Daily Archives: July 29, 2025

Starlink down LIVE: Elon Musk red-faced amid satellite internet’s global blackout

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Elon Musk’s satellite internet Starlink was last night hit with a global outage preventing tens of thousands of users from accessing the web.

According to DownDetector, reports of issues began to surge around 8pm GMT, with tens of thousands of worldwide users reporting issues at the peak of the outage. The difficulties persisted for several hours – and affected people in countries across the globe – until the service was finally restored this morning.

Mr Musk eventually spoke out about the chaos, apologising to Starlink’s users. He said: “Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Source: Starlink down LIVE: Elon Musk red-faced amid satellite internet’s global blackout – World News – Mirror Online

Pebble is officially Pebble again

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Good news for Pebble fans. Not only are the Pebble watches coming back, they’ll also officially be called Pebble watches.

“Great news — we’ve been able to recover the trademark for Pebble! Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this to work out so easily,” Core Devices CEO Eric Migicovsky writes in an update blog. “Core 2 Duo is now Pebble 2 Duo. Core Time 2 is now Pebble Time 2.”

As a refresher, Pebble was one of the OG smartwatches. Despite a loyal customer base, however, it wasn’t able to compete with bigger names like Fitbit, the Apple Watch, or Samsung.

In 2016, Pebble was acquired by Fitbit for $23 million, marking the end of the first Pebble era. Along the way, Fitbit was acquired by Google. That’s important because the tech giant agreed to open-source Pebble’s software, and Migicovsky announced earlier this year that Pebble was making a comeback. However, because Migicovsky didn’t have the trademark, the new Pebble watches were initially dubbed the Core 2 Duo and the Core Time 2.

[…]

“With the recovery of the Pebble trademark, that means you too can use the word Pebble for Pebble related software and hardware projects,” Migicovsky writes, acknowledging Pebble’s history of community development. In the years when Pebbles were defunct, many diehards would pop up in the comments of my smartwatch reviews, lamenting how nothing could compare to their Pebble. So deep was their Pebble love, many participated in a grassroots community called Rebble to keep their devices alive. For those folks, this is probably the cherry on top of an already sweet comeback.

Source: Pebble is officially Pebble again | The Verge

Congress introduces bill to ban AI surveillance pricing

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Two Democratic members of Congress, Greg Casar (D-TX) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI,) have introduced legislation in the US House of Representatives to ban the use of AI surveillance to set prices and wages.

During Delta’s Q2 earnings call last week, Delta’s president Glen Hauenstein said that the airline has already rolled out AI-controlled dynamic pricing for 3 percent of its customers and is aiming to have 20 percent of fares set using the system by the end of the year. Software biz Fetcherr supplies the pricing code to Delta and others in the industry, including Virgin Atlantic and WestJet.

“We’re in a heavy testing phase. We like what we see,” he told analysts. “We like it a lot, and we’re continuing to roll it out, but we’re going to take our time and make sure that the rollout is successful as opposed to trying to rush it and risk that there are unwanted answers in there.”

Delta’s move is nothing new. Many companies adjust prices depending on circumstances – the business plan for ride-hailing apps, for instance, is built around the idea that peak demand leads to peak prices. Supply and demand is a fundamental part of current economic thinking. Software that munges massive amounts of data just makes that process more efficient and instantaneous.

Nevertheless, the use of AI sparked an outcry, and politicians took interest. The new legislation, the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act, wants to ban the use of advanced AI systems to analyse personal data in setting prices and wages.

“Giant corporations should not be allowed to jack up your prices or lower your wages using data they got spying on you,” said Casar. “Whether you know it or not, you may already be getting ripped off by corporations using your personal data to charge you more. This problem is only going to get worse, and Congress should act before this becomes a full blown crisis.”

The representatives want the FTC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and individual states to enforce the rules of the bill. The legislation would also allow private citizens to take action against companies using such practices.

[…]

Source: Congress introduces bill to ban AI surveillance pricing • The Register

Considering the US is otherwise completely happy to have AIs run around with no legislation around them (eg they absolutely HATE the EU AI Act and Digital Services Act), I hope they get this through, but doubt it.

US clouds crush EU clouds in the EU and that won’t change soon

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European cloud infrastructure companies make up just 15 percent of their own market, and the huge investment the US giants can wield makes their dominance “an impossible hill to climb” for any would-be challengers.

Details shared by Synergy Research on regional markets show that Euro cloud operators continue to grow, but none comes remotely close to competing with the big American rivals for leadership of European markets.

According to Synergy, local companies accounted for nearly a third (29 percent) of cloud infrastructure revenues in 2017, but by 2022 their share had dropped to just 15 percent and has held fairly steady ever since.

European cloud market share

European operators more than tripled their revenues between 2017 and 2024, yet the regional market as a whole has grown by a factor of six to reach €61 billion ($70 billion) in value, meaning the local players were simply outgrown by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Those three global providers now account for 70 percent of the European market between them, while the largest regional firms such as SAP and Deutsche Telekom account for just a 2 percent share each.

This represents a sobering reality check amid calls for Europe to reduce its reliance on American-owned technology infrastructure, a call that gained momentum following the inauguration of President Trump and his administration’s confrontational stance toward others, particularly the EU.

As The Register reported earlier this year, data privacy worries have taken on new urgency following moves by Washington such as removing members of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that safeguards data under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, plus alleged flouting of federal data rules to advance policy goals.

And it can’t have helped that a Microsoft executive recently conceded during a French Senate inquiry that Microsoft “cannot guarantee” customer data sovereignty if the US government demands access, despite its many assurances to the contrary.

A group of nearly 100 technology companies and other organizations lobbied the European Commission in March for the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund to invest in key technology so as to lessen dependence on US corporations.

French cloud biz OVHcloud also claimed – briefly – that it was working with the Commission to investigate shifting workloads to its platform from Microsoft’s Azure.

However analysts and other experts told us in May that decoupling from the big US cloud players would be difficult and is largely an unrealistic ambition.

“In theory, there’s nothing stopping European companies from repatriating their data and applications to European clouds, or even bringing everything back on-premise,” said Steve Brazier, former CEO at Canalys and now a Fellow at Informa.

“But in practice, it’s close to impossible. The barriers are significant, and they stack up quickly,” he added.

Synergy Research Chief Analyst John Dinsdale echoed this sentiment, noting that the sheer scale of the American operators and their financial clout has made it difficult for others to compete against them.

“As US cloud providers continue to invest some €10 billion ($11.7 billion) every quarter in European capex programs, that presents an impossible hill to climb for any companies who wish to seriously challenge their market leadership,” Dinsdale said.

“The cloud market is a game of scale where aspiring leaders have to place huge financial bets, must have a long-term view of investments and profitability, must maintain a focused determination to succeed, and must consistently achieve operational excellence.

“No European companies have come close to that set of criteria and the result is a market where the five leaders are all US companies,” he added.

European cloud providers have mostly settled into positions of serving local groups of customers that have specific local requirements, sometimes working as partners to the big US cloud providers, according to Dinsdale.

“While many European cloud providers will continue to grow, they are unlikely to move the needle much in terms of overall European market share,” he predicts.

European cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS, and hosted private cloud services) were estimated by Synergy to be €36 billion ($42 billion) in the first half of 2025, with revenues for the full year expected to be up by 24 percent year-on-year.

The largest cloud markets in Europe are the UK and Germany, but the highest growth rates are currently seen in Ireland, Spain, and Italy.

Public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) account for the bulk of the European market and continue to grow more rapidly than hosted private cloud services, Synergy says.

However, AI is increasingly driving the market, with growth of 140-160 percent seen in GenAI-specific services such as GPUaaS and GenAI PaaS, the analyst claimed. ®

Source: US clouds crush European competition on their home turf • The Register

Majority of 1.4M customers caught in Allianz Life data heist

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Financial services biz Allianz says the majority of customers of one of its North American subsidiaries had their data stolen in a cyberattack.

Lawyers acting on behalf of US-based Allianz Life filed a breach notification with Maine’s attorney general on Saturday, saying the intrusion began on July 16 and was detected a day later.

Official filings did not state how many people were affected, or what data was compromised, although in a statement to The Register, Allianz said the majority of its 1.4 million customers were impacted.

“The threat actor was able to obtain personally identifiable data related to the majority of Allianz Life’s customers, financial professionals, and select Allianz Life employees, using a social engineering technique,” a spokesperson said.

Allianz went on to say that the attacker or attackers gained access to Allianz Life’s third-party, cloud-based CRM system, although it did not confirm the vendor supplying that system.

[…]

Source: Majority of 1.4M customers caught in Allianz Life data heist • The Register

What is most amazing is that nowadays 1.4m people affected feels like a small hack.

Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse

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[…]

Google Home is at the center of what I would describe as a reputation shitstorm. According to way too many people on Reddit, Google Home is so broken that some people are actually unable to even turn their smart lights on and off properly. And it’s not just lights; if Reddit complaints are anything to go off of, it looks like all kinds of smart devices are affected by problems with Google Home, including other speakers and even (disconcertingly) cameras and smart doorbells.

While Google has apparently promised to fix the issues, it looks like, for lots of people, they’ve persisted. A quick scan of the Google Home subreddit reveals that connectivity issues and general issues are still pouring in, with no official announcement from Google.

[…]

Source: Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse

And that is what you get with cloud dependent crap that update themselves without any control by the user.

Internet Archive is now an official US government document library

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The US Senate has granted the Internet Archive federal depository status, making it officially part of an 1,100-library network that gives the public access to government documents, KQED reported. The designation was made official in a letter from California Senator Alex Padilla to the Government Publishing Office that oversees the network. “The Archive’s digital-first approach makes it the perfect fit for a modern federal depository library, expanding access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape,” he wrote.

[…]

With its new status, the Internet Archive will be gain improved access to government materials, founder Brewster Kahle said in a statement. “By being part of the program itself, it just gets us closer to the source of where the materials are coming from, so that it’s more reliably delivered to the Internet Archive, to then be made available to the patrons of the Internet Archive or partner libraries.” The Archive could also help other libraries move toward digital preservation, given its experience in that area.

It’s some good news for the site which has faced legal battles of late. It was sued by major publishers over loans of digital books during the Coronavirus epidemic and was forced by a federal court in 2023 to remove more than half a million titles. And more recently, major music label filed lawsuits over its Great 78 Project that strove to preserve 78 RPM records. If it loses that case it could owe more than $700 million damages and possibly be forced to shut down.

The new designation likely won’t aid its legal problems, but it does affirm the site’s importance to the public. “In October, the Internet Archive will hit a milestone of 1 trillion pages,” Kahle wrote. “And that 1 trillion is not just a testament to what libraries are able to do, but actually the sharing that people and governments have to try and create an educated populace.”

Source: Internet Archive is now an official US government document library

Finally something goes right in the world of copyright.

CRISPR Gene Editing in Mosquitoes Halts Malaria Spread

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Mosquitoes kill more people each year than any other animal. In 2023, the blood-sucking insects infected a reported 263 million people with malaria, leading to nearly 600,000 deaths, 80% of which were children.

Recent efforts to block the transmission of malaria have been stalled because mosquitoes have adapted resistance to insecticides and the parasites within mosquitoes that cause malaria have become resistant to drugs. These setbacks have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which impeded ongoing anti-malarial efforts.

Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego, Johns Hopkins University, UC Berkeley and the University of São Paulo have developed a new method that genetically blocks mosquitoes from transmitting malaria.

Biologists Zhiqian Li and Ethan Bier from UC San Diego, and Yuemei Dong and George Dimopoulos from Johns Hopkins University, created a CRISPR-based gene-editing system that changes a single molecule within mosquitoes, a minuscule but effective change that stops the malaria-parasite transmission process. Genetically altered mosquitoes are still able to bite those with malaria and acquire parasites from their blood, but the parasites can no longer be spread to other people. The new system is designed to genetically spread the malaria resistance trait until entire populations of the insects no longer transfer the disease-causing parasites.

[…]

The system targets a gene that produces a protein known as “FREP1” that helps mosquitoes develop and feed on blood when they bite. The new system switches an amino acid in FREP1 known as L224 with a genetic alternate, or allele, called Q224. Disease-causing parasites use L224 to swim to the insect’s salivary glands, where they are positioned to infect a person or animal.

Dimopoulos, a professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute (Bloomberg School of Public Health), and his lab tested strains of Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes, the main vector of malaria transmission in Asia. They found that the L224-to-Q224 switch could effectively block two different types of malarial parasites from reaching the salivary glands, thereby preventing infection.

[…]

In a range of follow-on tests, the researchers found that although the genetic switch disrupted the parasite’s infection capabilities, the mosquitoes’ normal growth and reproduction remained unchanged. Mosquitoes carrying the newly inserted variant Q224 exhibited similar fitness to those with the original L224 amino acid, a key achievement since the FREP1 protein plays an important role in the biology of the mosquito, which is separate from its role in being exploited by malarial parasites.

Similar to a gene-drive, the researchers created a technique for mosquito offspring to genetically inherit the Q224 allele and spread it throughout their populations, halting the transmission of malaria parasites.

[…]

Source: CRISPR Gene Editing in Mosquitoes Halts Malaria Spread | Technology Networks

As far as I am concerned, just kill them all please: We finally may be able to rid the world of mosquitoes. But should we? (hell yes! And ticks please!)

29-million-person study shows air pollution fuels dementia and Alzheimers

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Air pollution isn’t just bad for your lungs—it may be eroding your brain. In a sweeping review covering nearly 30 million people, researchers found that common pollutants like PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide, and soot are all linked to a significantly higher risk of dementia. The most dangerous? PM2.5—tiny particles from traffic and industry that can lodge deep in your lungs and reach your brain.

[…]

In a paper published on July 24 in The Lancet Planetary Health, a team led by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis of existing scientific literature to examine this link further. This approach allowed them to bring together studies that on their own may not provide sufficient evidence, and which sometimes disagree with each other, to provide more robust overarching conclusions.

In total, the researchers included 51 studies, including data from more than 29 million participants, mostly from high-income countries. Of these, 34 papers were included in the meta-analysis: 15 originated in North America, 10 in Europe, seven in Asia, and two in Australia.

The researchers found a positive and statistically-significant association between three types of air pollutant and dementia. These were:

  • Particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less (PM2.5), a pollutant made up of tiny particles small enough that they can be inhaled deep into the lungs. These particles come from several sources, including vehicle emissions, power plants, industrial processes, wood burning stoves and fireplaces, and construction dust. They also form in the atmosphere because of complex chemical reactions involving other pollutants such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. The particles can stay in the air for a long time and travel a long way from where they were produced.
  • Nitrogen dioxide (NO2), one of the key pollutants that arise from burning fossil fuels. It is found in vehicle exhaust, especially diesel exhaust, and industrial emissions, as well as those from gas stoves and heaters. Exposure to high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide can irritate the respiratory system, worsening and inducing conditions like asthma and reducing lung function.
  • Soot, from sources such as vehicle exhaust emissions and burning wood. It can trap heat and affect the climate. When inhaled, it can penetrate deep into the lungs, aggravating respiratory diseases and increasing the risk of heart problems.

According to the researchers, for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m³) of PM2.5, an individual’s relative risk of dementia would increase by 17%. The average roadside measurement for PM2.5 in Central London in 2023 was 10 μg/m³.

For every 10 μg/m3 of NO2, the relative risk increased by 3%. The average roadside measurement for NO2 in Central London in 2023 was 33 µg/m³.

For each 1 μg/m³ of soot as found in PM2.5, the relative risk increased by 13%. Across the UK, annual mean soot concentrations measured at select roadside locations in 2023 were 0.93 μg/m³ in London, 1.51 μg/m³ in Birmingham and 0.65 μg/m³ Glasgow.

[…]

Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain how air pollution may cause dementia, primarily involving inflammation in the brain and oxidative stress (a chemical process in the body that can cause damage to cells, proteins, and DNA). Both oxidative stress and inflammation play a well-established role in the onset and progression of dementia. Air pollution is thought to trigger these processes through direct entry to the brain or via the same mechanisms underlying lung and cardiovascular diseases. Air pollution can also enter circulation from the lungs and travel to solid organs, initiating local and wide-spread inflammation.

The researchers point out that the majority of people included in the published studies were white and living in high-income countries, even though marginalised groups tend to have a higher exposure to air pollution. Given that studies have suggested that reducing air pollution exposure appears to be more beneficial at reducing the risk of early death for marginalised groups, they call for future work to urgently ensure better and more adequate representation across ethnicities and low- and middle-income countries and communities.

[…]

Further analysis revealed that while exposure to these pollutants increased the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the effect seemed stronger for vascular dementia, a type of dementia caused by reduced blood flow to the brain.

[…]

Clare B Best Rogowski, Christiaan Bredell, Yan Shi, Alexandra Tien-Smith, Magdalena Szybka, Kwan Wai Fung, Lucy Hong, Veronica Phillips, Zorana Jovanovic Andersen, Stephen J Sharp, James Woodcock, Carol Brayne, Annalan Navaratnam, Haneen Khreis. Long-term air pollution exposure and incident dementia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Planetary Health, 2025; 101266 DOI: 10.1016/S2542-5196(25)00118-4

Source: Is the air you breathe silently fueling dementia? A 29-million-person study says yes | ScienceDaily