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The data center boom is running into a backlash, and according to Axios, China may be adding fuel to the fire. Automated bots linked to Chinese infrastructure are reportedly driving artificial traffic that strains American data center capacity, giving already frustrated local communities one more reason to push back against new construction.
That frustration has a human face too. The Wall Street Journal reports that blue-collar workers have become the new flashpoint in the data center fight. Construction unions and local labor groups are increasingly at odds with tech developers over wages, hiring practices, and who actually benefits when a billion-dollar facility lands in a small town. The promise of jobs, it turns out, is more complicated than the press releases suggest.
On a quieter note, a community fork of TrueNAS Core has quietly launched under the name FreeCORE, aiming to keep the open-source network-attached storage platform alive after iXsystems shifted its focus toward the commercial TrueNAS Scale product. It is early days, but for home lab enthusiasts and small operators, the project represents a familiar story of a community refusing to let a beloved tool quietly disappear.
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