Month: July 2024

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Continuing to evolve the fact-checking service that launched as Twitter's Birdwatch, X has announced that Community Notes can now be requested to clarify problematic posts spreading on Elon Musk's platform.

X's Community Notes account confirmed late Thursday that, due to "popular demand," X had launched a pilot test on the web-based version of the platform. The test is active now and the same functionality will be "coming soon" to Android and iOS, the Community Notes account said.

Through the current web-based pilot, if you're an eligible user, you can click on the "•••" menu on any X post on the web and request fact-checking from one of Community Notes' top contributors, X explained. If X receives five or more requests within 24 hours of the post going live, a Community Note will be added.

Enlarge (credit: hdaniel)

Airlines, payment processors, 911 call centers, TV networks, and other businesses have been scrambling this morning after a buggy update to CrowdStrike's Falcon security software caused Windows-based systems to crash with a dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD) error message.

We're updating our story about the outage with new details as we have them. Microsoft and CrowdStrike both say that "the affected update has been pulled," so what's most important for IT admins in the short term is getting their systems back up and running again. According to guidance from Microsoft, fixes range from annoying but easy to incredibly time-consuming and complex, depending on the number of systems you have to fix and the way your systems are configured.

Microsoft's Azure status page outlines several fixes. The first and easiest is simply to try to reboot affected machines over and over, which gives affected machines multiple chances to try to grab CrowdStrike's non-broken update before the bad driver can cause the BSOD. Microsoft says that some of its customers have had to reboot their systems as many as 15 times to pull down the update.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg Creative Photos)

Although US coal consumption has fallen dramatically since 2005, the country still consumes millions of tons a year, and exports tons more—much of it transported by train. Now, new research shows that these trains can affect the health of people living near where they pass.

The study found that residents living near railroad tracks likely have higher premature mortality rates due to air pollutants released during the passage of uncovered coal trains. The analysis of the San Francisco Bay Area cities of Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley shows that increases in air pollutants such as small particulate matter (PM 2.5) are also associated with increases in asthma-related episodes and hospital admissions.

"This has never been studied in the world. There's been a couple studies trying to measure just the air pollution, usually in rural areas, but this was the first to both measure air pollution and trains in an urban setting," said Bart Ostro, author of the study and an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis.

Enlarge / Access to first-party games on launch day remains a major selling point for the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier. (credit: Microsoft)

The FTC says the across-the-board price increases that Microsoft recently announced for its Xbox Game Pass subscription service tiers represent "exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged" when it sought to block Microsoft's merger with Activision. In a letter to the court posted as part of an ongoing appeal by the FTC in the case, the federal regulator alleges Microsoft's moves are a clear example of "product degradation" brought about by "a firm exercising market power post-merger."

The letter's primary focus is on the soon-to-be-discontinued $10.99/month Console Game Pass tier. That's being replaced with a $14.99/month Game Pass Standard tier (a 36 percent price increase) that no longer includes "day one" access to all of Microsoft's first-party titles. To maintain that key benefit, "Console" subscribers will have to spend 81 percent more for the $19.99 Game Pass Ultimate tier, which also includes a number of additional benefits over the current $10.99/month option.

Is this “based on the acquisition”?

The FTC notes that these changes "coincide with adding Call of Duty to Game Pass’s most expensive tier." Previously, Microsoft publicly promised that this Game Pass access to Activision's ultra-popular shooter would come "with no price increase for the service based on the acquisition."

Enlarge / A passenger sits on the floor as long queues form at the check-in counters at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, on July 19, 2024 in Manila, Philippines. (credit: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

Millions of people outside the IT industry are learning what CrowdStrike is today, and that's a real bad thing. Meanwhile, Microsoft is also catching blame for global network outages, and between the two, it's unclear as of Friday morning just who caused what.

After cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike shipped an update to its Falcon Sensor software that protects mission critical systems, Blue Screens of Death started taking down Windows-based systems. The problems started in Australia and followed the dateline from there. TV networks, 911 call centers, and even the Paris Olympics were affected. Banks and financial systems in India, South Africa, Thailand, and other countries fell as computers suddenly crashed. Some individual workers discovered that their work-issued laptops were booting to blue screens on Friday morning.

Airlines, never the most agile of networks, were particularly hard-hit, with American Airlines, United, Delta, and Frontier among the US airlines overwhelmed Friday morning.