GoKawiil
Tech News
An investigation by The Guardian found that nearly all of the world's ten largest producers of PFAS, or 'forever chemicals,' intend to expand production to supply the booming data center industry. These chemicals are widely used in cooling systems, AI chips, circuit boards, fire suppression equipment, and cable coatings inside data centers.
Datamimic has released a Community Edition of its data engine as an open-source, MIT-licensed, Python-native tool that generates deterministic synthetic datasets and pseudonymizes PII in staging or QA exports. The CE version runs standalone across databases and file formats like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, CSV and JSON, while a paid Enterprise Platform adds governed workflows, PII scanning, access controls, audit logging and scheduling for regulated industries.
Wuyoh Sui, a digital-health researcher at Western University in Canada, examined how smart watches and rings are increasingly used in scientific studies of exercise, sleep and chronic disease. He points out that these commercial devices rely on opaque AI algorithms whose data handling is difficult to audit, raising ethical questions for researchers who adopt them.
Revolut, valued as Europe's most valuable startup, disclosed customer information to an individual who fraudulently claimed to represent a government agency. Hundreds of accounts were affected by the breach, which stemmed from the bank's own verification failure rather than a hack of its systems.
Activists in Philadelphia, led by Shawmar Pitts of Philly Thrive, are pushing for a moratorium on new AI data centers after city officials identified potential construction sites in Northeast Philadelphia and Grays Ferry, a neighborhood near a shuttered oil refinery. Pitts and his neighbors, many of whom suffered health problems linked to decades of industrial pollution, worry that data centers could bring similar environmental and energy burdens despite promises of jobs and growth.
Rheinmetall has released as open source its onboardapi interface library and middleware, a component of its Battlesuite platform designed to let sensors and software from different vendors communicate using a common data model. Built on the ddkit SDK and the OMG's Data Distribution Service standard, the library uses DDS XTypes and XCDR2 encoding to keep older and newer software versions compatible, with core code in C++ and wrappers for Java, C#/.NET and Python.
A New York Times/Siena University poll of 1,503 likely voters conducted in early September found 61 percent opposed building data centers for AI, with only 14 percent strongly supportive. Opposition skewed heavily among Harris voters and non-voters, while 2024 Trump voters were nearly evenly split between support and opposition. Environmental and water-use concerns topped the list of reasons for opposition, followed by community impact and general distrust of AI.
A new BloombergNEF report forecasts that US data centers will consume roughly 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, nearly double its estimate from nine months earlier. That figure would exceed the combined natural gas consumption of Germany and Japan, with grid-connected facilities accounting for the bulk of the growth rather than onsite gas plants built by companies like Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu confirmed the city has ended its use of Flock Safety's automated license-plate reader cameras after a vendor error let outside law enforcement agencies access BPD-collected vehicle data nationwide, despite a contract requiring the sharing feature be disabled. The city's 2025 surveillance report says the breach occurred within days of launching a pilot with about 45 cameras and was corrected once discovered, but Boston has since moved on to trials with Motorola and Axon instead.
A year-end review of 2026's major hacks highlights an unresolved controversy over the Department of Government Efficiency's access to Social Security Administration data. Ongoing federal lawsuits and a whistleblower's claims allege DOGE staff uploaded a live copy of the Social Security database to an unsecured third-party server, potentially exposing sensitive personal information tied to most living Americans. The broader roundup also notes a year marked by ransomware, nation-state attacks on infrastructure, and data weaponization by governments.
A storage guide outlines how heat, humidity, and magnetic fields can damage hard drives over time, and notes that even undisturbed drives can fail due to seized mechanical parts or degraded capacitors. It recommends backing up all important data before archiving a drive, verifying the transfer, and following the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of data on two different mediums with one stored offsite.
Bloomberg forecasts that U.S. AI data centers will consume up to 15 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, more than double an earlier projection of 6.9 billion cubic feet. The surge stems from operators turning to onsite gas turbine generators as grid power buildouts lag behind AI compute demand, with data centers expected to draw roughly 194 gigawatts, or 20% of U.S. power, by that year.