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Researchers argue AI coding tools disrupt community and hinder returns to maintainers

Tailwind Labs CEO Adam Wathan recently blamed AI for forcing him to lay off three workers.…

California tech executive Gordon Abas Goodarzi has been arrested and charged with murder in the death of his estranged wife, Aryan Papoli, whose body was found last November down an embankment off Highway 138 in San Bernardino County. Authorities initially believed the injuries were consistent with a fall, but the case was later ruled a homicide following a months-long investigation by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. "Arrest records show that Goodarzi is currently in custody without bail and faces a murder charge and that he is set to appear in court Monday," reports SFGATE. From the report: Goodarzi, a California tech executive with ties to BattleBots, is publicly listed as the president and CEO of Magmotor, which describes itself as a "proud" supporter of the combat robot community and claims to support several teams each year. According to his LinkedIn, Goodarzi also previously worked as a research affiliate at UCLA's B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences since 2023. Originally from Iran, Papoli and Goodarzi settled in Los Angeles County's verdant Rolling Hills community because of its tranquility and natural beauty, Papoli previously wrote. [...] She described her husband, Goodarzi, as a pioneer in the world of renewable energy, developing both electric and hybrid vehicles since the 1980s. According to Papoli, he also worked as the technical director at Hughes Electronics, which developed and manufactured the EV1, an early iteration of the electric car, in the 1990s.

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The cloud giant talks loudest about what scares it most. Here's what should terrify it

For a decade, AWS's position on multi-cloud was clear: don't.…

Google is adding Gemini-powered "Suggested times" to Google Calendar, automatically scanning attendees' calendars to surface the best meeting slots based on availability, work hours, and conflicts. The feature also streamlines rescheduling with one-click alternatives when invitees decline. Digital Trends reports: According to a recent post on the Workspace Updates blog, Gemini in Google Calendar can now help you quickly identify optimal meeting times when creating an event, as long as you have access to the attendees' calendars. The new "Suggested times" feature scans everyone's calendars and highlights the best time slots based on availability, working hours, and potential conflicts, eliminating the need to manually check schedules. Google has also made rescheduling simpler. The company explains that if multiple attendees decline your invite, you'll see a banner in the event showing a time when everyone is available, letting you update the invite with a single click. The feature is being rolled out starting today to eligible Workspace tiers. It will be enabled by default and is expected to reach all eligible users over the next few weeks.

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Atlassian, RingCentral, ZoomInfo also among tech targets

ShinyHunters has targeted around 100 organizations in its latest Okta single sign-on (SSO) credential stealing campaign, according to researchers and the criminal group itself.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people's private conversations through their phones. [...] the lawsuit claimed Google Assistant would sometimes turn on by mistake -- the phone thinking someone had said its activation phrase when they had not -- and recorded conversations intended to be private. They alleged the recordings were then sent to advertisers for the purpose of creating targeted advertising. The proposed settlement was filed on Friday in a California federal court, and requires approval by US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman. The claim has been brought as a class action lawsuit rather than an individual case -- meaning if it is approved, the money will be paid out across many different claimants. Those eligible for a payout will have owned Google devices dating back to May 2016. But lawyers for the plaintiffs may ask for up to one-third of the settlement -- amounting to about $22 million in legal fees. The tech firm also denied any wrongdoing, as well as claims that it "recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation" without consent.

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Robin Rowe talks about coding, programming education, and China in the age of AI

feature TrapC, a memory-safe version of the C programming language, is almost ready for testing.…

The Trump administration is planning to use AI to write federal transportation regulations, ProPublica reported on Monday, citing the U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers. From the report: The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI's "potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings," agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase "exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster." Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency's general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is "very excited about this initiative." Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the "point of the spear" and "the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules." Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. "We don't need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don't even need a very good rule on XYZ," he said, according to the meeting notes. "We want good enough." Zerzan added, "We're flooding the zone." These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency's rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes? The answer from the plan's boosters is simple: speed. Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years. But, with DOT's version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying.

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Inference-optimized chip 30% cheaper than any other AI silicon on the market today, Azure's Scott Guthrie claims

Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new in-house AI accelerator to rival Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Video game developer and distributor Valve must face a 656 million-pound ($897.7 million) lawsuit in Britain, which alleges it charged publishers excessive commissions for its Steam online store, after a tribunal ruled on Monday the case could continue. Valve was sued in 2024 on behalf of up to 14 million people in the United Kingdom who bought games or additional content through Steam or other platforms since 2018. Lawyers representing children's welfare advocate Vicki Shotbolt, who is bringing the case, allege Valve prevents publishers selling products more cheaply or earlier on rival platforms to Steam by imposing conditions on them. They say Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam if they've bought that game through the platform, effectively "locking in" users to make purchases on its platform. This allows Valve to charge "unfair and excessive" commissions of up to 30%, Shotbolt's lawyers said at a hearing in October.

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The new US-based joint venture blamed a datacenter power outage, but hasn’t elaborated

TikTok's new life under majority American ownership is off to a rough start, after users complained of widespread service disruptions the company blamed on a datacenter power outage.…

California house hunters now have legal protection against the kind of real estate photo trickery that has long plagued the home-buying process, as a new state law requiring disclosure of digitally altered listing images took effect on January 1. Assembly Bill 723 mandates that real estate agents and brokers include a "reasonably conspicuous" statement whenever photos have been altered using editing software or AI to add, remove, or change elements like furniture, appliances, flooring, views or landscaping. Agents must also provide access to the original, unaltered image through a QR code, link, or placement next to the altered photo. The law does not cover wide-angle lenses -- a perennial complaint among buyers who find rooms smaller than they appeared -- nor does it apply to routine adjustments like cropping, color correction or exposure. California is the first state to require such disclosures, though Wisconsin passed a similar law in December that takes effect next year.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An insider who correctly leaked information about Oblivion: Remastered and other titles is warning that GTA 6's physical release could be pushed back. GTA 6 is set to finally launch on November 19, 2026, but fans hoping to get their hands on a physical copy could be stuck waiting even longer. According to a report from Polish site PPE, insider Graczdari says Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two, isn't planning to release a physical edition of GTA 6 at launch. "We are getting more and more information that the box version will not be released simultaneously with the digital version to prevent leaks," the report says.

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An official Model Context Protocol extension

Anthropic's Claude can now present the interfaces of other applications within its chat window, thanks to an extension of the Model Context Protocol (MCP).…

But CEOs remain frozen in place

More than 400 tech workers have urged their CEOs to "call the White House and demand ICE leave our cities" after masked federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti over the weekend and the world's richest and most powerful chief executives remained silent.…

Nike says it is investigating a potential data breach, after a group known for cyber attacks reportedly claimed to have leaked a trove of data related to its business operations. From a report: "We always take consumer privacy and data security very seriously," Nike said in a statement. "We are investigating a potential cyber security incident and are actively assessing the situation." The ransomware group World Leaks said on its website that it had published 1.4 terabytes of data from Nike.

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Television marks its centenary today, exactly 100 years after Scottish inventor John Logie Baird first demonstrated his electro-mechanical system to journalists and members of the Royal Institution in a cramped attic workshop above what is now Bar Italia in London's Soho. On January 26, 1926, small groups of visitors climbed to 22 Frith Street and watched fuzzy images of a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill appear on screen, followed by each other's faces transmitted from a separate room. One visitor got too close to the spinning discs and ended up with a sliced beard. The Times published a short account two days later. Baird had built his first transmitting equipment in Hastings in 1923 using a hatbox, tea chest, darning needles and bicycle light lenses. A 1000-volt electric shock and a displeased landlord pushed him to London, where Gordon Selfridge soon invited him to demonstrate the device during the store's Birthday Week celebrations. The building at 22 Frith Street now carries three plaques commemorating the invention.

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Points to a use-case problem

AI adoption in the workplace stalled in the fourth quarter of 2025, but those who have already started using it are making increased use of it, according to a survey by pollster Gallup. Don't let that fool you into thinking AI is taking over work, though: frequent AI users are still a tiny minority of overall workers.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: From Sandisk shareholders to vibe coders, AI is making -- and breaking -- fortunes at a rapid pace. One unlikely beneficiary has been the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, which lucked into a future fortune when ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, gave the island the ".ai" top-level domain in the mid-1990s. Indeed, since ChatGPT's launch at the end of 2022, the gold rush for websites to associate themselves with the burgeoning AI technology has seen a flood of revenue for the island of just ~15,000 people. In 2023, Anguilla generated 87 million East Caribbean dollars (~$32 million) from domain name sales, some 22% of its total government revenue that year, with 354,000 ".ai" domains registered. As of January 2, 2026, the number of ".ai" domains surpassed 1 million, per data from Domain Name Stat -- suggesting that the nation's revenue from ".ai" has likely soared, too. This is confirmed in the government's 2026 budget address, in which Cora Richardson Hodge, the premier of Anguilla, said, "Revenue from domain name registration continues to exceed expectations."

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Even agents checking other agents can still get it wrong

Agents may be the next big thing in AI, but they have limits beyond which they will make mistakes, so exercise extreme caution, a recent research paper says.…