Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily read on the technology stories that matter.
Google has officially launched its first datacenter satellite into orbit under a project it calls Suncatcher. The mission is testing whether the company's tensor processing units can survive the rigors of space and tap into the effectively unlimited solar energy available above Earth's atmosphere. Whether it can scale remains an open question, but the experiment itself marks a genuine shift in how we think about where computing lives.
Closer to home, federal data security is back under the microscope after two separate breaches of government agencies exposed a staggering volume of sensitive records. The Pentagon is now notifying more than two million current and former military members that personnel files, including Social Security numbers, were stolen during a months-long compromise of one of its networks. Two breaches in a single month is a pattern that demands a serious policy response, not just notifications.
On the developer side, Python three point fifteen is set to ship Tachyon, a sampling profiler built directly into the standard library. For years, profiling a live Python application meant either slowing your code by two to three times or relying on third-party tools that broke with every new release. Having a near-zero overhead profiler baked in is the kind of quiet, unglamorous improvement that actually changes how engineers work day to day.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
