The data center gold rush is warping reality

It begins quietly, as many stories do, in a small rural town where the horizon seems impossibly broad. The town planning commission gathers in a modest room, the air thick with the scent of burnt coffee and aged carpet, to hear that their town will soon win the modern economy: 10 new data centers within the town’s boundaries. Not just one or two, but 10. The PowerPoint presentations shine with promises: construction jobs, some permanent positions, “community investment,” and a new tax base that will “transform the region.”

Sure, there will be jobs. But not the jobs that rebuild a town’s soul. Data centers don’t employ thousands once they’re up; they employ dozens, sometimes fewer, depending on how automated the operation is. The real impact isn’t people—it’s power, land, transmission capacity, and water. When you drop 10 massive facilities into a small grid, demand spikes don’t just happen inside the fence line. They ripple outward. Utilities must upgrade substations, reinforce transmission lines, procure new-generation equipment, and finance these investments. Guess who ends up paying a meaningful portion of that over time? Local ratepayers, in one form or another, will face higher bills or the quiet deferral of other infrastructure work.

Water is often the second shoe to drop. Even when operators insist they’re “water efficient,” cooling is cooling, and cooling at scale is never free. Some facilities will use evaporative systems; some will use closed-loop systems; some will promise innovation that appears impressive in a press release. Meanwhile, the town’s farmers now watch the aquifer levels and the weather forecast with equal anxiety, except now they’re competing with an industry whose thirst is measured in engineering diagrams, not drought stories.

This is what the data center boom looks like on the ground: a glossy promise wrapped around very physical constraints. READ MORE...

www.infoworld.com

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

AI security company Irregular looked at Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and found all three GenAI tools put forward seemingly strong passwords that were, in fact, easily guessable.

Prompting each of them to generate 16-character passwords featuring special characters, numbers, and letters in different cases, produced what appeared to be complex passphrases. When submitted to various online password strength checkers, they returned strong results. Some said they would take centuries for standard PCs to crack.

The online password checkers passed these as strong options because they are not aware of the common patterns. In reality, the time it would take to crack them is much less than it would otherwise seem.

Irregular found that all three AI chatbots produced passwords with common patterns, and if hackers understood them, they could use that knowledge to inform their brute-force strategies.

The researchers took to Claude, running the Opus 4.6 model, and prompted it 50 times, each in separate conversations and windows, to generate a password. Of the 50 returned, only 30 were unique (20 duplicates, 18 of which were the exact same string), and the vast majority started and ended with the same characters.

www.theregister.com

Kim & Don's 60th birthday fundraiser for Hope and Soul

Thanks for celebrating our special joint birthday with us - we're really pleased that you can be with us! To mark this milestone (LOL!) - we want to raise funds for a great cause that's close to our hearts: www.hopeandsoul.org.uk .

Hope Prosser has been a family friend for many years. The work that she & her team do in Tanzania is incredible. Please take five minutes to visit her site & see what an incredible difference her charity makes to children living in extreme poverty - giving them an education & a better chance of having a good life.

So no presents for us please - but we'd be very grateful if you could make a donation to support Hope's work. Thanks & Blessings, K&D xxx

www.justgiving.com

British bikers Lindsay and Craig Foreman jailed in Iran for ten years

Lindsay and Craig Foreman, the British couple riding around the world on motorcycles, have been handed a 10-year jail sentence in Iran after being accused of espionage – a charge their family insist is baseless.

The Foremans, a Sussex couple in their 50s, were arrested in January 2025 while travelling through Iran as part of a round-the-world bike trip. This week, a judge at Branch 15 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced them to a decade behind bars.

They are being held separately inside Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, a facility long criticised by human rights groups for alleged torture and inhumane conditions.

www.visordown.com

Western Digital is already sold out of hard drives for all of 2026

Western Digital Chief Executive Officer Irving Tan said that the company has already sold out of hard drives for 2026. Tan confirmed this during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, where, according to the transcript shared by Investing.com, he also confirmed that there are already some long-term agreements (LTAs) in place for the next couple of years.

“As we highlighted, we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers,” the executive said. “And we’ve also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028. Obviously, these LTAs have a combination of volume of exabytes and price.” This announcement is on track with the report from late last year that hard drives are on backorder for two years due to massive data center demand.

www.tomshardware.com

In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud

A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different 'interfaces.'

Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original CD file, with the three others recorded through 180cm of pro audio copper wire, via 20cm of wet mud, through 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, and via a 13cm banana, and 120cm of the same setup as earlier.

Initial test results showed that it’s extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. “The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't," Pano said. "All of the re-recordings should be obvious, but they aren't."

www.tomshardware.com

Motorcycle helmet cameras & intercoms vs the law

When Schuberth announced its new ‘Concept’ helmet in 2025, it proudly pointed out that its ‘ECE-R22.06 UA’ marking meant it was the first lid to be tested and certified as safe to use with a universal accessory… like an intercom. 

But digging into what that actually means opens a massive can of worms, and it’s one we need get into so you can understand why it has such a big impact on fitting intercoms, cameras and ANY other accessory to ANY motorcycle helmet.

While debate still rages over whether the GoPro fixed to Michael Schumacher’s helmet contributed to his tragic injuries, it’s entirely plausible that sticking objects to the outside of your motorcycle lid, or indeed adding anything – inside or out – that wasn’t designed specifically for it could lead to injury or worse in a crash.

The new ‘UA’ (Universal Accessory) and ‘SA’ (Specific Accessory) classification of helmets under the ECE-R22.06 safety regulation sets out to address that, but it also means your choices for intercoms and other gear could be very limited… READ MORE...

www.bennetts.co.uk