now accounts for more than half of all active patent families globally in AI and machine learning fields, according to data analytics service LexisNexis. The university also has more AI research papers among the 100 most cited than any other school at last count. The US still holds the most influential AI patents and the top performing models. Harvard and MIT consistently rank ahead of Tsinghua in patent influence. American institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 compared to 15 from Chinese organizations, according to Stanford's AI Index Report. China's share of the world's elite AI researchers -- the top 2% -- rose from 10% in 2019 to 26% in 2022. The US share fell from 35% to 28% during the same period, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

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Cloudflare suffered its worst network outage in six years on Tuesday, beginning at 11:20 UTC. The disruption prevented the content delivery network from routing traffic for roughly three hours. The failure, writes Cloudflare in a blog post, originated from a database permissions change deployed at 11:05 UTC. The modification altered how a database query returned information about bot detection features. The query began returning duplicate entries. A configuration file used to identify automated traffic doubled in size and spread across the network's machines. Cloudflare's traffic routing software reads this file to distinguish bots from legitimate users. The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size. Users attempting to access websites behind Cloudflare's network received error messages. The outage affected multiple services. Turnstile security checks failed to load. The Workers KV storage service returned elevated error rates. Users could not log into Cloudflare's dashboard. Access authentication failed for most customers. Engineers initially suspected a coordinated attack. The configuration file was automatically regenerated every five minutes. Database servers produced either correct or corrupted files during a gradual system update. Services repeatedly recovered and failed as different versions of the file circulated. Teams stopped generating new files at 14:24 UTC and manually restored a working version. Most traffic resumed by 14:30 UTC. All systems returned to normal at 17:06 UTC.

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Burnout and slowing growth push Eugen Rochko into an advisory role after nearly a decade in charge

Eugen Rochko, CEO and founder of decentralized social network Mastodon, is stepping down after nearly a decade at the helm and walking away with a sizable exit payment.…

Analysts warn LPDDR4 supply is tightening fast with shift to higher-end components

Memory prices could soon be double what they were earlier this year as chipmakers switch to advanced products to target the AI market, leaving a shortfall of more mature chips such as those meeting the LPDDR4 standard.…

Vendors set up sovereign fallback so customers aren't stranded by foreign interference

SAP and Microsoft have struck a partnership designed to provide safeguards for users of the US vendor's cloud services in Europe during "times of crisis."…

An anonymous reader shares a report: California-based TP-Link says it may take a sales hit of more than $1 billion because of erroneous reports that the networking company's technology has been "infiltrated" by Beijing. In a lawsuit, TP-Link claims its competitor, Netgear, orchestrated a smear by planting false claims with journalists and internet influencers with the goal of scaring off customers. Closely held TP-Link, which makes wireless routers, alleges in a complaint filed Monday that Netgear's campaign "threatens injury to well over a billion dollars in sales" and violates a 2024 settlement of a patent fight. That accord, in which TP-Link agreed to pay Netgear $135 million, includes a provision that the public company promises not to disparage its rival, according to the suit in Delaware federal court. The suit comes as TP-Link faces growing scrutiny in Washington over national-security issues. US lawmakers from both parties have expressed concern that TP-Link's wireless equipment could be exploited by Chinese hackers following a series of attacks on its routers.

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Two-day exploit opened up 3.5 billion users to myriad potential harms

Researchers in Austria used a flaw in WhatsApp to gather the personal data of more than 3.5 billion users in what they believe amounts to the "largest data leak in history."…

Event supposedly for IT pros doesn't have much to tell admins on the Windows front

The Copilot company kicked off its Ignite shindig this week with AI, AI, and more AI. Oh, and a lot of agents.…

Open source RDMS popularity offers devs 'something other than Oracle' as database standard, analyst says

Microsoft has announced a distributed PostgreSQL database service designed to rival other hyperscaler systems and third-party RDBMSes such as CockroachDB and YugabyteDB.…

Preliminary proposal is already provoking debate

The Python community is chewing over a new idea: allowing the C-based reference implementation, CPython, to incorporate Rust. It's only at the "pre-PEP" stage, but it's already sparked lively debate.…

B&Q owner resists the S/4HANA push, betting it can innovate around legacy ERP, but questions remain

In 2020, SAP's CFO told investors that its plans for customer upgrades, cloud migration, and a move to SaaS would give the German software vendor a greater "share of wallet."…