GoKawiil
Tech News
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates regions was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes on its data centers months earlier. An AWS status update posted September 15 said the company could not restore data in one UAE availability zone and across all three availability zones in Bahrain, though recovery work continues elsewhere.
Work For America launched as a career-matching platform aimed at helping federal employees who lost their jobs transition into state and local government positions. The service has since expanded to welcome all job seekers, including those with no prior public sector experience, functioning much like a LinkedIn tailored specifically to government careers.
Grab Holdings will acquire an initial 60% controlling stake in Singapore-based buy-now-pay-later platform Atome Financial for $1.49 billion in cash, with an option to purchase the remaining 40% about two years after the deal closes. CFO Peter Oey said the staged structure helps de-risk the transaction while giving Grab access to Atome's merchant network in travel, beauty and e-commerce. Grab shares fell 3.64% on Nasdaq after the announcement.
Nitter and XCancel, third-party services that let users view X posts without logging in or using the official app, have gone dark again after a brief return earlier this month. X had sent a cease-and-desist in August accusing Nitter of unlawfully scraping its API, and both services now cite new legal developments as the reason for suspending operations.
Google is rolling out a Play Services update that lets a phone's IMEI number appear in emergency info accessible from the lock screen, without unlocking the device. The feature targets devices running Android 12 or newer and is meant to help identify a phone's owner if it's lost or found. Users can disable it through Settings under Security & Privacy, Lost Device Protection, and Theft Protection.
A group of researchers argue that global urbanization, while celebrated for green city initiatives, is masking the steady degradation of the countryside that cities depend on. They cite up to 400 million hectares of abandoned land since the 1950s and roughly half the world's rangelands classified as degraded, driven by migration, land conversion and resource extraction to feed urban growth. They call for combined geospatial monitoring, landscape engineering and watershed planning to treat cities and their surrounding rural areas as one connected system.
A fractional Chief Marketing Officer who advises small business owners argues that generic marketing tactics like broad social ads and SEO campaigns waste money for niche businesses such as contractors and handymen. Instead, she recommends high-intent lead generation, hyper-local search tools like Google Local Services Ads, and partnerships within existing trust networks to reach customers making high-stakes decisions.
Code strings discovered in a recent Google Play Services update hint that Google plans to bring its main Google app to macOS, following the earlier arrival of Gemini on Apple's desktop platform. No official release date or feature list has been confirmed by Google.
Beyond the usual OS and security update settings, Android devices include a distinct, less visible menu for updating individual system services like Google Play services. Depending on the manufacturer, these services may need to be updated separately from the main software update screen, and how they appear can vary between brands such as Google Pixel and others.
Microsoft has verified that its September 2026 security updates are causing Remote Desktop Services failures across Windows Server 2012 and later, plus Windows 10 and 11. Affected systems show RDP connections dropping after a few minutes, sign-in errors, servers stuck loading the Remote Desktop Configuration screen, and related tools like MMC and File Explorer becoming unresponsive.
Astroscale executive Ron Lopez discussed the company's upcoming ISSA-J1 mission for JAXA, which will require rendezvousing with two decommissioned Japanese satellites rather than a rocket body. Unlike the ADRAS-J2 mission targeting a stable rocket stage, ISSA-J1 must approach satellites with protruding solar arrays that are likely tumbling, demanding more advanced rendezvous and proximity operations technology.
OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT for Financial Services, a Wall Street-tailored version of ChatGPT Work built with Morgan Stanley and Evercore, powered by its new GPT-6 Astra model. The tool can research potential M&A targets, pull data from industry-standard financial sources, and automatically generate formatted PowerPoint pitch decks matching a bank's style guide.