The 10 biggest things in tech, Mon, Aug 24
The ten biggest stories in tech today, scored 1–10 and ranked from 150+ engineering sources. Free, updated every morning.
Microsoft nonprofit data loss fallout
Over 170,000 nonprofits lost data permanently after Microsoft abruptly terminated free Office 365 licenses in June 2025 with minimal notice, despite renewal confirmations through 2026, prompting litigation planning and regulatory scrutiny.
#1 · platform · scored 8/10
Uber GDPR automated-suspension fine
Dutch regulators issued an €825 million GDPR fine — the second-largest ever — against Uber for automating driver account deactivations without sufficient human oversight, with related class-action litigation expected to follow.
#2 · security · scored 8/10
IPFS core funding collapse
Protocol Labs is ending Shipyard's IPFS funding on September 30, 2026, halting maintenance of Kubo, Helia, Boxo, and other core implementations and leaving the ecosystem without dedicated maintainers.
#3 · industry · scored 8/10
AI startup M&A wave accelerates
Hugging Face is in acquisition talks at a $13B+ valuation — triple its 2023 post-money — while General Intuition raised at a $6B pre-money valuation weeks after a $2.3B Series B, reflecting sector-wide consolidation alongside Stripe's $7B OpenRouter deal.
#4 · industry · scored 8/10
Critical Keycloak account-takeover CVE
Red Hat and Keycloak patched CVE-2026-18963 (CVSS 9.1), a critical unauthenticated account-takeover flaw in password-reset flows, with fixes available in Keycloak 26.7.2 and RHBK 26.4.15/26.6.6.
#5 · security · scored 8/10
AI-powered attacks on critical infrastructure
US government agencies warned of active AI-generated exploit attacks on Siemens S7 PLCs in water, energy, and manufacturing sectors, while Cisco Talos disclosed UAT-10147, a Chinese group using PentestGPT and DeepAudit to automate attacks on 170,000+ web servers globally.
#6 · security · scored 8/10
AI chip smuggling export-control crackdown
Taiwan indicted nine people — including an Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees — for forging documents to smuggle high-end AI servers to China, following Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw's arrest for funneling $2.5B in restricted AI servers.
#7 · security · scored 8/10
JDK 27 and C# 15 major language releases
JDK 27 reached its first release candidate with nine JEPs including post-quantum hybrid TLS 1.3, G1 as default GC, and structured concurrency; C# 15 (shipping with .NET 11 in November) adds union types, closed hierarchies, and extension indexers.
#8 · backend · scored 7/10
JPEG XL cross-browser adoption
Mozilla announced Firefox will ship JPEG XL after building a safe Rust decoder (jxl-rs), joining Chrome and Safari in full cross-browser support for the format's lossless and progressive-rendering strengths.
#9 · frontend · scored 7/10
Google homomorphic encryption toolchain
Google open-sourced HEIR, a compiler toolchain that lets developers run pre-trained AI models on encrypted data without decryption by annotating Python code and compiling for homomorphic inference.
#10 · ai · scored 7/10