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In rural Texas, Hill County has passed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction, as local officials take stock of what these facilities actually mean for their communities. The move follows a broader pattern of AI-driven data centers migrating to remote areas to avoid scrutiny — but the county's own attorney has warned the ban could invite lawsuits, and a state senator has asked the Attorney General to investigate counties pursuing similar measures. It is a collision between local anxiety and state authority, and it is far from settled.
Shifting to supply chain security, the node-IPC package in the NPM ecosystem has been compromised to steal user credentials. Node-IPC is widely used in JavaScript development environments, making this the kind of quiet, high-reach attack that security researchers find most alarming. If you or your team depend on it, auditing your dependencies right now is not optional.
And in a story that raises a genuine question about where convenience ends and absurdity begins, Dell's cloud-managed earbuds have received their first real-world review from The Register. Priced above Apple's latest AirPods, they require cloud infrastructure simply to manage audio settings — a trade-off that, on a plane with no connectivity, becomes rather self-defeating.
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