Last week millions of Windows machines went down in the biggest-ever global outage and we can learn a lot from that. One interesting claim is that EU rules forcing Microsoft to give third parties access to core functionality is to blame.
Google is also in the news, first of all for shutting down the URL shortener goo.gl soon and thus breaking tons of links. Furthermore, the company back-paddles on their announcement to ‘deprecate third-party cookies’. Might be a good time to read back up on cookies and tokens and to learn about concerns about passkeys as an alternative. They also plan a purge of ‘low-quality’ Android apps and good riddance - the store is a mess. A concern of us lovers of the web is that Google seems to defaults to not indexing the web because of AI generated garbage flooding it.
Talking of AI, Data Never Sleeps: AI Edition is an infographic on what happens in AI every minute. If you find AI confusing here is a cheat sheet explaining AI terms. OpenAI announced that its now blocks the ‘ignore all previous instructions’ loophole, China orders AI companies to infuse their models with socialist values and at the creepy end of things, a supermarket tracks employees’ smiles and service.
Squarespace had weak security defaults causing domains hijackings, there is an unpatchable IIS forever day being actively exploited, on AWS, fake packages ship malware In JPEG files and according to Cloudflare almost 7% of internet traffic is malicious. Telegram had a Zero-Day enabling malware delivery which is bad with their user base climbing to 950M and their app store plans. Following an assassination attempt, the FBI used Cellebrite to crack the shooter's phone, and leaked documents show what it can and can't crack. Spoiler: all Android phones are fair game.
Free software might be facing harder times as FOSS funding vanishes from EU’s 2025 Horizon program. In nicer news, it might be possible to recycle solid-state batteries and you can help the W3C with collaboration tool accessibility.
