Daily Tech News 17 May 2025

• Facebook is arguing in court that the FTC has no case that Facebook has become terrible because Facebook was always terrible. (Ars Technica)
  
  They might have a point there.

• Verizon is paying $9.6 billion and taking on $10 billion in debt to acquire Frontier. (Ars Technica)
  
  Frontier previously bought Verizon's network operations in California, Florida, and Texas in 2016, and fucked everything up.
  
  
  
• Charter is buying Cox (the Communications cancel out) for $21.9 billion. (Reuters)
  
  There will be no competition and we don't much care whether you like it.
  
  
  
• NASA has restored the primary roll thrusters on Voyager 1, twenty years after they were deemed unrepairable, and just before a long maintenance window on communications would have canceled out any such efforts. (Space)
  
  The backup thrusters are also failing and without them the spacecraft could not continue pointing its antenna back at Earth.
  
  This was not considered an issue when the thrusters were sidelined in 2004 because honestly nobody thought the probes would keep working this long.
  
  
  
• MIT has formally requested arXiv take down one of its preprint papers, not because of any beef with the service, but because the paper is apparently garbage. (MIT)
  
  They won't say what the problems are, but we'll know soon enough. Preprint services provide access to scientific papers that have not yet been peer reviewed and published, so it's not unusual for there to be errors, and everyone understands that. So taking down even the preprint suggests it's a bit embarrassing.
  
  
  
• The end of Windows 10 is nigh, but don't chuck your old PC yet even if it can't be upgraded to Windows 11 because Microsoft sucks; you can still run Linux or - the article doesn't mention this option - keep right on running Windows 10. (The Register)
  
  Microsoft will stop updating Windows 10 itself, true. But security updates for Windows Defender antivirus, and patches for the various version of Microsoft Office running on Windows 10, will continue through 2028.
  
  That's plenty of time for a PC to naturally implode all by itself.
  
  
  
• OpenAI is planning a new datacenter in Abu Dhabi that covers ten square miles and uses five gigawatts of power. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is four times larger than the company's new datacenter in Abilene, Texas.
  
  With any luck, that will also implode by 2028.
  
  
  
• Crypto company Coinbase has disclosed a data breach involving inside actors affecting up to a million users and expected to cost the company up to $400 million to offset customer losses. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The people behind the breach demanded $20 million in ransom to not release the data. Coinbase told them to go fuck themselves.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

| Access Comments