Western Digital Investigates Older SMR Hard Drive Failures Tied to Design Flaws

Western Digital has confirmed it is investigating potential problems with some of its older SMR-based hard drives (as opposed to CMR technology), following reports from multiple data recovery firms about unusually high failure rates. 

The affected models include 2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB, and 6 TB WD Blue and Red drives (model numbers WD*0EZAZ, WD*0EDAZ, and WD*0EFAX) released around 2020, products that previously landed the company in a class-action lawsuit over undisclosed use of SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology. Tom's Hardware reports that Western Digital said in a statement to Heise Online that it takes the findings seriously and that its engineering teams have launched an internal review.

According to 030 Datenrettung Berlin GmbH, which first published the failure analysis, the issue could have its origins in design-level limitations of SMR technology in lower-capacity consumer drives. SMR increases areal density by overlapping data tracks allowing up to 25% more capacity per platter. However, rewriting data can require adjacent tracks to be rewritten as well, introducing latency and potential instability. These shortcomings have long made SMR unsuitable for certain workloads such as RAID or ZFS arrays. Western Digital's earlier decision not to disclose SMR use in these drives led to a $2.7 million lawsuit settlement in 2021. Now, data recovery labs warn that the same models could suffer physical damage and data loss over time. Users with WD Blue or Red drives in the 2-6 TB range from 2020 onward are advised to check their hardware, as early failure symptoms may include unusual clicking or grinding noises from the platters.

www.techpowerup.com

The Churchillian War Room - Mental Health Motorbike Coffee Morning

 

The Churchillian, Portsdown Hill, Portsmouth: After the amazing turnout from our first event, we are excited to announce our next coffee morning ☕Sunday 16th November 2025. 10am to 12pm. 

Come along for a relaxed morning of great company, hot beverages and warm pastries 🥐🥐

The Mental Health Motorbike guys will be here for you to chat to if you want. 

Everyone is welcome - whether you ride of not. 

Lets keep building a supportive community together come rain or shine. 

www.facebook.com

Charity Christmas Gig in Havant - by Mono Motorcycles

Join us on Saturday 29th November 2025 for a Charity Gig in aid of Mental Health Motorbike and SERV Wessex.

Celebrate Christmas 2025 with a fantastic night of live music from 'Carbon Copy Party Band', an incredible raffle, licensed bar and hot food from 'MJ Fine Foods'.

Doors open at 7pm.

Band Session 1 — 7.30pm—8.15pm

Break 8.15pm—9.00pm

Band Session 2 — 9.00pm—9.45pm

Raffle draw 9.45pm—10.00am

Doors close 10.30pm

Tickets cost £10.00 and can be purchased over the telephone (01243 576212 or 07899 654446) or at the Mono Motorcycles workshop in Funtington, Chichester, PO18 9DA.

Location: The gig takes place at The Pallant Centre, Havant.

Download the flyer for this great event HERE.

www.facebook.com

AI news anchor debuts on U.K.’s Channel 4 in stunt proving dangers of Artificial Intelligence

A news special on Britain’s Channel 4 titled “Will AI Take My Job?” investigated how automation is reshaping the workplace and pitting humans against machines. At the end of the hour-long program, a major twist was revealed: the anchor, who narrates and appears throughout the telecast reporting from different locations, was entirely AI-generated.

In the final moments of the special, the host says: “AI is going to touch everybody’s lives in the next few years. And for some, it will take their jobs. Call center workers? Customer service agents? Maybe even TV presenters like me. Because I’m not real. In a British TV first, I’m an AI presenter. Some of you might have guessed: I don’t exist, I wasn’t on location reporting this story. My image and voice were generated using AI.”

WOW, remember when we used to say the camera never lies?...

Meanwhile, in other news: Amazon confirms 14,000 layoffs, says ‘AI’ innovation reason for ‘reducing roles’.

www.variety.com

Australia sues Microsoft over AI-linked 365 subscription price hikes

REUTERS: Australia's competition regulator on Monday sued Microsoft, accusing it of misleading millions of customers into paying higher prices for its Microsoft 365 software after bundling it with artificial intelligence tool Copilot.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) alleged that from October 2024, the technology giant misled about 2.7 million customers by suggesting they had to move to higher-priced Microsoft 365 personal and family plans that included Copilot.

After the integration of Copilot, the annual subscription price of the Microsoft 365 personal plan increased by 45% to A$159 ($103.32) and the price of the family plan increased by 29% to A$179, the ACCC said.

The regulator said Microsoft failed to clearly tell users that a cheaper “classic” plan without Copilot was still available.

www.reuters.com

Today's Reading, by C.S.Lewis. On goodness...

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. 

The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. 

An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

From Mere Christianity

AI models may be developing their own ‘survival drive’, researchers say

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000, some AIs seem to resist being turned off and will even sabotage shutdown. When HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, works out that the astronauts onboard a mission to Jupiter are planning to shut it down, it plots to kill them in an attempt to survive.

Now, in a somewhat less deadly case (so far) of life imitating art, an Artificial Intelligence safety research company has said that AI models may be developing their own “survival drive”.

After Palisade Research released a paper last month which found that certain advanced AI models appear resistant to being turned off, at times even sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, it wrote an update attempting to clarify why this is – and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed.

www.theguardian.com

Support the Poppy Appeal 2025

This Remembrance, will you show your support to our Armed Forces community? 

There are so many reasons why a veteran’s life can fall apart. It could start with a training accident, the loss of a friend or leaving service. All it takes is one event for everything else to spiral out of control. But, however their suffering starts, your donation today can help to stop it. Will you help us continue our vital work this Remembrance?

This year is the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. It was the most devastating and lethal war in history.

The Royal British Legion pays tribute to the Second World War generation, from British, Commonwealth and Allied Forces, by marking VE Day (8th May) and VJ Day (15th August).

Please give generously:
www.britishlegion.org.uk

Statement on Superintelligence

Statement: We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in.

Context: Innovative Artificial Intelligence tools may bring unprecedented health and prosperity. However, alongside tools, many leading AI companies have the stated goal of building superintelligence in the coming decade that can significantly outperform all humans on essentially all cognitive tasks. This has raised concerns, ranging from human economic obsolescence and disempowerment, losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control, to national security risks and even potential human extinction. The succinct statement above aims to create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who oppose a rush to superintelligence.

AI companies are racing to build superintelligence, without knowing how to control it. Let's take our future back from Big Tech.

Join the call to ban the development of superintelligence, until it can be done safely with public buy-in. #KeepTheFutureHuman

www.superintelligence-statement.org
 Future of Life futureoflife

"The most secure version of windows ever" - hey Microsoft, how's that working out for ya?...

www.bleepingcomputer.com - Microsoft's October Windows 11 updates have broken the "localhost" functionality, making applications that connect back to 127.0.0.1 over HTTP/2 no longer function properly.

Localhost refers to the local computer or device you're currently using, which can be accessed through the special IP address 127.0.0.1.

www.tomshardware.com - Windows 11's October update just broke the Windows Recovery Environment — USB keyboards and mice unusable in Windows RE after latest bug hits.

Windows Recovery Environment (RE), as the name suggests, is a built-in set of tools inside Windows that allow you to troubleshoot your computer, including booting into the BIOS, or starting the computer in safe mode. It's a crucial piece of software that has now, unfortunately, been rendered useless (for many) as part of the latest Windows update. A new bug discovered in Windows 11's October build, KB5066835, makes it so that your USB keyboard and mouse stop working entirely, so you cannot interact with the recovery UI at all.

www.microsoft.com

US hyperscale Data Centres to consume 22% more power by end of 2025

Hyperscale datacenters stateside will consume 22 percent more grid power by the end of 2025 than a year ago, and are forecast to need nearly three times as much electricity by the end of the decade.

Warnings about datacentres' rising energy draw are coming thick and fast of late, and this latest one from 451 Research (now a part of S&P Global) comes with figures and cautions about how fast this change may occur and what grid resources will be required to meet it.

The bit barn building boom is largely fuelled by estimated demand for new machine learning models, which require highly configured servers packed with power-hungry GPUs to develop and train. The power and cooling infrastructure required also mean it is easier to build a new facility rather than attempt to retrofit an existing one.

As a consequence, utility power to datacentres in America is estimated to jump 11.3 GW to 61.8 GW by the end of this year. 451 calculates this will rise again to 75.8 GW in 2026, then 108 GW in 2028, before hitting 134.4 GW by 2030.

Meanwhile, we are being told to eat less meat, not travel, turn the heating down, etc. Do be aware that whatever green changes we make to our lives will be massively offset by NEW datacentre power consumption. 

www.theregister.com

Pope Leo XIV & his BMW R 18 Transcontinental motorcycle!

BMW presented Pope Leo XIV with a customized BMW R18 Transcontinental which the Pontiff blessed and signed for a charity auction to help children in Madagascar.

The R 18 was donated by BMW Motorrad Deutschland and modified German dealer Witzel and JESUS-BIKER founder Thomas Draxler, painting it in mother-of-pearl white and adding other modifications including the Vatican's coat of arms. The touring Boxer was then ridden from the dealership in Sennfeld, Germany, to Rome where it was presented to the Pope.

The bike will be on display at the BMW Welt in Munich, Germany, until the auction in October.

www.motorcycle.com

Space Live on ITVX - a stunning continuous livestream of Earth from the ISS

ITV Studios has partnered with British space media company Sen to launch Space Live, which will deliver continuous live 4K views of Earth from orbit, making this unique view accessible to ITVX users across the UK from 15th October. 

Space Live will stream real-time ultra HD footage captured from the International Space Station.  Using Sen’s proprietary SpaceTV-1 camera system, mounted on the ESA’s Columbus module, viewers will be able to experience cinematic perspectives of Earth as they happen - from sweeping horizon shots to detailed imagery spanning over 240km of terrain below. READ MORE...

ALSO: Explore 25 years onboard the International Space Station with ISS in Real Time.

www.itv.com

Nicky Gumbel: 'Quiet Revival' happening at HTB - and across the nation

The founder of the Alpha course, Nicky Gumbel has said he’s seeing evidence of a ‘quiet revival’ at his own church, Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB).

Speaking to the Evangelical 360 Degree podcast he said that the turnout at the previous week's 1130 Sunday service had been far greater than usual because “at this time of year, it wouldn't normally be completely full. But not only was the church completely full, but all the overflow rooms were completely full and they virtually had to close the building because they just couldn't get everybody in...Something is happening.”

Our church All Saints, Denmead - is showing great signs of Blessed growth too - more / new folks attending on Sundays, homegroups full, Alpha well attended. Folks are fed up of this world's ways - and want to know God's ways. Is there to life than "this"? YES! Seek out a local Christian fellowship - and find out! Need a Bible? Contact me.

www.premierchristian.news

'Circular' AI mega-deals by tech giants are raising eyebrows

The incredibly vast sums of cash that Bay Area executives are now willing to throw into artificial intelligence tech have created an eyebrow-raising trend: the “circular” mega-deal.

Take San Francisco’s OpenAI, which is staking its claim at the centre of the nascent AI industry with a flurry of recent deals. Over the past month, it has roped in chipmaking juggernauts like Santa Clara’s Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, as well as data centre giant Oracle and upstart CoreWeave. 

The deals are so vast that they defy comprehension — the Financial Times put the company’s recent commitments at north of $1 trillion – and they’re making public companies’ stock prices jump. Stock analysts dub some of these agreements “circular,” because investment money is flowing between companies that also buy from or sell to one another. The worry then is that such deals might prop up or overhype a bad business.

Here’s one indicatively tangled pathway through the morass of companies. Nvidia is investing billions in and selling chips to OpenAI, which is also buying chips from and earning stock in AMD. AMD sells processors to Oracle, which is building data centers with OpenAI — which also gets data center work from CoreWeave. And that company is partially owned by, yes, Nvidia. Taken together, it’s a doozy. There are other collaborations and rivalries and many other factors at play, but OpenAI is the many-tentacled octopus in the middle, spinning its achievement of ChatGPT into a blitz of speculative investments.

UPDATE 191125: Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza - What do you get when you combine Anthropic, Microsoft, and Nvidia? A bubble that blows itself!

www.sfgate.com

Reading for today: We are the Church - the Body of Christ

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as “what a man does with his solitude.” 

It was one of the Wesleys, I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion. We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of our- selves together. 

Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.

By C.S. Lewis

From The Weight of Glory

Windows market share spells disaster for Microsoft's campaign to get people upgrading

 

In news I’m fairly certain no one saw coming, Windows 7 is making a comeback - at least in terms of market share.

The latest Statcounter figures claim the operating system many thought was long dead (Microsoft stopped supporting it at the start of 2020), has suddenly found a new lease of life as Windows 10 nears its support cutoff and Windows 11 continues to slide.

Yes, it was once again bad news for Microsoft’s current OS. Its share fell for the second time in a row in September 2025, accounting for 48.94% of desktop use compared with 49.08% in August and well off its July high of 53.51% - a 4.57 percentage point plunge in just two months.

www.techradar.com

South Korea - fire destroys government's cloud storage system, no backups available

The South Korean government’s central document storage system, known as “G Drive,” was reportedly destroyed in last week’s fire at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, wiping out the work documents of nearly 191,000 civil servants.

According to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety on Wednesday, G Drive was among the 96 systems confirmed to have been directly destroyed by Friday’s fire at the NIRS.

G Drive is a cloud-based repository where government employees have been advised to save all work-related documents since 2018, rather than on their computers. This system, allotted to nearly 191,000 government employees as of August, had never been backed up externally. The country has 750,000 public-sector officials nationwide.

“As the system was not backed up externally, all documents stored on the repository have been lost, and there is no way to bring back the lost documents,” Director General Lim Jeong-gyu of the Public Service Bureau said at Wednesday’s press conference.

www.koreaherald.com

Theo update - he's doing great!

Little Theo arrived with us on Friday 12th September & he's settled in really well!

He loves his food - got a great appetite! Enjoys playing rough & tumble with our Rosie's doggie Luna. Pretty much house-trained. Booked in for puppy training course - starting next week. Loves his garden - especially eating daddy longlegs of an evening - yuk! Now used to walking on a lead around the lovely paths of Denmead.

Definitely living up to his name of Theodore (a gift from God) - most of the time at least! Well he is a puppy!

 If you are considering bringing a furry friend into your home & family, PLEASE consider rehoming / adopting.

www.healingpawsanimalrescue.com

A ‘Godfather of AI’ Remains Concerned as Ever About Human Extinction

A little over two years ago, AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio was among the loudest voices calling for a moratorium on Artificial Intelligence model development to focus on safety standards.

No one paused. Instead, companies dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into building more advanced models that could execute long chains of reasoning and increasingly take autonomous action on behalf of users. And today, Bengio, considered one of the “godfathers of AI,” is as concerned as ever.

“If we build machines that are way smarter than us and have their own preservation goals, that’s dangerous,” he said.

Bengio is a professor at Université de Montréal and the founder and scientific adviser of Mila, an AI research institute for Quebec. Earlier this year, he also launched LawZero, a nonprofit research organization aimed at exploring how to build AI models that are truly safe.

www.msn.com

BLM? 52,000 Christians have been murdered in Nigeria — why is nobody talking about it?

Nigeria has become one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian. Human rights groups estimate more than 52,000 Christians have been killed in the country since 2009. This year alone, more than 7,000 have already been murdered and thousands more kidnapped. Advocacy groups say more than 19,000 churches have been destroyed and millions of believers displaced from their homes.

Despite the scale of the crisis, it has drawn little global attention. On a recent episode of HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher highlighted the lack of coverage. “If you don’t know what’s going on in Nigeria, your media sources suck,” he said. “You are in a bubble. They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country. Where are the kids protesting this?”

The attacks are concentrated in Nigeria’s Middle Belt and northern states, where armed groups storm villages, kill men, abduct women and children, torch crops and burn churches. Islamist extremists such as Boko Haram and ISIS affiliates are responsible for many raids. Militant Fulani herdsmen have also been linked to assaults on predominantly Christian farming communities, forcing families from their land. READ MORE...

www.relevantmagazine.com