Chinese Official’s Use of ChatGPT Revealed a Global Intimidation Opperation
New submitter sabbede shares a report from CNN Politics: A sprawling Chinese influence operation – accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT – focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-make … ⌘ Read more

iPhone and iPad Are First Consumer Devices Cleared for NATO Classified Data
Apple’s iPhone and iPad running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer mobile devices cleared for NATO-restricted classified data. No special software or settings are required. MacRumors reports: Apple’s devices are the first and only consumer mobile products that have reached this government certification lev … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 148 Lets You Kill All AI Features in One Click
Mozilla has released Firefox 148 for Windows, macOS and Linux, bringing a new AI Settings section that lets users disable all of the browser’s AI-powered features in one click and then selectively re-enable the ones they actually want, such as the local translation tool that works locally rather than in the cloud.

The update also patches more than 50 security vulner … ⌘ Read more

Which Piece of Speculative Fiction Had the Greatest Single-Day Stock Market Impact?
Speaking of the Citrini’s blog post, which imagines a near-future AI-driven economic collapse, and which ended up help triggering the S&P 500’s worst single-day drop in nearly two weeks on Monday, FT Alphaville decided to track how US stock markets have moved on the release days of notable dystopian speculative fic … ⌘ Read more

The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys
An anonymous reader shares a report: It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from pho … ⌘ Read more

The AI Case Against Indian IT Ignores What Indian IT Actually Does
A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% – its worst single-day fall since August 2023 – on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian … ⌘ Read more

New York Sues Valve For Enabling ‘Illegal Gambling’ With Loot Boxes
New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users “pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value.” From a report: While many randomized video game loot boxes have dr … ⌘ Read more

Burger King Will Use AI To Check If Employees Say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’
An anonymous reader shares a report: Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called “Patty,” is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for “friend … ⌘ Read more

HBO Max’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Will Expand Globally in 2026
HBO Max will be cracking down on password sharing around the world. From a report: The streamer first started cracking down on password sharing in the United States late last August. Subscribers are now able to add an additional out-of-household account for $7.99 a month. Before that August change, Warner Bros. Discovery had been testin … ⌘ Read more

EBay Is Laying Off About 800 Workers, 6% of Global Workforce
EBay is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its full-time employees, saying the layoffs are needed to align its workforce with strategic priorities. From a report: “We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce,” the San Jose, California-based company … ⌘ Read more

Americans Are Leaving the US in Record Numbers
An anonymous reader shares a report: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus – negative net migration – as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up d … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Experiment Ports Most of Next.js API in ‘One Week’ With AI
An anonymous reader shares a report: A Cloudflare engineer says he has implemented 94% of the Next.js API by directing Anthropic’s Claude, spending about $1,100 on tokens. The purpose of the experimental project was not to show off AI coding, but to address an issue with Next.js, the popular React-based framework sponsored by Vercel.

Acco … ⌘ Read more

Uber Employees Have Built an AI Clone of Their CEO To Practice Presentations Before the Real Thing
An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Uber employees have built an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi – internally dubbed “Dara AI” – and have been using it to rehearse and fine-tune presentations before delivering them to the actual Khosrowshahi, he revealed on a recent podcast. … ⌘ Read more

AI Can Find Hundreds of Software Bugs – Fixing Them Is Another Story
Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security, a research preview capability that uses its Claude Opus 4.6 model to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases – but security researchers say the real bottleneck was never discovery.

Guy Azari, a former securi … ⌘ Read more

Prediction Market Platform Kalshi Discloses First Insider Trading Enforcement Action
Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube’s biggest creator as the offender.

The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who … ⌘ Read more

Tech Firms Aren’t Just Encouraging Their Workers To Use AI. They’re Enforcing It.
Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer re … ⌘ Read more

Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.

Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a yea … ⌘ Read more

Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform
Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition.

Microsoft recently announced that Asha Shar … ⌘ Read more

Hacker Used Anthropic’s Claude To Steal Sensitive Mexican Data
A hacker exploited Anthropic’s AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vu … ⌘ Read more

DVD Sales Decline Slows Sharply as Gen Z Discovers the Appeal of Physical Media
DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S.

Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 202 … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Crack the Case of ‘Screeching’ Scotch Tape
The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface – that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about – is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E.

Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdulla … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Japan Raided Over Suspected Violation of Anti-Monopoly Law
An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan’s Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan’s offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The source said Japan’s antitrust authori … ⌘ Read more

Uber Previews Its Dubai Air Taxi Service
An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation’s electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app.

The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserv … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge
Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry’s most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy – a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral com … ⌘ Read more

HP Says Memory’s Contribution To PC Costs Just Doubled To 35%
HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM’s contribution will rise through the year. From a report: Speaking on the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreemen … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s Touch-Screen MacBook Pro To Have Dynamic Island, New Interface
Apple’s forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models – the company’s first-ever laptops to support touch input – will feature the iPhone’s Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people famili … ⌘ Read more

The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year
The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will … ⌘ Read more

First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor
A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell – who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women – underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in J … ⌘ Read more

Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox
Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a “speed run” while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop.

“I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was d … ⌘ Read more

New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain’s Electricity Use, Regulator Says
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity … ⌘ Read more

CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes
An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting … ⌘ Read more

Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” or invoke the Defense Produ … ⌘ Read more

The US Spent $30 Billion on Classroom Laptops and Got the First Generation Less Capable Than Its Parents
More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers – distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 â” neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first g … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Execs Worry AI Will Eat Entry Level Coding Jobs
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession’s future skills base.

The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is b … ⌘ Read more

Billions of Dollars Later and Still Nobody Knows What an Xbox Is
Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody – possibly not even Microsoft – can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes.

The brand started as a powerful video … ⌘ Read more

Discord Distances Itself From Persona Age Verification After User Backlash
Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord’s head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company “ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previous … ⌘ Read more

Russia Targets Telegram as Rift With Founder Pavel Durov Deepens
Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for “abetting terrorist activities,” [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, all … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches
Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global “AI kill switch” that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser’s AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link preview … ⌘ Read more

Quantum Algorithm Beats Classical Tools On Complement Sampling Tasks
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task – known as complement sampling – dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published i … ⌘ Read more

Texas Is About To Overtake California In Battery Storage
U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ™s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times … ⌘ Read more

US Farmers Are Rejecting Multimillion-Dollar Datacenter Bids For Their Land
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company,” sought her 650 acres … ⌘ Read more

New Microsoft Gaming CEO Has ‘No Tolerance For Bad AI’
In her first major interview as Microsoft’s new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that “great games” must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has “no tolerance for bad AI.” Stepping in after Phil Spencer’s retirement, she’s pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Says Bug In Classic Outlook Hides the Mouse Pointer
joshuark quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users. This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse po … ⌘ Read more

Viral Doomsday Report Lays Bare Wall Street’s Deep Anxiety About AI Future
A 7,000-word “doomsday” thought experiment from Citrini Research helped trigger an 800-point drop in the Dow, “painting a dark portrait of a future in which technological change inspires a race to the bottom in white-collar knowledge work,” reports the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are o … ⌘ Read more

Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ Explores Stablecoin For Gaza
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Officials working with Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave’s economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin – a type of cryptocurrency whose v … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Calls In the Consultants For Its Enterprise Push
OpenAI has formed a multi-year “Frontier Alliance” with four consulting heavyweights to accelerate enterprise adoption of its no-code AI agent platform, OpenAI Frontier. TechCrunch reports: The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterpris … ⌘ Read more

Panasonic Will No Longer Make Its Own TVs
Panasonic is handing over the manufacturing, marketing, and sales of its TVs to Shenzhen-based Skyworth, effectively exiting in-house TV production. Ars Technica reports: Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be “a top three global provider of the Android TV platform.” In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands … ⌘ Read more

ASML Unveils EUV Light Source Advance That Could Yield 50% More Chips By 2030
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade’s end, to help retain the Dutch company’s edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world’ … ⌘ Read more

IBM Shares Crater 13% After Anthropic Says Claude Code Can Tackle COBOL Modernization
IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘More Competent Who Isn’t Afraid of Numbers Past the Teens’ Will Take Over Linux One Day
Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: “You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel … ⌘ Read more