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An anonymous reader shares a report: Anyone who surveys the public, from marketers to pollsters, struggles nowadays to get people to answer their questions. That phenomenon afflicts crucial government data, making it harder for policymakers and investors to know the true state of the economy. Falling survey participation is an important reason the flagship jobs report released every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the Labor Department, has undergone such big revisions recently. This has rippled into the political sphere. On Aug. 1, President Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a particularly large downward revision to jobs for May and June that owed partly to late responses from survey participants. The White House and top administration officials increased their attacks on the BLS last week after the agency published an annual revision suggesting the U.S. added 911,000 fewer jobs over the 12 months through March. The BLS blamed the initial overestimate partly on response rates. [...] One hypothesis is known as survey fatigue: People are being asked to answer too many questionnaires. Jonathan Eggleston, a senior economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, found in a 2024 study that recent participants in that agency's monthly and annual surveys, which are voluntary, were less likely to answer the 2020 census by mail, phone or online, without a knock on the door. Another is the rise of cellphones with caller ID. In the days of landlines, people had to pick up the phone to know who was calling. These days, many decline to answer callers they don't recognize.

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The Microsoft Axman Cometh

While Windows 10 might seem to be the biggest casualty as a result of Microsoft's ax-swinging, Office and recent versions of Windows 11 are also set to be chopped.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The companies seeking to build larger AI models have been increasingly stymied by a lack of high-quality training data. As tech firms scour the web for more data to feed their models, they could increasingly rely on potentially sensitive user data. A team at Google Research is exploring new techniques to make the resulting large language models (LLMs) less likely to 'memorize' any of that content. LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can't exactly predict what they'll say. While the output varies even for identical inputs, models do sometimes regurgitate something from their training data -- if trained with personal data, the output could be a violation of user privacy. In the event copyrighted data makes it into training data (either accidentally or on purpose), its appearance in outputs can cause a different kind of headache for devs. Differential privacy can prevent such memorization by introducing calibrated noise during the training phase. Adding differential privacy to a model comes with drawbacks in terms of accuracy and compute requirements. No one has bothered to figure out the degree to which that alters the scaling laws of AI models until now. The team worked from the assumption that model performance would be primarily affected by the noise-batch ratio, which compares the volume of randomized noise to the size of the original training data. By running experiments with varying model sizes and noise-batch ratios, the team established a basic understanding of differential privacy scaling laws, which is a balance between the compute budget, privacy budget, and data budget. In short, more noise leads to lower-quality outputs unless offset with a higher compute budget (FLOPs) or data budget (tokens). The paper details the scaling laws for private LLMs, which could help developers find an ideal noise-batch ratio to make a model more private. The work the team has done here has led to a new Google model called VaultGemma, its first open-weight model trained with differential privacy to minimize memorization risks. It's built on the older Gemma 2 foundation and sized at 1 billion parameters, which the company says performs comparably to non-private models of similar size. It's available now from Hugging Face and Kaggle.

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Safe C++ proposal author claims that 'will not ever work'

The C++ standards committee abandoned a detailed proposal to create a rigorously safe subset of the language, according to the proposal's co-author, despite continuing anxiety about memory safety.…

Tech evolved from PoC to global campaign in under two months

An attack called FileFix is masquerading as a Facebook security alert before ultimately dropping the widely used StealC infostealer and malware downloader.…

Nothing says ‘circular economy’ like Microsoft stranding 400 million PCs on International E-waste Day

European e-waste campaigners are calling on EU leadership to force tech vendors to provide 15 years of software updates, using Microsoft's plan to end Windows 10 support next month — which may make an estimated 400 million PCs obsolete — as a textbook case of avoidable e-waste.…

Latest extension to factory closures takes incident response into fourth week

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced a further extension to its multi-site global shutdown, bringing its cyber-related downtime to nearly four weeks.…

Beware the meeting room zombies

Beware the meeting room zombies. We don't mean you when you're listening to a colleague reading out a 100-slide PowerPoint presentation, but some expensive Microsoft meeting room hardware that may be obsolete in a few short weeks.…

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: MI5 has conceded it "unlawfully" obtained the communications data of a former BBC journalist, in what was claimed to be an unprecedented admission from the security services. The BBC said it was a "matter of grave concern" that the agency had obtained communications data from the mobile phone of Vincent Kearney, a former BBC Northern Ireland home affairs correspondent. The admission came in a letter to the BBC and to Kearney, in relation to a tribunal examining claims that several reporters in Northern Ireland were subjected to unlawful scrutiny by the police. It related to work carried out by Kearney for a documentary into the independence of the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI). Kearney is now the northern editor at Irish broadcaster RTE. In documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), MI5 conceded it obtained phone data from Kearney on two occasions in 2006 and 2009. Jude Bunting KC, representing Kearney and the BBC, told a hearing on Monday: "The MI5 now confirms publicly that in 2006 and 2009 MI5 obtained communications data in relation to Vincent Kearney." He said the security service accepted it had breached Kearney's rights under article 8 and article 10 of the European convention on human rights. They relate to the right to private correspondence and the right to impart information without interference from public authorities. "This appears to be the first time in any tribunal proceedings in which MI5 publicly accept interference with a journalist's communications data, and also publicly accept that they acted unlawfully in doing so," Bunting said. He claimed the concessions that it accessed the journalist's data represented "serious and sustained illegality on the part of MI5." Bruce66423 comments: "The good news is that it's come out. The bad news is that it has taken 16 years to do so. The interesting question is whether there will be any meaningful consequences for individuals within MI5; there's a nice charge of 'malfeasance in public office' that can be used to get such individuals into a criminal court. Or will the outcome be like that of when the CIA hacked the US Senate's computers, lied about it, and nothing happened?"

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Tech giant confirms facility next to the M25 is its latest AI-fueled server farm

Google today confirmed it is the mystery hyperscaler behind one of Europe's largest datacenter campuses as it cut the ribbon on a facility situated on the outskirts of the M25 in Hertfordshire.…

Startup slots into CI/CD pipelines to warn engineers when a change could wreck production

Exclusive How big could the blast radius be if that change you're about to push to production goes catastrophically wrong? Overmind is the latest company to come up with ways to stop the explosion before it happens.…

Devs sketch plans for two more releases this year, blending Debian foundations with modern display tech

The Linux Mint team plans to speed up its release cycle and get two more versions out in the next few months.…

Cyberspace watchdog tightens reporting regime, leaving little time to hide incidents

Beijing will soon expect Chinese network operators to 'fess up to serious cyber incidents within an hour of spotting them – or risk penalties for dragging their feet.…

Fiverr is laying off 250 employees, or about 30% of its workforce, as it restructures to become an "AI-first" company. "We are launching a transformation for Fiverr, to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that's leaner, faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team, each with substantially greater productivity, and far fewer management layers," CEO Micha Kaufman said. Reuters reports: While it isn't clear what kinds of jobs will be impacted, Fiverr operates a self-service digital marketplace where freelancers can connect with businesses or individuals requiring digital services like graphic design, editing or programming. Most processes on the platform take place with minimal employee intervention as ordering, delivery and payments are automated. The company's name comes from most gigs starting at $5 initially, but as the business grew, the firm has introduced subscription services and raised the bar for service prices. Fiverr said it does not expect the job cuts to materially impact business activities across the marketplace in the near term and plans to reinvest part of the savings in the business.

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Microsoft reminds holdouts they've got less than a month before the update tap runs dry

Start the countdown! For any administrators living under a rock, Microsoft has posted another warning that Windows 10 22H2 will reach end of servicing on October 14.…

Study that used actual input to OpenAI’s chatbot finds personal use surging

Users of individual accounts for OpenAI’s ChatGPT mostly use it for research and to help with writing, according to a new study into the kind of queries fed into the service.…

Did you hear the one about the thin-skinned barrister?

The High Court of the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh has stopped live-streaming hearings to protect local lawyers from ridicule on social media.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, OpenAI's Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning) detailing how people end up using ChatGPT across time and tasks. While other research has sought to estimate this kind of usage data using self-reported surveys, this is the first such paper with direct access to OpenAI's internal user data. As such, it gives us an unprecedented direct window into reliable usage stats for what is still the most popular application of LLMs by far. After digging through the dense 65-page paper, here are seven of the most interesting and/or surprising things we discovered about how people are using OpenAI today. Here are the seven most interesting and surprising findings from the study: 1. ChatGPT is now used by "nearly 10% of the world's adult population," up from 100 million users in early 2024 to over 700 million users in 2025. Daily traffic is about one-fifth of Google's at 2.6 billion GPT messages per day. 2. Long-term users' daily activity has plateaued since June 2025. Almost all recent growth comes from new sign-ups experimenting with ChatGPT, not from established users increasing their usage. 3. 46% of users are aged 18-25, making ChatGPT especially popular among the youngest adult cohort. Factoring in under-18 users (not counted in the study), the majority of ChatGPT users likely weren't alive in the 20th century. 4. At launch in 2022, ChatGPT was 80% male-dominated. By late 2025, the balance has shifted: 52.4% of users are now female. 5. In 2024, work vs. personal use was close to even. By mid-2025, 72% of usage is non-work related -- people are using ChatGPT more for personal, creative, and casual needs than for productivity. 6. 28% of all conversations involve writing assistance (emails, edits, translations). For work-related queries, that jumps to 42% overall, and 52% among business/management jobs. Furthermore, the report found that editing and critiquing text is more common than generating text from scratch. 7. 14.9% of work-related usage is dealt with "making decisions and solving problems." This shows people don't just use ChatGPT to do tasks -- they use it as an advisor or co-pilot to help weigh options and guide choices.

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The FTC is investigating whether Ticketmaster is doing enough to prevent bots from illegally reselling tickets on its platform, with a decision on the matter coming within weeks, according to Bloomberg (paywalled). Reuters reports: The 2016 law prohibits the use of bots and other methods to bypass ticket purchase limits set by online sellers. As part of the probe, FTC investigators are assessing whether Ticketmaster has a financial incentive to allow resellers to circumvent its ticket limit rules, according to the report. A settlement is also possible, Bloomberg reported. If the FTC pursues a case and Live Nation loses, the company could face billions of dollars in penalties, as the law permits fines of up to $53,000 per violation.

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Nice plans for US manufacturing you had there, shame if something was to happen to them

Analysis On Sunday, President Trump took to his personal social media channel to calm a growing diplomatic storm with one of America's closest allies, South Korea.…