石田英司「データセンターの駅周辺建設計画に住民が反発」「仏スーパーでサイバー攻撃」「阪急電鉄が全車両の中吊り広告掲出終了へ」10月16日

"Data Center Ginza" in Inzai — When the Suburbs Fill Up, Stations Are Next

Inzai City in Chiba Prefecture is a bedroom community of roughly 110,000 people located about 15 kilometers from Narita Airport. Its hard Kanto Loam subsoil makes it exceptionally resistant to earthquakes and tsunamis, and the area already has robust high-capacity power infrastructure and fiber networks in place. Those advantages drew major corporations to cluster their data centers there over the years, earning the city the nickname "Data Center Ginza."

A data center is a facility where tens of thousands of servers run around the clock, 365 days a year. They consume enormous amounts of electricity and must be cooled continuously. Water-cooled systems are common; once the water has circulated through the equipment it evaporates from the top of the building, so large volumes are lost on an ongoing basis. The buildings have almost no windows, cooling and exhaust equipment produces a persistent low-frequency hum, and roughly 50-meter-tall concrete blocks line the surrounding streets.

For years these facilities were tucked away in suburban industrial zones and warehouse districts, where they attracted little complaint. But suburban land in Inzai has now reached saturation point, and the only remaining vacant plots are near train stations — many of them sites of shopping malls that closed as the local population aged. Plans for an additional facility have surfaced at the neighboring station as well, and resident opposition movements are spreading. The same conflict is playing out in Hino, Akishima, and Kodaira in Tokyo, and in built-up areas of Saitama Prefecture.

The objections go well beyond aesthetics. Data centers generate almost no local employment once they are up and running, and servers do not patronize nearby restaurants, so the economic ripple effect is essentially zero. Local governments welcome the property-tax revenue, but the gap between official enthusiasm and resident sentiment is wide. It is a textbook NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) situation: people accept that these facilities are necessary, just not in their own neighborhood.

Regulatory gaps make the problem harder to resolve. Under building-permit law, data centers are classified as "offices or warehouses," and there is no national legislation that uniformly governs them. One thread common to opposition movements across the country is that surrounding residents were not adequately consulted before plans were announced.

400 French Stores, Refrigerators Pushed to 80°C — A Cyberattack Targeting IoT

Between the night of October 11 and the early hours of October 12, a cyberattack struck approximately 400 stores belonging to a French retailer. The attackers penetrated the control systems of refrigeration and freezer units and raised temperatures to 50°C, in some cases as high as 80°C. Fires broke out in several stores, and all refrigerated food that could have spoiled had to be discarded, causing severe financial damage. The incident is regarded as effectively the first cyberattack of its kind in the European retail industry, and emergency safety inspections were carried out across the sector.

Investigators identified outdated refrigeration firmware as a key vulnerability. These systems normally receive automatic updates over the internet, but the older models involved in the attack were unable to support such updates, leaving known security gaps unpatched. No ransom was demanded and no political statement was issued, leading investigators to suspect the motive was simply malicious amusement.

The program also recalled a 2021 incident at a water treatment plant in the United States, where attackers attempted to inject a large dose of sodium hydroxide into the water supply. A staff member noticed the anomaly and stopped it in time. The lesson: keeping humans in the loop to visually monitor readings remains a vital last line of defense against digital threats. The practical baseline for any organization is to keep routers and all device firmware up to date at all times and to change the default password on every connected device.

Hankyu Railways Ends Hanging Advertisements in April 2027

Hankyu Railways has announced that it will end the display of hanging advertisements (chūzuri) across all lines and rolling stock on April 4, 2027. The official reason given is "changes in how people access information due to the spread of smartphones and other devices." The move is expected to eliminate roughly 830,000 sheets of paper per year. Advertisements on door panels and above windows will continue.

Commentator Ishida Eiji sees labor shortages as an equally significant underlying factor. Hanging 830,000 individual cards per year — each one straight and evenly spaced — is skilled, repetitive manual work performed 830,000 times annually. The convergence of shifting information habits and a shrinking pool of workers able to carry out that analog task appears to have driven the decision to end the format entirely.