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Cloudflare has acquired VoidZero, the company behind the popular Vite build tool, and the deal is raising interesting questions about the future of open source sustainability. Evan You and Cloudflare's Dane Knecht are framing this as a partnership model — one where distributed infrastructure and commercial backing can keep widely-used developer tools maintained without burning out the people who built them.
Shifting to cybersecurity, new research from Proofpoint is adding hard data to what security experts have warned for years — paying ransomware attackers is not a solution. Their two thousand twenty six AI-Era Ransomware Report found that thirty-seven percent of victims who paid faced repeat extortion, and two percent paid but never got their files back at all. The message from researchers remains consistent: invest in prevention, not negotiation.
And in surveillance tech, Flock Safety's CEO is walking back his own company's announcements. After losing its Los Angeles Police Department contract, he told local news that its license plate readers only capture a static image. The problem is Flock itself has repeatedly announced video capabilities. It's a credibility gap that lands at a sensitive moment for a company whose technology is embedded in cities across the country.
That's your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
