Fast Company revealed its 2026 Innovation by Design Awards winners in the data design category, recognizing projects that use data to improve user experiences through visualizations, interfaces, or algorithms. Pentagram's 'A Data Love Letter to the Subway,' a two-minute hand-drawn animation displayed across 52 screens at Fulton Transit Center, took the top honor for transforming New York subway data into an artistic visual narrative.
Developers behind the proposed Frederick Digital Campus have pitched a $110 million package to Frederick County, Maryland residents to secure approval for the site, which would house tenants including Amazon and Aligned Data Centers. The package includes a $30 million elementary school, $40 million in recreational facilities, a $14.5 million workforce training center, $10.5 million for agricultural preservation, and up to $100 million toward a water reclamation system that would cut potable water use by 80%.
Revolut disclosed that it inadvertently sent personal and financial data of some customers to a threat actor who impersonated a government agency using an authenticated domain. The leaked data reportedly includes identity documents, selfies, account statements, IBAN numbers, and transaction histories, including Bitcoin transactions. Revolut says the breach affects a limited but undisclosed number of accounts and that customer funds remain unaffected.
A 15.5 GB file containing over 7.3 million Chess.com user records surfaced for free on two data-leak forums, with no ransom attached. Analysis of the archive found genuine, recent Chess.com data including emails, usernames, ratings, and subscription status, but no passwords or payment details, pointing toward large-scale scraping rather than a server intrusion.
Security researchers at Kinryu Labs found an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster in Viettel-assigned IP space in Hanoi containing over 220 million passenger and crew records dating from 2017 to 2026. The exposed data included passport numbers, nationalities, dates of birth, flight details, seat assignments and baggage information, accessible due to a chain of misconfigurations and default credentials. The database was secured after being reported, though it remains unknown whether the data was accessed or copied before that point.
A group of drug companies trained an open-source AlphaFold 3 replica called OpenFold3 on more than 20,000 proprietary protein structures pooled from their private vaults. The resulting model outperformed versions trained only on public data or on any single firm's siloed dataset, according to an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed blog post.
In a TechCrunch interview, Insight Partners co-CEO Devin Parekh discussed why the $90 billion firm has spread investments across sectors instead of concentrating heavily on frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, even though it holds stakes in both. He also addressed missed deals such as legal-tech startup Legora, conflicts of interest in venture capital, and downplayed fears of AI-driven catastrophic risk, citing potential medical breakthroughs as a greater upside.
Y Combinator's newest Demo Day featured a batch skewed heavily toward deep tech, with startups like Atomarine pitching nuclear-powered floating data centers and Dipole Labs building optical networking hardware to cut power waste in AI clusters. TechCrunch surveyed early-stage investors who named nine companies that got flagged repeatedly as the standouts of the cohort. Investors noted the technology felt futuristic, but valuations across the batch were more restrained compared to recent quarters.
A widely circulated quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg suggests he characterized Cambridge Analytica's data practices as nothing unusual, implying similar data harvesting was common industry practice rather than a unique violation. The remark, dated to 2017, has resurfaced without full context around the original scandal that saw millions of Facebook users' data improperly obtained.
A new evaluation of AI research agents, described by researcher Sayash Kapoor, found the systems performed strong engineering tasks but produced papers far below top AI conference standards. The agents ran flawed experiments, struggled to explain their findings clearly, abandoned promising hypotheses too early, and failed to meaningfully use feedback, time, or compute resources.
Multiple AI companies are now accusing each other of stealing proprietary technology, models, or data, even as the broader industry itself has built its foundation on scraping internet content without explicit consent from original creators. This dynamic has created a contradictory landscape where firms decry theft while relying on similarly extractive practices for their own products.
External SSDs use flash storage that speeds up file transfers and editing directly from the drive, while offering greater durability, quieter operation, and lower power draw thanks to having no moving parts. External hard drives remain the cheaper option per gigabyte, with examples like a 2TB Seagate HDD costing less than a 1TB Samsung T9 SSD.
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