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Plan to fast-track bit barn connections leaves housing developers fuming and billpayers on the hook The British government is consulting on reforms to prioritize "strategically important" grid connections - including datacenters - amid reports of delays stretching more than a decade on some projects....

Government offers 100K to support software forecasting how travelers choose departure hubs The UK's Department for Transport is offering up to 100,000 over three years for access to a C++ programmer who can keep a module of its airport usage model up in the air....

Out of the Copilot and into the fire Organizations that rely on consumer-grade PCs or allow staff to bring their own devices to work have something new to worry about: a virtual Xbox lurking inside Windows 11....

Deploying them by the gigawatt but still can't flag obvious AI slop Social networking giant Meta has revealed details of four previously unknown custom chips powering its AI services....

Like deleting data, exposing keys, and loading malicious content - which may be why Beijing has reportedly banned it China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team has warned locals that the OpenClaw agentic AI tool poses significant security risks....

Company is reshaping our skill mix' amid long share price slide and SaaSpocalypse whispers Australian collaborationware company Atlassian has announced it will shed ten percent of staff - around 1,600 people....

Court issues preliminary injunction but delays it to allow an appeal Perplexity's AI browser Comet has been banned from accessing Amazon's website after the e-commerce giant obtained a court-ordered preliminary injunction....

State news published a list of nearly 30 sites that could be targeted Iran has reportedly designated Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir facilities as legitimate targets of retaliatory strikes, according to an Al Jazeera report citing Iran's state-affiliated Tasnim news agency....

Meanwhile, Verifone says 'no evidence' to support the digital intruders' claims A hacking crew with ties to Iran's intelligence agency claimed to be behind a global network outage at med-tech firm Stryker on Wednesday, and said the cyberattack was in response to the US-Israel airstrikes....

I see you're trying to kill children. Would you like some help with that? You might expect a bot to have guardrails that prevent it from helping you plan a crime, but your expectations might be too high. According to a study, eight of ten major commercial chatbots will help you prepare to conduct a school shooting....

150k accounts nuked, 21 suspects arrested Not every scam starts with malware or a compromised account. Sometimes all it takes is a friend request or a link shared via chat....

Inspector general flags Starship risks and gaps in testing The NASA Office of Inspector General has published a report on the agency's management of the lunar Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, highlighting the risks and arguments behind the scenes....

Project claims legal clarity and zero legacy code, but offers binaries only DR-DOS is back, and there is already a test version you can download. But as of yet, it's not finished, not FOSS - and not based on the original code....

Blue-on-blue internal investigation lands force 66k fine The UK's data protection watchdog has fined Police Scotland 66,000 ($88,000) for what it calls a "serious failure" in handling an alleged victim's sensitive data....

This is not satire, but we wish it was The Ig Nobel Prize, which satirizes its more noble namesake, is moving its award ceremony to Europe following concerns about the safety of those attending the US event....

Let them eat cores Intel has a new strategy for shoring up its eroding market share: Offering PC buyers more cores per dollar than arch-rival AMD in a refresh of its Arrow Lake range....

Reference design to stitch more than a thousand accelerators into a single enormous server. Exclusive If you thought Nvidia or AMD's 72-GPU rack systems were enormous, silicon Ayar Labs has something much bigger in the works....

Latest optical engine may not be CPO, but it's still better than pluggables Photonics startup Lightmatter says that its latest optical engine can cut the amount of fiber used by modern datacenters in half, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn't rely on co-packaging to do it....

Google also enables auto-approval of AI agents while their documentation warns against it Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is moving to a weekly release cycle, as well as joining Google in encouraging agentic AI development without manual approval with a new Autopilot feature....

Officials suspend Basel-Stadt trial and launch probe A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8....

17-year-old allegedly withdrew large sums of cash from ATMs Dutch police have arrested a 17-year-old boy who detectives suspect was responsible for 16 bank card frauds across the Netherlands....

Subscribers north of the border suffer the most long-running failures per 100 spent Broadband subscribers in Scotland suffer the most outages in the UK, according to Broadband Genie, with customers of BT typically experiencing the fewest....

Microsoft insists rebootless updates are 'the quickest way to get secure' From the department of "what could possibly go wrong?" comes news that Windows Autopatch is enabling hotpatch security updates by default....

Advocate General urges rethink of PSD2 to speed compensation after scams Analysis One of the European Union's top legal advisors is trying to change how banks treat cybercrime victims - meaning they could enjoy greater financial protections sooner than expected....

AI factories demand 800 volts because physics doesn't care about your upgrade budget Feature Hyperscale computing was built on a foundation of certainty. For years, 12V and 48V rack architectures - implemented at a steady 50-54 VDC (Volts of Direct Current) - ruled the datacenter floor, engineered to perfection for power densities of 10-15 kW per rack. These systems were finely tuned machines, optimized around the predictable, steady-state demands of general-purpose CPUs and storage servers. The infrastructure was stable. The math was settled....

CMA advisers say extra support justified as remediation costs and tax liability mount The UK's competition regulator has given a conditional thumbs-up to a request for 141.8 million in subsidies to the Post Office - a publicly owned company - to cover its costs in compensation for the Horizon IT scandal in the coming year and a tax liability....

Consultation launched, People's Panel planned, yet still no price tag attached The UK government has refused to estimate the cost of its digital identity system, saying this depends on what it decides after a consultation exercise launched yesterday....

Google knows asking agents to navigate GUIs designed for humans is ridiculous. Microsoft might not Opinion The command line interface is making a comeback because graphical user interfaces are a poor fit for autonomous agents, which could spell trouble for a lot of software - and software makers....

Fixed it amid user ire, swears new tool for bigger shifts is up to the job Atlassian has admitted that the tools it developed to move Jira users into the cloud were actually slower than older code that did the same job, and that its efforts to speed things up also had speed problems....

Big Red reckons paying for datacenters is easy when you have half a trillion dollars of cloud orders on the books Oracle says AI code generation tools have become so efficient, and it is so good at using them, that it will dodge the SaaSpocalypse and watch smaller rivals suffer....

Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines are all trying to conserve fuel The US government may be ordering staff back to the office, but governments across Asia have sent public sector workers back home to preserve fuel supplies due to supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Iran....

Cohesity, ServiceNow and Datadog team on recoverability suite Three more vendors have decided that the world needs tools to roll back mistakes made by AI, after Cohesity teamed with ServiceNow and Datadog on a recoverability service that will hunt down all the files and data corrupted by bad AI actors and restore systems to a trusted state."...

Could steal sensitive personal and financial data After a whopper of a Patch Tuesday last month, with six Microsoft flaws exploited as zero-days, March didn't exactly roar in like a lion. Just two of the 83 Microsoft CVEs released on Tuesday are listed as publicly known, and none is under active exploitation, which we're sure is a welcome change to sysadmins....

E-souk disputes report linking 'Gen-AI assisted changes' to recent high-impact incidents Amazon's weekly operations meeting today reportedly focused on recent service outages and on the role that code changes attributed to generative AI may have played. However, the company is downplaying the possibility of problems with AI....

Think it's hard to tell bot from human on Facebook now? The biggest generator of AI slop on the internet has a new home, as Meta has reportedly acquired Moltbook and hired the team behind the social network for AI agents....

Ransomware, malware-as-a-service, infostealers benefit MOIS, too Iranian government-backed snoops are increasingly using cybercrime malware and ransomware infrastructure in their operations - not just hiding behind criminal masks as a cover for destructive cyber activity, according to security researchers....

Study warns peak cooling demand could strain US water systems by 2030 Public water supplies in America will need billions invested to meet the peak requirements of datacenters during the hottest periods of the year, even if their overall annual consumption is relatively modest....

Agentic 'Air' lets multiple AI agents run tasks concurrently, while loyal IntelliJ users wonder what's in it for them JetBrains has previewed Air, a tool for agentic AI development which it describes as a new wave of dev tooling....

Rapid7 says crims broke into more than 250 sites globally, including a US Senate candidate's campaign page Cyber baddies quietly compromised legitimate WordPress websites, including the campaign site of a US Senate candidate, turning them into launchpads for a global infostealer operation....

FAA launches pilot projects starting this summer The skies over parts of the US could soon get busier, as the Federal Aviation Administration launches pilot projects spanning 26 states to test electric air taxis and other next-gen aircraft, with operations expected to begin by summer 2026....

Launch predictions continue to be optimistic as 2027 and Artemis III near SpaceX has rolled another Starship super heavy booster to the launch pad as the company's boss, Elon Musk, admits the first launch of Starship V3 had slipped....

Big Red waves new features including vector support, while skeptics await concrete timescales Oracle has proposed a more transparent approach to developing its open source database MySQL, including new features supporting vectors....

Low-cost computers bashed by billion-dollar investment in AI infrastructure Chromebooks, the low-cost computing option popular with education buyers, will be squeezed hardest this year as memory prices spiral out of control....

Don't celebrate yet - more states are considering them As more US states push to mandate OS-level age checks, System76 is taking its fight directly to lawmakers....

Russian-speaking attackers lure HR staff into downloading ISO files that disable defenses A Russian-speaking cyber criminal is targeting corporate HR teams with fake CVs that quietly install malware which can disable security tools before stealing data from infected machines....

Warning, lockout, then wipe if your device trips detection Microsoft is removing Entra credentials for school and work from jailbroken and rooted devices running iOS and Android....

Crooks used simple phone scam to compromise vendor account, spilling personal and financial data belonging to more than 15,000 people A voice-phishing scam targeting one of Ericsson's service providers has exposed the personal data of more than 15,000 individuals after attackers sweet-talked an employee into handing over access....

Digital freedom needs a Kali Linux for the rest of us Opinion The hacker mind is a curious way to be. To have it means to embody endless analytical curiosity, an awareness of any given rule set as just one system among many, and an ability to see any system in ways that its creators never expected. Combine this with a drive to find the bad and make things better, and you become one of the fundamental forces of the technological universe....

Kids profited from tools used to attack popular websites, say officials Polish police have referred seven suspected juvenile cybercriminals to family court over an alleged scheme to flog DDoS kits online....

Analog video spied by looking really, really closely at tracks A retro tech enthusiast has demonstrated that it is possible to view media on LaserDisc using a relatively inexpensive digital microscope....