The Register reports: Over the past two years, the open source curl project has been flooded with bogus bug reports generated by AI models. The deluge prompted project maintainer Daniel Stenberg to publish several blog posts about the issue in an effort to convince bug bounty hunters to show some restraint and not waste contributors' time with invalid issues. Shoddy AI-generated bug reports have been a problem not just for curl, but also for the Python community, Open Collective, and the Mesa Project.

It turns out the problem is people rather than technology. Last month, the curl project received dozens of potential issues from Joshua Rogers, a security researcher based in Poland. Rogers identified assorted bugs and vulnerabilities with the help of various AI scanning tools. And his reports were not only valid but appreciated. Stenberg in a Mastodon post last month remarked, "Actually truly awesome findings." In his mailing list update last week, Stenberg said, "most of them were tiny mistakes and nits in ordinary static code analyzer style, but they were still mistakes that we are better off having addressed. Several of the found issues were quite impressive findings...."

Stenberg told The Register that about 50 bugfixes based on Rogers' reports have been merged. "In my view, this list of issues achieved with the help of AI tooling shows that AI can be used for good," he said in an email. "Powerful tools in the hand of a clever human is certainly a good combination. It always was...!" Rogers wrote up a summary of the AI vulnerability scanning tools he tested. He concluded that these tools — Almanax, Corgea, ZeroPath, Gecko, and Amplify — are capable of finding real vulnerabilities in complex code.
The Register's conclusion? AI tools "when applied with human intelligence by someone with meaningful domain experience, can be quite helpful."

jantangring (Slashdot reader #79,804) has published an article on Stenberg's new position, including recently published comments from Stenberg that "It really looks like these new tools are finding problems that none of the old, established tools detect."

"Nvidia is investing billions in and selling chips to OpenAI, which is also buying chips from and earning stock in AMD," writes SFGate. "AMD sells processors to Oracle, which is building data centers with OpenAI — which also gets data center work from CoreWeave. And that company is partially owned by, yes, Nvidia.

"Taken together, it's a doozy." There are other collaborations and rivalries and many other factors at play, but OpenAI is the many-tentacled octopus in the middle, spinning its achievement of ChatGPT into a blitz of speculative investments. "We are in a phase of the build-out where the entire industry's got to come together and everybody's going to do super well," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the Wall Street Journal on Monday. "You'll see this on chips. You'll see this on data centers. You'll see this lower down the supply chain...."

Some worry that the more closely companies intertwine, the more susceptible they are to creating a bubble, or a market not actually supported by real consumer demand. "You don't have to be a skeptic about AI technology's promise in general to see this announcement as a troubling signal about how self-referential the entire space has become," Bespoke Investment Group wrote in a note to clients, per CNBC. "If NVDA has to provide the capital that becomes its revenues in order to maintain growth, the whole ecosystem may be unsustainable..."

Also, even with Nvidia's investment, AMD's shares and OpenAI's repeated fundraises, the ChatGPT-maker doesn't have the cash to meet all of these vast commitments. And if OpenAI's soaring projections about demand for AI computing don't bear out, there will be a lot of committed money — and a large share of the stock market — that would see its foundations topple.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the news.

California biotech entrepreneur and former magician Serhat Gumrukcu has been found guilty of orchestrating the 2018 murder of his business rival Gregory Davis, who had threatened to expose Gumrukcu's fraudulent dealings. He faces sentencing in November. SFGATE reports: Seven years ago, Turkish national Serhat Gumrukcu, 42, of Los Angeles, was negotiating a multimillion-dollar biotech merger built off his work on a supposed HIV cure. The deal was put in jeopardy by a former business partner named Gregory Davis, 49, who had threatened to bring legal action against Gumrukcu for fraudulent activities relating to a previous failed oil commodities deal, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a news release last week. Gumrukcu, a magician-turned-scientist who admitted to buying his medical degree from a Russian university, lived in a Hollywood mansion and partied with Oscar winners and movie producers, according to VTDigger. He stood to make millions from the merger of his biotech company Enochian BioSciences. [...]

In 2017, upon learning that Davis, a father of six from Danville, Vermont, could potentially spoil his fortune-making deal, Gumrukcu set in motion a hit on the former business partner. The murder-for-hire plot involved four men in total, prosecutors said. Gumrukcu had a close friend from Las Vegas, Berk Eratay, approach a third man, Aron Ethridge to find a hit man to kill Davis. The shooter, 37-year-old Montana man Jerry Banks, arrived at Davis' home on Jan. 6, 2018, in a vehicle fitted with flashing red and blue lights and posed as a deputy U.S. marshal. After abducting Davis, Banks shot him dead in the vehicle and left the body partially buried in a snowbank nearby.

Investigators soon narrowed in on Gumrukcu after discovering emails between him and Davis revealing tensions over the failed oil deal. Gumrukcu was interviewed twice by the FBI and made false statements on both occasions, federal prosecutors said. Further inspection of cellphone data, bank information and messages identified the four men involved in the kidnapping and killing of Davis.

The University of San Francisco issued a campuswide alert after reports of a man using Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses to film students while making "unwanted comments and inappropriate dating questions." Although no violence has been reported, officials said he may be uploading footage to TikTok and Instagram. SFGate reports: University officials said "no threats or acts of violence" have been reported, but they have been unable to identify all students who appear in the videos. They urged any school members affected to alert the app platform and the USF Department of Public Safety. "As a community, we share the responsibility of caring for ourselves, each other, and this place," school officials said in the alert. "By looking out for one another and promptly reporting concerns, we help ensure a safe and supportive environment for all."

The glasses feature a small camera that can be used for recording by pressing a button or using voice controls. Meta advises users to act "responsibly" when using the glasses. "Not everyone loves being photographed. Stop recording if anyone expresses that they would rather opt out, and be particularly mindful of others before going live," the company said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: It had all the makings of a viral X post, and viral it did go, with over 8 million views in under 24 hours. The message was straightforward: "I reverse engineered the San Francisco parking ticket system. I can see every ticket seconds after it's written." Underneath it was a familiar image for any iPhone user -- an Apple map of the city dotted with gray, initialed bubbles, and an explanation: "So I made a website. Find My Friends?" No. "AVOID THE PARKING COPS." The anarchy, however, was short-lived. [...]

Given the potential lost revenue at stake, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency caught on like the rest of the internet, and by Tuesday afternoon, the site had been quickly rendered obsolete. Undeterred, [creator of the site, Riley Walz] restored the site again after 10 p.m., though this, too, didn't last. By his estimation, it was only active for a few more hours. "We made sure that all access to citation data was via authorized routes," said Erica Kato, a spokesperson for SFMTA, in an email to SFGATE. "But when our staff's safety, and personal information of people who have received parking citations, is at risk, we must act on that swiftly."

Yet the saga wasn't over. By Wednesday, the official SFMTA ticket payment site was also down, citing "maintenance." "I'm curious what was going on there," said Walz over the phone. "If it is even because of me." As of Wednesday afternoon, that site is functional and the chaos seems over for now. According to SFMTA, there is no need for a site like Walz's."The official way to access our parking citation data is via our public website on DataSF," Kato said. "Anyone is still able to see [the] type of citation, date of issuance and data that can be mapped and analyzed on DataSF daily."

The Internet Archive has reached a confidential settlement with Universal Music Group and other major labels, "ending a closely watched copyright battle over the nonprofit's effort to digitize and stream historic recordings," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. From the report: The case (PDF), UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive, targeted the Archive's Great 78 Project, an initiative to digitize more than 400,000 fragile shellac records from the early 20th century. The collection includes music by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and has been made available online for free public access. Record labels including Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Capitol Records had sought $621 million in damages, arguing the Archive's streaming of these recordings constituted copyright infringement.

The Internet Archive, based in San Francisco's Richmond District, describes itself as a digital library dedicated to providing "universal access to all knowledge." Its director of library services, Chris Freeland, acknowledged the settlement in a brief statement. "The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter," he wrote.

Many coral reefs "have now turned ghostly white," reports CBS News — and "a major culprit is climate change."

SFGate adds that more than 50% of the world's coral reefs have been lost, mostly over the past 10 years, according to coral reef scientist Rebecca Albright at the California Academy of Sciences. "If changes aren't made soon, 90% to 99% of the coral reefs that are remaining could be deteriorated by 2050, Albright said..."

But CBS News notes that Albright's lab is the first in America to successfully spawn coral to regenerate the reefs: The lab is mastering the art and science of creating baby corals, and the scientists have brought their expertise into the wild. The location: the second-largest reef in the world, known as the Mesoamerican Reef, stretching some 700 miles along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras... Armed with test tubes, the scientists quickly dove into the water and collected the tiny packets of gametes. Back on land, the eggs were fertilized, incubated, and then brought back into the wild. "Then we planted over 3,000 baby corals back to the reef," explained Albright. The baby corals are now two months old. The Roatan staff will dive in a few months to see how many survived.
Scientists are worried because bleaching events "are becoming more common," notes SFGate, "happening more frequently and affecting more parts of the world... The most current event was confirmed on April 15, 2024, and is still ongoing, impacting approximately 84% of the world's coral reefs as of August 31.

"It has been documented in at least 83 countries and territories."

TIOBE attempts to calculate programming language popularity using the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors.

And the eight most popular languages in September's rankings haven't changed since last month:

1. Python
2. C++
3. C
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Visual Basic
8. Go

But by TIOBE's ranking, Perl is still the #10 most-popular programming in September (dropping from #9 in August). "One year ago Perl was at position 27 and now it suddenly pops up at position 10 again," marvels TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. The technical reason why Perl is rated this high is because of its huge number of books on Amazon. It has 4 times more books listed than for instance PHP, or 7 times more books than Rust. The underlying "real" reason for Perl's increase of popularity is unknown to me. The only possibility I can think of is that Perl 5 is now gradually considered to become the real Perl... Perl 6/Raku is at position 129 of the TIOBE index, thus playing no role at all in the programming world. Perl 5 on the other hand is releasing more often recently, thus gaining attention.
An article at the i-Programmer blog thinks Perl's resurgence could be from its text processing capabilities: Even in this era of AI, everything is still governed by text formats; text is still the King. XML, JSON calling APIs, YAML, Markdown, Log files..That means that there's still need to process it, transform it, clean it, extract from it. Perl with its first-class-citizen regular expressions, the wealth of text manipulation libraries up on CPAN and its full Unicode support of all the latest standards, was and is still the best. Simply there's no other that can match Perl's text processing capabilities.
They also cite Perl's backing by the open source community, and its "getting a 'proper' OOP model in the last couple of years... People just don't know what Perl is capable of and instead prefer to be victims of FOMO ephemeral trends, chasing behind the new and shiny."

Perl creator Larry Wall answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2016. So I'd be curious from Slashdot's readers about Perl today. (Share your experiences in the comments if you're still using Perl -- or Raku...)

Perl's drop to #9 means Delphi/Object Pascal rises up one rank, growing from 1.82% in August to 2.26% in September to claim September's #9 spot. "At number 11 and 1.86%, SQL is quite close to entering the top 10 again," notes TechRepublic. (SQL fell to #12 in June, which the site speculated was due to "the increased use of NoSQL databases for AI applications.")

But TechRepublic adds that the #1 most popular programming language (according to TIOBE) is still Python: Perl sits at 2.03% in TIOBE's proprietary ranking system in September, up from 0.64% in January. Last year, Perl held the 27th position... Python's unstoppable rise dipped slightly from 26.14% in August to 25.98% in September. Python is still well ahead of every other language on the index.

The Apache Software Foundation has unveiled a major branding overhaul that retires its three-decade-old feather logo after criticism from Native American activists. In its place is a new oak leaf design to symbolize endurance, resilience, and global reach. Along with the new visual identity, the group will emphasize "The ASF" as its shorthand name while keeping its full legal title intact.

Apache.org explained: "The oak is one of the most enduring trees and is found around the world. It grows slowly but steadily, supporting vast ecosystems and lasting for centuries. In the same way, The ASF has served as a stable, resilient steward of open source for more than 25 years and is looking to the long future ahead. Choosing the oak leaf as our new logo represents the enduring power of our ethos: community over code."

Taylor Otwell, inventor and maintainer of popular PHP framework Laravel, is warning against overly complex code and the risks of bypassing the framework. From a report: Developers are sometimes drawn to building "cathedrals of complexity that aren't so easy to change," he said, speaking in a podcast for maintainable.fm, a series produced by Ruby on Rails consultancy Planet Argon.

Software, he said, should be "simple and disposable and easy to change." Some problems are genuinely complex, but in general, if a developer finds a "clever solution" which goes beyond the standard documented way in a framework such as Laravel or Ruby on Rails, "that would be like a smell."

A code smell -- for the uninitiated in the The Reg readership -- is a term developers use for code that works but may cause problems at a later date. Otwell described himself as a "pretty average programmer" but reckons many others are the same, solving basic problems as quickly and efficiently as they can.

Mark Tyson writes via Tom's Hardware: On this day 34 years ago, an unknown computer science student from Finland announced that a new free operating system project was "starting to get ready." Linus Benedict Torvalds elaborated by explaining that the OS was "just a hobby, [it] won't be big and professional like GNU." Of course, this was the first public outing for the colossal collaborative project that is now known as Linux. Above, you can see Torvalds' first posting regarding Linux to the comp.os.minix newsgroup. The now famously caustic, cantankerous, curmudgeon seemed relatively mild, meek, and malleable in this historic Linux milestone posting.

Torvalds asked the Minix community about their thoughts on a free new OS being prepared for Intel 386 and 486 clones. He explained that he'd been brewing the project since April (a few months prior), and asked for direction. Specifically, he sought input about other Minix users' likes and dislikes of that OS, in order to differentiate Linux. The now renowned developer then provided a rough summary of the development so far. Some features of Linux that Torvalds thought were important, or that he was particularly proud of, were then highlighted in the newsgroup posting. For example, the Linux chief mentioned his OS's multithreaded file system, and its absence of any Minix code. However, he humbly admitted the code as it stood was Intel x86 specific, and thus "is not portable."

Last but not least, Torvalds let it be known that version 0.01 of this free OS would be out in the coming month (September 1991). It was indeed released on September 17, 1991, but someone else decided on the OS name at the last minute. Apparently, Torvalds didn't want to release his new OS under the name of Linux, as it would be too egotistical, too self-aggrandizing. He preferred Freax, a portmanteau word formed from Free-and-X. However, one of Torvald's colleagues, who was the administrator for the project's FTP server, did not think that 'Freax' was an appealing name for the OS. So this co-worker went ahead and uploaded the OS as 'Linux' on that date in September, without asking Torvalds.

"A fierce dust storm hit the Black Rock Desert on the eve of its annual Burning Man festival," reports the San Francisco Chronicle, "causing at least four minor injuries and damaging campsites that had been set up early." [Alternate URL]

"Winds of up to 50 mph stirred up the lake bed's alkaline dust so ferociously that participants in the annual art and culture festival reported not being able to see beyond a foot... " The dust storm arrived Saturday evening after strong thunderstorms in the Sierra Nevada drifted off the mountains and whipped up strong winds in the Nevada desert... At 5:14 p.m. Saturday, the weather service issued a dust storm advisory for Black Rock City and warned of "a wall of blowing dust coming off the Smoke Creek and Black Rock Desert playa areas is tracking northward at around 30 mph." The agency warned of visibility less than 1 mile and wind gusts exceeding 45 mph. A weather station at Black Rock City Airport measured gusts up to 52 mph at 5:50 p.m... ["We saw structures being ripped and torn down by the wind speeds even though we buttoned everything down as best as we could..." one Burner told the Chronicle.] Camp residents posted a slew of videos to social media featuring dust tornadoes, destroyed campsites, and fellow campers struggling to hold onto bucking canvases as the wind threatened to rip them away. "Every popup canopy I've seen has been destroyed," one Burner wrote on Reddit... ["Make sure you carry your particle/dust mask and goggles with you when you venture out on playa!" warns Burning Man's official weather page.]

Even after Saturday's storm, Burners won't be out of the woods from hazardous weather. The weather service warned of possible monsoon thunderstorms and heavy rain Sunday through Wednesday, raising concerns that this year's festival could echo disastrous 2023 conditions, when heavy storms stranded tens of thousands of attendees amid thick mud. "It's becoming increasingly likely that we could see an even greater flash flood threat," the weather service wrote in an online forecast. "If you're on the playa at the Black Rock Desert, you may very well be in for a muddy mess Monday through Wednesday." Slow-moving storms could drop an inch of rain or more in a short period.
"Still, gates to the festival had opened by Sunday morning," the article adds, "with organizers cautioning new arrivals to 'drive safely!'"

Burning Man's official weather page currently links to a National Weather Service page with a "Flood Watch" warning through 9 p.m. Sunday, and also predicting a chance of thunderstorms on Sunday and Monday.

"Solar and wind accounted for almost 91% of new U.S. electrical generating capacity added in the first five months of 2025..." reports Electrek, citing new data from America's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

"Solar has now been the largest source of new generating capacity added each month for 21 consecutive months, starting September 2023." The 11,518 MW of solar added during the first five months of 2025 was 75.3% of the total new capacity placed into service... Between January and May, new wind provided 2,379 MW of capacity additions, accounting for 15.6% of all new capacity added during the first five months of 2025. For the first five months of 2025, solar and wind comprised 90.9% of new capacity while natural gas (1,381 MW) provided just 9.0%; the remaining 0.1% came from oil (14 MW). Solar + wind are 22.9% of U.S. utility-scale generating capacity.

The installed capacities of solar (11.1%) and wind (11.8%) are now each more than a tenth of the U.S. total. Taken together, they constitute 22.9% of the U.S.'s total available installed utility-scale generating capacity. At least 25-30% of U.S. solar capacity is in the form of small-scale (e.g., rooftop) systems that are not reflected in FERC's data. Including that additional solar capacity would bring the share provided by solar + wind to more than a quarter of the U.S. total. With the inclusion of hydropower (7.7%), biomass (1.1%), and geothermal (0.3%), renewables currently claim a 32.0% share of total US utility-scale generating capacity. If small-scale solar capacity is included, renewables are now about one-third of total US generating capacity....

Taken together, the net new "high probability" capacity additions by all renewable energy sources over the next three years — the bulk of the Trump Administration's remaining time in office — would total 113,097 MW. There is no new nuclear capacity in FERC's three-year forecast, while coal and oil are projected to contract by 24,913 MW and 1,907 MW, respectively... If FERC's current "high probability" additions materialize by May 1, 2028, solar will account for 16.7% of US installed utility-scale generating capacity. Wind would provide an additional 12.7% of the total. Thus, each would be greater than coal (12.2%) and substantially more than nuclear power or hydropower (each 7.2%). In fact, assuming current growth rates continue, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar is likely to surpass that of either coal or wind within two years...

At the end of 2024, the mix of all renewables accounted for 30.96% of total generating capacity. Solar alone was 10.19% while wind was 11.68%. By the end of May, renewables' share had risen to 31.98% with solar at 11.13% and wind at 11.80%.
FERC also says that 43 "units" of solar totaling 1,515 megawatts (MW) were placed into service in May, according to the article, "accounting for 58.7% of all new generating capacity added during the month."

Cisco, the San Jose-based technology giant, has announced another round of layoffs affecting Bay Area workers, marking a familiar pattern of reporting skyrocketing revenue followed by drastic job cuts. From a report: According to Aug. 13 WARN filings with California's Employment Development Department, the company will eliminate 221 positions across its Milpitas and San Francisco offices.

WARN documents are generally required by the state in the event of mass layoffs. Employees were notified of the layoffs on Aug. 14 and their terminations will be effective Oct. 13. The most cuts, affecting 157 jobs, largely in software engineering roles, were at Cisco's Milpitas office at 560 McCarthy Blvd.

Cisco's San Francisco office at 500 Terry A. Francois Blvd. will cut 64 positions, according to the filing. The filings came the same day Cisco released its fourth-quarter earnings, which reported $14.7 billion in revenue, an 8% increase from the same quarter last year. Revenue for the 2025 fiscal year was $56.7 billion, up 5% from the previous year.

Kyte, a rental car startup once touted as a modern alternative to Hertz, has shut down after years of rapid growth followed by mounting financial troubles. From a report: Founded in 2017, the San Francisco company built its brand by delivering rental cars directly to customers' doors, eliminating the paperwork and long waits of traditional counters. At its peak, Kyte operated in 14 U.S. cities, managed a fleet of more than 2,000 vehicles and raised nearly $300 million from backers including Goldman Sachs and Ares Management.

Despite dwindling global market share, retreat from key regions like Europe, and halting in-house production, Sony insists its Xperia smartphone line remains "very important" to its business. 9to5Google reports: During Sony's latest financial results presentation this week, Sony CFO Lin Tao addressed the state of its Xperia smartphone brand, saying that Xperia is part of "a very important business for us" as reported by CNET Japan (translated). Tao said that "communication technology is a very important technology that Sony has cultivated for a long time. We also want to continue to value our smartphone business." Though adding that "communication technology is used in areas other than smartphones."

A San Francisco jury ruled that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act by collecting sensitive data from users of the Flo period-tracking app without consent. "The plaintiff's lawyers who sued Meta are calling this a 'landmark' victory -- the tech company contends that the jury got it all wrong," reports SFGATE. From the report: The case goes back to 2021, when eight women sued Flo and a group of other tech companies, including Google and Facebook, now known as Meta. The stakes were extremely personal. Flo asked users about their sex lives, mental health and diets, and guided them through menstruation and pregnancy. Then, the women alleged, Flo shared pieces of that data with other companies. The claims were largely based on a 2019 Wall Street Journal story and a 2021 Federal Trade Commission investigation. Google, Flo and the analytics company Flurry, which was also part of the lawsuit, reached settlements with the plaintiffs, as is common in class action lawsuits about tech privacy. But Meta stuck it out through the entire trial and lost.

The case against Meta focused on its Facebook software development kit, which Flo added to its app and which is generally used for analytics and advertising services. The women alleged that between June 2016 and February 2019, Flo sent Facebook, through that kit, various records of "Custom App Events" -- such as a user clicking a particular button in the "wanting to get pregnant" section of the app. Their complaint also pointed to Facebook's terms for its business tools, which said the company used so-called "event data" to personalize ads and content.

In a 2022 filing (PDF), the tech giant admitted that Flo used Facebook's kit during this period and that the app sent data connected to "App Events." But Meta denied receiving intimate information about users' health. Nonetheless, the jury ruled (PDF) against Meta. Along with the eavesdropping decision, the group determined that Flo's users had a reasonable expectation they weren't being overheard or recorded, as well as ruling that Meta didn't have consent to eavesdrop or record. The unanimous verdict was that the massive company violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The jury's ruling could impact over 3.7 million U.S. users who registered between November 2016 and February 2019, with updates to be shared via email and a case website. The exact compensation from the trial or potential settlements remains uncertain.

After an 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Russia, "weather authorities leapt into action," reports SFGate, by modeling the threat of a tsunami "and releasing warnings and advisories to prepare their communities..."

But some residents of Hawaii, Japan and North America's West Coast turned to AI tools for updates that "appear to have badly bungled the critical task at hand." Google's "AI Overview," for example, reportedly gave "inaccurate information about authorities' safety warnings in Hawaii and elsewhere," according to reports on social media. Thankfully, the tsunami danger quickly subsided on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning without major damage. Still, the issues speak to the growing role of AI tools in people's information diets... and to the tools' potentially dangerous fallibility... A critic of Google — who prompted the search tool to show an AI overview by adding "+ai" to their search — called the text that showed up "dangerously wrong."
Responding to similar complaints, Grok told one user on X.com "We'll improve accuracy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: During the 2010s' boom in on-demand services such as Uber and DoorDash, Wag staked a claim to the market for dog walking. It became a buzzy, high-flying company, at one point gaining a valuation of around $650 million, and grew to offer a whole range of tech products for pet care. But as the years passed, struggles mounted and profits remained elusive. On July 21, Wag filed (PDF) for bankruptcy. To stay alive, the San Francisco-headquartered company is now using bankruptcy court to restructure in what's known as a Chapter 11 process. Its lines of business -- including gig-work dog walking and sitting, pet insurance, and the veterinary tool "Furscription" -- will remain open, according to a news release. If a judge approves Wag's restructuring plan, it will take the company off the public markets and into the private hands of a company called Retriever.

On the same day of the bankruptcy filing, Wag's chief financial officer, Alec Davidian, submitted a document (PDF) supporting and explaining the move. He wrote that Wag's "monthly revenues declined rapidly after March 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic" and pointed to $69.5 million in losses from 2022 through 2024. The losses weren't Wag's only problem. The company had taken out debt in 2022 when it went public, and in that loan agreement, it had set a minimum level of cash Wag would need to have on hand at all times. This year, Wag dropped below that amount, Davidian wrote. Wag also failed to find a third-party deal to get more money, the CFO noted, and its debt obligations are set to mature in August, meaning the company was "facing a dire liquidity crisis." So, Wag opted for the bankruptcy proceeding, in which it plans to eliminate the 2022 debt, which is currently held by Retriever. "Through the Restructuring," Davidian wrote, "[Wag] will emerge from these Chapter 11 Cases a stronger company, with a more sustainable capital structure that is better aligned with [Wag's] present and future operating prospects."

"A Chinese mega-constellation of communications satellites is facing serious delays," reports the South China Morning Post, "that could jeopardise its ambitions to compete with SpaceX's Starlink for valuable orbital resources." Only 90 satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit for the Qianfan broadband network — also known as the Thousand Sails Constellation or G60 Starlink — well short of the project's goal of 648 by the end of this year... Shanghai Yuanxin Satellite Technology, the company leading the project, plans to deploy more than 15,000 satellites by 2030 to deliver direct-to-phone internet services worldwide. To stay on track, Yuanxin — which is backed by the Shanghai municipal government — would have to launch more than 30 satellites a month to achieve its milestones of 648 by the end of 2025 for regional coverage and 1,296 two years later for global connectivity.
The New York Times reports that "the other megaconstellation, Guowang, is even farther behind. Despite plans to launch about 13,000 satellites within the next decade, it has 34 in orbit." A constellation has to launch half of its satellites within five years of successfully applying for its frequencies, and complete the full deployment within seven years, according to rules set by the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency that allocates frequencies. The Chinese megaconstellations are behind on these goals. Companies that fail to hit their targets could be required to reduce the size of their megaconstellations.
Meanwhile SpaceX "has about 8,000 Starlink satellites in orbit and is expanding its lead every month," the Times writes, citing data from the U.S. Space Force and the nonprofit space-data group CelesTrak. (The Times has even created an animation showing Starlink's 8,000 satellites in orbit.) Researchers for the People's Liberation Army predict that the network will become "deeply embedded in the U.S. military combat system." They envision a time when Starlink satellites connect U.S. military bases and serve as an early missile-warning and interception network....

One of the major reasons for China's delay is the lack of a reliable, reusable launcher. Chinese companies still launch satellites using single-use rockets. After the satellites are deployed, rocket parts tumble back to Earth or become space debris... Six years after [SpaceX's] Falcon 9 began launching Starlink satellites, Chinese firms still have no answer to it... The government has tested nearly 20 rocket launchers in the "Long March" series.