Berlin officials confirmed cybercriminals are attempting to extort the city after the Rhysida ransomware gang publicly listed it on their leak site last Friday, following an intrusion discovered in mid-August. The attackers claim to have stolen nearly 1.44 million files totaling 5.79TB, including government, legal, financial, HR, and health records, along with credentials belonging to senior officials and infrastructure security assessments. Mayor Kai Wergner said Berlin will not pay, and law enforcement including the State Criminal Police Office and federal security agencies are investigating.
Google rolled out a new location metadata API for Android's Photo Picker in its August Mainline update, and Snapseed (version 4.1.5.970833206) is the first app to adopt it. The update adds a prompt asking whether to include an image's location info when selecting it, plus a floating toggle button to quickly enable or disable that metadata sharing.
SB Energy, a SoftBank-owned data-center developer, offered OpenAI a discount valued at $5.5 billion as part of an agreement to build data-center capacity together. The concession strengthens the financial relationship between SB Energy and OpenAI as they work to develop new infrastructure projects.
A technical post explains intrusive linked lists, a linked-list variant where the 'next' pointer is embedded directly inside the data structure being linked rather than stored in a separate wrapper node. It walks through how to construct such a list in C, including how to recover the address of a containing object by subtracting the offset of its embedded list member.
Security researchers warn that enterprises deploying AI agents are prioritizing gateway controls before establishing the identity and attribution systems those gateways depend on. A real-world example cited is a LiteLLM flaw added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog in June, which let attackers run commands on the host without credentials, one of seven vulnerabilities found in that gateway in a single month. Analysts argue gateways should be the fifth layer of defense, not the first, since without knowing which agent is acting and why, enforcement systems can't tell legitimate actions from technically permitted but inappropriate ones.
Artie, a Y Combinator-backed startup building real-time data streaming infrastructure, has announced five open positions for Technical Account Executives. The company is seeking candidates focused on engineering quality, speed of execution, and measurable business impact.
Elon Musk announced on X that SpaceX will begin manufacturing turbine blades and vanes internally to increase production of natural gas turbine generators used to power AI data centers. The move addresses a supply bottleneck as data center operators increasingly rely on portable gas turbines to bypass slow grid connections, with blade casting alone typically taking 60 to 90 weeks per batch. Musk said SpaceX and Tesla are also each targeting 100GW/year of solar capacity, but gas turbines remain necessary to bridge power needs in the near term.
Facing grassroots opposition that has already jeopardized roughly $130 billion in planned data center projects this year, tech executives are shifting their public messaging from AI-doomsday warnings to more optimistic narratives. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and venture capitalist Matt Higgins have both publicly acknowledged the need for a new communications strategy, while Meta's Mark Zuckerberg published a lengthy essay touting AI's potential to improve daily life.
Anti-surveillance group Secure Justice reports that 214 cities and counties have dropped Flock Safety's license-plate camera contracts since 2021, with 90 cancellations in August alone—a fourfold jump from July. Communities from Lansing, Michigan to Pflugerville, Texas cited cost, data-sharing practices, network reach, and cases of police misuse as reasons for ending their deals. Flock says new city partnerships still outnumber cancellations roughly 10 to 1 this year.
Meta is testing robots from vendors like Kinova, ABB, and Watney Robotics to perform physical data center tasks such as power-cycling servers, swapping network cables, and restarting machines. Internal workers say one arm alone could eventually take over up to 80% of certain job duties if trials succeed. The initiative has not been previously disclosed.
Building trade unions, including Steamfitters UA Local 602, are mobilizing to pressure politicians who oppose new data center construction, with leadership warning members they will withhold political support from officials seen as hostile to the industry. An internal memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal frames the fight as an 'existential moment' for the union, given how much work data centers generate in the Maryland-DC-Virginia corridor known as data center alley.
Extortion group FulcrumSec has claimed responsibility for a breach at Manchester Airports Group, saying it stole roughly 86GB of customer data across Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports. BleepingComputer verified sample records against a real traveler's purchase history, finding detailed booking, payment and travel information beyond what MAG initially disclosed. The hackers allege they used exposed Iterable API credentials found in client-side JavaScript to access the data, including nearly 200,000 records tied to travel scheduled through 2026.
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