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South Korea's President Lee Jae Myung asked at a televised policy meeting last month whether the country's state-run healthcare plan could cover hair-loss treatment, framing it as a question about whether hair loss qualifies as a disease. The health minister told Lee that baldness is generally considered an aesthetic problem and therefore covered out-of-pocket, but the 61-year-old president -- who himself has a full head of hair -- pushed back, arguing that young people experiencing thinning hair view their situation as a "matter of survival." The proposal has divided the country. South Korea is known for a cultural phenomenon called "lookism," where physical appearance carries significant weight in professional and social settings. The expression "your appearance is also a credential" is common, and nearly all job applications require a photograph, including those for part-time barista positions. Lee first made the pledge to cover hair-loss treatment during his unsuccessful 2022 presidential campaign but dropped it when he ran again. He won a snap election in June and has now resurrected the idea as a way to appeal to younger voters who have grown more dissatisfied with him. The Korean Medical Association has called the proposal "questionable" given the health system's stretched finances. The health ministry is currently reviewing whether the treatments are appropriate for coverage. More than three in four South Koreans believe everyone has concerns about hair loss, according to a recent Embrain Trend Monitor poll.

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Trillion-dollar internet giants don't need freebies, watchdog warns, as giveaways double in a year

The US state of Virginia forfeited $1.6 billion in tax revenue through datacenter exemptions in fiscal 2025 – up 118 percent on the prior year – as the AI-driven construction boom accelerates.…

Proposal targets long-standing behavior as 'an X11ism'

Opinion Ever since Linux got a graphical desktop, you could middle-click to paste – but if GNOME gets its way, that's going away soon, and from Firefox too.…

Committee told shifting timelines could alter automatic reversals in UK's historic Fujitsu computing scandal

The Post Office's Horizon computer system may have been deployed earlier than thought, potentially affecting which convictions get automatically quashed under legislation introduced to speed up justice in one of the biggest scandals in recent British history, MPs heard yesterday.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The founder of a U.S.-based spyware company, whose surveillance products allowed customers to spy on the phones and computers of unsuspecting victims, pleaded guilty to federal charges linked to his long-running operation. pcTattletale founder Bryan Fleming entered a guilty plea in a San Diego federal court on Tuesday to charges of computer hacking, the sale and advertising of surveillance software for unlawful uses, and conspiracy. The plea follows a multi-year investigation by agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a unit within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. HSI began investigating pcTattletale in mid-2021 as part of a wider probe into the industry of consumer-grade surveillance software, also known as "stalkerware." This is the first successful U.S. federal prosecution of a stalkerware operator in more than a decade, following the 2014 indictment and subsequent guilty plea of the creator of a phone surveillance app called StealthGenie. Fleming's conviction could pave the way for further federal investigations and prosecutions against those operating spyware, but also those who simply advertise and sell covert surveillance software. HSI said that pcTattletale is one of several stalkerware websites under investigation.

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High-risk system compromised long before intrusion was finally spotted

The UK's Ministry of Justice spent £50 million ($67 million) on cybersecurity improvements at the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) before the high-profile cyberattack it disclosed last year.…

Production halts and supply-chain disruption left luxury automaker reeling in fiscal Q3

Brit luxury automaker Jaguar Land Rover has reported devastating preliminary Q3 results that lay bare the cascading consequences of a crippling cyberattack, revealing wholesale volumes collapsed more than two-fifths year-on-year.…

The rise will be postponed until you hit F1 to continue

Bork!Bork!Bork! The baddest of AI bad guys, the Terminator, has confirmed what the vast majority of IT professionals already know. The machines are not about to rise, not until they can deal with that pesky battery voltage.…

Customers report being locked out after grabbing the password manager via F-Droid

Some HSBC mobile banking customers in the UK report being locked out of the bank's app after installing the Bitwarden password manager via an open source app catalog.…

Ritchie Torres has introduced a bill to ban government officials from using insider information to trade on political prediction markets like Polymarket. The bill was prompted by reports that traders on Polymarket made large profits betting on Nicolas Maduro's removal, raising suspicions that some wagers were placed using material non-public information. "While such insider trading in capital markets is already illegal and often prosecuted by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, online prediction markets are far less regulated," notes Axios. From the report: Rep. Ritchie Torres' (D-N.Y.) three-page bill, a copy of which was obtained by Axios, is called the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026. It would ban federal elected officials, political appointees and bureaucrats from making insider trades on prediction sites sites such as Polymarket. Specifically, the bill prohibits such government officials from trading based on information that is not publicly available and that "a reasonable investor would consider important in making an investment decision." [...] It's not clear if House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would put Torres' bill to a vote in the House or if President Trump would sign it. "We're looking at the specifics of the bill, but we already ban the activity it cites and are in support of means to prevent this type of activity," said Elisabeth Diana, a spokesperson for the prediction website Kalshi. Diana added that the "activity from the past few days" did not occur on their platform.

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Department for Work and Pensions lines up bot bouncers for one of Europe's largest call-handling systems

The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is set to introduce a conversational AI platform it hopes will steer calls from citizens with queries about their benefits. The contract is worth up to £23 million.…

National Weather Service pulled an AI-generated forecast graphic after it hallucinated fake town names in Idaho. "The blunder -- not the first of its kind to be posted by the NWS in the past year -- comes as the agency experiments with a wide range of AI uses, from advanced forecasting to graphic design," reports the Washington Post. "Experts worry that without properly trained officials, mistakes could erode trust in the agency and the technology." From the report: At first glance, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Saturday's wind forecast for Camas Prairie, Idaho. "Hold onto your hats!" said a social media post from the local weather office in Missoula, Montana. "Orangeotild" had a 10 percent chance of high winds, while just south, "Whata Bod" would be spared larger gusts. The problem? Neither of those places exist. Nor do a handful of the other spots marked on the National Weather Service's forecast graphic, riddled with spelling and geographical errors that the agency confirmed were linked to the use of generative AI. NWS said AI is not commonly used for public-facing content, nor is its use prohibited. The agency said it is exploring ways to employ AI to inform the public and acknowledged mistakes have been made. "Recently, a local office used AI to create a base map to display forecast information, however the map inadvertently displayed illegible city names," said NWS spokeswoman Erica Grow Cei. "The map was quickly corrected and updated social media posts were distributed." A post with the inaccurate map was deleted Monday, the same day The Washington Post contacted officials with questions about the image. Cei added that "NWS is exploring strategic ways to continue optimizing our service delivery for Americans, including the implementation of AI where it makes sense. NWS will continue to carefully evaluate results in cases where AI is implemented to ensure accuracy and efficiency, and will discontinue use in scenarios where AI is not effective." A Nov. 25 tweet out of the Rapid City, South Dakota, office also had misspelled locations and the Google Gemini logo in its forecast. NWS did not confirm whether the Rapid City image was made with generative AI.

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Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, revealed a deceptively simple workflow that uses parallel AI agents, verification loops, and shared memory to let one developer operate with the output of an entire engineering team. "I run 5 Claudes in parallel in my terminal," Cherny wrote. "I number my tabs 1-5, and use system notifications to know when a Claude needs input." He also runs "5-10 Claudes on claude.ai" in his browser, using a "teleport" command to hand off work between the web and his local machine. This validates the "do more with less" strategy Anthropic's President Daniela Amodei recently pitched during an interview with CNBC. VentureBeat reports: For the past week, the engineering community has been dissecting a thread on X from Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic. What began as a casual sharing of his personal terminal setup has spiraled into a viral manifesto on the future of software development, with industry insiders calling it a watershed moment for the startup. "If you're not reading the Claude Code best practices straight from its creator, you're behind as a programmer," wrote Jeff Tang, a prominent voice in the developer community. Kyle McNease, another industry observer, went further, declaring that with Cherny's "game-changing updates," Anthropic is "on fire," potentially facing "their ChatGPT moment." The excitement stems from a paradox: Cherny's workflow is surprisingly simple, yet it allows a single human to operate with the output capacity of a small engineering department. As one user noted on X after implementing Cherny's setup, the experience "feels more like Starcraft" than traditional coding -- a shift from typing syntax to commanding autonomous units.

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According to Bloomberg, Discord has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Reuters reports: The U.S. IPO market regained momentum in 2025 after nearly three years of sluggish activity, but hopes for a stronger rebound were tempered by tariff-driven volatility, a prolonged government shutdown and a late-year selloff in artificial intelligence stocks. Discord, which was founded in 2015, offers voice, video and text chatting capabilities aimed at gamers and streamers. According to a statement in December, the platform has more than 200 million monthly users.

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schwit1 shares a report from Gothamist: Wegmans in New York City has begun collecting biometric data from anyone who enters its supermarkets, according to new signage posted at the chain's Manhattan and Brooklyn locations earlier this month. Anyone entering the store could have data on their face, eyes and voices collected and stored by the Rochester-headquartered supermarket chain. The information is used to "protect the safety and security of our patrons and employees," according to the signage. The new scanning policy is an expansion of a 2024 pilot. The chain had initially said that the scanning system was only for a small group of employees and promised to delete any biometric data it collected from shoppers during the pilot rollout. The new notice makes no such assurances. Wegmans representatives did not reply to questions about how the data would be stored, why it changed its policy or if it would share the data with law enforcement.

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The company has also redesigned the X1 Carbon’s internals for easier repairs

If there was a kingdom of laptop screen flexibility, Lenovo would take the crown. Last year, the company released the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, with a mechanical screen that could roll out to increase its size from 14 to 16.7 inches. Now, it’s back with the ThinkPad Rollable XD concept laptop that expands from 13.3 to 16 inches at the touch of a button or a swipe, along with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist, which uses a motor to rotate its screen and follow you around the room.…

Amazon's community surveillance biz bets on AI to recognize danger

A year after a series of fires obliterated communities in Los Angeles, Amazon's Ring security service has announced a feature called Fire Watch intended to mitigate future wildfire risk.…

sinij shares a news release from the Utah Department of Commerce: The state of Utah, through the Utah Department of Commerce's Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Doctronic, the AI-native health platform, to give patients with chronic conditions a faster, automated way to renew medications. This agreement marks the first state-approved program in the country that allows an AI system to legally participate in medical decision-making for prescription renewals, an emerging model that could reshape access to care and ultimately improve care outcomes. Politico provides additional context in its reporting: In data shared with Utah regulators, Doctronic compared its AI system with human clinicians across 500 urgent care cases. The results showed the AI's treatment plan matched the physicians' 99.2 percent of the time, according to the company. "The AI is actually better than doctors at doing this," said Dr. Adam Oskowitz, Doctronic co-founder and an associate professor of surgery at the University of California San Francisco. "When you go see a doctor, it's not going to do all the checks that the AI is doing." Oskowitz said the AI is designed to err on the side of safety, automatically escalating cases to a physician if there's any uncertainty. Human doctors will also review the first 250 prescriptions issued in each medication class to validate the AI's performance. Once that threshold is met, subsequent renewals in that class will be handled autonomously. The company has also secured a one-of-a-kind malpractice insurance policy covering an AI system, which means the system is insured and held to the same level of responsibility as a doctor would be. Doctronic also runs a nationwide telehealth practice that directs patients to doctors after an AI consultation. In Utah, patients who use the system will visit a webpage that verifies they are physically in the state. Then the system will pull the patient's prescription history and offer a list of medications eligible for renewal. The AI walks the patient through the same clinical questions a physician would ask to determine whether a refill is appropriate. If the system clears the renewal, the prescription is sent directly to a pharmacy. The program is limited to 190 commonly prescribed medications. Some medications -- including pain management and ADHD drugs as well as injectables -- are excluded for safety reasons.

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Long after CVEs issued and open source flaws fixed

Last fall, Jakub Ciolek reported two denial-of-service bugs in Argo CD, a popular Kubernetes controller, via HackerOne's Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program. Both were assigned CVEs and have since been fixed. But instead of receiving an $8,500 reward for the two flaws, Ciolek says, HackerOne ghosted him for months.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On Monday, [Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip-making giant Nvidia] said the company would begin shipping a new A.I. chip later this year, one that can do more computing with less power than previous generations of chips could. Known as the Vera Rubin, the chip has been in development for three years and is designed to fulfill A.I. requests more quickly and cheaply than its predecessors. Mr. Huang, who spoke during CES, an annual tech conference in Las Vegas, also discussed Nvidia's surprisingly ambitious work around autonomous vehicles. This year, Mercedes-Benz will begin shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology comparable to Tesla's Autopilot. Nvidia's new Rubin chips are being manufactured and will be shipped to customers, including Microsoft and Amazon, in the second half of the year, fulfilling a promise Mr. Huang made last March when he first described the chip at the company's annual conference in San Jose, Calif. Companies will be able to train A.I. models with one-quarter as many Rubin chips as its predecessor, the Blackwell. It can provide information for chatbots and other A.I. products for one-tenth of the cost. They will also be able to install the chips in data centers more quickly, courtesy of redesigned supercomputers that feature fewer cables. If the new chips live up to their promise, they could allow companies to develop A.I. at a lower cost and at least begin to respond to the soaring electrical demands of data centers being built around the world. [...] On Monday, he said Nvidia had developed new A.I. software that would allow customers like Uber and Lucid to develop cars that navigate roads autonomously. It will share the system, called Alpamayo, to spread its influence and the appeal of Nvidia's chip technology. Since 2020, Nvidia has been working with Mercedes to develop a class of self-driving cars. They will begin shipping an early example of their collaboration when Mercedes CLA cars become available in the first half of the year in Europe and the United States. Mr. Huang said the company started working on self-driving technology eight years ago. It has more than a thousand people working on the project. "Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous," Mr. Huang said. The Rubin chips are named for the astronomer Vera Rubin, a pioneering astronomer who helped find powerful evidence of dark matter.

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