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Mailbox costs leap overnight as longtime users vent their frustration

Rackspace is giving a masterclass in how to annoy customers after an eye-watering price hike for email hosting.…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs are starting to be reflected in the price of some items, as sellers weigh how to absorb the shock of the added costs. From a report: Amazon and many of its third-party merchants pre-purchased inventory to try to get ahead of the tariffs and keep prices low for customers, but most of that supply ran out last fall, Jassy said in a Tuesday interview with CNBC's Becky Quick at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "So you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items, and you see some sellers are deciding that they're passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, some are deciding that they'll absorb it to drive demand and some are doing something in between," Jassy said. "I think you're starting to see more of that impact." The comments are a notable shift from last year, when Jassy said Amazon hadn't seen "prices appreciably go up" a few months after Trump announced wide-ranging tariffs. Further reading: Americans Are the Ones Paying for Tariffs, Study Finds: Americans, not foreigners, are bearing almost the entire cost of U.S. tariffs, according to new research that contradicts a key claim by President Trump and suggests he might have a weaker hand in a reemerging trade war with Europe. [...] The new research, published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a well-regarded German think tank, suggests that the impact of tariffs is likely to show up over time in the form of higher U.S. consumer prices. [...] By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year's U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.

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And the world economy might depend on it finding an answer

This week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar took to the internet to make a bold pitch for the company's future, which she claims is bright, despite what the current numbers say.…

PwC survey finds more than half of 4,500+ biz leaders see no revenue growth nor cost savings

More than half of CEOs report seeing neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI, despite massive investments in the technology, according to a PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders.…

Update Chainlit to the latest version ASAP

Two "easy-to-exploit" vulnerabilities in the popular open-source AI framework Chainlit put major enterprises' cloud environments at risk of leaking data or even full takeover, according to cyber-threat exposure startup Zafran.…

Sony plans to spin off its TV hardware business to a new joint venture controlled by Chinese electronics giant TCL, the two said Tuesday, a significant retreat for the Japanese giant whose Bravia line has long occupied the premium end of the television market. TCL would hold a 51% stake in the venture and Sony would retain 49% under a nonbinding agreement the two companies signed. They aim to finalize binding terms by the end of March and begin operations in April 2027, pending regulatory approvals. The new company would retain the Sony and Bravia branding for televisions and home audio equipment but use TCL's display technology. Japanese TV manufacturers have steadily lost ground to Chinese and Korean rivals over the years. Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric and Pioneer exited the business entirely. Panasonic and Sharp de-emphasized televisions in their growth strategies. Sony's Bravia line survived by positioning itself at the premium tier where consumers pay more for high-end picture and sound quality.

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Corporate IT refreshed hardware to stay supported, not chase new features

If 2025 proved anything about PCs, it's that corporate IT will upgrade hardware out of necessity long before it does so out of AI-fueled excitement.…

Prompt injection for the win

Anthropic has fixed three bugs in its official Git MCP server that researchers say can be chained with other MCP tools to remotely execute malicious code or overwrite files via prompt injection.…

In an opinion piece for The Register, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that while "vibe coding" can be fun and occasionally useful for small, throwaway projects, it produces brittle, low-quality code that doesn't scale and ultimately burdens real developers with cleanup and maintenance. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Vibe coding got a big boost when everyone's favorite open source programmer, Linux's Linus Torvalds, said he'd been using Google's Antigravity LLM on his toy program AudioNoise, which he uses to create "random digital audio effects" using his "random guitar pedal board design." This is not exactly Linux or even Git, his other famous project, in terms of the level of work. Still, many people reacted to Torvalds' vibe coding as "wow!" It's certainly noteworthy, but has the case for vibe coding really changed? [...] It's fun, and for small projects, it's productive. However, today's programs are complex and call upon numerous frameworks and resources. Even if your vibe code works, how do you maintain it? Do you know what's going on inside the code? Chances are you don't. Besides, the LLM you used two weeks ago has been replaced with a new version. The exact same prompts that worked then yield different results today. Come to think of it, it's an LLM. The same prompts and the same LLM will give you different results every time you run it. This is asking for disaster. Just ask Jason Lemkin. He was the guy who used the vibe coding platform Replit, which went "rogue during a code freeze, shut down, and deleted our entire database." Whoops! Yes, Replit and other dedicated vibe programming AIs, such as Cursor and Windsurf, are improving. I'm not at all sure, though, that they've been able to help with those fundamental problems of being fragile and still cannot scale successfully to the demands of production software. It's much worse than that. Just because a program runs doesn't mean it's good. As Ruth Suehle, President of the Apache Software Foundation, commented recently on LinkedIn, naive vibe coders "only know whether the output works or doesn't and don't have the skills to evaluate it past that. The potential results are horrifying." Why? In another LinkedIn post, Craig McLuckie, co-founder and CEO of Stacklok, wrote: "Today, when we file something as 'good first issue' and in less than 24 hours get absolutely inundated with low-quality vibe-coded slop that takes time away from doing real work. This pattern of 'turning slop into quality code' through the review process hurts productivity and hurts morale." McLuckie continued: "Code volume is going up, but tensions rise as engineers do the fun work with AI, then push responsibilities onto their team to turn slop into production code through structured review."

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Group-IB says crims forking out for Dark LLMs, deepfakes, and more at subscription prices

Cybercrime has entered its AI era, with criminals now using weaponized language models and deepfakes as cheap, off-the-shelf infrastructure rather than experimental tools, according to researchers at Group-IB.…

Hold down Shift to make the magic happen (or not, as the case might be)

Microsoft's Raymond Chen has explained why holding down Shift during a Windows 95 restart would get the system up and running again far faster than a full reboot.…

Wave of American-imposed tariffs failed to derail global growth, according to the IMF

The global economy has proved more resilient than many expected in the wake of US tariff shocks, with the International Monetary Fund now projecting worldwide growth of 3.3 percent in 2026 as a surge in AI investment helps offset trade disruption.…

Definitely Maybe running Windows 7?

Bork!Bork!Bork! Just because Microsoft has ended support doesn't mean an operating system will suddenly disappear. Take this crusty ATM running Windows 7 in the fair city of Manchester, England.…

Committee says watchdogs lack urgency as accountability for automated decisions remains unresolved

UK financial regulators must conduct stress testing to ensure businesses are ready for AI-driven market shocks, MPs have warned.…

Fancy it? As national health tech boss, you'd be one of the highest paid in the team

England's Department of Health and Social Care is recruiting a head of technology, digital and data at a maximum salary of up to £285,000 a year, well above that most recently advertised for the department's boss.…