Good morning. It’s Thursday, January 15. Today we are covering:
Verizon says its service is back after a 10-hour outage
Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public
OpenAI partners with Cerebras
Hundreds of Millions of Audio Devices Need a Patch to Prevent Wireless Hacking and Tracking
Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are paying up for ‘enterprise’ access to Wikipedia
Let’s dive in
Verizon says its service is back after a 10-hour outage
By Ian Carlos Campbell via Engadget
Verizon said a major outage affecting wireless voice and mobile data was resolved after roughly 10 hours, telling customers still offline to restart their devices to reconnect.
The disruption began around 12PM ET and peaked at 181,769 reports on DownDetector, with many users seeing “SOS” instead of signal bars and Verizon’s own network status page struggling to load.
Verizon offered account credits to impacted subscribers, while T-Mobile and AT&T said their networks were not affected, even as outage reports clustered in big cities including Boston, New York, and Washington, DC.
𝕏: After 8 hours and 30 minutes, Verizon services are beginning to come back online following a major nationwide outage that disrupted service across much of the United States. - American Citizen 🇺🇸 (@realtalkstruth)
Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public
By Sarah Perez via TechCrunch
Digg has opened its rebooted Reddit-style platform to the public in an open beta, led by founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, with a web experience and mobile app built around communities where users can post, comment, and upvote (“digg”).
The team says the resurgence of AI is the catalyst for rebuilding Digg, aiming to curb toxicity and bot-driven manipulation by combining “signals of trust” over time, including experimentation with zero-knowledge proofs and optional product ownership verification for certain communities.
After a private beta capped at about 67,000 invite-only users and a starter set of roughly 21 broad communities, Digg now lets anyone join and create niche communities, with moderators setting rules and publishing public moderation logs, alongside a redesigned interface optimized for more visual feeds.
𝕏: So it begins... open communities, transparent moderation actions, and a public algorithm. - Kevin Rose (@kevinrose)
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OpenAI
OpenAI is partnering with Cerebras to add 750MW of ultra low-latency AI compute, aiming to make model responses significantly faster across tasks like tough queries, code generation, image creation, and AI agents.
Cerebras says its speed comes from combining compute, memory, and bandwidth on a single giant chip to reduce inference bottlenecks, and OpenAI plans to integrate this capacity into its inference stack in phases across workloads.
The new capacity will roll out in multiple tranches through 2028, as part of OpenAI’s broader strategy to maintain a “resilient portfolio” of compute options tailored to different workloads.
𝕏: Many years ago, OpenAI considered buying Cerebras. Elon was trying to push them to do it through Tesla. - Theo - t3 gg (@theo)
Hundreds of Millions of Audio Devices Need a Patch to Prevent Wireless Hacking and Tracking
By Andy Greenberg via WIRED
Security researchers at KU Leuven disclosed “WhisperPair” flaws in Google Fast Pair that let nearby attackers silently pair with and hijack Fast Pair–compatible earbuds, headphones, and speakers, enabling audio disruption, microphone eavesdropping, or injected audio in as little as 10–15 seconds from roughly 50 feet away.
The team found vulnerabilities across 17 devices from 10 brands including Sony, Jabra, JBL, Marshall, Xiaomi, Nothing, OnePlus, Soundcore, Logitech, and Google, and warned some Google and Sony models could also be abused for stealth Find Hub location tracking, even against users who only use an iPhone.
Google and several manufacturers have issued patches, but updates often require installing vendor apps and may go unapplied for months; researchers argue the deeper fix is for Fast Pair to cryptographically enforce owner-approved pairing and prevent rogue “owners” from attaching without authentication.
𝕏: Hundreds of millions of earbuds, headphones and speakers need a security update (yes, patch your earbuds) to prevent a wireless hacking technique that can hijack audio, eavesdrop via mics, and in some cases remotely track the accessory’s location. - Andy Greenberg (@agreenberg at the other places) (@a_greenberg)
Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are paying up for ‘enterprise’ access to Wikipedia
By Emma Roth via The Verge
Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI have joined Google in paying the Wikimedia Foundation for commercial access to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, announced alongside Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary.
The deals run through Wikimedia Enterprise, a paid program launched in 2021 that provides a “tuned” premium Wikipedia API for large and AI-focused customers, including feature requests and data structuring tailored to commercial needs.
Wikimedia says Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral joined over the past year, while Meta and Amazon were already partners but are being publicly named for the first time, with revenue used to support Wikimedia’s nonprofit operations and long-term sustainability.
𝕏: “Tuned” API Access -> The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral joined Wikimedia Enterprise to get “tuned” API access; Google is already a member “Wikipedia content is crucial to training AI models — its 65 million articles across over 300 languages are a key part of training data for generative AI chatbots and assistants developed by tech majors… - Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe)
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