Salesforce Shelves Heroku
Salesforce is essentially shutting down Heroku as an evolving product, moving the cloud platform that helped define modern app deployment to a “sustaining engineering model” focused entirely on stability, security and support.

Existing customers on credit card billing see no changes to pricing or service, but enterprise contracts are no longer available to new buyers. Salesforce said it is redirecting engineering investment … ⌘ Read more

Hidden Cameras in Chinese Hotels Are Livestreaming Guests To Thousands of Telegram Subscribers
An investigation has uncovered a sprawling network of hidden cameras in Chinese hotel rooms that livestream guests – including couples having sex – to paying subscribers on Telegram. Over 18 months, the BBC identified six websites and apps on the messaging platform that claimed to opera … ⌘ Read more

AI.com Sells for $70 Million, the Highest Price Ever Disclosed for a Domain Name
Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has paid $70 million for the domain AI.com – the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a website name, according to the deal’s broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.

The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller … ⌘ Read more

Big Tech’s $1.1 Trillion Cloud Computing Backlog
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) – signed contracts for cloud computing services that can’t yet be filled and haven’t yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.

[![](https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.pn … ⌘ Read more

KPMG Pressed Its Auditor To Pass on AI Cost Savings
An anonymous reader shares a report: KPMG, one of the world’s largest auditors of public and private companies, negotiated lower fees from its own accountant by arguing that AI will make it cheaper to do the work, according to people familiar with the matter. The Big Four firm told its auditor, Grant Thornton UK, it should pass on cost savings from the rollout of AI and threat … ⌘ Read more

The Bizarre Enhancement Claims Rocking Ski Jumping
German newspaper Bild reported in January that some ski jumpers have been injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid ahead of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics – the theory being that temporarily enlarged genitalia would yield looser-fitting suits when measured by 3D scanners, and those looser suits could act like sails to produce longer jumps.

A study published last … ⌘ Read more

Europe Accuses TikTok of ‘Addictive Design’ and Pushes for Change
TikTok’s endless scroll of irresistible content, tailored for each person’s tastes by a well-honed algorithm, has helped the service become one of the world’s most popular apps. Now European Union regulators say those same features that made TikTok so successful are likely illegal. From a report: On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary d … ⌘ Read more

Canada Unveils Auto Industry Plan in Latest Pivot Away From US
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a sweeping plan to shore up the country’s auto industry and accelerate its electric vehicle transition, the latest in a series of moves to reduce Canada’s deep economic dependence on the United States as American tariffs continue to batter the sector.

The plan includes financial incentives for carmak … ⌘ Read more

Why This Is the Worst Crypto Winter Ever
Bitcoin has fallen roughly 44% from its October peak, and while the drawdown isn’t crypto’s deepest ever on a percentage basis, Bloomberg’s Odd Lots newsletter lays out a case that this is the industry’s worst winter yet. The macro backdrop was supposed to favor Bitcoin: public confidence in the dollar is shaky, the Trump administration has been crypto-friendly, and fiat currencies are under perceiv … ⌘ Read more

CIA Has Killed Off The World Factbook After Six Decades
The CIA has shut down The World Factbook, one of its oldest and most recognizable public-facing intelligence publications, ending a run that began as a classified reference document in 1962 and evolved into a freely accessible digital resource that drew millions of views each year.

The agency offered no explanation for the decision. Originally titled The National … ⌘ Read more

Google Confirms AirDrop Sharing is Coming To Android Phones Beyond Pixels
Google’s Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability, which has been exclusive to the Pixel 10 series since its surprise launch last year, is headed to a much broader set of Android devices in 2026.

Eric Kay, Google’s Vice President of Engineering for the Android platform, confirmed the expansion during a press briefing at the company’s … ⌘ Read more

The European Commission Is Testing an Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Teams
The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams.

Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven to … ⌘ Read more

Court Rules That Ripping YouTube Clips Can Violate the DMCA
A federal court in California has ruled that YouTube creators who use stream-ripping tools to download clips for reaction and commentary videos may face liability under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions – a decision that could reshape how one of the platform’s most popular content genres operates.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi of the … ⌘ Read more

NASA Will Finally Let Its Astronauts Bring iPhones To the Moon
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has announced that astronauts on the upcoming Crew-12 and Artemis II missions will be allowed to carry iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and to the Moon – a reversal of long-standing agency rules that had left crews relying on a 2016 Nikon DSLR and decade-old GoPros for the historic lunar flyby.

Is … ⌘ Read more

Musk Predicts SpaceX Will Launch More AI Compute Per Year Than the Cumulative Total on Earth
Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity su … ⌘ Read more

Automattic and the Internet Archive Team Up To Fight Link Rot
Automattic and the Internet Archive have released a free, open-source WordPress plugin that automatically detects broken outbound links on a site and redirects visitors to archived Wayback Machine copies instead of serving them a 404 error.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, which launched last fall and is available on WordPress.org, run … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 as Its AI Tools Rattle Software Markets
Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company’s AI tools have already spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors.

The new model improves on Opus 4.5’s coding abilities, the company said – it plans more carefully, … ⌘ Read more

Western Digital Plots a Path To 140 TB Hard Drives Using Vertical Lasers and 14-Platter Designs
Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Plans To Use AI To Speed Up TV and Film Production
Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the cre … ⌘ Read more

Spotify Plans To Sell Physical Books
Spotify is planning to let premium subscribers in the U.S. and U.K. buy hardcovers and paperbacks directly through its app starting this spring, partnering with Bookshop.org to handle pricing, inventory and fulfillment.

The Swedish streaming company, which entered the audiobook market in 2022, will also introduce a feature called Page Match that lets users scan a page from a physical book or e-reader … ⌘ Read more

FBI Couldn’t Get Into Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled
The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter’s seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records. 404Media: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and whi … ⌘ Read more

Kalshi Claims ‘Extortion,’ Then Recants in Feud Over User Losses
Kalshi, the largest U.S. prediction market, accused a small data startup called Juice Reel of “extortion” after a stock analyst used the company’s transaction-level data to argue that prediction market users lose money faster than gamblers on traditional betting apps – then walked the allegation back hours later.

The equity research analyst Jordan Bend … ⌘ Read more

China Has Seized Sony’s Television Halo
Sony announced last month that it plans to pass control of its home entertainment division – including the two-decade-old Bravia television brand – to Chinese electronics group TCL through a joint venture in which TCL would hold a 51% stake. The Japanese company was long ago overtaken in sales by South Korea’s Samsung and LG and now holds just 2% of the global television market. Sony s … ⌘ Read more

Munich Makes Digital Sovereignty Measurable With Its Own Score
alternative_right writes: The city of Munich has developed its own measurement instrument to assess the digital sovereignty of its IT infrastructure. The so-called Digital Sovereignty Score (SDS) visually resembles the Nutri-Score and identifies IT systems based on their independence from individual providers and ‘foreign’ legal spheres. The Technical … ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Steam Machine Has Been Delayed, and the RAM Crisis Will Impact Pricing
Valve has pushed back the launch of its Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller hardware from its original Q1 2026 window to a vaguer “first half of the year” target, blaming the ongoing memory and storage shortage that has been squeezing the tech industry.

The company said in a post today that rising component pr … ⌘ Read more

BMW Commits To Subscriptions Even After Heated Seat Debacle
BMW may have retreated from its controversial plan to charge monthly fees for heated seats, but the German automaker is pressing ahead with subscription-based vehicle features through its ConnectedDrive platform.

A company spokesperson told The Drive that BMW “remains fully committed” to ConnectedDrive as part of its global aftersales strategy. Features r … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Adds Sysmon To Windows
Microsoft has finally delivered on its promise to integrate Sysmon – the long-standing system monitoring tool from its Sysinternals suite – directly into Windows, a move that should make life considerably easier for enterprise administrators who have struggled with deploying and managing the utility across thousands of endpoints.

The functionality landed this week in Windows Insider builds 26300.7733 (Dev … ⌘ Read more

Russian Spy Satellites Have Intercepted EU Communications Satellites
European security officials believe two Russian space vehicles have intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over the continent. From a report: Officials believe that the likely interceptions, which have not previously been reported, risk not only compromising sensitive information transmitted by the satellites … ⌘ Read more

‘Everyone is Stealing TV’
A sprawling informal economy of rogue streaming devices has taken hold across the U.S., as consumers fed up with rising TV subscription costs turn to cheap Android-based boxes that promise free access to thousands of live channels, sports events, and on-demand movies for a one-time $200 to $400 purchase.

The two dominant players – SuperBox and vSeeBox – are manufactured by opaque Chinese companies and distributed … ⌘ Read more

As Software Stocks Slump, Investors Debate AI’s Existential Threat
Investors were assessing on Wednesday whether a selloff in global software stocks this week had gone too far, as they weighed if businesses could survive an existential threat posed by AI. The answer: It’s unclear and will lead to volatility. From a report: After a broad selloff on Tuesday that saw the S&P 500 software and services index fall nearly … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a ‘Space To Think’
Anthropic said today that its AI assistant Claude will not carry advertising of any kind – no sponsored links next to conversations, no advertiser influence on the model’s responses, and no unsolicited third-party product placements – calling Claude a “space to think” that should remain free of commercial interrupt … ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Sacks Workers For Creating Tool To Track Layoffs
Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. BBC: The company recently announced job cuts, with chief executive Bill Ready stating in an email he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach,” according to an employee who posted some of the memo on LinkedIn.

Pinterest told investors the move would imp … ⌘ Read more

Why Google’s Android for PC Launch May Be Messy and Controversial
Google’s much-anticipated plan to merge Android and ChromeOS into a single operating system called Aluminium is shaping up to be a drawn-out, complicated transition that could leave existing Chromebook users behind, according to previously unreported court documents in the Google search antitrust case.

The new OS won’t be compatible with all exi … ⌘ Read more

Adobe Actually Won’t Discontinue Animate
Adobe is no longer planning to discontinue Adobe Animate on March 1st. From a report: In an FAQ, the company now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode and that it has “no plans toâdiscontinue or remove access” to the app.

Animate will still receive “ongoing security and bug fixes” and will still be available for “both new and existing users,” but it won’t get new features. Many creat … ⌘ Read more

AMD Hints the Next-Gen Xbox Console Could Launch Next Year
An anonymous reader shares a report: Speaking during an earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Lisa Su stated that its development of Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox SoC is “progressing well to support a launch in 2027.”

While the comment doesn’t outright confirm the next Xbox will release next year, it indicates that the Microsoft could be ready to launch soon.

[![](ht … ⌘ Read more

Say Hello To GoogleSQL
BrianFagioli writes: Google has quietly retired the ZetaSQL name and rebranded its open source SQL analysis and parsing project as GoogleSQL. This is not a technical change but a naming cleanup meant to align the open source code with the SQL dialect already used across Google products like BigQuery and Spanner. Internally, Google has long called the dialect GoogleSQL, even while the open source project lived under a differ … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies
OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. From a report: The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.

The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, … ⌘ Read more

Walmart Joins $1 Trillion Club
Walmart’s market cap surpassed $1 trillion on Tuesday, putting the largest U.S. retail chain in an exclusive club dominated by tech groups. Bloomberg adds: The Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain – a longtime favorite of bargain-hunting consumers – has flexed its massive scale and supplier network to keep prices low and grab market share across the income spectrum. While Walmart has maintained its appeal to households … ⌘ Read more

Google Home Finally Adds Support For Buttons
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Home users, your long nightmare is over. The platform has finally added support for buttons. The release notes for a February 2 update state that several new starter conditions for automations are now available, including “Switch or button pressed.”

Smart buttons are physical, programmable switches that you can press to trigger automations or … ⌘ Read more

Ultra-Processed Foods Should Be Treated More Like Cigarettes Than Food, Study Says
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the pa … ⌘ Read more

NASA Delays Artemis II To March
ClickOnThis writes: NASA has delayed the Artemis II launch to March of this year, after a wet dress-rehearsal uncovered a hydrogen leak. From the NASA article: During tanking, engineers spent several hours troubleshooting a liquid hydrogen leak in an interface used to route the cryogenic propellant into the rocket’s core stage, putting them behind in the countdown. Attempts to resolve the issue involved stop … ⌘ Read more

Google Plots Big Expansion in India as US Restricts Visas
Alphabet is plotting to dramatically expand its presence in India [non-paywalled source], with the possibility of taking millions of square feet in new office space in Bangalore, India’s tech hub. From a report: Google’s parent company has leased one office tower and purchased options on two others in Alembic City, a development in the Whitefield tech corrido … ⌘ Read more

‘Vibe Coding Kills Open Source’
Four economists across Central European University, Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute have built a general equilibrium model of the open-source software ecosystem and concluded that vibe coding – the increasingly common practice of letting AI agents select, assemble and modify packages on a developer’s behalf – erodes the very funding mechanism that keeps open-source projects alive.

The core problem … ⌘ Read more

YouTube Kills Background Playback on Third-Party Mobile Browsers
YouTube has confirmed that it is blocking background playback – the ability to keep a video’s audio running after minimizing the browser or locking the screen – for non-Premium users across third-party mobile browsers including Samsung Internet, Brave, Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge.

Users began reporting the issue last week, noting that audio wou … ⌘ Read more

PayPal’s CEO Change Blindsided HP’s Board
An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal said on Tuesday it was booting its CEO and replacing him with its board chair Enrique Lores, sparing no ambiguity as to why: “The pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board’s expectations,” it said in a statement. One group that was blindsided was HP, where Lores was until Tuesday serving as CEO, according to people familiar with the matt … ⌘ Read more

Adobe Is Killing A Popular Animation And Game Development Program
Adobe has emailed users of Adobe Animate to let them know the popular animation and game development program will be discontinued on March 1, an abrupt decision that has angered animators and game developers who say the tool remains an industry standard in television and game production.

Animate, the successor to the once-popular Flash, is wid … ⌘ Read more

Fintech CEO and Forbes 30 Under 30 Alum Charged for Alleged Fraud
An anonymous reader shares a report: By now, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list has become more than a little notorious for the amount of entrants who go on to be charged with fraud.[…] Gokce Guven, a 26-year-old Turkish national and the founder and CEO of fintech startup Kalder, was charged last week with alleged securities fraud, wire fraud, visa fra … ⌘ Read more

The Switch is Now Nintendo’s Best-Selling Console of All Time
The original Switch is officially Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time after surpassing the DS handheld in lifetime sales. From a report: In its latest earnings release, Nintendo reports that the Nintendo Switch has, as of December 31, 2025, sold 155.37 million units since its launch in 2017, compared to 154.02 million units for the 2004 Nintend … ⌘ Read more

Hidden Car Door Handles Are Officially Being Banned In China
sinij writes: Automakers have increasingly implemented door handles that retract into the bodywork for aerodynamic reasons, but they are now off limits in China.
My issue is with electronic-only door latch mechanism. It should be possible to open the door from both inside and outside the car in case of complete power loss.

[![](https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twi … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Acquires xAI in $1.25 Trillion All-Stock Deal
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired his AI startup xAI in an all-stock deal that values the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, ahead of what would be the largest initial public offering in history. SpaceX pegged its own valuation at $1 trillion – a markup from the $800 billion it commanded in a December secondary stock sale – and priced xAI at $250 billion based on a recent $20 … ⌘ Read more