Weeknotes 2026.37

This week I had to deal with a sudden performance decrease on one of our Postgres servers. Not a general decrease. Just on some queries.

It is always challenging to figure out what is going on. But at least to some extent, we were able to identify the problem and fix it.

Besides this, I managed to enjoy some of the last hot days of summer. And was happy about the rainy last couple of days.

European space industry

It was a successful week for Isar Aerospace. For the first time in history a rocket has reached the orbit from Western European soil.

The Exploration Company announced this week the largest-ever Series C funding round by a Europe-based space company. CEO Hèlene Huby said that the company wants to build a massive reusable rocket that should have a greater maximum lift capacity than Ariane 6.

• Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
• Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment

Fairphone

Ryan Whitwam wrote about the new Fairphone 6+. It is a nice peace about a repairable smartphone.

Nearly impossible? How Fairphone built the ethical, repairable Fairphone Gen 6+

Switzerland

Switzerland is trying to replace M365 and wants to test openDesk on 3.000 workstations. This pilot is based on the proof of concept with 172 employees. The only troubles in the first phase have been large-scale video conferencing.

• Switzerland tests a FOSS escape route from Microsoft 365
• Switzerland's Federal Government is Replacing Microsoft on 3,000 Computers

Mistral and open-weight models

Mistral announced a Series D funding round of €3 billion. The money will be used for the development of frontier open-weight models and building the computing power.

• Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier
• Mistral wants open-weight AI to compete at the frontier. It just raised $3.5 billion to do it.

Open-weight models are quite controversial. At least from the perspective of the United States. They claim that Chinese AI companies are heavily distilling American models.

US claims Chinese AI companies’ core AI strategy is distilling American models

Data breach ticker

• IDScan confirms breach after hackers offer 153 million driver’s license scans for sale
• Florida says motor vehicle data breach tied to credentials stolen from officer’s personal device
• French hospital fined €500,000 after breach exposes data of 727,000
• US and Canadian court data exposed in Thomson Reuters breach
• Health data of more than 9.5 million people leaked from Aesto record system
• Mathspace discloses data breach affecting over 1 million people
• Trezor data breach impact now reaches 81,000 customers
• 220 million traveler records exposed in Vietnam-linked APIS leak
• Electronic health record company says customer data stolen in breach