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Updated 2025-12-19 16:00
SC25 gets heavy with mega power and cooling solutions
Hydrogen-powered turbines, megawatt-scale coolant loops, and 800V power take center stage at annual supercomputing conference SC25 Hydrogen-fueled gas turbines, backup generators, and air handlers probably aren't the kinds of equipment you'd expect on the show floor of a supercomputing conference. But your expectations would be wrong....
Gemini tries to sniff out AI slop images while also making them easier to create
Featuring an image of a man creating an image of a man creating an image... hands on Google Gemini users can now use the AI's app and website to figure out whether an image is AI-generated, though with some considerable limitations....
PHP 8.5 lays down long-awaited pipe operator, adds new URI tools
Unfashionable web workhorse refreshed for its ongoing run PHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser, marking one of the scripting language's more substantial updates....
Salesforce-linked data breach claims 200+ victims, has ShinyHunters’ fingerprints all over it
They keep coming back for more Salesforce has disclosed another third-party breach in which criminals - likely ShinyHunters (again) - may have accessed hundreds of its customers' data....
LLM-generated malware is improving, but don't expect autonomous attacks tomorrow
Researchers tried to get ChatGPT to do evil, but it didn't do a good job LLMs are getting better at writing malware - but they're still not ready for prime time....
Don't spill your guts to your chatbot friend - it'll hoover up that info for training
LLM makers may be training on user chat with few privacy safeguards, lawmakers hear The US House of Representatives has heard that LLM builders can exploit users' conversations for further training and commercial benefit with little oversight or concern for privacy risks....
Trump, Republicans try again to stop states from regulating AI
If at first you don't succeed, swing again - Big Tech certainly isn't complaining The Trump administration and congressional Republicans are trying again to eliminate state-level AI regulations in favor of a federal standard. The plan faces opposition from many state governments and civil-society organizations, while AI vendors have welcomed it....
Thunderbird 145 finally adds ‘native’ Exchange support
EWS-powered email only for now, with calendars and contacts still on the to-do list It's easy to forget in the FOSS world, but Exchange still runs most corporate email - and the new version of Thunderbird can talk to it directly....
Fired techie admits sabotaging ex-employer, causing $862K in damage
PowerShell script locked thousands of workers out of their accounts An Ohio IT contractor has pleaded guilty to breaking into his former employer's systems and causing nearly $1 million worth of damage after being fired....
Nvidia pushes out hotfix after Windows 11 October update tanks gaming performance
Quick and dirty driver aims to undo slowdown introduced in OS patch The Windows 11 October 2025 Update is still causing headaches for users of Microsoft's flagship operating system....
AWS under pressure as big three battle to eat the cloud market
Google and Microsoft are catching up, while Oracle and neoclouds are growing from a small base The big three cloud companies are all growing thanks to an expanding market, but Amazon is under increasing pressure from Microsoft and Google, while newcomers are on the rise....
TP-Link accuses rival Netgear of 'smear campaign' over alleged China ties
Networking vendor claims rival helped portray it as a national-security risk in the US TP-Link is suing rival networking vendor Netgear, alleging that the rival and its CEO carried out a smear campaign by falsely suggesting, it says, that the biz had been infiltrated by the Chinese government....
Education boards left gates wide open for PowerSchool mega-breach, say watchdogs
Privacy cops say attack wasn't just bad luck but a result of sloppy homework Canadian privacy watchdogs say that school boards must shoulder part of the blame for the PowerSchool mega-breach, not just the ed-tech giant that lost control of millions of student and staff records....
Google and Westinghouse lean on AI to speed US nuclear plant builds
Pair say digital twin-powered scheduling will cut costs, shrink timelines for 10 planned reactors Google and atomic power biz Westinghouse Electric claim that AI will speed construction and cut the cost of building the new US power plants it is planning in response to rising demands for energy to fuel AI....
Palo Alto kit sees massive surge in malicious activity amid mystery traffic flood
GlobalProtect login endpoints targeted, sparking concern that something bigger may be brewing Malicious traffic targeting Palo Alto Networks' GlobalProtect portals surged almost 40-fold in the space of 24 hours, hitting a 90-day high and putting defenders on alert for whatever comes next....
Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats
PostmarketOS pushed for the change, but devs warn it may not last Along with new functionality, systemd is broadening its distro support even further, which will surely delight members of the wider Linux community....
Manchester hits snooze again on joining Palantir-run NHS data platform
Care board still waiting for evidence that it will be in the best interests of the population Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board (ICB) has again put off its adoption of an NHS data platform prescribed by the UK government and run by Palantir until there is more evidence that it will be in the "best interests" of the city's population....
Eleven years after Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server biz, profits are still elusive
PC sales are pushing upwards nicely, but AI PCs only account for a third of the new fleet Lenovo has again said its enterprise hardware business is on the cusp of becoming consistently profitable, despite the division again posting a loss after massive revenue growth....
Palo Alto CEO tips nation-states to weaponize quantum computing by 2029
Company thinks you'll contemplate replacing most security kit in the next few years to stay safe Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora has suggested hostile nation-states will possess quantum computers in 2029, or even a little earlier, at which point most security appliances will need to be replaced....
US, UK, Australia sanction Lockbit gang’s hosting provider
Bulletproof' hosts partly dodged the last attack of this sort Cybercrime fighters in the US, UK, and Australia have imposed sanctions on several Russia-linked entities they claim provide hosting services to ransomware gangs Lockbit, BlackSuit, and Play....
It's a good time to be the arms dealer for the AI boom
Bubble? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn't see one Nvidia kicked the can labeled "AI bubble" down the road on Wednesday....
Fortinet 'fesses up to second 0-day within a week
Attackers may be joining the dots to enable unauthenticated RCE Fortinet has confirmed that another flaw in its FortiWeb web application firewall has been exploited as a zero-day and issued a patch, just days after disclosing a critical bug in the same product that attackers had found and abused a month earlier....
Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats
The force-feeding will continue until morale improves Some software developers complain that they're being required to use AI tools to the detriment of code quality and their own skills....
Senators propose to let users sue tech giants for harmful algos
The latest attack on Section 230 is likely to face the same fate as many previous efforts A pair of bipartisan senators wants to hold social media giants accountable for pushing content that radicalizes Americans....
Pegasus XL rocket dusted off to rescue NASA’s Swift observatory from fiery demise
Air-launched antique picked for tricky low-inclination orbit job NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, facing the risk of an uncontrolled dive back to Earth, is set for a rescue ride on a Pegasus XL, the air-dropped rocket that hasn't flown since 2021....
Amazon security boss: Hostile countries use cyber targeting for physical military strikes
And companies are getting caught in the crossfire interview Warfare has become a joint cyber-kinetic endeavor, with nations using cyber operations to scope out targets before launching missiles. And private companies, including shipping, transportation, and electronics manufacturers, are getting caught in the crossfire, according to Amazon....
DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move
Skim the atmosphere and air-breathing VLEO sats can theoretically maintain orbit DARPA is on the verge of reaching a new low - an orbital one - as the Defense Department's research arm moves its Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) Otter satellite program into the production phase....
Canada ups its European Space Agency bet 10x with $376M
Massive jump in spending shows the Great White North isn't betting everything on NASA Canada will boost its investment in European Space Agency (ESA) programs by CA$528.5 million ($376 million USD), a tenfold increase, according to the Canadian Space Agency....
Ford rolls into the Xen Project as hypervisor gears up for autos
Version 4.21 also brings advances in the datacenter, on ARM, and RISC-V The Xen Project today delivered a major release of its hypervisor and associated tools, including contributions from automaker Ford, which quietly joined the project in June....
US pumps $1B into Three Mile Island nuclear plant reboot to keep AI datacenters fed
A reactor at the site suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 The Trump administration is so eager to get extra power into the grid that it is offering a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy to help it restart the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear facility....
San Jose's 'warrantless' license plate queries land cops in court
Digital rights groups argue cameras used to unconstitutionally surveil locals The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) are suing the City of San Jose and its police department over alleged abuses of automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology....
Mastodon CEO steps down with €1M payout and a deep sigh
Burnout and slowing growth push Eugen Rochko into an advisory role after nearly a decade in charge Eugen Rochko, CEO and founder of decentralized social network Mastodon, is stepping down after nearly a decade at the helm and walking away with a sizable exit payment....
Commodity memory prices set to double as fabs pivot to AI market
Analysts warn LPDDR4 supply is tightening fast with shift to higher-end components Memory prices could soon be double what they were earlier this year as chipmakers switch to advanced products to target the AI market, leaving a shortfall of more mature chips such as those meeting the LPDDR4 standard....
Microsoft-SAP pact aims to keep Euro cloud running in a crisis
Vendors set up sovereign fallback so customers aren't stranded by foreign interference SAP and Microsoft have struck a partnership designed to provide safeguards for users of the US vendor's cloud services in Europe during "times of crisis."...
Researchers claim 'largest leak ever' after uncovering WhatsApp enumeration flaw
Two-day exploit opened up 3.5 billion users to myriad potential harms Researchers in Austria used a flaw in WhatsApp to gather the personal data of more than 3.5 billion users in what they believe amounts to the "largest data leak in history."...
Ignite awash with agents as Microsoft triples down on AI
Event supposedly for IT pros doesn't have much to tell admins on the Windows front The Copilot company kicked off its Ignite shindig this week with AI, AI, and more AI. Oh, and a lot of agents....
Microsoft spins up Azure HorizonDB to take on distributed Postgres rivals
Open source RDMS popularity offers devs 'something other than Oracle' as database standard, analyst says Microsoft has announced a distributed PostgreSQL database service designed to rival other hyperscaler systems and third-party RDBMSes such as CockroachDB and YugabyteDB....
CPython may go Rusty, but older platforms risk getting iced out
Preliminary proposal is already provoking debate The Python community is chewing over a new idea: allowing the C-based reference implementation, CPython, to incorporate Rust. It's only at the "pre-PEP" stage, but it's already sparked lively debate....
SAP's migration narrative suddenly looks messy as Kingfisher goes off-script
B&Q owner resists the S/4HANA push, betting it can innovate around legacy ERP, but questions remain In 2020, SAP's CFO told investors that its plans for customer upgrades, cloud migration, and a move to SaaS would give the German software vendor a greater "share of wallet."...
Tens of thousands more ASUS routers pwned by suspected, evolving China operation
Researchers say attacks are laying the groundwork for stealthy espionage activity Around 50,000 ASUS routers have been compromised in a sophisticated attack that researchers believe may be linked to China, according to findings released today by SecurityScorecard's STRIKE team....
Whatever your job, mentoring is your job – and the one that matters most
Nobody succeeds alone, and no community thrives without generosity Opinion When I started coding for a living 43 years ago, I didn't know shit from Shinola. I'd written a lot of BASIC, some Z80 assembler, and knew my way around floppy drives and a disk operating system. I knew nothing at all about how to operate as a junior engineer in a professional environment....
China recruiting spies in the UK with fake headhunters and ‘sites like LinkedIn’
MI5 sounds the alarm about attempts to source sensitive information Chinese spies are using social media and fake recruitment agents to recruit sources with access to sensitive information in the UK....
Microsoft reveals new cloudy AI PC that’s not a Copilot+ PC
And a cloud PC that's for AI agents only Microsoft has created a new type of AI PC - the Windows 365 AI-enabled Cloud PC"....
Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query
Thought it was the victim of a hyper-scale DDoS attack' before finding the fix Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has admitted that the cause of its massive Tuesday outage was a change to database permissions, and that the company initially thought the symptoms of that adjustment indicated it was the target of a hyper-scale DDoS attack," before figuring out the real problem....
Networking startup Meter takes a page from the Steve Jobs playbook
Vertical integration meets subscriptions "We love moving packets," declared Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder of Meter, on a stage overlooking San Francisco Bay at the networking startup's annual networking event. He continued, "This crowd probably knows this intimately, but everything in the world is packets. Regardless of what type of work you do, it is just packets all the way down."...
Microsoft blanks out BSODs on public displays with new ‘Digital Signage mode’
BORK is borked Microsoft has added a new Windows mode that blanks out the Blue Screen of Death on public displays after 15 seconds....
Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza
What do you get when you combine Anthropic, Microsoft, and Nvidia? A bubble that blows itself It wouldn't be a week of tech news without more circular exchanges of billions of dollars between AI firms. This time around, it's a $45 billion back-scratching session involving Microsoft, Anthropic, and Nvidia, announced during Redmond's Ignite conference....
Self-replicating botnet attacks Ray clusters
Using AI to attack AI Malefactors are actively attacking internet-facing Ray clusters and abusing the open source AI framework to spread a self-replicating botnet that mines for cryptocurrency, steals data, and launches distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks....
FCC looks to torch Biden-era cyber rules sparked by Salt Typhoon mess
Regulator sides with telcos that claimed new cybersecurity duties were too burdensome' The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote this week on whether to scrap Biden-era cybersecurity rules, enacted after the Salt Typhoon attacks came to light in 2024, that required telecom carriers to adopt basic security controls....
China readies a lifeboat for stranded Shenzhou crew
Stuck on the Tiangong station with a cracked capsule for company China is preparing for an early launch of the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft to rescue the crew of Shenzou-21, who were left stranded aboard the Tiangong space station after their emergency rescue of the Shenzou-20 crew earlier this month....
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