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In storage news, Longsys is pushing the boundaries of what a solid-state drive can do. Their new WM8500 chip compresses data on the fly at a ratio of two to one, meaning a one hundred twenty eight terabyte drive effectively behaves like two hundred fifty six terabytes. The pitch is simple — more capacity without the price tag to match.
Shifting to orbit, Amazon's Kuiper satellite internet ambitions are running into a serious bottleneck. The company has hundreds of satellites built and waiting, but the large rockets it was counting on simply haven't materialized on schedule. Of the major launch partners, only Europe's Ariane program has meaningfully delivered, leaving Amazon in a holding pattern with a lot of hardware and not enough rides.
And from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a quiet but significant farewell. The EFF published a piece titled Onward, Friends — what appears to be a goodbye from a long-standing staff member. At a moment when digital rights advocacy faces mounting pressure from multiple directions, departures like this tend to signal something worth watching about the health of the institutions fighting those battles.
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