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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is pushing back on viral social media posts and articles like this one by Malwarebytes, claiming Google has changed its policy to use your Gmail messages and attachments to train AI models, and the only way to opt out is by disabling "smart features" like spell checking. But Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson tells The Verge that "these reports are misleading -- we have not changed anyone's settings, Gmail Smart Features have existed for many years, and we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model."

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Accuracy errors or inadvertent unmasking of rage-bait trolls? Probably somewhere in between

Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) has inadvertently taught a large number of web users an important lesson. Not everyone online is necessarily who you think they are, and you shouldn't believe everything you read.…

Somewhere between a cover version and a loving homage of the interface that helped shape the modern desktop

LisaGUI is a faithful reconstruction of the desktop and user interface of Apple's Lisa, the workstation that fed ideas into the early Macintosh, and it shows that there are still things to learn from that system.…

NATO has hired Google to provide "air-gapped" sovereign cloud services and AI in "completely disconnected, highly secure environments." From a report: The Chocolate Factory will support the military alliance's Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Centre (JATEC) in a move designed to improve its digital infrastructure and strengthen its data governance. NATO was formed in 1949 after Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty. Since then, 20 more European countries have joined, most recently Finland and Sweden. US President Donald Trump has criticized fellow members' financial contribution to the alliance and at times cast doubt over how likely the US is to defend its NATO allies. In an announcement this week, Google Cloud said the "significant, multimillion-dollar contract" with the NATO Communication and Information Agency (NCIA) would offer highly secure, sovereign cloud capabilities. The agreement promises NATO "uncompromised data residency and operational controls, providing the highest degree of security and autonomy, regardless of scale or complexity," the statement said.

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DAOS needs user education, Nvidia GPU access, and better manageability to grow

DAOS has been a great success in the traditional HPC/supercomputing world, but is nowhere in the new, AI-focused, GPU supercomputing arena. What will it take for DAOS to find customers outside its high-end, legacy supercomputing niche?…

Microsoft is rolling out yet another update to Notepad for Windows 11 Insiders that adds table support and faster AI-generated responses, continuing a transformation of the once-minimal text editor that has drawn sustained criticism from users who preferred its original simplicity. The update, version 11.2510.6.0, lets users insert tables via a formatting toolbar or Markdown syntax and enables streaming responses for the app's Write, Rewrite, and Summarize AI features.

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Lenovo is stockpiling memory and other critical components to navigate a supply crunch brought on by the boom in AI. From a report: The world's biggest PC maker is holding on to component inventories that are roughly 50% higher than usual, [non-paywalled source] Chief Financial Officer Winston Cheng told Bloomberg TV on Monday. The frenzy to build and fill AI data centers with advanced hardware is raising prices for producers of consumer electronics, but Lenovo also sees opportunity in this to capitalize on its stockpile.

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Japanese team finds 80% of the tiny plant cells remained viable after 283 days in orbit

Moss has been shown to survive one of the harshest environments imaginable: the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS).…

Fluent Bit has 15B+ deployments … and 5 newly assigned CVEs

A series of "trivial-to-exploit" vulnerabilities in Fluent Bit, an open source log collection tool that runs in every major cloud and AI lab, was left open for years, giving attackers an exploit chain to completely disrupt cloud services and alter data.…

Apple's next major iPhone software update will prioritize stability and performance over flashy new features, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who reports that iOS 27 is being developed as a "Snow Leopard-style" release [non-paywalled source] focused on fixing bugs, removing bloat and improving underlying code after this year's sweeping Liquid Glass design overhaul in iOS 26. Engineering teams are currently combing through Apple's operating systems to eliminate unnecessary code and address quality issues that users have reported since iOS 26's September release. Those complaints include device overheating, unexplained battery drain, user interface glitches, keyboard failures, cellular connectivity problems, app crashes, and sluggish animations. iOS 27 won't be feature-free. Apple plans several AI additions: a health-focused AI agent tied to a Health+ subscription, expanded AI-powered web search meant to compete with ChatGPT and Perplexity, and deeper AI integration across apps. The company has also been internally testing a chatbot app called Veritas as a proving ground for its re-architected Siri, though a standalone chatbot product isn't currently planned.

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SitusAMC rules out ransomware, but accounting records for major institutions potentially affected

Real estate finance business SitusAMC says thieves sneaked into its systems earlier this month and made off with confidential client data.…

Ubisoft has revealed Teammates, a first-person shooter built around AI-powered squadmates that the company is calling its "first playable generative AI research project" -- not long after the publisher went all-in on NFTs and the metaverse only to largely move on from both. Built in the Snowdrop Engine that powers The Division 2 and Star Wars Outlaws, the game features an AI assistant named Jaspar and two AI squadmates called Pablo and Sofia. Players can issue natural voice commands to direct the squadmates in combat or puzzle-solving, while Jaspar handles mission tracking and guidance. The project comes from the same team behind Ubisoft's Neo NPCs, demonstrated at GDC 2024.

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Trojanized npm packages spread new variant that executes in pre-install phase, hitting thousands within days

A self-propagating malware targeting node package managers (npm) is back for a second round, according to Wiz researchers who say that more than 25,000 developers had their secrets compromised within three days.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: With the release of its third version last week, Google's Gemini large language model surged past ChatGPT and other competitors to become the most capable AI chatbot, as determined by consensus industry-benchmark tests. [...] Aaron Levie, chief executive of the cloud content management company Box, got early access to Gemini 3 several days ahead of the launch. The company ran its own evaluations of the model over the weekend to see how well it could analyze large sets of complex documents. "At first we kind of had to squint and be like, 'OK, did we do something wrong in our eval?' because the jump was so big," he said. "But every time we tested it, it came out double-digit points ahead." [...] Google has been scrambling to get an edge in the AI race since the launch of ChatGPT three years ago, which stoked fears among investors that the company's iconic search engine would lose significant traffic to chatbots. The company struggled for months to get traction. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and other executives have since worked to overhaul the company's AI development strategy by breaking down internal silos, streamlining leadership and consolidating work on its models, employees say. Sergey Brin, one of Google's co-founders, resumed a day-to-day role at the company helping to oversee its AI-development efforts.

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WordPad died for this?

Microsoft is shoveling yet more features into the venerable Windows Notepad. This time it's support for tables, with some AI enhancements lathered on top.…

Chocolate Factory wins contract to build fully disconnected systems for training and operational support

NATO has hired Google to provide "air-gapped" sovereign cloud services and AI in "completely disconnected, highly secure environments."…

Months after China-linked spies burrowed into US networks, regulator tears up its own response

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has scrapped a set of telecom cybersecurity rules introduced after the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, reversing course on measures designed to stop state-backed snoops from slipping back into America's networks.…

In 2018 researchers claimed evidence of a lake beneath the surface of Mars, detected by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument (or Marsis for short). But new Mars observations "are not consistent with the presence of liquid water in this location and an alternative explanation, such as very smooth basal materials, is needed." Phys.org explains Aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) uses higher frequencies than MARSIS. Until recently, though, SHARAD's signals couldn't reach deep enough into Mars to bounce off the base layer of the ice where the potential water lies — meaning its results couldn't be compared with those from MARSIS. However, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team recently tested a new maneuver that rolls the spacecraft on its flight axis by 120 degrees — whereas it previously could roll only up to 28 degrees. The new maneuver, termed a "very large roll," or VLR, can increase SHARAD's signal strength and penetration depth, allowing researchers to examine the base of the ice in the enigmatic high-reflectivity zone. Gareth Morgan and colleagues, for their article published in Geophysical Research Letters, examined 91 SHARAD observations that crossed the high-reflectivity zone. Only when using the VLR maneuver was a SHARAD basal echo detected at the site. In contrast to the MARSIS detection, the SHARAD detection was very weak, meaning it is unlikely that liquid water is present in the high-reflectivity zone.

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Report warns of 2030s capacity crunch without expanding mid-band airwaves

The GSMA says 6G networks will need up to three times the spectrum currently allocated to mobile operators to meet anticipated demands for data.…

Agencies have until December 12 to mitigate flaw that was likely exploited before Big Red released fix

CISA has ordered US federal agencies to patch against an actively exploited Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) flaw within three weeks – a scramble made more urgent by evidence that attackers may have been abusing the bug months before a fix was released.…