A buyer’s technical review of a Scandinavian software takeover has uncovered a hidden route for linking supposedly anonymous public-service records to individual accounts. The finding affects 1.4 million profiles and has prompted urgent questions from municipal customers about who could have used it.
A nightly surge of phantom mobile devices in Saudi Arabia’s empty desert has thrown a multibillion-euro AI acquisition into doubt. The apparent traffic came from a startup’s own simulations, which its customers say were labelled as real network activity.
A sudden loss of low-cost cloud storage has pushed Mexican universities and libraries to connect their own servers into a vast searchable archive. The network, launched this week, is the largest of its kind in Latin America, according to a specialist register.
A software accident has revealed that a Philippine start-up’s drought-prediction app counted duplicated rain readings as separate proof of its accuracy. The company won ₱48 million (about €740,000) in public contracts on the strength of forecasts it said were right 96% of the time.
A new city scheme promises cash credits for discarded phones and laptops, but repairers say its software could shut them out of the trade. On Tuesday, protesters brought a tangle of cables to Surabaya’s city hall — and won a pause before the first lockers open.
A former reliability chief at VelaTrace Systems says its emergency-call software quietly recoded 1.2 million location warnings as routine network events. A review of public records, a controlled software test and interviews with dispatch officials found that the change affected services used by 63 US call centres.
A timing camera was knocked out of alignment when a venue cart caught its cable during Lisbon’s Atlantic Games, briefly giving athletes the wrong results in two track finals. The accident has divided teams over whether an experimental AI system should have been trusted to decide medals.
A former engineer says a forecasting platform used by Italian fuel buyers overstated the danger of delivery delays during a summer of tense oil markets. The resulting rush for spot purchases cost three utilities an estimated €1.9 million in extra premiums, according to figures reviewed by The Plausible Post.
A recall of 48,200 Heliand Nera S4 phones over overheating has led technicians to a second, undisclosed fault: an update kept collecting location data after owners switched diagnostics off. A review of returned handsets traced 3.1 million location records to a beta service that the company said had been removed.
A scientific paper says a Nigerian flood-forecasting system mistook blue roof coverings for water and mapped a phantom lake across 68 square kilometres of Lagos. The error helped send thousands of false flood advisories to app users before researchers traced the source to the city’s rooftops.
Retired football star Altan Koral says his synthetic voice will answer residents’ questions through municipal call centres, with a pilot planned for November. Experts warn that putting a trusted public figure’s voice on routine government services could make fabricated instructions harder to spot.
The head of a Japanese technology standards group resigned on Friday, hours after researchers reported that AI software reversed the meaning of more than 1,100 emergency alerts in tests. The authors say the results expose a serious weakness in systems being considered by local governments, though they found no evidence of public warnings being altered in actual emergencies.