Google Maps Gets Its Biggest Navigation Redesign In a Decade, Plus More AI
Google Maps is rolling out its biggest update in more than a decade, introducing a Gemini-powered chatbot and a new “Immersive Navigation” interface. “Ask Maps” lets users plan trips, ask questions, and refine travel suggestions conversationally within the app. “The new chatbot will be accessible via a button up near the search … ⌘ Read more

Atlassian CEO Cites AI Shift When Announcing Plan To Shed 1,600 Jobs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Atlassian plans to cut 1,600 jobs or a 10th of its global workforce, joining rivals in slashing staffing to cope with the advent of AI and a broader post-Covid industry slowdown. Australian billionaire founder Mike Cannon-Brookes explained the reductions in a staff memo, while also announcing … ⌘ Read more

Strait of Hormuz Closure Triggers Work From Home, 4-Day Weeks In Asia
Asian governments are implementing emergency measures like four-day workweeks and work-from-home mandates to cope with a fuel shortage triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. “Asia is particularly dependent on oil exports from the Middle East; Japan and South Korea respectively source 90% and 70% of their … ⌘ Read more

Reducing Europe’s Nuclear Energy Sector Was ‘Strategic Mistake’, EU Chief Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Reducing Europe’s nuclear energy sector was a “strategic mistake,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday, as governments grapple with an energy crunch from the Iran war. Europe produced around a third of electricity from nuclear power in 1990 bu … ⌘ Read more

AMD Formally Launches Ryzen AI Embedded P100 Series 8-12 Core Models
AMD announced back at CES the Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series with initially the models up to six Zen 5 cores launching while the eight through twelve core models would be available later in H1. Today AMD formally announced those higher-tier Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series parts… ⌘ Read more

お知らせ：JPCERT/CC インターネット定点観測レポート［2025年10月1日～2025年12月31日］ ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oh god, make it stop!

Recently the guy maintaining chardet changed its GPL license to MIT because “it is a complete re-write” (by AI, of course). It was called out by the original author. Changing the license is something the current maintainer wanted to do for long time, getting nos, and nos then. That didn’t stop him 12 years later.

Drones vs OTAN : on a perdu la 7ème compagnie
L’exercice Hedgehog-2025 devait être une démonstration de force face à la menace russe. Il s’est transformé en séminaire accéléré sur l’obsolescence programmée des grandes manœuvres blindées. En mai dernier, sur les plaines estoniennes, 16 000 soldats issus de 12 pays de l’Alliance dont une brigade britannique et des unités estoniennes ont appris à leurs dépens […] ⌘ Read more

AMD DCN 4.2 IP, GFX 12.1 Updates For AMDGPU Driver In Linux 7.1 Plus GCN 1.1 APU DC
AMD has begun staging AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver improvements for the upcoming Linux 7.1 cycle… ⌘ Read more

Accenture Acquires Ookla, Downdetector As Part of $1.2 Billion Deal
Accenture is acquiring Downdetector parent company Ookla from Ziff Davis in a $1.2 billion deal to bolster its network analytics and visibility tools for telecoms, hyperscalers, and enterprises. “The deal, which will transfer all of Ziff Davis’s Connectivity division to Accenture, includes Ookla’s Speedtest, Ekahau, and RootMetrics,” notes The … ⌘ Read more

AI Mistakes Are Infuriating Gamers as Developers Seek Savings
The $200 billion video game industry is caught between studios eager to cut ballooning development costs through AI and a player base that has grown openly hostile to the technology after a string of visible blunders.

As Bloomberg news, Arc Raiders, a surprise hit from Stockholm-based Embark Studios that sold 12 million copies in three months, was br … ⌘ Read more

Smartphone Market To Decline 13% in 2026, Marking the Largest Drop Ever Due To the Memory Shortage Crisis
An anonymous reader shares a report: Worldwide smartphone shipments are forecast to decline 12.9% year-on-year (YoY) in 2026 to 1.1 billion units, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. This decline will bring … ⌘ Read more

Intel Vulkan Driver Sees Some Minor Optimizations For DX12 Games On Linux
Merged to Mesa 26.1-devel this week is a minor improvement to the Intel “ANV” Vulkan driver providing some slight enhancements to DirectX 12 games running on Linux by way of Valve’s Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 LTS / 6.12 LTS / 6.6 LTS Support Periods Extended
Greg Kroah-Hartman today extended the planned maintenance periods of the latest Linux 6.18, Linux 6.12, and Linux 6.6 Long Term Support (LTS) kernel series… ⌘ Read more

Code.org President Steps Down Citing ‘Upending’ of CS By AI
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

Last July, as Microsoft pledged $4 billion to advance AI education in K-12 schools, Microsoft President Brad Smith told nonprofit Code.org CEO/Founder Hadi Partovi it was time to “switch hats” from coding to AI. He added that “the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI.” … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass
Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft’s accelerated aging … ⌘ Read more

Linux Still Working To Clean Up The Realtek RTL8723BS 802.11b/g/n WiFi Driver In 2026
Introduced to the Linux 4.12 kernel’s staging area back in 2017 was the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/ SDIO WLAN adapter with Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity too. In the nearly decade since this driver was added to the staging area, it’s continued to be cleaned up and with the Linux 7.0 merge window there is yet again a lot of work on cleaning up this WiFi driver for the old Realtek hardware… ⌘ Read more

Study of 12,000 EU Firms Finds AI’s Productivity Gains Are Real
A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run.

Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms … ⌘ Read more

Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling “the Fuckening.”

Yang cited a conversa … ⌘ Read more

Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids Memory Scaling Performance From 6 To 12 MRDIMMs
With memory pricing being as wild as it is these days and with MRDIMMs on Xeon 6 Granite Rapids offering much more memory bandwidth than conventional DDR5 RDIMMs, you may be wondering about the performance impact when not populating all twelve memory channels on the Xeon 6900 series processors. In this article are benchmarks to demonstrate the performance difference of MRDIMM-8800 memory across using six, eight, ten, and twelve MRDIMMs … ⌘ Read more

All gray the last few days, but there was one morning exception: https://lyse.isobeef.org/morgensonne-2026-02-12/

Windows 11 Notepad Flaw Let Files Execute Silently via Markdown Links
Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11’s Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday upda … ⌘ Read more

CIA Makes New Push To Recruit Chinese Military Officers as Informants
An anonymous reader shares a report: Just weeks after a dramatic purge of China’s top general, the CIA is moving to capitalize on any resulting discord with a new public video targeting potential informants in the Chinese military. The U.S. spy agency on Thursday rolled out the video depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military o … ⌘ Read more

IBM Plans To Triple Entry-Level Hiring in the US
IBM said it will triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, even as AI appears to be weighing on broader demand for early-career workers. From a report: While the company declined to disclose specific hiring figures, it said the expansion will be “across the board,” affecting a wide range of departments. “And yes, it’s for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do,” said Nickl … ⌘ Read more

WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties
WP Engine’s third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark.

The amended filing, based on previously sealed information … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year
Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund … ⌘ Read more

Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing
An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Plans Smartphone-Style Permission Prompts for Windows 11 Apps
Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company’s Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding u … ⌘ Read more

Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser
An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, … ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux Running Well On LoongArch - Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks
Earlier this month I posted benchmarks of the Loongson 3B6000 for this 12-core / 24-thread LoongArch Chinese CPU with DDR4 ECC memory. Those initial benchmarks were done with Debian LoongArch64 while since then I’ve shifted over to using Arch Linux on LoongArch. ⌘ Read more

Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool
Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company’s in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic’s Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption o … ⌘ Read more

The “Are You Sure?” Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking “are you sure?,” according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behavior, known in the … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers
AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to “estimate and cover” consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay fo … ⌘ Read more

Meta Auditor EY Raised Red Flag on Data-Center Accounting
Meta Platforms’ latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant’s auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta’s accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a “critical a … ⌘ Read more

US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says
Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris’s hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers – including the Russian govern … ⌘ Read more

Siri’s AI Overhaul Delayed Again
Apple’s long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri – first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 – struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and s … ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc B390 Panther Lake Generational Performance Since The Gen9 Graphics Era
Last week on Phoronix we provided initial Linux graphics benchmarks for the new Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics found with the higher-end Panther Lake SoCs with 12 Xe cores. Those benchmarks showed great gains over recent generations of Intel graphics like with Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and even Alder/Raptor Lake… But what if you hold onto your laptop for even longer? In this article is an Intel integrated graphics comparison look … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Scores +12% In UDP Network Performance Test From Manually Inlining Function
The core timer changes to the Linux 7.0 kernel score a rather nice performance improvement in a UDP receive network stress test from inlining a function that compilers haven’t been able to tackle with their optimizations… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Azure Linux Adds 6.12 HWE Kernel, ARM64 Kernel Tuning For More Performance
Microsoft overnight released Azure Linux 3.0.20260204 as the latest release of their in-house Linux distribution widely used within their Azure environment and elsewhere… ⌘ Read more

Scientists Explored Island Cave, Found 1 Million-Year-Old Remnants a Lost World
“A spectacular trove of fossils in a discovered in a cave on New Zealand’s North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago,” reports Popular Mechanics:

The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including sever … ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.2 Released With More Improvements & 32 Bug Fixes
Wine 11.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release in the road toward the Wine 12.0 stable release next January… ⌘ 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

Intel Arc B390 Graphics Performance On Linux With Panther Lake
Yesterday was our first look at the Intel Panther Lake Linux performance with the Core Ultra X7 358H and focused on the CPU performance. In today’s benchmarking is a look at the very exciting Xe3 graphics found with the top-tier Panther Lake models: the Arc B390 Graphics with 12 Xe cores. ⌘ Read more

Leica Camera’s Owners Weigh $1.2 Billion Sale of Controlling Stake
The owners of Leica Camera AG – Austrian billionaire Andreas Kaufmann and private equity giant Blackstone – are considering a sale of a controlling stake in the German camera maker in a deal that could value the company at about $1.2 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

HSG, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China, … ⌘ Read more

Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks: How China’s LoongArch CPU Compares To AMD Zen 5, Intel Arrow Lake & Raspberry Pi 5
Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China’s Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current gen … ⌘ Read more

AI Use at Work Has Increased, Gallup Poll Finds
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:

American workers adopted artificial intelligence into their work lives at a remarkable pace over the past few years, according to a new poll. Some 12% of employed adults say they use AI daily in their job, according to a Gallup Workforce survey conducted this fall of more than 22,000 U.S. workers.

The survey found roug … ⌘ Read more

Radiologists Catch More Aggressive Breast Cancers By Using AI To Help Read Mammograms, Study Finds
A large Swedish study of 100,000 women found that using AI to assist radiologists reading mammograms reduced the rate of aggressive “interval” breast cancers by 12%. CBC News reports: For the study – published in Thursday’s issue of the medical journal The Lancet – more than … ⌘ Read more

Libgcrypt 1.12 Released With VAES/AVX-512 Accelerated AES: 2x Performance On AMD Zen 5
Werner Koch released libgcrypt 1.12 as the newest feature release to this library providing the cryptographic building blocks used by GnuPG and other software like email clients, file encryption utilities, and other software… ⌘ Read more

Apple Updates iOS 12 For the First Time Since 2023
Apple quietly released its first update to iOS 12 since 2023 to keep iMessage, FaceTime, and device activation working on older hardware through January 2027. The update applies to legacy devices like the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6/6 Plus, and 2013-era iPads. Macworld reports: The update appears to be related to a specific issue. According to Apple’s “About iOS 12 Updates” page, … ⌘ Read more

AI is Hitting UK Harder Than Other Big Economies, Study Finds
The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of AI and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests. From a report: British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% – the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, accordi … ⌘ Read more