The New York Times reports that data centers are “painting gray concrete and gray steel with more gray,” leading to an unexpected boom for paint manufacturers. Gravel producers and wiring companies are also enjoying an uptick, “creating a long tail of unlikely winners.”
[The New York Times]
CEO Matthew Prince says the company saw thousands of attempts to exploit the PHP vulnerability across the Cloudflare network in the 10 hours before the issue was publicly announced. That jumped to “hundreds of thousands” of attacks in the 2 hours after the disclosure, and “millions” by last night. Yikes.
[X (formerly Twitter)]
The court-ordered change takes effect from March 1st 2027, following similar rulings in the EU, Japan, and Brazil. Apple will have to let Fortnite back in the App Store too — one of the last holdouts after a global return — and allow developers to offer alternative payment methods. Apple told Reuters it plans to appeal.
[Yahoo News Australia]
Some Android users are reporting receiving a Google Play system update dated “1 January 2027,” which really seems to be getting ahead of itself. Sadly, all my Android phones are still stuck on September 2026, which now feels entirely old fashioned.
[Android Police]
YouTuber Tim Pan put the new Apple foldable through a total of 11,500 folds, a thousand of which were in freezing conditions. Like Joanna Stern, he found the hinge holds up well, but like any other foldable, the crease gets a lot more visible (and a bit more even after only 500), matte display or not.
Even though Mass Effect developer BioWare has been shut down, IGN reports that Amazon is still working on the Prime Video series, citing “sources inside Prime Video.”
I asked both EA and Amazon about the status of the show today, and both companies declined to comment.
AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:
It said in a filing that Zuckerberg “was evaluating relocating his primary residence” if California’s Proposition 40 passes. As Bloomberg reports, Meta’s board issued special shares so that he wouldn’t have to leave:
Zuckerberg gets non-voting shares he can sell for liquidity without reducing his voting control. In return, he has committed to remain in California — or wherever Meta is headquartered — for eight years while he remains in a full-time leadership role.
That’s according to Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s earnings call today. He also says that “About 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day. For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better the retention seems to get.”
This week, Sensor Tower reported that the Muse app had hit 10 million US downloads.
TechCrunch reports that layoffs have hit the company’s “communications team, social team, WordPress.com, and its VIP enterprise business.” It’s unclear how many have been laid off.
Automattic’s head of comms, Chenda Ngak, gave this statement to The Verge — “We’re staggering our organizational changes to be more generous with severance and allow more time with each Automattician.” — and said she had nothing else to add.
The cuts follow CEO Matt Mullenweg being briefly placed on leave in September.
Update: Added Automattic statement.
Microsoft’s annual report reveals the company employed around 223,000 people as of June 30th. That’s 5,000 less than the 228,000 people employed in 2025. It’s the first time Microsoft has had a headcount reduction in 10 years, after the gutting of the Nokia phone business in 2015 and 2016. The reduction comes as Microsoft has laid off more than 9,000 employees over the past year.
[Microsoft]
